A wide smile of genuine joy spread over his face as he grasped both my hands and wrung them in excited cordiality—enthusiastic to a degree utterly foreign to Boston. Early in his life he had spent four years in Boston. Since then he has never ceased regretting his inability to return there. His uncompromising loyalty to what he called “the best city on earth” would have done credit to any Bostonian of Mayflower lineage.
Nijni streets flaunted gay colors, the myriad peoples who thronged the thoroughfares of the fair made up a crowd remarkably different from any I had ever before beheld. Here, I thought, it will not be difficult to forget Russia and her troubles. Alas! the Russian people make no such resolve. Never a day but some stroke against the government is contemplated. Never an event without some effort to turn toward the goal of Russian liberty. Hardly had I reached the fair when a chance acquaintance urged me to buy a ticket for a certain performance to be given that night, ostensibly for the benefit of an orphan asylum in a distant part of the country. But, as my friend explained, this orphan asylum was non-existent and the proceeds really were for the Social Democratic party. Next Tuesday another “charity” performance was advertised, the proceeds to go to the Social Revolutionary party, these being the two most active revolutionary organizations in European Russia at that time.
In the midst of the fair-grounds I met an old-time revolutionist whom I had known as an exile on the east side in New York. She was among the amnestied in October, 1905, and had returned, like a released prisoner of war, to the fight. When I met her she was about to start for a revolutionary meeting to be held in the depths of a forest a little way out of Nijni. Meetings of this nature were quite common at that time, despite the fact that they were attended at considerable risk. The place of meeting must be announced by word of mouth, through a small committee, to each and every one of the four or five hundred people who are to attend. Absolutely nothing may be committed to paper. In spite of these precautions the secret police frequently hear of the gatherings, and Cossacks are sent to fire upon the crowd. Twice within a fortnight my friend had been at such meetings which were surprised by soldiers. At one, the volleys from the Cossack rifles had brought down a number of men and several young girls.
The Nijni Novgorod fair was inaugurated long before the discovery of America. It owes its origin to the jealousy of the Muscovite princes of the commerce and trade which annually centered at Kazan, the seat of the Tartar khans. The Kazan fairs date from 1257, but the Muscovite fairs soon began to surpass those of the Tartars, and eventually the Kazan fair ceased to exist. Nijni has not always been the location of this fair, for in the early days Czar Michael Feodorovitch, the first Romanoff, and Ivan the Terrible, changed the site to other Volga towns, but so far as history is concerned the associations will remain clustered round the old fortified town, built at the junction of the Oka and the Volga and called Nijni Novgorod.
It is a big affair. At the last official rebuilding there were sixty buildings and twenty-five hundred bazars. Many small booths are added each year, and in addition are the usual “side shows”—usual in the East. To me they were most unusual. Beautiful Caucasian dancers, real Cossacks doing wonderful feats of horsemanship, old Russian tableaux, sectional characterizations such as singers from Little Russia; northern camps; Daghestanese, Turkestanese, and Persian industries.
All in all the fair comprises about eight thousand definite exhibits, some of which are very large. But the impression made is not of costly wares, designed for the homes of the rich, but simple things such as simple people need in daily life. The grand shops are there, as everywhere, but the ensemble effect was of useful, cheap articles for a workaday people.
The Caucasian bazars glisten with silver wares—bejeweled daggers, silver ornamented whips, bracelets, cigarette boxes, slippers adorned with hand-worked designs of gold and silver thread. Costly sounding articles, these, but in reality very cheap, and to Caucasians very necessary. To the rest of the world very pretty. A dagger is as much a part of Caucasian dress as a waistcoat of a European. All Caucasians are horsemen, and ornamented whips are as universal among them as embossed saddles among Mexicans. As for the bracelets and earrings and brooches—where is milady who will deny that these are among life’s essentials?
The Russian stalls show samovars, of brass and nickel, linens—peasant linens—often exceedingly pretty and ridiculously cheap, home-pounded metal candlesticks, cups, plates, and even small implements, the various kinds of Russian costumes of the present day and of long ago—ancient styles being frequently worn on Sundays and special feast-days by the peasants for their extra dress-up clothes.
Before the Persian bazars I was wont to linger longer. The stately mien, the innate dignity of these swarthy Easterners, commands interest. Their great, dark eyes suggest infinite depth lost in height, their strange, yet meaningful, expressions seem to flit from age to age as lightly and as swiftly as a woodland bird darts from bough to bough. Now soft as memory, recalling a long and mighty past; now stern and austere, remembering the hardness of the present. And the goods they sell are not of our world. Delicate embroideries, slight stuffs of silks as veil-like as dew webs on the grass of a summer morning, yet traced with bright colors by fingers we know not where—beyond the great mountains that divide Europe from Asia, far beyond the Caspian Sea.