Life in St. Petersburg

PETER’S choice of a Finnish marsh for the site of his European capital has been greatly marveled at by historians. Some, forgetting that monarch’s frequent brushes with the Swedes along the Neva, have pronounced the selection a mere caprice. Others, losing sight of the reformer’s adventurous spirit and characteristically racial love of novelty, have seen in the founding of the modern Russian metropolis little more than the act of a madman, or the infatuation of a fool. Yet a position more sheltered by land and sea, a port better connected with Europe and less a part of Europe, a chief city in a higher degree suited to a state with a standing policy of expansion, a centre of government further removed from the shock of a popular revolution or less open to the attacks of a foreign foe, a capital more isolated and inaccessible than St. Petersburg, — these no extremes of political foresight or of happy accident could have so well provided for modern Russia as they have been supplied by the great metropolis of Slav empire in the north. Merely to reach by land this furtive city on the Neva, in its hiding-place almost at the foot of the granite heights of Finland, would involve a march far more fatiguing than that which Napoleon and the Grand Army undertook to Moscow. To strike Russia in a vulnerable point would mean to strike her in a dozen points at once, since the capital of Slav power in the east of Europe is no national heart, but only an administrative centre, which may be changed with even greater facility than that shown in recent government oscillations between Paris, Versailles, and Lyons. By sea, moreover, the passage to St. Petersburg is a strange zigzag, crowded with obstacles that seem to increase in number and formidableness the nearer one draws to the goal. In a season favorable to spectacles of which the contrasting elements are contributed by land and water, the course is one exceedingly picturesque. High summer, at any rate, touches it as with an enchanter’s wand, greening the low Scandinavian shores, turning the “black Baltic” into a transparent deep of aqueous blue, and in the gulf giving to midnight the luminousness of only half-quenched day. But if the way is bright, it is also devious. From the English coast the course runs northward ; in the Kattegat the steamer heads for the south, but only to mount again towards the polar regions; while the later part of the journey lies in the direction of the dawn: added to which there are sudden turns and windings to be accomplished, islands to be skirted, hidden rocks to be avoided, mirage cities and their gleaming pillars and spires to be taken not seriously, but for the phantoms they are. In winter a white boom, wide as the Gulf of Finland, and as long, bars the navigator from the upper Russian waters. Here for miles the flying sail of the ice-boat warns away the steadier canvas of merchant fleets and ocean steamers during six months out of every twelve. Even when thaw sets in, at the end of April, the Baltic is not more, but less, navigable than in the season of frost; for the sea is then alive with glittering privateers, not more picturesque above water than they are deadly beneath it, or with mastless derelicts that have broken loose from their moorings in the Gulf of Bothnia, and are melting southwards in the teeth of the early skippers and the warm west wind. Before Cronstadt itself “ the Tsar’s granite squares,” as they are grimly called, command the wave with many tiers of ponderous artillery : so numerous are the forts and batteries at this point that they narrow the Gulf of Finland to less than half a dozen navigable passages, none of them more than a few yards in width. While beyond Cronstadt, from the forts to St. Petersburg, a distance of about twenty miles, stretch the shallows, forming the last and least surmountable obstacle of the whole course.¹

The traveler to the Russian capital by water thus meets at Cronstadt with a reception similar in kind, if not like in degree, to that which harbor-masters, custom-house officials, and, in extreme cases, artillery officers are prepared to offer to the heaviest squadrons afloat. His steamer, whatever may be the fame of its “ trips to St. Petersburg,” never passes Cronstadt, and is there “docked” until the moment comes for its return to the English, French, or German coast. Such of its passengers as wish to complete their journey must do so under new conditions. Six hours or more after the transfer they may be seen on the way to the capital in one of those puffing, Pancks-like river steamers that ply between Cronstadt and the Neva mouths three or four times in the course of the summer day. One compensation, at least, there is on board one of these shallow-bottomed craft, for the grimy filth of one’s material surroundings, for the spy-like attention of the brass-buttoned customs official, whose prisoner one virtually is until St. Petersburg is reached : it is the consciousness that the goal is nearing, is at hand. The Finnish and Russian shores close slowly in ; tiny flags begin to mark the channel of the Neva, whose waters grow more and more distinct from those of the gulf. Finally some keen eye glimpses, through a break in the lazily shifting vapor of the horizon, a bright lance, shimmering for a moment with reflected sunlight; or far ahead a gilt cuirass high in air, or something that, in the sultry thickness of the atmosphere, reminds one of the copper moon of a lunar eclipse in its penumbral phase. Ten minutes later the veil rolls upward, and St. Petersburg lies on the retina, an image long, narrow, and many-spired, panoramic in its vividness, recalling one of those ideals of the far-off Eastern city that live in the fancies of the poet and the painter. There are dark outlines in the picture, it is true ; a closer view reveals many quite Western details of prosaic brick and unpolished stone; but these heighten, by contrast, the striking features of an image that, suddenly received by the eye, seems for a moment everywhere aglow with gilt spears, golden cupolas, stardotted towers and temples, here capped by crescent and cross, there bulbed over with graceful curves of green and blue.

My own first impressions of the Russian capital were gathered during the late hours of a long summer night; at a time when partial withdrawal of the human element seemed to lend an aspect of added vastness to wide streets, spacious squares, noble lines of quays, and high buildings. St. Petersburg has an appearance really unique amongst cities. Untouched by the stony frost of mock age which makes London venerable, with little of the freshness of masonry and architecture that charms visitors to the capital of France, differing from Berlin as much as a Russian bureaucrat differs from a Prussian martinet, though with an inner resemblance suggesting that of the “rescript” to the ukaz, St. Petersburg may fall conspicuously short, in mere magnificence, of many other great centres of population and government in Europe ; but in the single quality of impressiveness I venture to say that it excels them all. Its nearly perfect levels, its straight lines, its right angles and hollow squares, have always captivated the military fancy; as the city is permanently in a state of siege and well-nigh half full of soldiers, the phrase which dubs it a military camp is the most appropriate of all metaphors. But to the merely lay imagination Petropolis has an awful solidity, like that of the hills from which its builders drew their granite blocks; its ponderousness is an unfailing source of bewilderment. How its hotels came to be massive in appearance as jails, its lodging-houses to wear the aspect of barracks, its public offices to seem hewn bodily from the rock; how, in fact, stone, so lacking to the country as a whole, should be the great, ever-present feature of material environment in the capital, and should there thrust itself beneath one’s feet and above one’s head in a profusion that points eloquently to days in which the Russian contractor was not, — these are questions that do not perplex the less because the true answer to them is to be sought in Peter himself, not in the industry or the architecture of the period in which he lived. In the European capital of the reformer the traveler sees the exaggerated antithesis not only of the Moscow capital of wood, but of the whole “wood” period of housebuilding in Russia. Peter planned a contrast and aimed at a resemblance, but as a city builder he knew too much of Russia to properly limit the one, too little of Europe not to overdo the other. Happily, the reformer’s predilection for stone has given a massive, monotonous character to no more than the framework of the city. There is an irresistible appeal to the eye in the noble Neva, with its numerous branches and canals, spanned by bridges as graceful as those of the Seine or the Thames ; in the quays, with their marble palaces and outlook upon the wooded islands and holiday resorts of the capital; in frequent parks, public gardens, and open spaces or “ fields; ” in churches and praying chapels, full of costly shrines, beautiful images, and impressive services. It is true enough, of course, that you cannot indulge in boating on the stream, the calmness and purity of whose waters you admire so much, without paying to attend upon you a passenger who is a police spy as well as a boatman ; that the palaces, at whose grand outlines you never cease to marvel, are some of them protected by subterranean canals against the subtle approach of the conspirator’s parallel, or are surrounded by trenches at points where, a few feet beneath the roadway, the popular imagination hears the tread of armed patrols; that some of the “ fields ” are utilized to the recovery of the popular health, and others employed as hideous state golgothas, wherein those who loved their country not wisely, but too well, have first been strangled and then buried ; and that probably the most zealous opponents of the popular cause in Russia are the secret inquisitors into political morals who wear the garb of the church in the service of the state. St. Petersburg is none the less a splendid capital, a wondrous mingling of East and West, the mighty centre of an iron system, the seat of a trinity of granite, winter, and Tsarism, that with the tenacity of a spiritual faith and the tyranny of a material superstition holds sway alike over the senses and the soul.

To many, no doubt, the structural interest of the Russian capital will stand towards its human interest in a relation of decided inferiority. To know St. Petersburg as a city one must neglect no tour or visit likely to promote acquaintance with its contrasted quarters and varying aspects. A knowledge of the capital as a centre of population can be gained by a mere study of its representative streets. Watching conscientiously a thoroughfare like the Nevsky Prospect, for example, the traveler will learn more in an hour about Russia and Russian life than he can possibly gather during whole months spent in consulting guide-books, or taking part in gregarious visits to monuments, picturegalleries, and churches. It may startle him to find that in Russia the class distinctions of Western Europe have little or no expression in out-door life. Having heard of the rank assigned to the Nevsky as the most fashionable thoroughfare in St. Petersburg, he may not be prepared to witness the intimate mingling of democratic and aristocratic elements everywhere noticeable in this treeless boulevard. In the older countries parts of a community may become so far isolated from each other by differences of wealth and position as to give a special aspect to the streets or districts in which they settle. In Russia distinctions of class are fewer and less strongly marked than in Western Europe j no rivalry intensifies them, nor are they prompted by any strong feeling of separated interest. A formal separation of classes exists, it is true, but behind this lies a sense of communal solidarity which, however its growth may have been aided or its extinction hindered by political causes, had its origin in the democratic character of the national foundations. This is why the Nevsky Prospect is a Regent Street and a Ratcliffe Highway combined, or, better, a Champs Elysées and a Boulevard St. Antoine rolled into one. Its remarkable variety is a product of the widest differences of rank and dwellingplace. It is the home of the highest and the lowest in the land. The wretched peasants who sell watermelon seeds in its gutters are as sure of finding their resting-place for the night in the Nevsky as the land-owning grandees whose carriage wheels are every moment threatening amputation to the venders’ bare feet. In luxurious apartments level with the street are the ministers who receive, the imperial councilors who consult, the princes in daily contact with royalty ; but nearer to the sky than all these is the woman who sings the “ song of the shirt,” the droshky driver who piles up his copeks of copper against the evil day of famine, or the studentdreamer learning to hibernate till the police come and find him cold and stark, at rest in his northern Nirvana. Yet the strangest of all contrasts which the thoroughfare of a great capital can offer is this : that it shall present to you royalty dining in scarlet and poverty partaking of its daily meal in rags, the two so near each other that, were it inclined, royalty might witness the fare and garb of poverty with its own eyes, might even swell the humbler meal from its own table. This, the most remarkable of all juxtapositions, is actually offered by the Nevsky Prospect. From the Annichkin Palace it is no more than a few yards across the roadway to the nearest corner on the opposite side. At that angle is a small pogreb, literally " cellar,” in which the same spectacle may be witnessed from the street, at a given hour, each night, year in, year out. Thither comes habitually a band of twelve, led by a graybeard. The men wear red shirts and loosely fitting trousers, that sometimes precede, sometimes lag behind, the limbs which protrude from them. All descend, and for a moment disappear. But gazing through the window of their retreat, you may see the twelve seated at a table, — a circle of shaggy, matted heads, twinkling, expectant eyes, and silent lips. In a few moments a steaming bowl appears in their midst, crowning each with an aureole of vapor. What is it ? Broth ? Cabbage soup ? The famous, scarcely pronounceable shchi ? Impossible to say ! But where are the plates ? There are none. It is the spoons that are of importance. Each figure has seized one and sits ready. Then, with a slow and solemn movement, the graybeard dips his into the steaming mixture, and thence conveys the half-liquid nutriment to his mouth, His right-hand neighbor, with the same deliberate gravity, plunges a second spoon into the bowl ; after a reverential pause, a third ventures to take his share: and thus the movement, once begun, passes contagiously round the table until the bowl is quite empty and the aureoles have all vanished. Solemnly the twelve rise ; silently the graybeard leads them to the stairway top; and there you lose them in the flow and whirl of the street. That the emperor has seen them from his window opposite is unlikely, for what is there to interest a Tsar in a dozen laborers coming once a day into the Nevsky for their dinner?

The great charm of the Nevsky Prospect for the military and official eye is its fullness of uniforms. At times every third man you meet is a soldier. The Circassian or Khirgiz foreigner rarely visits the capital save in military dress. It would need an expert ethnologist to name on the spot all the representatives of Russia’s subject races who promenade the Nevsky every day in the year ; yet a layman may make many happy guesses by merely discriminating between peculiarities of attire. Pupils of the St. Petersburg military schools invariably wear uniform. With few exceptions, all students are uniformed, the dress being occasionally of the strictest military pattern. Young girls studying at the various educational establishments are no more spared from this law of outward resemblances on account of sex than fellow professors and teachers are excused from it on the ground of position. There are military uniforms, official uniforms, religious uniforms, educational uniforms ; uniforms of royalty, uniforms of nobility, uniforms of rank, uniforms of service; distinctive attires for all degrees of achievement and degradation ; dresses optional and dresses enforced. The spectacular effect of this contrasting of attires, this mixing and blending of ribbons, buckles, stars, epaulettes, wristbands, armbands, badges, stripes, cockades, may be easily imagined. Yet it is not a little heightened by the cross-fire of signals which is continually going on between the elements of the checkered army. It is the duty of the soldier to salute his superior, of the pupil to salute his teacher, and of both to salute the city and government authorities. It thus becomes the lot of the uniformed class to be ever and at a moment’s notice separating itself into categories of superiority and subordination, that each may discharge its prearranged duties of respect, recognition, and acknowledgment. In England a system of this kind would weary ; Americans would quickly bring it to an end by a social revolt. The pedestrians of the Nevsky Prospect acquiesce in it mechanically. To them the act of saluting is no more an intellectual operation than is the act of making the sign of the cross. In the Russian mind, to apply the phraseology of Mr. Herbert Spencer, the two movements are alike automatic, being simply psychical states that have attained to complete organization.

The really mysterious element of life in St. Petersburg is one that transcends Western experiences. Below the outward forms of things you enter an atmosphere in which thought seems limited by new laws. Out of novel habits, strange customs, hereditary legacies of the intellect in which you have had no share, the fancy makes a stair for its ascent into another planet. The differences you encounter everywhere are unlikenesses not between Aryan and Aryan, but between Europe and Asia on the one hand, between a new and an old civilization on the other. Readily would the native help you in your bewilderments. were it within his power, but the abnormal to you is the normal to him. You call upon him to look, and he sees nothing. Your spectres are his thin air, the novelties you italicize his daily commonplace. So that in time your surprise becomes less demonstrative, if not less acute. In time your diary is content to hold the mirror up to nature. “ The municipal council,” for example, “has just fixed the price of bread for the next twelve months.” “ The Golos punished for ‘ improper tendencies ’ by an order depriving it for six months of the right to publish advertisements.” “ The authorities about to raise money by imposing a tax on all foreigners resident in St. Petersburg.” “ Newspapers contain appeals on behalf of poor families in the capital.” “ A well-known police official purchases the wife of a subordinate for ten thousand roubles.” “ Newspaper proprietor exiled to a northern province for having published a cartoon representing, in a series of nine views, the torments of a dog attacked by a wasp, and finally forced to retire into kennel : the whole without head-line, but believed in official circles to be an allusion to the Tsar’s enforced retirement to Gatchina.” “ Householders warned that the morrow is the ‘ name-day ’ of the empress, and that they must celebrate on the occasion, — that is to say, hang out banners and burn lamps, — or pay a heavy penalty.” And thus it runs on, this record of events, a mere story of familiar experience to the native Russian, but to the foreigner a tale of doings in a world all other than his own.

It may be well here to remind the reader that the habit of living in lodgings is general in St. Petersburg. So far as Russian life is a bivouac, the term “ lodgings ” ² is aptly used ; etymologically, it corresponds with the English “ house,” or “ home,” and is therefore without the sense usually associated with it in the West. In the capital a man who lives in his own house occupies little more than a corner of it, or sleeps in a palace. Some of the richest families are content with lodgings, and but few of them need all the apartments which constitute a St. Petersburg flat. This is in itself suggestive of the scale upon which houses are built in the great Russian cities. But it is all too inadequate as preparation for the statement that a St. Petersburg lodging-house frequently contains as many as a thousand rooms, with a population of from two to three thousand persons. The finest apartments are on the ground floor; the poorest are reached by ascent of from ten to twelve stories. A suite of six rooms suffices for the wealthiest lodgers who have no palace of their own. Two or three supply all the needs of the well-to-do tradesman and his family; the majority of professional men who are bachelors, nearly all teachers and students, and a large class of officials find themselves amply accommodated by a single apartment. The cost of lodgings depends, of course, upon such elements as situation, number and furnishing of rooms, height of flat, and service. As a rule, it may be said that, taking into consideration the general purchasing power of the money expended, — a precaution consistently neglected in international comparisons of this kind.— house rent is somewhat higher in St. Petersburg than it is in Paris or London. I offer these details simply in order that the reader may be the better prepared for a singular custom to which I here invite his attention. Rent charges in Russia are invariably exacted “in advance,” even when a lodger surrounds himself with luggage valuable enough to yield the amount of a whole year’s arrears. Upon personal property of this kind there can be legally no lien. The same Russian law which hampers foreigner and native alike with the police surveillance of passport regulations, seizing every opportunity to throw obstacles in the way of free movement, gives to a lodger the fullest right to carry off his luggage in the teeth of an irate landlord clamoring for the settlement of his unpaid bill. Any forcible detention of property in such cases is treated by the courts as a quasi-criminal offense. How easy it is, under these circumstances, to attach to a whole class an undeserved stigma of sordid caution, or of suspicious distrust of their fellow-beings, will be at once seen. The law itself is an interesting survival: its origin, as a defense of personal rights in the country where the modern ukaz so frequently ignores them, must lie as deeply in historical causes as the democratic period itself.³

We have thus noted, in a general wav, how persistent is the tendency of Russian life, even in the most advanced aspects of its urban civilization, to revert to strictly communal forms. It will now be seen that the absence of strict lines of class separation and the close physical intimacies of wealth and poverty are continued in Russia as sociological phenomena by habits of housebuilding and domestic economy. The old patriarchal life of the Slav, in which a number of families cohabited practically, sometimes actually, under the same roof, has its merely material aspects vividly suggested by the manyroomed lodging houses of St. Petersburg, Where a number of students form an association for mutual and collective benefit, with a common fund made up of the contributions of each, the communal idea attains to a much more than formal realization. Generally speaking, there is little real isolation from each other of the occupants of a Russian flat. When all are engaged in educational work, as teachers or students, a brotherly sociableness makes light of partitions. The lodging-house is structurally a continuous quadrangular wall, full of apartments, the windows of which look out upon the inclosed space within. Comrades know each other’s windows, while the corridors lead easily from room to room. Reunions are numerous under these circumstances, and no more charming or delicate part is taken in them than by the young girls, whom eagerness for knowledge has led to the capital, hundreds of versts, it may be, from their own homes, and who, once in St. Petersburg, labor with singular perseverance and a really remarkable success to qualify themselves for the positions to which they aspire.

But these phalansteries have another aspect, and it is related to that just described as night is to day. To understand it fully one must have that power of sympathy with another race which it seems to be the business of most national processes of culture to suppress. To interpret it fully demands a special faculty which I do not possess. It is a mental state, the product of many influences. It gives color to thought, but cannot be reduced to language, and bears the same vague relation to uttered speech as music. In evasiveness it resembles one of those ideas that can be expressed only in a far-off way by thoughts lying in adjacent planes. When the centre is inaccessible, you measure the periphery. Yet multiply illustrations and metaphors as you may, the result will be little more than so many asymptotic lines. Exact definition of this dark presence hovering over Russian life is impossible. Were any human being able to compass adequately the description of it, some would dub him rhetorician, others would attack him for his metaphysics, many more would call him mad. It has, nevertheless, so strange a vitality in Russia as a moulder of literary expression that, despite the strictest censorship in the world, it gives its character to every book of note issued from the press. Above all, it wrought that inimitable language of moods which enabled writers like Pushkin, Gogol, Lermontov, and Dostoievsky to play an important part in awakening the national consciousness against the forces of oppression and wrong.

Let us, then, try to realize for a moment what life in St. Petersburg is, not to the easy-minded traveler, whose home is far away and who may leave Russia at any moment, but to the native resident, whose family ties and general interests — to say nothing of patriotism — bind him to the country even more firmly than he may chance to be attached to it by the arbitrariness of the police.⁴ The lodging-house, under circumstances like these, wears an aspect strikingly suggestive of the jail. Exigencies of state turn the communal dwelling-place and its picturesque survivals into an aggregation of cells, watched over by a house-porter in the pay of the police. This functionary is a very Heimdal in sharpness of senses: he hears the faintest sounds, and sees without any light whatever ; while his omnipresence when not wanted is far more complete than any magic carpet of Arabian tale could make it. This personage it is who mounts guard at the porte-cochère to watch entries and exits ; it is he who sees that all new lodgers are promptly numbered and pigeon-holed at police headquarters; he who keeps a record of the personal habits, companions, and resorts of every man, woman, and child under his charge ; he, too, who reports regularly to the authorities any “ suspicious circumstances ” which may come under his notice. If a christening, a wedding, or a funeral is to bring together a few friends, it is the house-porter who facilitates the intrusion of police spies, ready to snatch at any scrap of colloquial “ sedition” capable of conversion into roubles or advancement. If a students’ “ literary evening ” or social gathering is to be swelled into an assembly of conspirators seeking to undermine the foundations of law and order, it is again the house-porter who, figuratively speaking, supplies the gendarmes with their magnifying -glasses. And if some unfortunate youth is to pay the penalty of his liberalism by being dragged from his bed at midnight to the fortress of Peter and Paul, nobody is more eager to lead the way to the sleeping suspect than this treacherous janitor of many households, nightly consummating in the garb of the watch-dog his unholy compact with the wolves.

To go in constant fear of the paid denunciator ; never to “ talk politics ” save with relatives, or intimates incapable of treachery ; to have your local newspaper turned by the censor into a mere record of foreign events, and your foreign journal sub-edited for you by a policeman, who carefully clips from it or erases everything of “dangerous ” tendency; not to know the moment when an enemy may thrust some seditious publication into your letter-box, and so time his disclosure to the police as to have you surprised with the forbidden matter in your possession ;⁵ to be kept by a silenced press in a state of complete ignorance as to serious events occurring around you; and to feel in regard to your own personal safety, and that of your family and friends, an uncertainty truly Oriental⁶ — all this is no more than a mere suggestion of what life is to thousands of persons born to Russian citizenship in St. Petersburg. And when to the elements of the general discontent, to the bitter emptiness of existence, to the longing for a life of nobler activities, you add the pangs of poverty and the sense of personal wrong, it cannot seem strange that in many of these lodging-houses sensitive humanity should find its last and only safeguard against voluntary extinction in the hopes, the idealism, and the self-sacrifice of a political religion.

Native writers have suggested a connection between peculiarities of climate and the mental fermentation noticeable in St. Petersburg. For a month summer rages with an almost tropical heat, driving the wealthy to their cool country residences, but leaving the poor afoot on the blistering granite pavements of the dust-swept, sun-tormented city. At midday, when the streets seem to run with liquid fire, when scarcely any pedestrian is abroad, and even the policeman has retired to enjoy the luxury of shade, you may see the droshky driver clinging to his post of duty, the carter urging on his dirt-besmeared equipage, the vender offering his wares with the cry which is a shriek, and the beggars, sexless by plenitude of rags, awaiting their copek at the blazing doors of church and cathedral. What adds to the intolerableness of the summer day in St. Petersburg is the abnormal amplitude of the arc through which the solar rays descend upon the capital. Thoroughfares long and broad give the sky an aspect of unusual vastness, while the high buildings, with their long tracks of sun and shade, prolong for the imagination the duration of light and heat. Thus even to the classes possessed of wealth and leisure the St. Petersburg day in summer — nearly twenty hours intervening between sunrise and sunset — is a white, glaring, sustained weariness. To feel what it must be to those who toil in street and field, stimulated for tasks that begin and end with the light by scant allowances of black bread and watermelon, one must go in fancy to some Afric slave king’s metropolis, wherein the torments of nature are added to the cruelties of man.

It is naturally an inexpressible relief that to the unbearable summer day of the sixtieth parallel succeeds a night of brief yet strange beauty. A cool moment comes at last, in which the atmosphere has a just tepid ebb and flow, healing and grateful to the senses. There is then, strictly speaking, neither light nor dark. If it is night at all, it is night unachieved, incomplete, night full of the chaste mystery of early morning. The sky is so luminous that one may read small print in the open air without effort. It is a light with a hue of its own, seen, it is said, in no other part of the world, — a delicate green of marvelous tenderness, deepening near the horizon into blue, and in the north expanding towards the sun in vivid alternations of rose and amber. To the ordinary eye the heavens, though clear, are almost starless ; only brilliants like Vega and Arcturus have power to make an impression upon the retina. Summer midnight in the Russian capital is thus a simple twilight, uniting day to day, separated from actual morning only by a few brief moments. Its social effect is remarkable. Native residents of St. Petersburg are rarely in bed earlier than twelve o’clock. To issue forth an hour before midnight, with the park or public garden for one’s destination, is a fashionable habit sanctioned by the highest precedents. To return from theatre or promenade at one A. M. is by no means unusual. The immediate result is much loss of sleep ; the ultimate effect of these late hours appears in a peculiar form of nervous irritability.

Happily, this period of extreme heat is over in July, though warm noons may persist up to the opening days of September. The cold begins its attack as early as August. Day is then vulnerable in the narrow neck of twilight which the sun fails to guard, and through this the winds blow from the ice-fields. Frost quickly enters the breach, and under cover of growing darkness a territory once heat-ridden in its entire length is gradually won for winter. September evenings, for example, not only bring back many of last year’s overcoats ; they empty the country residences, and open a social season that is sure to last until February or even March. In October St. Petersburg is fairly besieged. The householder, entrenched behind double windows, replies to the atmospheric attack with crackling logs of pine and birch, until the great Russian stove threatens to bring back a mimic summer of its own. But without the enemy is inexpugnable. On the coldest days not men, but furs, are abroad. At 40° Réaumur the human face becomes invisible ; that is to say, disappears in the twelve-inch collar of a bear-skin turned upwards. Without precautions of this kind all accidents are sometimes possible. A beard is a treacherous thing to lie in the way of vapor exhaled from the lungs. Many a man goes out for a harmless walk to return with his mouth securely closed by a clamp of solid ice.

The sun does not rise now until almost ten o’clock. Even at midday it is difficult to believe that the large red ball you see swimming in tremulous vapor a few degrees above the horizon is the same orb as that which hung high over the city in summer. Diners at three meet each other by gaslight. A long night succeeds, full of lethargic influences heightened by the intensity of the cold. To the poor and badly clothed it is a night of hardship and suffering, to the wealthy a time of amusement and dissipation. In no capital in the world are the pleasures of winter, in-door and out-door, pursued with a greater zest than in St. Petersburg. Yet charity makes disbursements in the Russian capital that yearly put to shame cities in which it is better organized and has larger resources ; while the Russian fondness for receiving and entertaining guests gives a charming unselfishness to social intercourse. Whether the cause is to be sought in the vast distances which the Russian empire places between man and man, investing human meetings with a pleasure which they could not have amongst the crowded populations of Western Europe, or whether the Russians, being racially young, are not yet tired of living with each other, it is not for me to decide. But that social life in Russia has a freshness, an altruism, an interest in human nature not calculating or easily discouraged, that do not belong to it in many of the older countries, I had many opportunities of observing. And as virtues of this kind find their widest scope in a centre of population like St. Petersburg, so winter is the time of the year for being most favorably impressed with them.

The commoner out-door amusements of the cold season fill the thoroughfares of the capital with sound and movement during the period of frost. The first fall of snow consigns the low-wheeled droshkys to their winter quarters, and then appear a host of sledges not equaled for beauty and compactness anywhere in the world. No industrial art in Russia has reached the perfection with which the carriage-maker produces these delicate, fairy-like vehicles,—structures which it is a pleasure to feast the eye upon, a rare luxury to be driven in. The tiniest and daintiest of them, you think, was surely not made for use by grown-up people. It must be a toy sledge. But on the driver thrusting his legs into a narrow slit in its front you are led to take courage and mount. There is just room for a single passenger, — not an inch too little, not a finger too much, — and, once seated, away you are drawn, with a speed and safety at first bewildering, but in the end strangely enjoyable. Not less compactly constructed are the larger sledges, some of which are capable of accommodating twenty or thirty pleasure-seekers ; while below the “ turn-out ” for a single person the sledge descends in a gradual diminuendo, until it is minute enough to please the smallest girl and carry the most insignificant doll. It is unnecessary to add that when a fine thoroughfare like the Nevsky Prospect is filled with these winter carriages — here marching in regular lines, there broken up and going all abreast ; now keeping time with the jink-jink of the brass bells, anon yielding place to the swift troika with its silver tinklings and its trio of steeds — the spectacle offered is highly animating and picturesque.

Perhaps it is at Christmas that the foreign resident usually finds himself most at home in St. Petersburg. With the deepening of his first winter spent in the Russian capital, a pleasant surprise has been maturing for him apart even from the wildest suggestions of his dreams ; for what West-European would ever dream of going to the Slav world for the Christkindbaum, and of finding it as firmly rooted in Russian soil as in any of the Teutonic countries ? Did the warlike Varegs bring the Christmas tree with them, or were its seeds planted in some mysterious fashion by founders of the faith, like the saintly Olga or Vladímir, the bright sun of Kiev ? The fact is indisputable, whatever explanation of it may be offered. Christmas time turns Russian markets into veritable forests, while Christmas Eve fills the streets of St. Petersburg with crowds that, in the purchases they are making for the morrow, bear a striking resemblance to the pedestrians and shoppers one may meet in any German city at the same time of the year.

In this and many other ways a St. Petersburg winter increases the closeness of social and family intimacies. Yet between ruler and ruled it seems to erect new barriers of separation. In Russia there is a double incapacity, of the people to appreciate the power of an organized government, of the government to appreciate the forces of popular resistance. Winter diminishes the visible displays of authority, while it gathers popular elements together under circumstances favorable to a sense of unity and common aim. The long nights make assemblies and communications possible that probably could not take place in the brighter half of the year. The increased activity of the spy ; the frequent interference with newspapers, read in the cold season more than at any other time ; the closer surveillance exercised by the police over assemblies both public and private; the gloom of the day itself, harmonizing with and therefore intensifying the obscurity of a cheerless political climate, — all these contribute to the mental tension of the time. That under such influences as these the relations of the reigning family with the governed class can be of a pleasant kind in a great city of miscellaneous population like St. Petersburg is not at all likely to suggest itself to the reader. What those relations are in the cold season I shall try to suggest by sketching a scene the details of which are vividly present to me as I recall them.

First, let us realize a dark day in the Nevsky. Snow has been falling drearily for hours, and when the brief winter twilight comes the white crystals are still descending. All at once the gates of the Annichkin Palace are thrown open. Three officers emerge, and after a brief consultation disperse in different directions. Half an hour later the Prospect is prepared. That is to say, the great human currents to right and left of the thoroughfare are not all flowing upwards and downwards so uniformly anil unbrokenly as at first sight a spectator might suppose. At every twenty paces you come upon a pedestrian who, though continually in motion, makes no real progress whatever, but is simply pacing backwards anti forwards in a prescribed area. Simultaneously with this discovery you find the foot-walk on the palace side of the Prospect “ reserved ” for a distance of nearly two hundred yards; which means that if you stand thereon a moment some policeman in “ plain clothes ” will warn you to “ be off,” and that in default of compliance with the order you may be thrust into the gutter or handed over to the soldier at the palace gate. Finally, a plain covered carriage turns quickly into the Nevsky from the Grand Morskaya.⁷ Preceded by a single mounted Cossack, it threads its swift way, piloted through the maze of moving sledges, and halts not until it is safe within the courtyard of the Annichkin Palace. Such is the modest entry of the Emperor of all the Russias! A few hours ago he was miles away from the capital. No newspaper paragraph announced his coming. No enthusiastic crowd gathered at the railway station to welcome him on his return. Nor is a single cheer raised as, under the cover of darkness and official secrecy, he steals to his residence in the Nevsky Prospect.

How times are changed, indeed, in Russia! The day once was when the Slav ruler could he seen of his people ; nay, mingled with them as an equal in mart and thoroughfare. Even Nicholas walked the Nevsky, affable and fearless, almost daily, pausing from time to time to exchange words with a pedestrian whom he recognized, or to chide with good-humored banter some foreigner yet to be taught that smoking in the street was a violation of ukaz. Alexander II. himself for years strolled through the parks unattended. But to-day, like the gods of popular mythology, the wielders of absolute power on earth no longer appear among men. The reign of their celestial mimicry is nearly over; one by one they have melted away in the light of a new morning; the last of them will soon disappear. Hereafter men may glimpse them, but it will only be as unnatural figures on the firmament of history, as repulsive shapes of the imagination, giving their names to the fairest constellations, but powerless to retard the swing of planet or the march of star. And in that time the wonder, I believe, will be not why the world produced such forms, but why it tolerated them so long.

Edmund Noble.