Some years ago a party of ladies and gentlemen, while spending the summer in the country, determined upon getting up a succession of theatrical amusements, just to try their effect upon the minds of the lower class. They accordingly fitted up a hall with great care, took immense pains to learn their parts, and when all was ready they invited the serfs as their audience, and gave them a holiday for the purpose of attending. The ignorant boors stood with open eyes and mouths wondering what it was all about, and what the gentry could mean by coming in and going out, and chattering so much to each other. After the play was over, the gentlemen asked them how they liked it.
“O, very well, Barinia,” was the reply, “but we hope you will pay us for the time we have lost in coming to see it!”
It need scarcely be said that the entertainment was not repeated, their plan being thus stifled at the commencement.
In the autumn the women belonging to the estates have a very busy time; they help to reap the corn, cut the flax, and pull up the hemp-stalks, and then prepare them for sale by beating them with flat pieces of wood, which is extremely fatiguing, but they enliven their work by singing their national ballads.
In the winter both men and women employ themselves in weaving the Russian linen and canvas; the girls also in some villages make a pretty kind of lace. The produce of their winter industry is either sent to the proprietor, who disposes of it to the shopkeepers, or the women carry it about and offer it for sale in the same manner as the hawkers of Irish cloth do in England. In the dark days or evenings, having no candles, they make use of slips of pine-wood or the bark of the birch-tree, which are very inflammable and emit a strong light that enables them to continue their work. They make the thread in the ancient manner with the distaff, which has quite a classic appearance.
In some of the villages all the females make lace, in others there is nothing but linen manufactured. I saw some beautiful samples of the former, the work of the peasants belonging to the Princess L., which would be admired even in London or Paris; and a woman once offered to sell me a scarf for sixty roubles (10l.), which she assured me took her three entire years to make.
Some of the serfs are trained as hunters on the estates: their whole lives are devoted to killing and ensnaring game in the forests, which is sold, and becomes a part of the revenue of the property.
When a very fine bear is slain, his skin is generally presented to the proprietor, together with the head. The skin is made into a magnificent rug, the head into a foot-stool, forming a handsome ornament to the drawing-room.
The peasants one day sent us a young bear; he was not full-grown, but he was so enraged at being made captive that he gnawed his paws to pieces, and they were obliged to kill him. It is no uncommon thing to see young wolf-cubs offered for sale even in St. Petersburg itself, but I do not know to what use they are put. In the most northern parts, in which lynxes and ermines, squirrels and sables are found, the hunters go into the forests for weeks at a time. They are provided with a little sledge, which they draw after them, containing the necessary provisions, and which they fill with skins as the stock of provisions diminishes. I was told that their quickness of sight is wonderful, and that they can discern at an immense distance the little black tip of the ermine’s tail on the wide plains of snow that it traverses.
Whoever has travelled in Russia cannot fail to have admired the great skill of the peasantry in using their axes: it is no exaggeration to say that a common boor can build and furnish his house with the help of that instrument alone. Nothing can be more interesting than to watch a number of these poor people engaged in constructing their dwellings, and very much goodwill is also to be remarked among them in assisting each other. All who have ever seen them must have felt the greatest admiration and even respect for the serfs, who, with all their faults, are really good-hearted, and possessed of natural talents which it is a shame and a sin in the government to stifle or render useless by keeping them in ignorance; but until slavery disappears from the land, and they are taught the proper use of freedom, it is nonsense to hope that great men will rise from the people. There was a poor man in Twer, a slave belonging to M. M——ff, a land-proprietor, who was possessed of a genius for painting that in any other country would have acquired for him both fame and fortune. Better for him had he been born an idiot! To him his talents were a dire misfortune, for his master, on learning his love for drawing and his great natural gifts, perceived at once that some handsome profit, by the way of abrock, might be realized for himself in cultivating them. Accordingly he placed him with an ordinary portrait-painter, where he was forced to learn a branch of the art which, although the most likely to serve his owner’s views, was most distasteful to himself, as he had genius for better things. He had no sooner served his time than the amount of poll-tax was yearly demanded: as everybody does not have a likeness taken, especially in a provincial town, it was no small difficulty to pay it. When we last saw him he had pined into a decline, and doubtless ere this the village grave has closed over his griefs and sorrows, and buried his genius in the shades of its eternal oblivion.