But these tender relations were not in like manner oblivious; and, after seven years of absence, the Poles were roused from their trance of pleasure by the tidings of a revolt among the women at home, who, tired of waiting their return, in revenge gave themselves up to the embraces of their slaves. Burning under the disgrace, the Poles hurried home to wreak their vengeance on wives and paramours; but they met at Warsaw a bloody resistance; the women, maddened by despair, urged on their lovers, many of them fighting in person, and seeking out on the battle-field their faithless husbands: an awful warning to married men!
For a long time Kiev was the prey alternately of the Poles, the Lithuanians, and the Tartars, until in 1686 it was finally ceded by the Poles to Russia. The city is composed of three distinct quarters; the old, with its Polish fortifications, containing the palace of the emperor, and being the court end; the Petcherk fortress, built by Peter the Great, with ditches and high ramparts, and an arsenal capable of containing eighty or a hundred thousand stand of arms; and the Podolsk, or business part, situated at the foot of the hill on the banks of the Dnieper. It contains thirty thousand inhabitants besides a large military garrison, partly of Cossack troops, and one pretty good hotel; but no beds, and none of those soft couches which made the hardy Poles sleep away their senses; and though a welcome resting-place for a traveller through the wild plains of Russia, it does not now possess any such attraction as to put in peril the faith and duties of husbands. By its position secluded from intercourse with strangers, Kiev is still thoroughly a Russian city, retaining in full force its Asiatic style of architecture; and the old Russian, wedded to the manners and customs of his fathers, clings to it as a place which the hand of improvement has not yet reached; among other relics of the olden time, the long beard still flourishes with the same solemn dignity as in the days of Peter the Great. Lying a hundred miles away from the direct road between Moscow and the Black Sea, few European travellers visit it; and though several of them have done so since, perhaps I was the first American who ever passed through it.
We passed the morning in riding round to the numerous convents and churches, among which is the church of St. Sophia, the oldest in Russia, and, if not an exact model of the great St. Sophia of Constantinople, at least of Byzantine design; and toward evening went to the emperor's garden. This garden is more than a mile in length, bounded on one side by the high precipitous bank of the hill, undulating in its surface, and laid out like an English park, with lawn, gravel-walks, and trees; it contains houses of refreshment, arbours or summer-houses, and a summer theatre. At the foot of the hill flows the Dnieper, the ancient Borysthenes, on which, in former days the descendants of Odin and Ruric descended to plunder Constantinople. Two or three sloops were lying, as it were, asleep in the lower town, telling of a still interior country, and beyond was a boundless plain covered with a thick forest of trees. The view from this bank was unique and extraordinary, entirely different from anything I ever saw in natural scenery, and resembling more than anything else a boundless marine prospect.
At the entrance of the garden is an open square or table of land overlooking the plain, where, every evening at seven o'clock, the military band plays. The garden is the fashionable promenade, the higher classes resorting to it in carriages and on horseback, and the common people on foot; the display of equipages was not very striking, although there is something stylish in the Russian manner of driving four horses, the leaders with very long traces and a postillion; and soldiers and officers, with their splendid uniforms, caps, and plumes, added a brilliant effect.
Before the music began, all returned from the promenade or drive in the garden, and gathered in the square. It was a beautiful afternoon in June, and the assemblage was unusually large and brilliant; the carriages drew up in a line, the ladies let down the glasses, and the cavaliers dismounted, and talked and flirted with them just as in civilized countries. All Chioff was there, and the peasant in his dirty sheepskin jacket, the shopkeeper with his long surtout and beard, the postillion on his horse, the coachman on his box, the dashing soldier, the haughty noble and supercilious lady, touched by the same chord, forgot their temporal distinctions, and listened to the swelling strains of the music till the last notes died away. The whole mass was then in motion, and in a few moments, except by a few stragglers, of whom I was one, the garden was deserted. At about ten o'clock I returned to my hotel. We had no beds, and slept in our cloaks on settees stuffed with straw and covered with leather. We had no coverlets; still, after four days and nights in a carriage, it was a luxury to have plenty of kicking room.
CHAPTER II.
A lucky Encounter.—Church of the Catacombs.—A Visit to the Saints.—A tender Parting.—Pilgrims.—Rough Treatment.—A Scene of Starvation.—Russian Serfs.—Devotion of the Serfs.—Approach to Moscow.
Early in the morning, while I was standing in the yard of the hotel, chaffering with some Jews about the sale of our carriage, an officer in a faded, threadbare uniform, with two or three ribands at his buttonhole and stars sparkling on his breast, came up, and, taking me by the hand, told me, in capital English, that he had just heard of the arrival of two English gentlemen, and had hurried down to see them; that he was a great admirer of the English, and happy to have an opportunity, in the interior of his own country, to show its hospitalities to the natives of the Island Queen. At the risk of losing the benefit of his attentions, I was obliged to disclaim my supposed English character, and to publish, in the heart of a grinding despotism, that I was a citizen of a free republic. Nor did I suffer for my candour; for, by one of those strange vagaries which sometimes happen, we cannot tell how or why, this officer in the service of Russia had long looked to America and her republican government as the perfection of an ideal system. He was in Chioff only by accident. Wounded in the last campaign against the Turks, he had taken up his abode at Ismail, where, upon his pension and a pittance of his own, he was able to live respectably as a poor officer. With no friends or connexions, and no society at Ismail, his head seemed to have run principally upon two things, apparently having no connexion with each other, but intimately connected in his mind, viz., the British possessions in India and the United States of America; and the cord that bound them together was the wide diffusion of the English language by means of these powerful agents. He told me more than I ever knew of the constitution and government of the East India Company, and their plan of operations; and, in regard to our own country, his knowledge was astonishing; he knew the names and character, and talked familiarly of all our principal men, from the time of Washington to the present day; had read all our standard works, and was far more familiar with those of Franklin, Irving, &c., than I was; in short, he told me that he had read every American book, pamphlet, or paper he could lay his hands on; and so intimate was his knowledge of detail, that he mentioned Chestnut-street by name as one of the principal streets in Philadelphia. It may be supposed that I was not sorry to meet such a man in the heart of Russia. He devoted himself to us, and seldom left us, except at night, until we left the city.
After breakfast, accompanied by our new friend with as unpronounceable a name as the best in Russia, we visited the catacombs of the Petcherskoi monastery. I have before remarked that Chioff is the holy city of the Russians, and the crowds of pilgrims we met at every turn in the streets constantly reminded us that this was the great season of the pilgrimage. I was but imperfectly acquainted with the Russian character, but in no one particular had I been so ignorant as in regard to their religious impressions. I had seen Italian, Greek, and Turkish devotees, but the Russian surpassed them all; and, though deriving their religion from strangers, they exceed the punctilious Greeks themselves in the observance of its minutest forms. Censurable, indeed, would he be considered who should pass, in city or in highway, the figure of the cross, the image of the Virgin, or any of the numerous family of saints, without taking off his hat and making on his breast the sacred sign of the cross; and in a city like Chioff, where every turn presents some new object claiming their worship, the eyes of our drosky boy were rapidly turning from one side to the other, and his hand was almost constantly in a quick mechanical motion.