Russia in 1839 -Empire of the Czar: A Journey Through Eternal Russia

116KRONSTADT.

As regards myself, this childish Colossus by no means predisposes me to admire what I may expect to see in the interior of the empire. To admire Russia in approaching it by water, it is necessary to forget the approach to England by the Thames. The first is the image of death ; the last, of life,

On dropping anchor before Kronstadt, we learned that one of the noble vessels we had seen man?uvering around us had just been lost on a sand bank. This shipwreck was dangerous only to the captain, who expected to be cashiered, and, perhaps, punished yet more

severely. Prince К said to me privately, that

he would have done better to have perished with Ins

vessel. Our fellow-traveller the Princess Lhad a

son attached to the unlucky ship. She was placed in a situation of painful suspense, until news of his safety was brought to her by the governor of Kronstadt,

The Russians are incessantly repeating to me that it is requisite to spend at least two years in their country before passing a judgment upon it; so difficult is it to understand.

But though patience and prudence may be necessary virtues in those learned travellers who aspire to the glory of producing erudite works, I, who have been hitherto writing only for my friend and myself, have no intention of making my journal a work of labour. I have some fear of the Russian customhouse, but they assure me that my ecritoire will be respected.

Nothing can be more melancholy than the aspect of nature in the approach to St. Petersburg. As one advances up the Gulf, the flat marshes of Ingria

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terminate in a little wavering line drawn between the sky and the sea; this line is Russia. It presents the appearance of a wet lowland, with here and there a few birch trees thinly scattered. The landscape is void of objects, and colours ; has no bounds, and yet no sublimity. It has just light enough to be visible; the grey mossy earth well accords with the pale sun which illumines it, not from overhead, but from near the horizon, or almost indeed from below, — so acute is the angle which the oblique rays form with the surface of this unfavoured soil. In Russia the finest days have a blueish dimness. If the nights are marked by a clearness which surprises, the days are clothed with an obscurity which saddens.

Kronstadt, with its forest of masts, its substructures, and its ramparts of granite, finely breaks the monotonous reverie of the pilgrim, who is, like me, seeking for imagery in this dreary land. I have never seen, in the approaches to any other great city, a landscape so melancholy as the banks of the Neva. The campagna of Rome is a desert, but what picturesque objects, what past associations, what light, what fire, what poetry, if I might be allowed the expression, I would say, what passion animates this religious land. To reach St. Petersburg, you must pass a desert of water framed in a desert of peat earth ; sea, shore, and sky, are all blended into one mirror, but so dull, so tarnished, that it reflects nothing.

The thought of the noble vessels of the Russian navy, destined to perish without having ever been in action, pursues me like a dream.

The English, in their idiom, which is so poetical when it relates to maritime subjects, call a vessel of

118 APPEOACII TO ST. PETEESBURGH.

the royal navy, a man of tear. Never will the Russians be thus able to denominate their ships of parade. These men of court, or wooden courtiers, are nothing more than the hospital of the imperial service. If the sight of so useless a marine inspired me with any fear, it was not the fear of war but of tyranny. It recalled to mind the inhumanities of Peter I., that type of all Russian monarchs, ancient and modern.

Some miserable boats, maimed by fishermen as dirty as Esquimaux, a few vessels employed in towing timber for the construction of the imperial navy, and a few steam-boats, mostly of foreign build, were the only objects that enlivened the scene. Such is the approach to St. Petersburgh: all that could have influenced against the choice of this site, so contrary to the views of nature or to the real wants of a great people, must have passed before the mind of Peter the Great without striking him. The sea, at any cost; — such was his sentiment. Whimsical idea in a Russian to found the capital of the empire of the Slavonians among the Finns, and in the vicinity of the Swedes ! Peter the Great might say that his only object was to give a port to Russia; but if he had the genius which is ascribed to him, he ought to have foreseen the scope of his work; and in my opinion he did foresee it. Policy, and, I fear, the revenge of imperial self-love, wounded by the independence of the old Muscovites, have created the destinies of modern Russia.

Russia is like a vigorous person suffocating for want of external air. Peter I. promised it an outlet, but without perceiving that a sea necessarily closed

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during eight months in the year, is not like other seas. Names, however, are everything in Russia. The efforts of Peter, his subjects, and successors, extraordinary as they are, have only served to create a city which it is difficult to inhabit; with which the Neva disputes the soil whenever the wind blows from the Gulf, and from which the people think of flying altogether, at each step that this war of elements compels them to take towards the south. For a bivouac, quays of granite are superfluous.

The Finns, among whom the Russians fixed their new capital, are of Scythian origin, they are still almost Pagans — suitable inhabitants of the soil of Petersburg. It was only in 1836 that an ukase appeared, commanding their priests to add a family name to the saint's name given to the children in baptism.

This race is almost without physiognomy. The middle of the face is flattened to a degree that renders it deformed. The men, though ugly and dirty, are said to be strong, which, however, does not prevent their being poor. Although the natives, they are seldom seen in Petersburg except upon market days. They inhabit the swamps, and slightly elevated granite hills of the environs.

Kronstadt is a very flat island in the middle of the Gulf of Finland : this aquatic fortress is raised above the sea only just sufficiently to defend the navigation to St. Petersburg. Its foundations and many of its works are under water. Its guns are disposed, according to the Russians, with great skill, and by virtue of the shower of ball that an order of the emperor could here pour upon an enemy, the place passes for

120BATTEEIES OF KRONSTADT.

impregnable. I am not aware whether these guns command both the passages of the Gulf; the Russians who could have informed me, would not. My experience, although of recent date, has already taught me to distrust the rodomontades and exasperations in which the subjects of the Czar, inspired by an excess of zeal in the service of their master, indulge. National pride appears to me to be tolerable only among a free people.

We arrived at Kronstadt about the dawning of one of those days without real beginning or end, which I am tired of describing though not of admiring.

After casting anchor before the silent fortress, we had to wait a long time for the arrival of a host of official personages, who boarded us one after the other; commissaries of police, directors and sub-directors of the