Théophile Gautier

Travels in Russia (Voyage en Russie, 1858-59, 1861)

Part VII: Moscow

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Chapter 16: Moscow.
Chapter 17: The Kremlin.

Chapter 16: Moscow

Though finding life most pleasant in Saint Petersburg, I was filled with the desire to see the true Russian capital, the great Muscovite city, an enterprise that the railway made easy enough.

I was sufficiently acclimatised not to fear a trip amidst twenty degrees of cold. The opportunity to visit Moscow in agreeable company presenting itself, I took full advantage, gripping winter’s frost-white forelock tightly, and donning its costume: a mink overcoat, beaver-skin hat, and fur-lined boots rising to above the knee. A sled took my trunk, another received my person, carefully stowed, and here I am in the immense railway station, awaiting the time indicated for departure to the south; though the Russian railways do not pride themselves like ours on their chronometric punctuality. If some important personage is to travel on board the train, the locomotive tempers its ardour for a few minutes, a quarter of an hour if necessary, and grants them time to arrive. Travellers are seen off by their parents and friends; and their parting when the bell finally rings, is not accomplished without clasped hands, hugs, and tender words, often interspersed with tears. Sometimes they buy tickets, mount the carriage, and prolong the parting until the first station, only to return by the next train. I like this custom and find it touching; they wish to enjoy the company of the beloved person a little longer, and to delay as much as possible the painful moment of separation. A painter might have observed there, on the faces of the moujiks, finer expressions of simple pathos, than seen elsewhere. Women, mothers, whose son or husband would be absent for a long time, recalled in their naive and deep suffering those holy women with reddened eyes, mouths contracted, sobbing suppressed, whom the artists of the Middle Ages portrayed along the Way of the Cross. I have witnessed many a transit point in diverse countries, many a boarding pier, and departure platform; but nowhere have I seen such tender and desolate farewells as I saw in Russia.

Railway trains, in a country where the thermometer drops, more than once during the winter, to thirty degrees or more below zero on the Réaumur scale (twenty-four degrees below zero Centigrade) scarcely resemble those in a country which enjoys a temperate climate. The tin-plate containers filled with hot water employed at home would soon freeze under the feet of travellers left with a block of ice instead of a heater. The flow of air through the joints of the doors and windows would induce colds, bad chests, and rheumatism. Here, several carriages, linked together, and communicating through doors that open and close at the discretion of the traveller, form a species of apartment, preceded by an anteroom with a toilet and dressing room, in which small items of luggage are stored; this antechamber gives on to a platform surrounded by a rail, which one accesses by means of a stair, more convenient certainly than the steps of our carriages. Stoves filled with logs heat the compartment and maintain the temperature at fifteen to sixteen degrees. Along the window joints, felt pads prevent the entrance of cold air and conserve the internal heat. Thus, you may see that a trip from St. Petersburg to Moscow, in January, in a climate whose enunciation alone would make Parisians shudder and their teeth chatter, has nothing arctically glacial about it. One would definitely suffer more in accomplishing the journey from Burgos to Valladolid at the same time of year.

Around the inside of the first carriage was a large sofa for the use of sleepers, and those afraid to seat themselves cross-legged on the floor in the oriental manner. I preferred the couch to the softer armchairs equipped with padded ear-mufflers in the second carriage, and made myself comfortable in a corner. I felt, thus placed, as if I were in a house on wheels, rather than enduring the discomfort of a carriage. I could get to my feet, walk about, and move from one room to another with the degree of freedom a passenger aboard ship enjoys, and which the unfortunate traveller is deprived of when embedded in a stagecoach, post-chaise, or cart, as still obtains in France.

Given that we were not yet about to depart, and with my place secured and marked by my overnight bag, I was walking beside the track, when the singular shape of the locomotive’s stack caught my eye. It was topped with a vast funnel which gave it the appearance of those tall Venetian chimneys with flared tops that rise so picturesquely above pinkish walls in Canaletto’s paintings.

Russian locomotives are not fired, like ours and those of other western countries, with coal, but with wood. Birch or fir logs are piled symmetrically on the tender, and renewed at stations adorned with wood piles. Which means to the older peasants that, at the rate things are moving in Holy Russia, it will soon be necessary to pluck out the timbers of their izbas (traditional log-houses) to fuel the boilers; but before the forests are all felled, at least those not too far from the rail tracks, the engineers’ surveys will have discovered some bed of coal or anthracite. The virgin soil must surely hide inexhaustible riches.

Finally, we depart. We leave behind, to our right, on the old cross-country road, the Moscow Triumphal Gate of St. Petersburg, with its proud and grandiose silhouette, and catch a last fleeting glimpse of the urban dwellings, gradually growing sparser, their plank fences, and wooden walls painted in the old Russian fashion and their green roofs glazed with snow; for, as we move further from the city, the buildings which, in the finer neighbourhoods affect the styles of Berlin, London or Paris, take on a national character. St. Petersburg begins to disappear; but the golden dome of Saint Isaac’s, the spire of the Admiralty, the pyramidions of the regimental church of the Horse-Guards (the Cathedral of the Annunciation, not extant), the starry azure domes, and the bulbous pewter-coloured bell-towers still gleam on the horizon, appearing like a Byzantine crown set on a cushion of silver brocade.

The houses of men seemed to sink towards the earth; the houses of God to soar towards the sky.

As I looked out, a light quicksilver-coloured arborescence formed on the window of the carriage door, due to the contrast between the temperature of the cold air from outside and the hot air within, an arborescence whose branches soon intersected and spread broad leaves, to form a magical forest and spread so widely over the pane that my view of the landscape was totally obscured. Surely, nothing is prettier than those patterns, arabesques, and filigree threads of ice so delicately shaped by Winter’s fingers. It is like a work of Northern poetry, and the imagination discovers Hyperborean images there.

However, having contemplated them for an hour or so, one grows impatient with the white embroidered veil which prevents you alike from seeing and being seen. One’s curiosity is piqued by the feeling that behind the frosted glass a whole world of unknown scenery is passing by, that will never reveal itself again to one’s eyes. In France, I would have unceremoniously lowered the window; but in Russia it would have been a possibly-fatal act of imprudence: the cold, which ever awaits its prey, would have laid its monstrous polar bear’s paw on the carriage, and raked me with its claws, In the open air, you can fight it, as you would an enemy, fierce but, after all, faithful and generous in its harshness; but don’t let it enter where you are: don’t open the door or the window; for then it engages the heat in an all-out fight; it pierces it with its frozen arrows, and if it plants one in your side, you’ll have a hard time recovering.

However, it was necessary for me to take action, for it would have been sad to be transported from St. Petersburg to Moscow in a box behind square panes of milky white, allowing nothing of the outside world to be divined. I do not possess, thank God, the temperament of that Englishman who was borne from London to Constantinople with his eyes blindfolded, the blindfold only being removed at the entrance to the Golden Horn, so he might enjoy that splendid panorama, unrivalled in all the world, all at once, and without weakening the effect of the transition. So, pulling my fur hat over my eyebrows, straightening the collar of my coat, and tightening it around me, drawing my boots to mid-thigh, and pushing my hands into gloves the thumb of which alone was articulated — a real Samoyed outfit — I headed, bravely, towards the small platform projecting from the carriage’s antechamber. A veteran, in his military greatcoat, decorated with several medals, stood there monitoring the progress of the train, seemingly untroubled by the temperature. A small gratuity, consisting of a silver ruble, which he had not solicited but which he did not refuse either, rendered him so obliging as to turn towards another point of the horizon, while I lit an excellent cigar purchased in the Eliseyev Emporium (on Nevsky Prospekt) and taken from one of those glass-walled boxes which allow one to view the merchandise, without the need to break the band stamped by the tax authorities which encircles it.

I was soon forced to throw away this pure Havana from the Vuelta Abajo (a region of western Cuba), because though it burned at the one end, the other was freezing. A lump of ice welded it to my lips, a layer of which remained stuck to the tobacco-leaf whenever I took it from my mouth. Smoking outdoors, in twenty degrees of cold, is a thing that is well-nigh impossible, and it costs one little to comply with the ukase (legal decree) which prohibits, the smoking of pipes and cigars outside. The spectacle unfolding before my eyes was interesting enough to compensate me for that small deprivation.

As far as the view extended, snow covered the earth with its cold drapery, leaving one to guess the vague shapes of objects within its white folds, akin to a shroud which hides the corpse from view. There were no longer any roads, paths, rivers, or demarcation lines of any kind to be seen. Nothing but humps and depressions barely visible amidst the general whiteness. The beds of the frozen streams could not be distinguished except by valleys, of a kind, tracing their sinuosities through the snow and often filled by it. Further away, clumps of reddish, half-buried birch trees, emerged to show their bare heads. A few log-cabins, coated with ice, launched their columns of smoke which stained the paleness of the dreary scene. Along the track, lines of bushes had been planted in rows, with the intention of halting in its course the icy white powder transported, with terrible impetuosity, by the snowy blast, the polar khamsin. You can scarcely imagine the strange, sad grandeur of that immense white landscape, appearing as the full moon does through a telescope. It seemed as if one was on a dead planet gripped forever by eternal cold. One’s imagination refused to believe that this prodigious accumulation of snow would ever melt, evaporate, vanish to the sea amid the rivers’ swollen waves, or that Spring would someday render that discoloured plain green and flowering once more. The low, overcast sky, of a uniform grey that seemed yellow contrasted with the whiteness of the earth below, added to the melancholy nature of the scene. A profound silence reigned in solitude over the countryside, disturbed only by the thrum of the engine on the rails, since the snow’s ermine carpet muffled all other sounds. Not a living thing was visible in the empty expanse; not a creature. The human inhabitants were nestling amid the logs of their izbas, the wild creatures deep in their dens. Only, as we approached the stations, from some fold of snow, sleighs, and kibitkas (covered sledges) emerged, drawn at the gallop by little shaggy horses, speeding over the field ignoring the buried roads, hastening from some unseen village to meet the travellers. There was a group of young noblemen in my compartment who were on a hunting trip, and dressed for the occasion in fine brand-new tulups of a pale salmon hue, pricked out with stitching forming graceful arabesques. The tulup is a sort of sheepskin kaftan worn with the wool inwards, as is the fur of fur-coats in really cold countries. Fastened by a button at the shoulder, a leather belt with metal plating cinches it at the waist. Add to that an astrakhan cap, white felt boots, a hunting knife hanging from the belt, and you have a costume of Asian elegance; although it is the type of clothing worn by moujiks, barins (gentlemen) do not hesitate to don it in these circumstances, since there is nothing more convenient or better suited to the climate. Besides, the difference between this clean, supple, tulup, like a buffed-leather glove, and the soiled, greasy, shiny tulup worn by the moujik, is great enough for there to be no possible confusion. The birch-woods and fir-trees I could see on the horizon, where they traced brown lines, host wolves, bears, and sometimes, it is said, elk, the fierce wild game of the North, the hunting of which is not without danger, and which requires agile, robust, and courageous Nimrods.

A troika, drawn by three superb horses, awaited my young lords at one of the stations, and I saw them vanish into the interior with a speed the locomotive might envy, on a road hidden beneath the snow, but indicated at a distance by poles serving as milestones. Given the speed at which they were travelling, I soon lost sight of them. They were off to a castle whose name escapes me, to find their hunting companions, promising themselves a greater happiness than those simpletons in La Fontaine’s fable (see his Fables, Book V, 20: ‘L’Ours et les Deux Compagnons’) who sold the bear’s skin before having slain him. They planned to kill the bear, and keep the pelt to make one of those scarlet-bordered rugs with a stuffed head, of which there is no shortage in the salons of St. Petersburg for the novice traveller to stumble over. Given the hunters quietly deliberate air, I had little doubt of their prowess.

I will not name, station by station, the places past which the railway runs: it offers the reader little to be told that the train stops at such and such a locality whose name arouses in them not a single idea or memory, especially since these towns or villages are of little importance, as most of them are quite far from the tracks and only betrayed by the green and bulbous copper domes of their churches. Because the railway from St. Petersburg to Moscow follows an inflexibly straight line and fails to deviate on any pretext whatsoever, it even fails to honour Tver with a curve or bend, which is the largest city encountered on the journey, and the place from which the Volga steamboats depart; it passes proudly at a distance, and one gains Tver by means of a carriage or droshky, according to the season.

The stations, built to a uniform plan, are magnificent. Their architecture is pleasing to the eye, a mixture of the red tones of brick and the pale ones of stone. But whoever has seen one has seen them all; let me describe the one at which we halted for dinner. This station offered the peculiarity of being sited not at the side of the track but in the middle, like Marylebone church in the Strand. The railway surrounds it with iron, and it is at this point that the trains from Moscow and St. Petersburg meet, while avoiding each other. The two trains pour their travellers, who are about to sit at the same table, onto the platforms to left and right. The Moscow train brings people from Archangel, Tobolsk, Kyakhta, and Yakutsk, from the banks of the Amur River and the shores of the Caspian Sea, from Kazan, from Tbilisi, from the Caucasus and the Crimea, from the furthest depths of European and Asian Russia, who, in passing, shake hands with their Western acquaintances brought by the train from St. Petersburg. It is a cosmopolitan feast where folk talk in more languages than the Tower of Babel ever knew. Wide-arched bays with double windows facing each other illuminated the room in which the table was set, and a pleasant hothouse temperature reigned which allowed lataniers, tulip trees, and other plants of the tropical regions, to spread their broad silken leaves. Such luxurious profusions of rare plants, that one scarcely expects to encounter in such a harsh climate, are almost universally met with in Russia. They produce a festive air indoors, rest one’s eyes from the sparkling glare of the snow, and preserve a memory of greenery. The table was splendidly equipped, covered with silverware and glass, and bristling with bottles of all shapes, and from all sources. Tall bottles of Rhine wine protruded above the heads of long-necked bottles of Bordeaux sealed with metal caps, and Champagne sealed with foil and paper; every grand cru was there, Châteaux d’Yquem, Haut Barsac, Château Lafitte, Gruaud-Larose, Veuve Clicquot, Roederer, Moët, and Sternberg-Cabinet, and all the famous brands of English beer as well; a complete assortment of illustrious drinks, adorned with gilded labels in bright colours with engaging designs and authentic coats of arms. It is in Russia that the fines of French wines are drunk; and the purest juice of our harvests, the mother-lode of our vintages, passes through these northern throats careless of the cost of what they swallow. Except for the soup, the shchi, the cuisine, needless to say was French, and I recall a certain chaud-froid grouse that would not have been disowned by Robert Vinot, that great dean of the palate, of whom Antonin Carême said: ‘He is sublime at chaud-froid!’ (classic chaud-froid is a dish of cooked poultry, cooled, and coated with a jellied brown or white sauce). Waiters in black, with white ties and white gloves, circulated around the table, and served us with quiet alacrity.

My appetite quenched, I inspected, as the various travellers emptied glasses of all shapes, the two lounges located at the ends of the room and reserved for illustrious people, the elegant little shops displaying bags, boots, and slippers, in morocco from Tula, and embroidered with gold and silver, Circassian carpets embroidered in silk on a scarlet background, belts braided with gold thread, cases containing platinum cutlery nielloed in gold and tasteful in style, models of the Kremlin’s cracked bell (the Tsarsky Kolokol or Royal Bell, cracked after a fire and never rung), Russian crosses in wood, carved with Chinese patience, and decorated with an infinite number of microscopic personages, and a thousand other amusing nothings designed to tempt the tourist and lighten his purse of a few rubles, if he lacks, as I do, the strength to resist the eyes’ greed and be satisfied with simply looking. Nonetheless, it is difficult, on thinking of absent friends, not to burden oneself with these pretty trifles which mark at one’s return that one has not forgotten them, and to which one always ends by succumbing.

The meal brought together in the one room, guests from the separate trains, and I noted that when travelling, as in the city, the women appeared less sensitive to cold than the men. Most were content with a satin coat lined with fur, their heads free of raised collars, and layers of clothes piled on top of one another. Doubtless, coquetry has something to do with it; what is the point of having a slender waist, a trim foot, if one looks like a parcel? A pretty Siberian attracted all eyes with her elegance, which the journey had in no way troubled. One would have thought her merely descending from a carriage to enter the Opéra. I was struck by the sight of a pair of Romani women, richly and strangely dressed, whose unfamiliar facial type rendered their semi-civilised adornment even more singular. They laughed at the gallant remarks of the young gentlemen, displaying the fierce white teeth embedded in brownish gums characteristic of Bohemian folk.

Emerging from this lukewarm bath, the cold, on the verge of night, seemed more piercing despite the overcoat I had donned once more. Indeed, the thermometer was lower by a few degrees. The snow had taken on a more intense whiteness, and crackled underfoot like powdered glass. Diamantine flakes floated in the air, before falling again to the ground. It would have been reckless to resume my post at the rail of the carriage. It might have compromised the future existence of my nose. Besides, the landscape continued ever the same. White plain followed white plain, since in Russia one must travel an immense distance before the horizon alters in appearance.

The veteran, whose chest was plastered with medals, filled the stove with logs and the temperature of the carriage, which had cooled, rose swiftly; a pleasurable warmth reigned, and without the swaying motion produced by the locomotive’s progress one might have thought one was in one’s room at home. The lower-class carriages, though less comfortable and luxurious, were heated in the same manner. In Russia, warmth is provided for everyone. Nobleman and peasant are equal before the thermometer. The palace and the cabin are heated to the same degree. It’s a matter of life or death.

Lying on the couch, my head resting on my night-bag, and covered in my fur coat, I was soon asleep in perfect comfort, lulled by the constant rhythm of the train. When I woke, it was one in the morning and the fancy took me to spend a few moments contemplating the nocturnal state of northern nature. The winter nights are long and dark in these latitudes, but the darkness fails to completely dim the snow’s whiteness. Under the blackest sky one can distinguish its livid pallor, as it lies like a mortuary sheet beneath a cavernous vault. It emits a vague glow, a bluish phosphorescence. It betrays the presence of hidden objects by the touches it adds to their forms and draws them as if with a white crayon on a black background of shadow. This pale landscape, whose lines of perspective altered and folded swiftly behind the train, possessed the strangest appearance. At one moment, the moon, piercing the thick layer of cloud, shed her cold light over the icy plain, the illuminated areas of which took on a silvery lustre, while the rest turned bluish with deep blue shadows, proving the truth of Goethe’s observations regarding shadows on snow, in his Theory of Colours (see his treatise ‘Zur Farbenlehre: 74 et al’).

You can scarcely imagine the melancholy of this pale and immense horizon which seemed to reflect the moonlight it received. It formed and re-formed around the train, ever the same like the sea, even though the locomotive was running at full speed, launching flickering showers of red sparks from its funnel, seemingly concerned as to our ever leaving this white expanse. The cold, increased by the displacement of air, became intense and penetrated to the marrow of my bones, despite the dense softness of my furs; my breath crystallised on my moustache like an icy gag; my eyelashes stuck together and I felt, although I was upright, unconquerable sleep invading my eyes: it was time to retreat.

When there is no wind, the harshest cold is bearable, but the slightest breath sharpens its arrows and the edge of its steel axe. Ordinarily, at these low temperatures at which mercury congeals, there is not the slightest breeze and one could cross Siberia holding a lighted candle without the flame wavering: but at the slightest draught one freezes, even if bundled up in the pelts of the furriest inhabitants of the polar regions.

It was a most pleasant feeling to regain the benign atmosphere of the compartment and huddle in my corner, where I slept till dawn with that particular feeling of pleasure one experiences when sheltered from the rigours of the season, traced on the windows in icy lettering. The ‘grey-eyed morn’, as Shakespeare has it (see ‘Romeo and Juliet, act 3, line 1’), since Homer’s ‘rosy-fingered Dawn’ would have incurred frostbite at such a latitude, wrapped in her pelisse, began to tread the snow in her white felt boots. We were approaching Moscow whose jagged silhouette I could already discern from the platform of the carriage, in the first light of day.

Not so many years ago, Moscow had appeared, waveringly, to the eyes of the French, as the backcloth to a prodigious Russian retreat and beneath a kind of aurora borealis that filled the entire sky, by the light of the fires lit by Fyodor Rostopchin; her Byzantine diadem, bristling with turrets and strange bell-towers, against an outpouring of smoke and flame. It seemed a fabulous city, splendidly and chimerically distant, a jewelled tiara set on a snowy desert, of which the returnees of 1812 spoke with a sort of stupefied amazement, since, the city had changed before their eyes to a fiery volcano. Indeed, before the invention of steamboats and railways, it was no trivial undertaking to reach Moscow. It was more difficult even than travelling to Corinth, a visit, indeed, not open to all the world, if the proverb is to be believed (the saying in Latin, ‘Non licet omnibus adire Corinthum’: in Greek, ‘Οὐ παντὸς ἀνδρὸς ἐς Κόρινθόν ἐσθ᾽ὁ πλοῦς’, is attributed to Horace).

As a child, thoughts of Moscow filled my imagination and I often lingered on the Quai Voltaire, in ecstasy in front of the window of a dealer in engravings, in which large panoramic views of Moscow were exhibited, done in aquatint, coloured after the methods of Jean-Louis Demarne, or Philibert-Louis Debucourt, as many then were. Those onion-shaped bell-towers, these domes surmounted by chained crosses, those painted houses, the men with large beards and flared hats, the women with poivoniki headdresses (of cloth, stiffened, embroidered, and often decorated) wearing short tunics tied under the arms, seemed to belong to a lunar world, and the idea of ever travelling there never presented itself to my mind; Besides, since Moscow had been burned to the ground, what interest could a heap of ashes offer? It was a while before I could accept that the city had been rebuilt, and that not all the older buildings had been lost to the flames. Well, in less than half an hour I would be able to judge if the aquatints of the Quai Voltaire were accurate or no!

View of Moscow, 1856

View of Moscow, 1856
Rijksmuseum

At the station, a whole crowd of isvochtchiks had gathered, offering their sleighs to travellers, and seeking to gain their preference. We chose two. I mounted one with my companion (the photographer Pierre Ambroise Richebourg) and the other took care of our luggage. According to the custom of Russian coachmen who never wait to be told their destination, our drivers set their horses instantly to the gallop, and set out in a random direction. They never fail to act out this fantasy.

Snow had fallen more abundantly in Moscow than in St. Petersburg, and the sleigh runs, the borders of which had been carefully raised with a shovel, exceeded the level of the cleared sidewalks by more than a foot and a half. Over this dense layer, polished by the sleighs’ runners, our frail equipage flew like the wind, while the horses’ hooves threw icy lumps, thick as hail, against the leather of the snow-screen. The street we were following was lined with public baths, steam-baths, since bathing in water is rarely practised in Russia. If the people look dirty, the uncleanliness is only apparent, for the dirt clings merely to expensive winter clothes freshly-renewed; while there is never a little mistress in Paris massaged with cold cream, rice powder, and virginal milk, who is cleaner than a peasant lass fresh from the steam-room. The poorest go there at least once a week. These baths, taken together without distinction of sex, cost no more than a few kopecks. Be it understood, of course, that more luxurious establishments, in which all the knowledge of the art of bathing is united, exist for the rich.

After a few moments of senseless speed, our coachmen, judging further discretion was unneeded, turned round in their seats and asked where we were going. We indicated the Hotel Chevrier, on the Rue des Vieilles-Gazettes (Gazetny Pereulok). They resumed their race towards the newly-identified goal. On the way we gazed eagerly to left and right without seeing anything particularly characteristic. Moscow was built in concentric zones; the outer ones are the most modern and the least interesting. The Kremlin, which once comprised the whole city, represents its heart and marrow.

Above houses that differed little from those of St. Petersburg, rose the occasional azure dome starred with gold, or a bulbous bell-tower clad in tin-plate; a church with rococo architecture displayed a colourful bright-red façade strangely enhanced with snow on every projection; at other times the eye was surprised by a chapel painted Marie-Louise blue, which winter had frosted with silver here and there. The question of polychrome architecture, still so hotly debated in France, has long been settled in Russia; they gild, they silver there, they paint the buildings all colours without the least concern for sobriety or good taste, as pseudo-classicists comprehend such things, since it is certain that the Greeks applied various colours to their monuments and even their statues. Nothing is pleasanter than the application of this rich palette to works of architecture which in the West are condemned to pale greys, neutral yellows, and dull whites.

The store signs presented the beautiful letters of the Russian alphabet, of Greek character, like a form of golden ornamentation, which can be employed on decorative flags, like Kufic script. A translation was available, for illiterate folk or foreigners, in the form of naive representations of the goods the shops contained.

We soon arrived at the hotel, whose large, paved wooden courtyard displayed under shed-roofs the most varied carriages, troikas, tarantasses (four-wheelers), droshkys, kibitkas (covered sledges), post-chaises, berlins, landaus, and charabancs, carriages for summer and winter, for in Russia no one walks, and if one sends a servant to buy cigars he travels the hundred paces to the tobacconist’s shop in style. We were given rooms adorned with mirrors, large-flowered wallpaper, and sumptuous furniture, just as in the grand hotels of Paris. Not the smallest vestige of local colour, yet, on the other hand, all the blessings of modern comfort. However romantic one may be, one readily resigns oneself to it, civilisation having wooed the most rebellious characters to its luxuries; there was nothing Russian about the rooms except the usual large green leather sofa on which it is so sweet to sleep rolled in one’s coat.

Our heavy travelling-clothes having been hung in the closet, and our ablutions done, we thought it would be a good idea, before launching ourselves on the city, to partake of lunch, so that our admiration would be undistracted by the rumblings of our stomachs, forcing us to return to the hotel from the depths of some wildly remote neighbourhood. The meal was served to us in the middle of a conservatory, arranged like a winter-garden and cluttered with exotic plants. To eat, in Moscow, a beef steak with a potato soufflé in a miniature virgin forest is a quite bizarre experience. The waiter, standing a few steps from the table, who took our order, though wearing a black coat and a white tie, had a yellowish complexion, protruding cheekbones, and a small flattened nose, which betrayed his Mongolian origin and proclaimed that he could not have been born far from the border with China, despite his looking like a waiter in an English restaurant.

Since one cannot observe the details of a city in comfort, when borne by a sleigh dashing about as swiftly as lightning, we resolved, at the risk of being taken for mediocre fellows and attracting the contempt of the mujiks, to make our first excursion on foot, wearing heavy fur-lined galoshes intended to separate the sole of our boots from the icy pavements, and soon arrived at Kitay-Gorod, the business district, next to Krasnaya Ploschad, which means Red Square, or rather the beautiful square, since in Russian the words red and beautiful are virtually synonymous.

One side of this square is occupied by the long facade of Gostiny-Dvor, an immense bazaar traversed by glassed-in lanes like our passages, and which contains no less than six thousand shops. The surrounding wall of the Kremlin, or Kreml, its towers with pointed tops pierced by portals, rises at the other side of the square, allowing a view, above its battlements, of the domes, bell-towers and church spires it contains. At the other corner, as strange as the architecture seen in dreams, stands the chimerically impossible church of Vasiliya Blazhennogo, St Basil’s Cathedral, which casts doubt on the testimony of one’s eyes. One sees a building which bears the appearance of reality, and wonder if it is not some fantastic mirage, a thing of clouds strangely coloured by the sun which some tremor of the air will distort or cause to fade. It is, without a shadow of doubt, the most original monument in the world, recalling nothing one has ever seen before, and of no known style: it looks like a gigantic coral cluster, a crystallised mass, a cavern full of upside-down stalactites. But no comparison can give an idea of something which has no forerunner or peer. Let me try instead to describe Saint Basil’s, if I possess the vocabulary to describe what has no like.

St Basil’s Cathedral

St Basil’s Cathedral
From Voyage pittoresque en Russie by Charles de Saint-Julien, 1853
Internet Archive

There is a legend about Vasiliya Blazhennogo which is probably untrue, but which no less expresses with force and poetry the feeling of amazed admiration it must have induced in the semi-barbarian age in which it arose, this building so singular, so outside all architectural tradition. Ivan the Terrible had the cathedral constructed in thanksgiving for the capture of Kazan, and when completed he found it so beautiful, surprising, and admirable he ordered that the architect be blinded – an Italian, it is said – so that the latter could not build a similar one elsewhere.

According to another version of the same legend, the Tsar asked the author of the church if he could not raise an even more beautiful one and, on his responding in the affirmative, had his head cut off so that Vasiliya Blazhennogo might remain a monument without rival. He could imagine no more flattering cruelty in his jealousy, for this Ivan the Terrible was at heart a true artist, a passionate dilettante. Such ferocity, in matters of art, displeases me less than indifference. Whatever the truth, Vasiliya Blazhennogo was only printed in a single rendering.

Imagine, on a kind of platform isolated from the earth below, the most bizarre, the most incoherent, the most prodigious accumulation of pavilions, lodges, external staircases, arcaded galleries, recesses, unexpected projections, porches lacking symmetry, juxtaposed chapels, and windows pierced as if at random and indescribably shaped; an interior plan revealed in relief, as if the architect, seated at the centre of his work, had formed the building from within. From the roof of this church, which might be taken for a Hindu, Chinese, or Tibetan pagoda, springs a forest of bell-towers, in the strangest and fantastic style, to which nothing else comes near. The middle one, the highest and the most massive, consists of three or four floors to the base of its spire. First, there are columns and denticulated bands, then pilasters framing long mullioned windows, then a tier of superimposed decorated arches, then the ribs of the spire its every edge adorned with jagged protuberances, all topped by a lantern surmounted by an upside-down golden bulb, bearing the Russian cross at its tip. The other bell-towers, of smaller size and height, affect the forms of minarets, while their fancifully-worked turrets each terminate in the bizarre bulge of an onion-shaped dome. Some are hammered into facets, others ribbed; these cut in diamond shapes like pineapples, those arrayed in spiral stripes, others adorned with scales, lozenges, honeycombed bosses, and all dressed at the summit with a cross above a gilded globe.

What further adds to the fantastical effect of Vasiliya Blazhennogo is that it is coloured from top to bottom in the most disparate tones which however deliver a harmonious and charming whole to the eye. Red, blue, apple-green, and yellow decorate all the sections of its architecture. The columns, capitals, arches, and ornamentation are painted in various shades, in powerful relief. On the rare areas which are flat, there are simulated divisions, panels framing flower-pots, rosettes, interlaced forms, and chimerical faces. The manner of decoration has painted the pinnacles with patterns similar to those seen on Indian shawls, and, set thus on the roof of the church, they look like a sultan’s kiosks. Jacques Ignace Hittorf, the apostle of polychrome architecture, would find here a dazzling confirmation of his theory.

So that nothing is lacking as regards this magical spectacle, patches of snow, retained by the projections of roofs, the friezes, and the ornamentation, sow with silver sequins the multi-coloured robe of Vassili Blagennoi and prick out in a thousand sparkling points its marvellous decor.

Postponing our visit to the Kremlin, we immediately entered the church, whose oddity roused our curiosity to its highest point, so as to discover whether its interior fulfilled the promise of its exterior. The same whimsical genius had presided over the interior layout and decoration. A first, low-ceilinged chapel, where a few lamps flickered, looked like a golden cave; sudden glows cast their rays there among tawny shadows, and highlighted the stiff images of ghostly Greek saints. The mosaics of Saint Mark in Venice may grant a rough idea of the astonishingly rich effect. Within, the iconostasis stood as a wall of gold and precious stones between the faithful and the arcana of the sanctuary, in a semi-darkness traversed by shafts of light. Vasiliya Blazhennogo does not, as other churches do, offer a single space composed of several inter-communicating naves, intersecting at certain points according to the needs of the rite followed in that temple. It is formed of a cluster of juxtaposed churches or chapels, which are independent of one another. Each-bell tower contains one within its shell. The vault is the sheath of the spire itself, or the bulb of the dome. It feels as if one is beneath the disproportionately-sized helmet of some giant Circassian or Tartar. These ceilings within, moreover, are wonderfully painted and gilded. The same is true of the walls covered with figures of hieratically-ordered barbarity, products of that art the secret of which the Greek monks of Mount Athos preserved from century to century, and which, in Russia, more than once deceive the inattentive observer as to a monument’s age. It feels strange to find oneself in one of these mysterious sanctuaries where the identifiable figures of the Catholic cult mingle with the particular saints of the Greek calendar, seeming, in their archaic, constrained, Byzantine poses, to have been clumsily transformed to gold through the childish devotion of some primitive people. These images have the air of idols, that gaze at you from the vermilion niches of iconostases or symmetrically line their gilded walls, opening their large fixed eyes, raising their brown hands with fingers symbolically folded, and producing by their fierce, super-human, and immutably traditional appearance, a religious impression that would not be obtained by works of more advanced artistry. These figures, amidst the shimmer of gold, in the flickering lamplight, readily take on an air of fantastical life, capable of striking the naive imagination and inspiring, as the daylight fades, a certain sacred dread.

Narrow corridors, galleries with low arches, where one’s elbows touch the walls, and which force you to lower your head, encircle these chapels and allow you to pass from one to the other. Nothing is more fanciful than these passageways; the architect seems to have taken pleasure in confusing their course. You ascend you descend, you depart the building entirely, you re-enter and follow a cornice about some round bell-tower, you walk a corridor in the thickness of the wall by a tortuous route, as if traversing the capillary tubes of a mass of coral, or the paths that bark-beetles (scolytinae) trace beneath the bark of a tree. After so many twists and turns your head spins, you feel dizzy, and you seem like a mollusc in an immense shell. Not to speak of the mysterious corners, unexplained passage, low doors leading who knows where, and dark stairs descending into the never-ending depths of this building’s architecture where one seems to walk in a dream.

The winter days are of very short duration in Russia and already the twilight shadows were beginning to make the lamps burning before the images of the saints shine more brightly, as we left Vassili Blagennoi, which augured well, as a sample of the picturesque riches of Moscow. I had just experienced that rare sensation the search for which drives the traveller to explore the extremes of the world; that of seeing something which exists nowhere else. Though, I admit, the bronze group, a monument to Kuzma Minin and Dimitri Pozharsky, sited near Gostiny, facing the Kremlin, as a work of art produced a mediocre effect on me, despite the author of the statuary group, Ivan Martos, possessing no shortage of talent. But, beside the unbridled fantasy of Vasiliya Blazhennogo, his work seemed too cold, too correct, too studiously academic. Minin was a prosperous butcher in Nizhny Novgorod who raised an army to drive out the Poles who had become masters of Moscow following their usurpation of Boris Godunov, and handed over command to Prince Pozharsky. Between them, the man of the people and the grand duke delivered the holy city from the foreigners, and on the pedestal decorated with bronze bas-reliefs once can read this inscription: ‘Erected in memory of citizen Minin, and Grand Duke Pozharsky, by grateful Russians, in the year 1818.’

In travelling I obey a rule, when time does not drive me on too imperiously, of halting after receiving some vivid impression. There comes a moment when the eye, saturated with shapes and colours, refuses to absorb new sights. It can accept nothing more, like an overflowing jug. The previous image persists and refuses to be erased. In this state one looks, but no longer sees. One’s retina has not had time to re-sensitise itself in order to accept a new image. This was my case on leaving Vassili Blagennoi, while to view the Kremlin required a fresh look, a virginal eye. However, I was about to summon a sleigh to return to our hotel, having taken one last glance at the extravagant bell-towers of the cathedral of Ivan the Terrible, when I was detained on Red Square by a singular noise which made me lift my face to the sky.

Ravens and crows, croaking loudly, were traversing the greyish sky, which they punctuated with their dark commas. They were returning to the Kremlin for the night, but as yet only the advance guard had appeared. Soon the denser battalions arrived. From all points of the horizon flew their bands, as if obeying the order of their leaders in some strategic retreat. The dark swarms did not all fly at the same height, but wheeled in descending layers, completely obscuring the heavens. Their number increased from moment to moment. Their cries and the sound of beating wings filled the ear, and always new phalanxes appeared above my head, flying to swell the prodigious congregation.

I would not have believed there were so many ravens and crows in all the world. Without exaggeration, they had to be counted by the hundred; even that figure seems modest, by the thousand might be more just. It was reminiscent of those flights of wild pigeons (passenger pigeons) that John James Audubon, the American ornithologist, spoke of (see his ‘Birds of America’, plate 62) covering the sun, and casting shadows on the earth like the clouds, bowing the forest branches on which they perch, and seemingly undiminished by the immense massacre committed by the hunters. Here, the innumerable army, having united, twisted and turned above Red Square, rising, descending, describing circles, and emitting a noise like the sounds of a storm. Eventually, the winged tornado seemed to join in a single resolution and each bird headed towards its nocturnal lodging. In an instant the bell-towers, domes, towers, roofs, and battlements were enveloped in black swirling clouds, to deafening cries. They fought for a place with great blows from their beaks. The slightest fissure, the narrowest crack that could provide them shelter was the object of fierce siege. Little by little the tumult subsided, they all settled down as best they could, and I no longer heard a single croak, nor saw a single crow and the sky, latterly riddled with black spots, resumed its twilight lividity.

One wonders what they live on, those myriads of sinister birds which could devour in a sitting all the corpses left behind by some rout, given that the ground is covered for six months by a thick shroud of snow? The rubbish, the dead animals, the carrion of the city cannot suffice. Perhaps they eat each other then, like rats in times of scarcity, but then their numbers would be less, and they would eventually disappear. Moreover, they seem full of vigour and animation, amid their joyful turbulence. Their means of dining remains no less of a mystery to us, and proves that animal instinct finds resources in Nature where human reason sees none.

My companion, who had like myself viewed this spectacle, but without astonishment, it not being the first time he had witnessed ‘the crows returning to the Kremlin,’ now declared: ‘As we are in Red Square, all equipped, and a stone’s throw from the most famous Russian restaurant in Moscow, let’s not dine at the hotel, where we’ll be served a pretentiously French meal. Your traveller’s stomach trained to exotic dishes is happy enough to accept local colour in cooking, and considers that what feeds one man can readily feed another. So, let’s enter here, and dine on shchi, caviar, suckling pig, sterlets from the Volga, with an accompaniment of agoursi (ogorsi, cucumbers) and horseradish sauce, all soaked with kvass (one needs to try everything) and cold Champagne. Does that menu suit?’

On my replying in the affirmative, my friend who was desirous of serving as guide led me to the restaurant, located at the far end of Gostiny Dvor, opposite the Kremlin. We went up a heated flight of stairs and entered a vestibule which looked like a fur store; in the blink of an eye the attendants rid us of our furs, which they hung beside the others on a coat-rack. Russian attendants are never at a loss when it comes to overcoats, and with only a glance, set yours on your shoulders, without needing a number assigned or any other mark of recognition.

In the first room there was a kind of bar loaded with bottles of kummel, vodka, cognac and other liqueurs, beside dishes of caviar, herring, anchovies, smoked beef, elk and reindeer tongues, cheese, and pickled preserves, every delicacy which serves to whet the appetite and can be eaten standing, before the meal. One of those Cremona organs that mimics sounding trumpets and a battery of drums, the sort that the Italians walk about the street with, it being set on a small cart drawn by a horse, was leaning against the wall, and its crank, turned by a moujik, had set it playing I know not what fashionable opera aria. Many rooms in a row, in which the bluish smoke from cigars and pipes floated near their ceilings, succeeded each other, to the extent that a second Cremona organ set at the far end was able to play a different tune to the organ in the first room, without creating a cacophony. One dined between Donizetti and Verdi.

What gave this restaurant a characteristic physiognomy is that the service, instead of being delivered by Tartars disguised as waiters at the Frères Provençaux (Les Trois Frères Provençaux, a famous restaurant in the Palais Royal, Paris) was quite naively entrusted to moujiks. At least, one had a sense of being in Russia. These moujiks, young and handsome, their hair separated by a middle parting, beards neatly combed, bare-necked, and wearing a pink or white summer tunic tight at the waist, their baggy blue pants tucked into their boots, in all the ease of the national costume, had a fine air, and a deal of natural elegance. Most of them had blond hair, that hazelnut blond hair which legend attributes to Jesus Christ, and the features of some were distinguished by that Greek regularity found more often in Russia among men than women. Thus costumed, in their respectful waiter’s pose, they looked like slaves in antiquity at the threshold of a Roman triclinium (dining-room).

After dinner, I smoked a few pipes of extremely strong Russian tobacco, and drank my two or three glasses of excellent Caravan tea (in Russia tea is not taken in cups), while listening with an idle ear to the tunes played by the Cremona organs, which sounded above the vague murmur of conversation, feeling satisfied to have dined amidst local colour.

Chapter 17: The Kremlin

One would, doubtless, like to imagine the Kremlin as blackened by time, with that dark smoky hue which, in Europe, covers old monuments and contributes to their beauty by making them appear venerable. In France we take this idea to its extreme by granting a like patina to new buildings, using soot and water, so as to cloak the crude whiteness of the stone and harmonise them with those of older construction. One has to have arrived at a higher stage of civilisation to understand this feeling, and attach value to the traces that the centuries have left from their passage over the surfaces of temples, palaces, and fortresses. Like other nations still naive as yet, Russians love what is new or at least appears so, and believe that it demonstrates respect for a monument to renew its painted robes as soon as they are frayed or torn. They are the greatest whitewashers of buildings in the world. They go so far as to repaint old frescoes, in the Byzantine style, which adorn churches within and often without, when their colours appear tarnished, such that the paintings, so solemnly ancient and primitively barbaric in appearance, often seem as if created yesterday. It is no rare sight to see a painter perched on a frail scaffolding retouching, with the confidence of a monk from Mount Athos, some mother of God, and filling with fresh hues the austere outline which is in itself an immutable model. It is therefore necessary to exercise extreme caution in seeking to appreciate these paintings which were ancient, if I can express it so, yet which are now anything but, despite their stiffness and hieratic savagery.

This brief preamble has no other purpose than to prepare the reader for the colourful appearance of the monument rather than the dark, melancholic, and fierce aspect dreamed of in the West.

The Kremlin, ever considered the acropolis, the holy place, the palladium, the very heart of Russia, was once surrounded by a palisade of strong oak beams – the citadel of Athens had no other defence before the first Persian invasion. Dmitri Donskoy replaced the palisade (1366-68) with crenelated walls, which Ivan III rebuilt (1485-95) due to their state of disrepair and dilapidation. Ivan III’s walls survive today, having frequently been restored, or in many places reconstructed. Thick layers of plaster also hide the wounds that time has dealt them, and the dark traces of the great fire of 1812, which, however, merely licked, with its tongues of flame, the exterior enclosure. The Kremlin shares some similarities with the Alhambra. Like that Moorish fortress, it occupies a plateau atop a hill which it envelops with a wall flanked by towers, and contains royal residences, churches, squares, and, among the old buildings, a modern palace, embedded as sadly within it as the palace of Charles V amidst the delicate Arabian architecture the latter crushes with its mass. The tower of Ivan Veliki (dedicated to Ivan III, constructed, 1505-08, after his death) is not without some resemblance to the Torre de la Vela; and from the Kremlin, like the Alhambra, one enjoys an admirable view, a panorama whose glare the eye retains in its surprise. But let me not urge a further comparison, for fear of straining it by taking it too far.

Oddly enough, the Kremlin seen from the outside is, to a degree, more oriental than the Alhambra itself, with massive reddish towers none of which betray the magnificence within. Above its wall with indented battlements, between the turrets with ornate roofs, a myriad of domes, bulbous pinnacles with metallic reflections and unexpected gleams, seem to rise and fall like glittering golden bubbles. The wall, white as a silver basket, surrounds this bouquet of golden flowers, and one feels the sensation of having before one, in reality, one of those magically lavish towns such as were built in the imaginations of Arab storytellers, some architectural crystallisation of the Arabian Nights. And when winter sprinkles these strangely dreamlike buildings with its powdery mica, one might truly think oneself transported to another planet, nothing like it ever having struck one’s eyes before.

View of the Kremlin

View of the Kremlin
From Voyage pittoresque en Russie by Charles de Saint-Julien, 1853
Internet Archive

We entered the Kremlin via the Spasskaya Gate which opens onto Red Square. No entrance could be more romantic. It pierces an enormous square tower preceded by a sort of porch or antechamber. The tower has three levels, diminishing in bulk, and ends in a spire borne on recessed arches. A double-headed eagle, holding the globe of the world in its claws, surmounts the sharp tip of this spire, ribbed at its edges and gilded at its sides, the level beneath which is octagonal. Each face of the second level bears an enormous dial, so that the tower shows the time of day to each quarter of the horizon. Add, for effect, a few flakes of snow settled, as in a Christmas card, on its architectural protrusions, and you will have some slight idea of the appearance presented by this prominent tower climbing in three stages above the denticulated wall whose length it interrupts.

The Spasskaya Gate is the object, in Russia, of remarkable veneration because of some image (in fact the icon of ‘Spas Nerukotvorny’ or ‘The Saviour Not Rendered by Human Hands’, placed above the gate on the inside wall in 1658) or legendary miracle about which I was unable to obtain precise information, and no one may pass by with head covered, even if it were the autocrat himself. Any irreverence in this regard is treated as sacrilege and may be perilous for the offender. Foreigners are warned about the custom. It is not enough to simply acknowledge, at the entrance to the porch, the holy images before which perpetual lamps burn, but one’s head must remain bare until one has left the place. Now is not a pleasant thing to hold your fur hat in your hand, in twenty-five degrees of cold, in a long corridor through which an icy wind rushes. But everywhere one must comply with the customs of the country: remove your hat beneath the Spasskaya Gate, and your boots on the thresholds of the Suleymaniye Mosque or Hagia Sophia (both in Istanbul). The true traveller never objects, even if he were to catch the most dreadful cold.

Emerging from this porch, one finds oneself on the Kremlin Esplanade, in the midst of the most splendid crowd of palaces, churches, and monasteries the imagination can devise. All these relate to no known style. The architecture is not Greek or Byzantine, Gothic, Arabian, or Chinese; it is Russian, it is Muscovite. Never did architecture realises its fantastical whims in a freer manner, or one more original, more unconcerned with rules, or, in a word, more Romantic. Sometimes its manifestations seem like chance products of crystallisation. However, the domes, the golden-bulbed bell-towers are characteristic of this style which seems to acknowledge no law, and they render it identifiable at first sight.

Below the esplanade, where the main buildings of the Kremlin are grouped and which forms the plateau of the hill, the double walkway of its rampart follows the contours of the ground, flanked by an infinite variety of towers, some round, others square, these as slender as minarets, those like massive bastions, with machicolated collars, recessed floors, roofs pierced at the sides, open galleries, lanterns, spires, scales, ribs, every imaginable feature of tower design. The tall denticulations of the battlements, lining the walls, carved at their summits with notches like the nock of an arrow, are alternately solid or pierced by a barbican. I am quite ignorant of the strategic value of these as a means of defence, but, from the point of view of poetry, they fully satisfy the imagination and convey the idea of a formidable citadel.

Between the rampart and the embankment bordered by a balustrade, lie gardens, at this moment sprinkled with snow, while a picturesque and small church with bulbous bell towers rises above them. Beyond, as far as the eye can see, extends an immense and prodigious panorama of Moscow, to which the denticulated crest of the wall forms an admirable foreground, framing views of the horizon in a manner that all the inventiveness of art could not better.

The River Moskva, as wide as the Seine and as sinuous, curves round all this side of the Kremlin, and from the esplanade I could see, in the depths, its icy surface resembling opaque glass, since the snow had been swept from the area I was gazing at, so as to trace a course for horses training for some sleigh race on the ice, next day.

View of the Kremlin from the River Moskva - Willem van Senus, 1838

View of the Kremlin from the River Moskva - Willem van Senus, 1838
Rijksmuseum

The quayside, bordered by hotels, and superb houses of modern design, formed a starting point for the lines of houses and roofs behind them, seemingly stretching to infinity, created by the height and perspective of my viewpoint.

A fine frost — a word that makes Joseph Méry shiver with horror, since that chilly poet claims that all frost is ugly — having chased from the sky the vast and uniform cloud of a yellowish-grey colour, drawn like a curtain the day before across the darkened horizon, a quite brightly-coloured azure occupied the panorama’s circular canvas, and the resurgence of cold air, crystallising the snow, had revived its whiteness. A pale shaft of sunlight, such as gleams in the month of January in Moscow, in those short winter days which recall one’s closeness to the polar regions, slid obliquely over the city, spreading like a fan over the Kremlin, and slanting across the snow-covered roofs making them glitter in places like mica. Above these white roofs, like flakes of foam in a freezing storm, the upper levels of public buildings, temples and monasteries rose up like reefs or ships. It is said that Moscow contains more than three hundred churches and convents; I know not if this figure is accurate or purely hyperbolic, but it seems quite likely when you view the city from the top of the Kremlin, which itself contains a large number of cathedrals, chapels, and religious buildings.

One could not dream of anything richer, more splendid, beautiful, or magical, than those domes topped with Greek crosses, those bulb-shaped pinnacles, those hexagonal or octagonal spires, ribbed, hollowed, rounded, flared, pointed, in the light, above the motionless tumult of snowy roofs. The gilded domes acquire reflections of wonderful translucency while, at their highest point, the light is concentrated to form a star that shines like a lamp. The domes of silver or tinplate seem to crown churches on the moon; further off are azure helmets studded with gold, caps made of plates of beaten copper, nested like dragon scales, and inverted onions painted green and glazed by a covering of frost; in the distance, the details are lost, even when viewing the scene through a telescope, and one can only distinguish a glittering confusion of domes, spires, towers and campaniles of every imaginable shape, silhouetted in shadowy lines against the bluish hue of the horizon, their outlines highlighted by a gleam of gold, silver, copper, sapphire or emerald. To complete the painting, imagine, on the cold and bluish tones of the snow, a few faint streaks of purplish light, pale roses of the polar sunset sown on the ermine carpet of a Russian winter.

I remained there, unaffected by the cold, absorbed in silent contemplation, as if in a sort of stupor of admiration.

No other city gives this impression of absolute originality, not even Venice, for which Canaletto, Francesco Guardi, Richard Parkes Bonington, Jules-Romain Joyant, William Wyld, Félix Ziem, and a series of photographs have prepared one. Moscow has not, to date, been much visited by artists, and its stranger aspects have scarcely been reproduced. The harsh northern climate adds to the singularity of the scene, with snowy effects, bizarre sky colours, and a quality of light which differs from ours, granting Russian painters a singular palette whose rightness is difficult to accept from afar.

On the Kremlin esplanade, with the panorama of Moscow before you, you feel truly elsewhere, and even a Frenchman deeply in love with Paris no longer pines for the Rue du Bac’s stream (which flowed into the Seine, where a ferry once ran.)

The Kremlin encloses within its walls a large number of churches, or cathedrals as the Russians term them. The Athens Acropolis, on its narrow plateau, likewise brought together a large number of temples. We will visit them one after the other, but let us halt first at the Tower of Ivan Veliki, an enormous octagonal bell-tower, on three levels diminishing in size, the last of which, from a band of ornamentation, rounds to a turret topped with a swollen dome, fierily gilded, as bright as a gold ducat, and surmounted by a Greek cross with its base on the vanquished crescent. On every level, arches pierced all around the tower each reveal the curve of a bronze bell. There are thirty-three of them, and among them are, they say, the famous bells of Novgorod, whose ringing called the people to tumultuous deliberations in the public square. One of them weighs no less than sixty thousand kilograms, and the drone bell (the bell of lowest pitch) of Notre-Dame of which Quasimodo was so proud would seem, next to this metallic monster, no more than a simple handbell at Mass.

It would seem that the Russians have a passion for colossal bells, for, close to the tower of Ivan Veliki, the astonished eye may view a bell (the Tsar Bell) on a granite base, a bell so enormous that it might be taken for a bronze tent, more so since a large crack in its side forms a kind of entrance through which a man could enter easily without lowering his head. It was cast by order of the Empress Anna Ivanovna, and two hundred tons or so of metal (more than two hundred thousand kilograms) were thrown into the furnace. Auguste de Montferrand, the architect of Saint-Isaac’s, had it raised (in 1826) from the ground where it was half-buried, either by the violence of a fall while it was being mounted, or following some fire or collapse. Has so beautiful a mass ever been hung before? Did its iron clapper ever bring forth a sounding storm from that monstrous shell? History and legend seem silent on this point. Perhaps, like some ancient peoples who left beds twelve cubits long in their abandoned camps to make it appear that they belonged to a race of giants, perhaps the Russians wished, by means of this bell disproportionately large as regards human use, to grant distant posterity an exaggerated idea of their size, if after many centuries the bell chanced to be found during some excavation.

Regardless of the facts, this bell possesses beauty, like all things of unusual dimensions. The grace of enormity, a monstrous and fierce grace, but a real one, offsets its defect. The sides flare in ample and powerful curves decorated by delicate ornamentation. A globe surmounted by a cross crowns it; it pleases the eye with the purity of its curvature and the patina of its metal, and its very breach opens like the mouth of a bronze cavern, mysterious and dark. At the foot of the base is placed, like a panel removed from a door, the fragment of metal that filled the gap caused by the break.

But enough talk of bells, for now; let us enter one of the oldest and most characteristic of the Kremlin’s cathedrals, the first which was built in stone, the Cathedral of the Assumption (the Cathedral of the Dormition, Uspenskiy sobor). It is not, it is true, the original building commissioned by Ivan I Kalita we see before our eyes. That collapsed after a century and a half of existence, and it was Ivan III who had it rebuilt (1475-79). The current cathedral therefore only dates from the fifteenth century, despite its Byzantine style and archaic appearance. I was surprised to learn that it was the work of Ridolfo Fioravanti, a Bolognese architect, whom the Russians named ‘Aristotele’, perhaps because of his great knowledge. The idea that naturally presented itself was that it had been created by some Greek architect summoned from Constantinople, my head being still full of Hagia Sophia and the various styles of Graeco-Oriental architecture. The Assumption is almost square, and its straight walls rise boldly in a surprising show of pride. Four huge pillars, like tall towers, as powerful as the columns of the Palace of Karnak, support a central dome set on a flat roof, in Asiatic style, flanked by four smaller domes.

This simple arrangement produces a grandiose effect, and the massive pillars provide, without heaviness, a firm base for, and extraordinary stability to, the cathedral’s nave.

The whole interior of the church is covered in paintings, in Byzantine style on gold backgrounds. The pillars themselves are decorated with personages, zoned in rows, like the columns of Egyptian temples and palaces. Nothing is stranger than this method of ornamentation, whereby thousands of figures envelop you, like a silent crowd, ascending and descending along the walls, walking in line in a Christian Panathenaea (the ancient Athenian festival), isolated in poses of hieratic stiffness, bowing from the pendants, arches, and domes, a motionless crowd adorning the temple with a human tapestry. Rare light, discreetly husbanded, further adds to the disquieting and mysterious effect. In the tawny glowing shadows these large fierce saints of the Greek calendar take on formidable life; they watch you with a fixed gaze and seem to threaten with those hands extended to bless.

The shining armour of militant archangels and saintly knights, with bold and elegant countenances, is juxtaposed with the dark robes of holy monks and anchorites. They possess that proudness of bearing, that memory of the ancient inclination of the head that distinguishes the figures of Manuel Panselinos, the Byzantine monk and master-painter of Agia Lavra, of whose designs Dominique Papety has made such beautiful copies. The interior of Saint Mark’s in Venice, with its golden cave-like appearance, gives an idea of the Assumption Cathedral; only the interior of the Moscow church rises towards the sky, while the vault of Saint Mark’s contracts mysteriously like a crypt.

The iconostasis, a high silver-gilt wall with five levels of figures, which looks like the facade of a golden palace, dazzles the eye with its fabulous magnificence. From the niches and panels of the metalwork, the mother of God, and the male and female saints, reveal their brown heads and their hands in shades of bistre. Their flat halos, catching the light, make the facets of precious stones, encrusted in their rays, gleam and blaze with true glory; to the icons, which are objects of special veneration, are applied gemmed pectorals, necklaces, and bracelets studded with diamonds, sapphires, rubies, emeralds, amethysts, pearls, and turquoises; the folly of religious luxuriousness can be taken no further.

What a beautiful decorative motif these iconostases make, veils of gold and precious stones stretched between the prayers of the faithful and the mysteries of the holy sacrifice! One must recognise that the Russians take pride in all this, and that, in terms of magnificence, the Greek religion is in no way inferior to the Catholic, even if it fails to equal it in the domain of pure art.

In the Cathedral of the Assumption, in a shrine of inestimable value, the tunic of Our Lord is preserved. Two other reliquaries glittering with jewels contain a fragment of the Virgin’s robe and a nail from the True Cross.

The Virgin of Vladimir (now in the Church of St. Nicholas in Tolmachi, part of the State Tretyakov Gallery) painted, according to tradition, by the hand of Saint Luke, an image that the Russians regard as a palladium (sacred protective image), the exhibition of which made Timur’s fierce hordes retreat, is adorned with a solitaire valued at more than a hundred thousand francs. The mass of goldsmith’s work which frames it cost two or three times that amount. Without doubt this degree of luxury would seem a little barbaric to a sensitive taste more attuned to beauty than wealth, but there is no denying that the mass of gold, diamonds, and pearls produces a splendid religious effect. These virgins whose frames are better furnished than those of queens and empresses impress the naively pious. They take on in the shadows, by the vague light of the lamps, a supernatural radiance, their crowns of diamonds scintillating like crowns of stars.

From the centre of the vault hangs an immense solid forty-six branched silver chandelier of beautiful workmanship, circular in shape, which replaced an older chandelier of considerable weight removed during the French invasion. The coronations of the emperors take place in this Cathedral of the Assumption. The platform destined for them rises between the four supporting pillars of the dome, and faces the iconostasis.

The tombs of the Moscow Metropolitans occupy the side walls. They are oblong in shape, arranged against the wall, and resemble, in the darkness that clothes them, traveller’s trunks furnished for the great voyage to eternity.

The Cathedral of the Archangel (Arkhangel’skiy sobor), whose façade turns obliquely towards the Church of the Assumption and is only a few steps away from it, offers no essential difference in layout. Here again is the same set of bulbous domes, massive pillars, iconostases sparkling with gold, and the Byzantine paintings covering the interior of the building like a sacred tapestry. Only this time the paintings lack the gilded backgrounds, and are more like frescoes than mosaics. They represent scenes from the Last Judgment, and haughty, forbidding portraits of the ancient Russian tsars.

It is here that the latter’s tombs are located, covered with cashmere and rich fabrics like the turbans of the Sultans of Constantinople. All is sober, simple, and severe. Death is not embellished by the detailed flourishes of Gothic artistry, to which the tomb provided the finest of ornamental themes. No kneeling angels, no theological virtues, no emblematic weeping figures, no saints in niches delicately carved, no fanciful valances bordering the coats of arms, no knights in armour, their heads on cushions of marble, their feet on sleeping lions: nothing but the corpse in its funeral casket clothed in a shroud. Art undoubtedly loses, but religion gains.

On the wall of the Cathedral of the Annunciation, adjoining the palace of the tsars, I would point out to you a rare and curious painting, representing the Angel Gabriel appearing to the Blessed Virgin, to announce that the Son of God will be born of her womb. The encounter, like that of Jesus and the Samaritan woman, takes place near a well. According to a tradition of the Greek Church, later, after her humble acquiescence to the Lord’s will, the Blessed Virgin was visited in her room by the Holy Spirit.

This dual scene, painted on the exterior wall of the church, is protected from bad weather by a sort of canopy. A single detail may suffice to indicate the interior richness of the church: the paving stones are made of agates brought from Greece.

On the New Palace (The Grand Kremlin Palace) side, and close to these churches, there is a strange building (The Palace of the Facets, Granovitaya palata) alien to all the known styles of architecture, with an Asian and Tartar appearance, which is, as a civil monument, akin to Vasiliya Blazhennogo (Saint Basil’s Cathedral) as a religious one, a chimera that is, realised in all its exactness by a sumptuous, barbaric, and fanciful imagination. It was built in the reign of Ivan III by the architect Aloisio the New. From its roof, with a graceful and picturesque irregularity, soar the gold-capped turrets of the chapels and the oratories it contains. An external staircase, from the top of which the emperor shows himself to his people after his coronation, gives access to it, producing by its ornamented projection an original architectural effect. It is as well-known in Moscow as the Giant’s Staircase in Venice. One of the curiosities of the Kremlin, it is called in Russian Krasnoe Kryltso (The Red Staircase).

The interior of the New Palace, which includes the Terem Palace, a former residence of the tsars, almost defies description; it seems as if its rooms and its passages were excavated gradually, carved out, to no particular plan, from an enormous block of stone, so tangled are they, changing level and orientation at the whim of some wild fantasy in a bizarre, confusing and complicated manner. I walked about, within, as in a dream, sometimes obstructed by a gate mysteriously opened; sometimes forced to follow a narrow dark corridor in which my shoulders almost touched the walls; at other times, finding no other path than the jagged edge of a cornice, from which I could view the copper plates of the roof and the rise and fall of the golden bulbs of the pinnacles, no longer knowing where I was, seeing, closer and closer, through golden latticework, the glow of a lamp shedding light on the gold of the iconostases, and which led, after all that internal journey, to a room of wild ornamentation and savage richness, in the depths of which I was surprised not to find the Grand Knyaz of Tartary sitting, legs crossed, on his black felt carpet.

Such for example, is the room called the Golden Room, which occupies the entire interior of the Palace of the Facets, the latter doubtless so named because of its eastern facade cut in diamond point and adjoining the old palace of the tsars. The golden vaults of this room are supported by a central pillar, by means of low arches, the thick gilded iron ribs of which, running from one arch to another, eliminate flat spaces. Various paintings here and there form sombre patches on the tawny splendour of the background. On the stringcourse below the arches is a run of inscriptions in Slavonic letters, a magnificent script which lends itself to the ornamentation of buildings as well as does the Arabian Kufic. I cannot imagine a decoration richer, more mysterious, more sombre, or more dazzling than that of the Golden Room. Shakespearean Romanticism might envisage it as the setting for the denouement of a drama of his.

Some vaulted rooms of the old palace are so low that a man whose height is a little below the average can barely stand upright. Here, in the overheated atmosphere beside the stove, the Imperial ladies, squatting in oriental style on piled carpets, passed the long hours of Russian winter watching, through the narrow windows, the snow sparkling on the gilded domes, and the crows describing their wide spirals around the bell-towers.

These apartments, colourfully adorned with paintings, whose palm-leaves, branches, and flowers recall designs for cashmere shawls, seem like those of an Asian harem transported to the polar frosts. The true Muscovite taste, later distorted by the unthinking imitation of Western art, appears here in all its primitive originality and with a harsh barbaric flavour. I have often noted that the progress of civilisation seems to rob nations of their feeling for architecture and ornamentation. The old buildings of the Kremlin prove once again the truth of that assertion, which may at first seem paradoxical. An inexhaustible fantasy governed the decoration of these mysterious rooms, in which golds, greens, blues, and reds mingle joyfully to produce charming effects. This architecture, without the slightest concern for symmetry, rises like a mass of soap bubbles, raised on a plate by blowing through a straw. Each bubble, added to its neighbours, alters the angles and facets of the whole, and everything gleams with the multi-coloured hues of iris flowers. This childish and seemingly odd comparison captures more accurately than any other the aggregate nature of these palaces, fantastic in appearance, but real nonetheless.

It is this style that I would have liked to have seen employed in the design of the New Palace (the extant Grand Kremlin Palace, built 1837-1849), an immense construction in the modern taste which would be fine anywhere else, but jars when seen amidst the old Kremlin. Classical architecture, with its long cold lines, looks even more solemn and tedious among these strangely shaped palaces, in bright colours, and this host of churches in the oriental manner, sending towards the sky a golden forest of cupolas, domes, pyramidions and bulbous bell-towers. One might believe, gazing at this Muscovite architecture, that one was viewing some chimerical city in Asia, with cathedrals replacing the mosques and bell-towers their minarets, while the sober facade of the New Palace returns you instantly to the West and modern civilisation: a painful thing to the Romantic barbarians among us.

One enters the New Palace via a staircase of monumental extent, its upper level closed off by a magnificent wrought-iron gate which opens slightly to let the visitor pass. One then finds oneself beneath the high vault of a domed room where four sentries stand guard, and are never relieved from duty: mannequins dressed from head to toe in ancient and curious Slavonic armour. These knights have a very grand appearance; they might be mistaken for living men; one might think a heart was beating beneath each coat of mail. Such suits of armour from the Middle Ages, standing tall in this manner, always prompt in me a kind of involuntary shudder. They preserve so faithfully the external form of a being who has forever vanished.

From this rotunda one reaches two galleries containing inestimable riches. The treasure of Harun al-Rashid, the war-spoils of Kai Kusrau in Abu’l-Qasem Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, the contents of the Green Vault of Dresden (the Grünes Gewölbe, in the Residenzschloss) united together would present no such accumulation of wonders, and here the historical adds to the material value. One sees, sparkling, shining, and sending forth prismatic lightning bolts and wild bluish gleams, hosts of diamonds, sapphires, rubies, emeralds, all the precious stones that jealous nature hides deep in its mines, lavished here as if they were little more than glass. They add stars to crowns, points of light to the tips of sceptres, flow like glittering rain over the insignias of empire, and form curves and arabesques that scarcely leave the gold that enshrines them visible! The eye is dazzled, and reason hardly dares to calculate the wealth represented by all this magnificence. To attempt to describe this prodigious scene would be madness. A whole book would not suffice. I must content myself by citing a few of the most remarkable pieces. One of the oldest crowns is that of Vladimir II Monomakh. It is said to have been a gift to him from the emperor Alexios I Komnenos, one brought from Constantinople to Kiev by a Greek embassy in 1116. In addition to the historical value attached to it, it is a work of exquisite taste. On a background of gold filigree, pearls and precious stones are arranged with an admirable understanding of ornamentation. The crowns of Kazan and Astrakhan, in oriental style, one strewn with turquoises, the other topped with an enormous raw emerald, are jewels to make modern gold-smiths despair of their art. The crown of Siberia is made of cloth of gold; like all the others it has a Greek cross at its summit, and, again, is starred with diamonds, sapphires and pearls. The golden sceptre of Vladimir Monomakh, almost a metre long, is adorned with no less than two hundred and sixty-eight diamonds, three hundred and sixty rubies, and fifteen emeralds. The enamelled sections, covering the space left free by the gems, represent religious subjects treated in the Byzantine style; it was also part of the emperor Alexios I Komnenos’ gift, as well as a reliquary in the shape of a cross containing a fragment of stone from the tomb of Our Lord, and a piece of wood from the Cross. A crude gold casket made of precious stones contains this treasure. A curious item is the Golden Chain belonging to the first of the Romanovs (Tsar Mikhail Fyodorovich), the rings of which are engraved with prayers, the Tsar’s titles, and a list of Russian lands, towns, and princedoms. There are eighty-nine of these rings. We cannot stop to admire the thrones, globes, sceptres, and crowns of the different kingdoms, but should note that, though the richness is always the same, the purity of taste and beauty of the objects diminishes as we approach the modern era.

A thing no less wonderful, but more open to description, is a room full of gold and silver vessels. Around the pillars circular shelving, in the form of tiered dressers, supports a whole universe of vases, pots, ewers, flagons, jars, jugs, and ladles, chalices, goblets, beakers, cannikins, mugs, tankards, and tumblers, cups and drinking-glasses, bottles, flasks, gourds, and amphoras, and everything related to drinking, or Beuverie as Master Rabelais has it, in his Pantagruelic language.

Behind these items, dishes made of gold and vermeil sparkle, as large as those on which Victor Hugo’s Burgraves (see his play ‘Les Burgraves’, 1843) served whole oxen. Every tankard is topped by such a nimbus. And what tankards they are! Not less than three or four feet tall in height and only to be raised in a Titan’s fist. What a vast expenditure of imagination was involved in creating this mass of tableware! The whole range of vessels capable of containing wine, mead, beer, kvass, or brandy, seems to have been exhausted. And what a rich, fanciful, grotesque taste has been expressed in the ornamentation of these gold, silver, and vermeil containers! Sometimes a bacchanalia of chubby joyful figures dances around the belly of a pot, sometimes foliage intertwines with wild creatures and hunting scenes, elsewhere dragons coil around the handles, antique medals encrust the sides of a drinking-glass, a Roman triumph parades its buccinas (trumpets) and ensigns, Israelites in Dutch costume carry grapes from the Promised Land, or mythological nudity is contemplated by satyrs amid dense arabesques. At the whim of the artist, goblets take on bestial forms, rear like bears, stretch like storks, beat eagles’ wings, strut like geese, or bear the antlers of a deer on their sides. Further on a spice-box shaped like a ship fills its sails, flies its flags, and takes aboard through its hatches the spices with which it is to be filled. All possible dreams of the goldsmith and silversmith are realised here on this prodigious dresser!

The armoury contains treasures to tire the pen of the most intrepid nomenclator. Circassian helmets, chain-mail inscribed with verses from the Koran, shields with filigreed bosses, scimitars, khanjars (daggers) with jade handles their sheaths decorated with precious stones, all those oriental weapons which are at the same time jewels, shine there among an arsenal of sober weapons from the West. Viewing all these heaped riches, one’s head spins and one begs mercy of the over-complacent or over-exacting guide who wishes not to wrong you by neglecting a single item.

I liked the chapter houses dedicated to various orders of Russian chivalry. Those of St. George the Martyr, St, Alexander Nesky, St. Apostle Andrew the First, and St. Catherine, each occupy a vast gallery whose ornamental motifs borrow elements from their coats of arms. Heraldic art is eminently decorative, and its application to monuments always yields a fine effect.

One may imagine, without my detailed description, the sumptuous furnishings of the ceremonial salons. Everything that modern luxury has been able to achieve in the way of ostentation, has been gathered there, at great expense, while not a single thing expresses the charms of Muscovite taste. The modern manner however was essential, so as to maintain consistency with that of the New Palace itself. But what surprised me greatly was to find myself, at the far end of the very last room, face to face with a pale phantom in white marble, posed in apotheosis, fixing large, motionless eyes on me, its mask of a Roman Caesar leaning forward in meditative gaze. Napoleon, in Moscow, in the Tsar’s palace: an encounter I’d not expected!

The End of Part VII of Gautier’s ‘Travels in Russia’

Bookmarks

Notes

Images

Théophile Gautier

Travels in Russia (Voyage en Russie, 1858-59, 1861)

Part VII: Moscow

Contents

Chapter 16: Moscow

Chapter 17: The Kremlin