KALMUCK INTERIOR
After Racinet
The policy of Catharine was dominated by her desire for the aggrandizement of Russia and the extension of the central rule. One of the most striking results of her active government is the extraordinary exodus of Kalmuck tribes in 1771. These people are of Central Asian origin. Their incursions led them early in the seventeenth century into Russian territory, where they secured a foothold in the region east of the Volga. Other immigration followed till the Kalmuck population and power became considerable. Generally nomadic in their habits, they dwelt in circular felt tents, and were impatient of government, but about the middle of the eighteenth century they came into voluntary subjection to Russia.
Russian woman has shown much artistic skill and taste in domestic manufactures. Her crochet work, laces, and embroidery deserve high praise and will doubtless be appreciated when they become better known outside of the comparatively narrow circle to which they are now confined. Russian peasant women have studied medical botany from time immemorial. For centuries they were the only physicians within the reach of the people. Even at present, when doctors with university training are accessible to almost everyone, peasants frequently prefer the ministrations of female herbalists.
In her home the Russian woman is a hard and steady worker. She gets up at daybreak and tends her cows, cooks and serves the family breakfast and the rest of the meals, keeps her house tidy, does the family sewing and washing, is her family dressmaker and tailor. She transforms the main room of the house into a factory in spring, and on her looms turns into crashes and homespuns the result of a winter's work at the spinning wheel. When the harvest time comes she does a good share of work in the fields. A woman parasite is unknown to the peasant family and can have no place in it. The Russian peasant woman earns her position in life through honest, wholesome toil by her husband's side. Her reward is the respect and consideration paid her. She is treated in the family as her husband's equal. Under special conditions she has a voice in the village folkmote, and has a right to a share in the village landed property on equal footing with men. She is not debarred even from holding offices in the village administration. Peasant women of ability have acted as preachers and spiritual advisers among the Russian dissenters who do not recognize the clergy of the established church. Through the woman school teacher the Russian village girl now begins to learn in a wholesome way of the wide world outside, and with ambition and means she will evolve for herself a career full of interest and success. The future of the Slavic race is the present world problem. It is a problem that becomes more prominent with each decade. In the solution, whatever it may be, of that problem the women of Russia will be a factor of tremendous importance.
CHAPTER XIII
WOMEN OF POLAND
In the great family of the Slavic races the Poles are preeminent by their ancient civilization, their genius, and their literary and artistic activity. Their ancient history, like that of most other nations, is lost in a confused mass of legends, but the rich treasures of their ancient popular songs reveal to us, largely, their old cultural status. Especially do many love and marriage songs of ancient origin and others preserved in Latin versions in old chronicles prove the conservatism of the mind of the Polish people and their conceptions of life. The maiden, now as in the olden days, sings before the all-important act of marriage: "Wreath, delicately bound of roses and white lilies intertwined, thou shalt for the last time adorn my anxious brow. Thou art the last of all garlands that I wound in the spring of maidenhood! By the side of the husband do I wander far away. Farewell to the mother's heart that bore me through bliss and pain. Might I repay all her toils with rich treasures...." Adorned with the gaily colored bridal treasures or tinsel, she kneels to-day as of yore before her parents to receive their blessing. All the symbolic ceremonies betray an ancient origin.
Though legendary and mythical, Princess Wanda, daughter of Cracus (founder of the ancient capital Cracow), symbolizes the virtues of Polish patriotism, chastity, and grace. She is the noblest type of Polish womanhood, and her memory lives on and on, in the soul of her race, as it were the personification of her sex Polonized. She had vowed eternal chastity, but a German war lord, Ritiger, inflamed by her beauty, waged war against her people to win her by force. Though the Poles were victorious, Wanda threw herself from the bridge of the castle on the Wawel mountain into the Vistula to save her country and her people from similar wars. Lyric and dramatic poetry, as well as the fine arts, music, painting, and sculpture, have glorified the self-sacrifice of the noble Polish princess at the legendary entrance of her race into history. Only the other great race of the western Slavic family, the Czechs, begins its history in like fashion with the beautiful and semi-divine form of Libussa.
With the reign of Mieczyslaw I. (962) Polish history begins. In 965, this prince adopted Christianity in order to win the hand of Dombrowka, daughter of king Boleslaw of Bohemia, and thus to consolidate the two great western Slavic races against the ever-increasing encroachments of the Germans. Roman Catholicism stands at the cradle of the Poles, thus placing them from the start in opposition to the eastern Slavs, foremost among whom are the Russians. After Dombrowka's death in 977, a German markgravine, Oda, shared the Polish throne.