This is a national amusement all over Russia. Ice mountains are raised in the court-yards of all the chief residents in the capital. And an imitation of them, for summer use, covered with some polished wood, instead of ice, is often found in the halls of private dwellings. In the Imperial palace is such a slide, built of mahogany.
Street-life in St. Petersburgh presents many aspects strange to one who comes fresh from the capitals of other countries. One of the first things which will strike him is the silence and desertion of most of the streets. The thronging, eager crowd of other cities is here unknown. There is room enough, and to spare here. Broad streets, lined with rows of palaces, are as silent and lonely as deserted Tadmor, and a solitary droshka breaking the uniformity of the loneliness, heightens the effect. Leaving these broad, still streets, and mingling in the throng that presses in and through the Admiralty Place, the Nevskoi Perspective, or the Place of St. Isaac, the most noticeable feature, at first glance, is the preponderance of the military. The ordinary garrison of the capital amounts to 60,000 men. The Russian army comprises an almost infinite variety of uniforms, and specimens of these, worn by [pg 453] the élite of every corps, are constantly in the capital.
There are the Tartar guards, and the Circassian guards, Cossacks from the Don, from the Ural, and from Crimea; guards with names ending with “off” and “ski,” unpronounceable by Western lips. The wild Circassian—enacting the double part of soldier and hostage—silver-harnessed and mail-coated, alternates with the skin-clad Cossack of the Ural, darting, lance in rest, over the parade-ground. There are regiments uniform not only in size of the men, color of the horses, and identity of equipments, but in the minutiæ of personal appearance. Of one, all the men are pug-nosed, blue-eyed, and red bearded; of another, every man has a nose like a hawk, with eyes, hair and beard as black as a raven's wing. Half the male population of St. Petersburg wear uniform; for, besides these 60,000 soldiers, it is worn by officers of every grade, by the police, and even by professors of the university, and by teachers and pupils in the public schools.
Turning from the military to the civil portion of the population, the same brilliant variety of costumes every where meets the eye. The sober-suited native of western and civilized Europe, jostles the brilliant silken robes of the Persian or Bokharian; the Chinaman flaunts his dangling pig-tail, ingeniously pieced out by artificial means, in the face of the smoothly-shorn Englishman; the white-toothed Arab meets the tobacco-stained German; Yankee sailors and adventurers, portly English merchants, canny Scotchmen, dwarfish Finlanders, stupid Lettes, diminutive Kamtschatkians, each in his own national costume, make up a lively picture; while underlying all, and more worthy of note than all, are the true Russian peasantry; the original stock out of which Peter and his successors have fashioned their mighty empire.
The Russian of the lower orders is any thing but an inviting personage, at first sight. The name by which they have been designated, in their own language, time out of mind, describes them precisely. It is tschornoi narod, “the dirty people,” or as we might more freely render it, “The Great Unwashed.” An individual of this class is called a mujik. He is usually of middle stature, with small light eyes, level cheeks, and flat nose, of which the tip is turned up so as to display the somewhat expanded nostril. His pride and glory is his beard, which he wears as long and shaggy as nature will allow. The back of the head is shaved closely; and as he wears nothing about his neck, his head stands distinctly away from his body. His ideal of the beauty of the human head, as seen from behind, seems to be to make it resemble, as nearly as may be, a turnip. He is always noisy and never clean; and when wrapped in his sheepskin mantle, or caftan of blue cloth reaching to his knees, might easily enough be taken for a bandit. As he seldom thinks of changing his inner garments more than once a week, and as his outer raiment lasts half his lifetime, and is never laid aside during the night, and never washed, he constantly affords evidence of his presence any thing but agreeable to the organs of smell. But a closer acquaintance will bring to light many traits of character which belie his rude exterior; and will show him to be at bottom a good-natured, merry, friendly fellow. His most striking characteristic is pliability and dexterity. If he does not possess the power of originating, he has a wonderful faculty of copying the ideas of others, and of yielding himself up to carry out the conceptions of any one who wishes to use him for the accomplishment of his ends. There is an old German myth which says that the Teutonic race was framed, in the depths of time, out of the hard, unyielding granite. The original material of the Russian race must have been Indian rubber, so easily are they compressed into any form, and so readily do they resume their own, when the pressure is removed. The raw, untrained mujik is drafted into the army, and in a few weeks attains a precision of movement more like an automaton than a human being. He becomes a trader, and the Jews themselves can not match him in cunning and artifice.
The mujik is a thoroughly good-tempered fellow. Address him kindly, and his face unbends at once, and you will find that he takes a sincere delight in doing you a kindness. In no capital of Europe are the temptations to crimes against the person so numerous as in St. Petersburg, with its broad lonely streets, unlighted at night, and scantily patrolled; but in no capital are such crimes of so rare occurrence.
But the mujik has two faults. He is a thorough rogue, and a great drunkard. He will cheat and guzzle from sheer love for the practices; and without the least apparent feeling that there is any thing out of the way in so doing. But in his cups he is the same good-natured fellow. The Irishman or Scotchman when drunk is quarrelsome and pugnacious; the German or the Englishman, stupid and brutal; the Spaniard or Italian, revengeful and treacherous. The first stages of drunkenness in the mujik are manifested by loquacity. The drunker he is the more gay and genial does he grow; till at last he is ready to throw himself upon the neck of his worst enemy and exchange embraces with him. When the last stage has been reached, and he starts for his home, he does not reel, but marches straight on, till some accidental obstruction trips him up into the mire, where he lies unnoticed and unmolested till a policeman takes charge of him. This misadventure is turned to public advantage, for by an old custom every person, male or female, of what grade soever, taken up drunk in the street by the police, is obliged the next day to sweep the streets for a certain number of hours. In our early rambles we often came across a woeful group thus improving the ways of others, in punishment for having taken too little heed of their own.
In vino veritas may perhaps be true of the juice of the grape; but it is not so of the bad brandy which is the favorite drink of the mujik. [pg 454] He is never too drunk to be a rogue, but yet you do not look upon his roguery as you do upon that of any other people. He never professes to be honest; and does not see any reason why he should be so. He seems so utterly unconscious of any thing reprehensible in roguery, that you unconsciously give him the benefit of his ignorance. If he victimizes you, you look upon him as upon a clever professor of legerdemain, who has cheated you in spite of your senses; but you hardly hold him morally responsible. Upon the whole, though you can not respect the mujik, you can hardly avoid having a sort of liking for him.
Punishment For Drunkenness.