THE contrast which strikes the traveller who travels directly from Central to Little Russia (which is in the South) is not unlike that of which a traveller would be aware if he went straight from Cambridgeshire or Norfolk to South Devon or Normandy. The season in both places is doing the same thing. The vegetation in the one place is not startingly behindhand or ahead of the vegetation in the other place; autumn in both places has reached the same stage; only in each place it has reached that stage in a different manner. In Central Russia there is a bite in the morning air, a smell of smoke, of damp leaves, of moist brown earth, and a haze hangs before the tattered trees, which are generously splashed with crimson and gold. In Little Russia the pageant of decay is just as far advanced; but little green remains in the yellow and golden woods; everything is hot and dry; there is no sharpness in the air and no moistness in the earth; summer instead of being conquered by the invading cold seems to be dying like a decadent Roman emperor of excess of splendour and softness and opulence. The contrast in the habitations of man is sharper still. In Central Russia the peasant’s house is built of logs and roofed with straw or iron according to the means of the inhabitant. The villages are monotonously and uniformly brown, colourless, and sullen; in the South the houses are white or pale green; these are surrounded with orchards and fruit trees; they often possess the luxury of glass verandahs; there is something well-to-do and smiling about them, something which recalls the whitewashed, straw-thatched cottages of South Devon, or the farms in Normandy, and all the delicious things which the French language conveys and suggests better than any other, since it is lighter; for in a few words, such as—
It conjures up endless vistas of joyousness, gaiety, and sunshine.
When people generalise about the intense misery of the Russian peasants, the squalor in which they live, they should remember that Russia is a large country; that it possesses a north, a south, an east, and a west, and that what is true about one place is quite untrue about another. So that in one village the peasants may be starving for want of bread, and a hundred miles to the north or south you may find a village where the peasants have spent 300,000 roubles (£30,000) in building an enormous church, which is the case in the village of Lamki, government of Tambov, and there the church stands, towering and immense, built entirely by the voluntary contributions of peasants, to witness if I lie.
Tennyson, I think, says something about the North being dark and tender and true, and the South false and fickle. I asked a Little Russian gentleman what the main differences were between Little Russians and Big Russians, and he said the Little Russians were more decent people but far lazier than the Big Russians; that the Little Russian was so lazy that he would say to his wife: “Little wife, say ‘woa’ to my horse; I have a pain in my tongue.”
On the other hand, I asked a Muscovite who lived in Little Russia, who told me that he infinitely preferred to deal with Big Russians, but that the Little Russians were perhaps cleverer, though they would pretend to be stupid out of laziness. On the score of indolence everybody seemed to be agreed. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine any great burst of energy in a country where the sun is so hot in October and the air so mild and so heavily charged with sunny indolence.
The country in the government of Kharkov was in distress owing to the want of rain; special services were being held in the village square praying for rain, because if the drought continues next year’s harvest will be ruined, and it is impossible at the present moment to sow. The dryness of the autumn in the government of Kharkov, which was threatening distress and disaster for the future, was in the meantime adding to the beauty of the present. The woods were harmonies in many-coloured golds; the nights were not yet cold, and every evening the sun sank in a cloudless halo of golden dust, making the yellow trees shine like the banners in a cathedral, as though they were the trophies of a triumphant conqueror instead of the last tattered remnants of the robe of a dying king. The little farms painted pale green are clean inside as they are outside. The walls are painted red and blue; the furniture is neatly arranged, and no poultry live in the living-room. Contrary to my expectations the inhabitants, instead of being dressed in their gloriously picturesque South Russian costumes, are far less striking to look at than the inhabitants of Central Russia, and they looked as if they had ordered their clothes from Birmingham or Manchester. The reason of this is the prevalence of large factories in this region, which spread education, civilisation, and the shirt and collars of the “intelligent” middle class. Every now and then, however, you see something which appeals more strongly to that which is primeval in you than to that which is progressive; a thing which may distress the theorising Socialist spirit in you, if you possess it, and please that which in you hankers towards Homer, Puss in Boots, and the elementary needs of the human heart. I saw just such a thing. It was a blind beggar. He was sitting on a hill in front of a church, and he was playing an instrument called a “lira,” that is to say, a lyre. But the lyre was not what you imagine when you think of pictures of the lyre of Orpheus or of Apollo. It was a wooden instrument shaped exactly like a violin. It had three strings, which were tuned with pegs like a violin, but it was played by fingering wooden keys, like those of a large concertina and by at the same time turning a handle which protruded from the base of the violin. The musician said he could play any kind of music, sad, joyous, and sacred, and he gave examples of all three of the various styles; they were to my ear indistinguishable in kind; they appeared to me all tinged with the same quick and deliciously plaintive melancholy, and the kind of music made by this instrument instantly suggested that which Schubert has rendered in the accompaniment of a song called “Der Leiermann”: the plaintive comfortable noise of the very first organ-grinders. But what I wondered at the time was this. Is the instrument, the sound of which Schubert renders in his song “Der Leiermann,” this very identical “lyre” which my blind beggar was playing in the village Giebko, government of Kharkov? Or is Schubert just imitating the noise of the earliest portable grinding organs, whose music is made by wind proceeding from a bellows into a small box and thence into pipes, and whose principle of construction is exactly the same, though the scale is different, as that of the organ in St. Paul’s Cathedral? In any case the noise made by this “lyre” was the same in kind as the noise which Schubert imitates in the accompaniment of his song “Der Leiermann.” I afterwards ascertained that this instrument is called Leierkasten in Germany, Vielle in France, and Hurdy-gurdy in English, and that my blind beggar must have been identical with Schubert’s Leiermann.
Another slight episode which gave me food for reflection happened in the train on a small line between the town of Kharkov and a neighbouring village. I was going to the town of Kharkov for the day; it was only half an hour’s journey. I was in a third-class carriage; there were not many passengers, and most of them were railway guards off duty, two peasants, a soldier, and a monk. The monk had no sooner entered the carriage than he began a theological discussion. Now, as soon as the train started, although I was sitting quite close, I could not unfortunately follow the intricacies of his argument for the noise made by the train, but whenever the train stopped at a station his words were plain. And the drift of the matter was this: that all the passengers in the carriage were uniting to express to him in forcible language that priests in general, and monks still more (and himself in particular), were lazy, worthless, good-for-nothing scoundrels, and deceivers into the bargain. The soldier said, and his words received universal approval, that every one who was not a born fool knew that there was one God, the same for everybody, and that all men were equal before Him, and that consequently there could be only one real religious faith (namely, a belief in God), and that all the rest was the invention of priests. By “the rest” it subsequently became plain that he meant the Devil and the tenets of the Orthodox Church in general and of any other Churches. The monk, on the other hand, said that the Devil was intensely real, and that every man was followed by angels, who were constantly fighting the Devil for the soul of the man. Now, the soldier, and three guards off duty who were taking part in this discussion, starting from the premise that there is only one God, one faith which consists in the belief in this one God, and that all priests are liars, worried the monk with questions and attacked him in every possible manner. They accused him of begging in the first place; they would be ashamed of doing such a thing, they said. Then the soldier asked him if he had seen the Devil. The monk said, “Yes, often.” “Where is he?” said the soldier. “It would be most interesting to see him.”
Then when the monk stood up for the Orthodox faith the soldier said: “You say it is the only faith. You lie, because I have been told there are any number of other Churches, and each of them says its faith is the true one. For instance, the Jews have an entirely different faith, and this proves that all priests are liars; because God is the same for everybody.”
At last the monk said that everybody attacked him and nobody stuck up for him, and he retired into another corner of the carriage, followed by the soldier, who went on with the argument, and afterwards repeated his main thesis to me separately, namely, that all priests were deceivers, because God is the same for everybody. Therefore there could be only one religious belief were it not for the lies of priests. But what struck me in this matter is a thing which has repeatedly struck me among Russians of the lower class, namely, their broad common sense in religious matters. “Mysticism,” Mr. Chesterton once wrote, “was with Carlyle as with all its genuine professors only a transcendent form of common sense. Mysticism and common sense alike consist in a sense of the dominance of certain truths which cannot be formally demonstrated.” Now the Russians of the lower class seem to me often the genuine professors of mysticism, because their mysticism is simply common sense. And it is this very fact which seems to me to lead people astray when they discuss the religion of the Russian peasant. For instance, you often hear people bewail the superstition of the peasant which makes him devote so much attention to paper and wooden images. Again, I have read in an English book on the Russian peasant that the peasant’s habit of perpetually crossing himself, his respect for images, and his prayers are purely mechanical and therefore meaningless, because they are often interrupted by, or simultaneous with, jokes, laughter, and the business of life. Now this union of the practice of the outward signs of religion with the business of everyday life, this interruption of a prayer by a conversation, this sign of the cross made before a theft seem to me all to derive from the broad common sense which is at the root of their belief, and which, as Mr. Chesterton says, is synonymous with mysticism.
Because if your belief in God is solid and based on great rocks of common sense it is not extraordinary that your outward expression of your allegiance to the great fact should be mechanical. For instance, if you are the loyal subject of the King, you mechanically take off your hat when he drives past you in the street or when you see the colours of his Army go by, and nobody says, if at that moment you happen to be whistling a comic song or thinking of the North Pole, that your action is hypocritical, insincere, or meaningless. But it is exactly the same in the case of the peasants; the outward expression of their religion is as mechanical as possible, but it is mechanical because their religious feeling is true and right and not because it is insincere and false.
I will end by telling two stories which exemplify the common sense which lies at the root of the Russian peasant’s religion. The first story happened at Kharbin. It was Easter, and the soldiers wanted Mass said for them. There were two priests. One priest had been engaged by some officers and the second priest was drunk. A soldier was relating these facts, and some asked: “Well, did you have to go without your Mass?” “Oh, no,” said the soldier, “we went to the priest who was drunk and we pulled him out of bed, and we said: ‘Say Mass, you devil’ (and a lot more uncomplimentary expressions), and he said Mass.” This story shows that the soldiers regarded the priest partly as an instrument to say Mass and partly as a man. They differentiated between the two, and the instrument had to perform its divine office whatever happened to the man, whose good or bad qualities had nothing to do with the case. This seems to me gloriously sensible.
The second story happened somewhere down in this government. A Socialist arrived in a village to convert the inhabitants to Socialism. He wanted to prove that all men were equal and that the Government authorities had no right to their authority. Consequently he thought he would begin by disproving the existence of God, because if he proved that there was no God, it would naturally follow that there should be no Emperor and no policemen. So he took a holy image, and said: “There is no God, and I will prove it immediately. I will spit upon this image and break it to bits, and if there is a God he will send fire from heaven and kill me, and if there is no God nothing will happen to me at all.” Then he took the image and spat upon it and broke it to bits, and he said to the peasants: “You see God has not killed me.” “No,” said the peasants, “God has not killed you, but we will,” and they killed him. And thus an act was committed which was one of common sense or of mysticism.
IN a small wooden house at the edge of a large wood, and within a stone’s-throw of a river which floods the whole of the neighbouring meadows in the spring-time, lives Feodor Petrovitch X—. He is what is called in Russia a small landowner. He is a Moderate Liberal. That is to say, for twenty years he has groaned and lamented at the foolish proceedings of the Russian Government, which he used to accuse of criminal levity. He is in favour of a policy of common sense. Therefore, in the rapid course of recent events he has veered, like many others, slightly to the Right; although he still calls himself a Constitutional Democrat. And this is not because his faith in the existing Government has increased or that his ideal, which consists in the carrying out of certain drastic reforms, has diminished, but because he is dissatisfied with the conduct of the Opposition. Nevertheless, he means to vote for the Constitutional Democrats at the coming election. He is a short, dark, middle-aged man, not scrupulously shaven, with a brown glittering eye and a great flow of talk. He has immense practical knowledge of farming, machinery, and manufactories. At the same time he likes talking literature and politics, and his opinions are worth listening to except when he tells shooting stories; in this region he is given to such gross exaggeration that many people cease to pay attention to what he says on other subjects which excite his interest but not his imagination.
I was drinking tea with him the other afternoon and talking over the Anglo-Russian Agreement. “This is the only sensible thing,” he said, “which the Russian Government has done for the last forty years.” And then the conversation veered on to the plays in Moscow and the latest productions in the world of literature.
Here I wish to make a long parenthesis. One of the most striking features among educated Russians of all classes, whether landowners, doctors, lawyers, or officials, is the prevalence of what is called “culture.” We consider “culture” as a luxury—something extra, a pleasant appendage to education. The Russians consider culture and education to be synonymous and “culture” to be indispensable. In their eyes what they call a “cultured” and we call an educated man must possess a certain wide general knowledge. He must be able to talk authoritatively on literature, science, and the arts, the European stage, etc. He is positively ashamed if he is caught ignorant of some one like Sudermann or Finsen or Grieg. I have often seen Russians amazed and aghast at the “unculturedness” of Englishmen who have taken their degree at a University. This is not surprising considering that for two or three generations boys in England no longer receive any kind of instruction at schools. To the educated Russian, a certain wide layer of general knowledge is considered absolutely indispensable. He is ashamed to be without it. You meet with extraordinary examples of this very often. For instance, I once knew a Cossack officer who was well known for the rows he made in restaurants, for letting off pistols at odd moments, and for fighting duels. He was what is called in Russia a “skandalist” (a row-maker). This same man, I afterwards found out, had written a most valuable work on the differential calculus, and was one of the most brilliant of modern mathematicians. Now this indispensable “culture” has its good sides, but it has its bad sides also. It is often exaggerated in Russia just as ignorance is exaggerated in England. In many cases what is called “culture” and what is considered to be indispensable, is not culture at all, but a terribly superficial smattering of thin-spread information, possessing which its owner considers he has the right and even the duty of pronouncing an arbitrary and final judgment on a subject of which he knows nothing. I once knew an official employed in business in Moscow who was perfectly aghast because he discovered I knew nothing, that I had not even the shadow of pretence to any kind or sort of knowledge of natural science, that I was ignorant and not ashamed of being ignorant, of the elementary principles of dynamics. This same official, secure of his position in what he considered a universal field of “culture,” told me that Browning’s “Ring and the Book” was an old-fashioned, milk-and-water poem, rather like one of Trollope’s novels, and that Browning was a writer who was all sound and no sense, a victim to a fatal fluency and an incredible facility of expression. The result, therefore, of this culture is that in some cases it makes the man genuinely many sided and widely appreciative, and in others, as in the case I have just quoted, it leads him to express opinions of the kind which the French call saugrenu.
To go back to Feodor Petrovitch. He is saturated with so-called “culture.” In his case it is in many respects not superficial at all. He knows exactly how to manage a starch factory, not only how to manage it, but how every part of the machine is made and worked. He has practical knowledge of agriculture; he is an excellent economist. Besides this he has travelled and understands English, German, and French; he is well acquainted with Dickens, Thackeray, Shakespeare, and Mrs. Humphry Ward, with Beaumarchais and Ibsen, and, of course, it goes without saying, after what I have related, that a thorough knowledge of the Russian classics is an absolutely indispensable part of “culture.” I happened to mention to Feodor Petrovitch that a discussion had lately been raging in the Morning Post as to the comparative merits of modern and ancient literature and I asked him on what side the balance of opinion would fall if a similar discussion were to be held in Russia. “Russian literature at the present moment,” he said, “is leaping along with the force of a strong stream, but it is impossible to point to any one author of the younger generation who is worthy to take his place side by side with the older giants.” “But,” I asked, “with regard to those same giants, is the general opinion the same as what it was thirty years ago? For instance, do the younger generation admire Tolstoi, Tourgenieff, Gogol, and Dostoievski as much as their fathers did, or are there people who cannot read Gogol and Tourgenieff just as in England there are people who cannot read Dickens and Thackeray?” “The younger generation,” he answered, “have read all the classics; they find no difficulty in doing that, and of course it is difficult to generalise on subjects which are, after all, matters of taste; but I think you will find many Russians not only of the young generation who on reading or re-reading Tourgenieff are acutely disappointed.” “I have just read an interesting and admirably-written article in an English newspaper,” I answered, “in which it is said that as a psychologist pure and simple Tourgenieff is superior to Tolstoi—that he is a writer for the aristocracy of taste, not for the general public, and that not to know him is not to have penetrated into the best society. The author quotes Renan and George Sand to back him up, and says, moreover, that his artistic form is superior to that of Tolstoi, Daudet, and even Flaubert.”
“When the writer said that Tourgenieff was not for the general public, he meant, of course, the English or the French general public,” said Feodor Petrovitch. “In Russia his novels are read by every schoolboy; they are generally the first grown-up books to be read by young boys and girls at school. We have all read Tourgenieff in our youth, and we have all come under his spell as a writer. But to many of us, and certainly to me when I read him now, much of the glamour has gone. The beauty of style remains. And first and foremost, I consider Tourgenieff to be a poet. The books of his which give me the most pleasure are The Poems in Prose, The Sportsmen’s Sketches, and Spring Waters. These works seem to me incomparable for their harmony and many-sided beauty. Besides being a poet Tourgenieff was a chronicler of his time; but he has always seemed to be more a chronicler of the atmosphere of the epoch he deals with than a portrait painter of the human beings that crowded it—I mean a portrait painter like Velasquez and not a writer of romans à clef. Of course, his characters are living, but to me they are living as the characters in Trollope’s novels are living. They are people who existed in an imaginary world, and that imaginary world has the atmosphere of the Sixties. But with Tolstoi the case is different; he gives you the human beings who did actually exist. You know that what he described happened. I do not mean to say that he was a photographer, but an artist of the calibre of Velasquez; he recreated a world and made the human beings which he put into it breathe and live and speak as they actually did in real life. Tourgenieff’s novels at their best are novels. One knows quite well that Smoke never happened. On the other hand, we know that the doings and sayings of Pierre, and Levin, and Natasha, and Dolly are as true as the doings of Dr. Johnson and Pepys, or as true as the sayings and doings of any of our acquaintances. For this reason, I don’t care a fig for Tourgenieff’s psychology.
“When my contemporaries and I,” Feodor Petrovitch added, “first read the novels of Tourgenieff we were carried off our feet by the skill and magic of a new and great artist. To us it was all new. When I read him now, I admire Poems in Prose and The Sportsmen’s Sketches as much as I used to do, and I am still enchanted by his incomparable style. But the matter seems hopelessly old-fashioned. Just that which seemed so new and so daring seems to me now like mahogany furniture, crinolines, Octave Feuillet, the Second Empire, and all that is what you call ‘Early Victorian.’ And nine-tenths of his characters seem to me to be clichés. We know all that. We have got beyond it. What we shall never get beyond is the poet in Tourgenieff, his apprehension of certain shades and values of beauty in nature and life, and his expression of it in matchless prose. In this respect he seems to me indeed superior to Flaubert and the French in that Tourgenieff is a poet; but on the other hand I find Madame Bovary infinitely more interesting than Virgin Soil or Smoke on account of its relation to real life, which seems to me far closer; the Frenchman’s work is, I think, more vital, more real, and more true. Virgin Soil is, I think, a collection of conventional characters, or rather caricatures who bear really no relation to the period represented. And hence I consider Dostoievski so infinitely superior to Tourgenieff. In his book called Devils he gives you a picture of the same epoch; the surroundings he invents are as fantastic as a picture thrown on the screen by a magic lantern; but the human beings, the naked souls of which he lays bare to you, how poignantly and terribly real they are! Tolstoi shows you life as it is, Tourgenieff life as one can imagine it, only he imagines it with the genius and skill of an artist; but Dostoievski leads you, as Virgil leads Dante, through the smoky regions which lie between the real and the unreal, regions which we all know; and although he was not a stylist, not an artist like Tourgenieff, yet in laying bare the human soul and revealing all its darkness and all its light he was without an equal. Of course, as I said, it is absurd to generalise on such things, which are matters of taste, but I am sure you will find many Russians who think that Tourgenieff is old-fashioned as a novelist, though immortal as a poet, and very few who would place him above Tolstoi or Dostoievski.”
Then he went on to talk of other things.
WHEN I arrived at the village of A—, in the government of Tambov, after an endless journey in a train which went three miles an hour and stopped for an indeterminate period, never less than an hour and a half, at every station, I found a large crowd at the station gathered round a pillar of smoke and flame. One’s first impression was, of course, that a village fire was going on. Fires in Russian villages are common occurrences in the summer, and this is not surprising since the majority of the houses are thatched with straw. The houses are in close proximity one to another, and the ground is littered with straw. Moreover, to set fire to one’s neighbour’s house is a common form of paying off a score. But it was not a fire that was in progress. It was the casting of a bell which was to take place. The ceremony was fixed for four o’clock in the afternoon with due solemnity and with religious rites, and I was invited to be present.
wrote Schiller in his famous poem, and here the words were appropriate. To-day the bell was to be. It was a blazing hot day. The air was dry, the ground was dry, everything was dry, and the great column of smoke mixed with flame issuing from the furnace added to the heat. The furnace had been made exactly opposite to the church. The church was a stone building with a Doric portico consisting of four red columns, a white pediment, a circular pale green roof, and a Byzantine minaret. The village consisted of wooden log-built cottages thatched with straw dotted over a rolling plain. The plain was variegated with woods—oak trees and birch being their principal trees—and stretched out infinitely into the blue distance. Before the bell was to be cast a Te Deum was to be sung.
It was Wednesday, the day of the bazaar. The bazaar in the village is the mart, where the buying and selling of meat, provisions, fruit, melons, fish, hardware, ironmongery, china, and books are conducted. This takes place once a week on Wednesdays, and peasants flock in from the neighbouring villages to buy their provisions. But this afternoon the bazaar was deserted. The whole population of the village was gathered together on the dry brown grassy square in front of the church to take part in the ceremony. At four o’clock two priests and a deacon, followed by a choir consisting of two men in their Sunday clothes, and by bearers of gilt banners, walked in procession out of the church. They were dressed in stiff robes of green and gold, and as they walked they intoned a plain song. An old card table with its stained green cloth was placed and opened on the ground opposite and not far from the church, and on this two lighted tapers were set together with a bowl of holy water. The peasants gathered round in a semicircle with bare heads and joined in the service, making countless genuflexions and signs of the cross, and joining in the song with their deep bass voices. When I said the peasants I should have said half of them. The other half were gathered in a dense crowd round the furnace, which was built of bricks and open on both sides to the east and to the west, and fed with wooden fuel. The men in charge of the proceeding stood on both sides of it and stirred the molten metal it contained with two enormous poles. On the southern side of the furnace was a channel through which the molten metal when released was to flow into the cast of the bell. The crowd which was assembled here was already struggling to have and to hold a good place for the spectacle of the release of the metal when the solemn moment should arrive. Three policemen were endeavouring to cope with the crowd; that is to say, one police officer, one police sergeant, and one common policeman. They were trying with all their might to keep back the crowd, so that when the metal was released a disaster should not happen; but their efforts were in vain, because the crowd was large, and when they pressed back a small portion of it they made a dent in it which caused the remaining part of it to bulge out; and it was the kind of crowd—so intensely typical of Russia—on which no words, whether of command, entreaty, or threat, made the smallest impression. The only way to keep it back was by pressing on it with the body and outstretched arms, and that only kept back a tiny portion of it. In the meantime the Te Deum went on and on; and many things and persons were prayed for besides the bell which was about to be born. At one moment I obtained a place from which I had a commanding view of the furnace, but I was soon oozed out of it by the ever-increasing crowd of men, women, and children.
The aspect of the whole thing was something between a sacred picture and a scene in a Wagner opera. The tall peasants with red shirts, long hair and beards, stirring the furnace with long poles, looked the persons in the epic of the Niebelungen as we see it performed on the stage to the strains of a complicated orchestration. There was Wotan in a blue shirt, with a spear; and Alberic, with a grimy face and a hammer, was meddling with the furnace, and Siegfried, in leather boots and sheepskin, was smoking a cigarette and waving an enormous hammer, while Mimi, whining and disagreeable as usual, was having his head smacked. On the other hand, the peasants who were listening and taking part in the Te Deum were like the figures of a sacred picture—women with red and white Eastern head-dresses, bearded men, listening as though a miracle were about to be performed, and barefooted children with straw-coloured hair and blue eyes running about everywhere. Towards six o’clock the Te Deum at last came to an end, and the whole crowd moved and swayed around the furnace. A Russian crowd is like a large tough sponge. Nothing seems to make any effect on it. It absorbs the newcomers who dive into it, and you can pull it this way and press it that way, but there it remains, indissoluble, passive, and obstinate. Perhaps the same is true of the Russian nation; I think it is certainly true of the Russian character, in which as fundamental qualities there are so much apparent weakness and softness, so much obvious elasticity and malleability, and so much hidden passive resistance.
I asked a peasant who was sitting by a railing under the church when the ceremony would begin. “Ask them,” he answered, “they will tell you, but they won’t tell us.” With the help of the policeman I managed to squeeze a way through the mass of struggling humanity to a place in the first row. I was told that the critical moment was approaching, and was asked to throw a piece of silver into the furnace, so that the bell might have a tuneful sound. I threw a silver rouble into the furnace, and then the men who were in charge of the casting said that the critical moment had come. On each side of the small channel they fixed metal screens and placed a large screen facing it. Then the man in charge said in a loud matter-of-fact tone: “Now, let us pray to God.” The peasants all uncovered themselves and made a sign of the cross, and a moment was spent in silent prayer. This prayer was especially for the success of the operation which was to take place immediately, namely, the release of the molten metal, since two hours had already been spent in praying for the bell. At this moment the excitement of the crowd reached such a pitch that they pushed themselves right up to the channel, and the efforts of the policemen, who were pouring down with perspiration and stretching out in vain, like the ghosts in Virgil, their futile arms, were pathetic. One man, however, not a policeman, waved a big stick and threatened to beat everybody back if they did not make way. Then at last the culminating moment arrived, the metal was released, and it poured down the narrow channel which had been prepared for it, and over which two logs placed crosswise formed an arch, surmounted by a yachting cap for ornament. It caused a huge yellow sheet of flame to flare up for a moment in front of the iron screen facing the channel. The women in the crowd shrieked. Those who were in front made a desperate effort to get back, and those who were at the back made a desperate effort to get forward, and I was carried right through and beyond the crowd in the struggle.
And the bell was born. I hope the silver rouble which I threw into it, and which now forms a part of it, will sweeten its utterance, and that it may never have to sound the alarm which signifies battle, murder, and sudden death.