Travels in the Steppes of the Caspian Sea, the Crimea, the Caucasus Part 12

Now and always the universities and gymnasia are and have been for the most part attended only by pupils of the cla.s.s of petty n.o.bles, or of those of the priests and burghers. As for the sons of the aristocratic families, they are generally educated at home by private tutors, and as they are almost all intended for the army, they enter at once into the corps of cadets established in St. Petersburg.

According to a table published by the ministry of the interior, all the first cla.s.s establishments for public instruction, that is to say the universities, the two medico-chirurgical academies, the pedagogic inst.i.tute and the three lycea, contained in 1840 only 612 functionaries and professors, and 3809 pupils, the numbers being thus made up:

Functionaries and Teachers. Students.

St. Petersburg 59 433 Moscow 82 932 Dorpat 66 530 Kharkof 79 468 Kasan 74 237 St. Vladimir (Kiev) 55 140 Richelieu Lyceum (Odessa) 25 52 Demidof ditto 20 33 Bezborodko ditto 15 19 Medico-chirurgical academies of Moscow and Vilna 94 797 Pedagogic inst.i.tute of St. Petersburg 43 68

According to the same report the Russian empire possessed at the close of the year 1840, 3230 establishments under the superior direction of the ministry of public instruction, and containing 103,450 pupils.

The young men who attend the university courses, have all but one single object in view, that of acquiring a grade of n.o.bility; and the examinations are too slight to make industry and proficiency in their studies really requisite to the attainment of their purpose. Besides, they are most of them educated at the cost of the government, and as the latter does not like to lose its money, they must all enter the imperial service, whether well taught or not. In this manner are formed all the physicians, surgeons, and subordinate professors of gymnasia.

As for the civil departments the sole condition required for admission into them, is the knowledge of writing and arithmetic; accordingly the common cla.s.s Russian thinks he has completed his education when he can read, write, and cypher; and he is indeed sufficiently erudite to get a footing in some chancery office, a common clerks.h.i.+p in which admits him to the first grade as a civil officer, and from thence he may arrive at the highest rank in the service.

Many young men on leaving the universities, are of course employed in the public offices; but then, whatever talents they may possess, and whatever fruit they may have gathered from their studies become utterly useless to them. From the moment they enter any office whatever, they perceive with astonishment that they know nothing of what it is essential they should know. They have stepped into a new world of which they do not even know the language. They hear nothing talked of around them but forms, rules, tricks for evading the laws and ordinances, artifices for giving a legal colouring to abuses and extortions, and all sorts of inventions for squeezing money out of those who have the misfortune to need the help of the _employes_.

They soon see that the greatest adepts in those frauds which are conveniently styled office usages, the least scrupulous, or, in plain terms, the greatest rogues, are considered clever fellows, and make their way rapidly; whilst those who still retain some sense of honesty and a lingering respect for the principles of morality, are laughed at as fools. What then does the novice, who has perhaps carried off the prize of eloquence at the university? Finding himself obliged to defer to the lowest pupil of an elementary school, who has already gained some knowledge of office practice, he tries to forget all he has learned, and applies himself to a new course of study. His conscientious scruples are soon silenced; prompted by emulation he gradually becomes as accomplished as his mates, and by dint of this second education the clever fellow at last quite effaces the honest man.

It is also from the universities that the young men are taken who are designed for the business of public instruction; and as we have already stated, they are for the most part educated at the expense of the state.

When their studies are completed they are appointed professors in the gymnasia and other schools. The government has neglected no means of making their calling as advantageous as possible, both as to salary and honorary advancement. These encouragements would have the happiest effect anywhere else than in Russia, but there they have quite the contrary result. It follows from the existing system of n.o.bility with its graduated scale, the privileges it confers, and the means of fortune its offers, that a man's whole status in life resolves itself into a question of official rank. Now, as no calling presents a greater chance of rapid advancement than that of the public instructor, in which capacity a young man rarely fails to obtain the rank of major (hereditary n.o.bility) after five or six years' service, the consequence is that all the sons of the petty n.o.bles, burghers, and priests, eagerly rush into this thriving profession. This, however, is not the real mischief; on the contrary, the great number of compet.i.tors might produce a very salutary rivalry; but unfortunately the little power and influence exercised by the professors, who after all, can only command boys, and still more than this, their want of opportunity to enrich themselves under cover of their office, strip the business of public instruction of all prestige, and cause it to be considered, notwithstanding its high pay, as much less advantageous than many other posts the fixed salary of which is almost nothing, but which enable the holders to levy almost unlimited contributions on those who come under their hands. What follows? As soon as the professors have obtained the rank of major, they quit the universities and enter the civil administrations, where they can fatten on law suits, chicanery, and exactions, and all the countless means by which the law enables them to make fraudulent fortunes. And here we may remark that this state of things is another consequence of the want of definite callings and professions in Russia. The career of official rank is the only one known to the Russian; for him there exists none other.

We must not wonder, therefore, if the instruction given in the elementary schools, and the gymnasia is incomplete and almost barren of good effect. The teachers are almost always mere boys without experience or sound knowledge. They content themselves with going through their routine of business according to the letter of the rules, and the military discipline imposed on them; but once escaped from their cla.s.ses, they think of nothing but enjoying themselves, eating, drinking, and playing cards. I have visited many gymnasia in Russia, and I have always seen in them the same effects flowing from the same causes.

Besides the great universities and high schools, all the leading towns of the empire formerly contained numerous boarding schools, most of them kept by strangers; but these were suppressed by ukase in the year 1842.

The means of instruction are at present confined to the imperial establishments, from which all foreigners not naturalised in Russia are excluded. These new regulations dictated by false vanity, will infallibly have a disastrous influence, and render the progress of education more and more difficult.

There still exist in Russia several establishments for the education of officers and civil and military engineers. The Inst.i.tute of Ways and Communications was established in the reign of Alexander, under the superintendence of four pupils of the Ecole Polytechnique of France, MM.

Potier, Fabre, Destreme, and Bazain, who entered the service of Russia, at the request to that effect preferred by the tzar to Napoleon. This school (which I have not visited) might have rendered great service to the empire, had the government been discreet enough to leave it its foreign professors, and not subject it to the absurd interference of the Russian military drill. Very few able men have issued from this inst.i.tution, and the profound ignorance I have seen exhibited in all the great works executed at a distance from the capital, attests the decay of a school which at first promised so fairly. Again, it must be owned, that from the time when engineers enter on active service, they have no leisure to complete their studies; as soon as they receive an appointment, their whole time is taken up with reports, accounts, writings without end, and all the countless formalities devised by the quibbling and captious spirit of the Russians. I have known several engineers at the head of important works; they had not a moment to themselves, their whole day being spent in writing and signing heaps of paper. The same observations apply to the military, for whom secondary manoeuvres and minute costume observances form a never relaxing and stultifying slavery. Under such a system, all the germs of instruction implanted in the schools, soon disappear in service.

Besides, it must be admitted that the generality of Russians have a natural indifference to the sciences and the arts, which will long defeat the efforts of sovereigns desirous of effecting an intellectual regeneration. Though I have gone over a large portion of the empire, I have found very few persons, young or old, who were really studious and well-informed, and too often I have met with nothing but the most utter apathy, where I had a right to expect interest and enthusiasm. It matters not that the emperor showers tokens of favour and respect on his _savans_, the Russians themselves continue, notwithstanding, to treat them with great disdain. The reason is, that the arts and sciences do not lead to fortune in Russia, and as they fall exclusively to the lot either of foreigners, or of the petty n.o.bles, they cannot enjoy high consideration in a form of society which respects only might and authority, and consequently recognises but two vocations worthy of ambition, viz., the military profession and the civil service.

But independently of the influence of a bad social organisation, the Russians seem to me to be at this day the least apt by nature of all the nations of Europe to receive solid instruction. The Sclavonic race may be divided into two great branches: the first of these, which contains the Poles among others, has felt the influence of the west, with which it has been in long and immediate contact, and so enabled to adopt its civilisation more or less closely; the second, on the contrary, has acknowledged the paramount influence of Asia, and the Russians who compose it, are still in our day under the action of the Mongol hordes, to which they were enslaved for more than three centuries. Again, Russia is absolutely and entirely a novice in civilisation; go over her whole history, and you will not find a single page which gives proof of a really progressive tendency. It is a very remarkable fact that her political and commercial relations with the Lower Empire were entirely barren of result upon her civilisation, which remained completely stationary, even in circ.u.mstances most favourable to its development: it is therefore by no means surprising, that despite all the efforts of her sovereigns, she has been unable to place herself on the level of the other nations of Europe within the s.p.a.ce of a hundred years.

The results of our civilisation, more than twenty centuries old, are not to be inculcated so rapidly: there needs we think, a long series of progressive initiations, so that the moral const.i.tution reacting on the physical, may render the perceptions and the organs of the latter more delicate, and more suited to intellectual development: and this period of transition must necessarily be very long for a nation to which the past has bequeathed only reminiscences of slavery and destruction. Look, on the other hand, at Greece, Moldavia, and Wallachia, countries which have all had glorious periods in history; they have made great strides within ten years, and have in that short s.p.a.ce of time established their claim to rank as members of the European family of nations. To their past history belongs in part the honour of their present advancement.

That thirst for instruction, that incredible apt.i.tude to seize and understand every thing, which is characteristic above all of the Greeks, are evidently but old faculties long sunk in torpor under the pressure of slavery, and which waited but for a little freedom to break forth with new energy.

CHAPTER XVI.

ENTRY INTO THE COUNTRY OF THE DON COSSACKS--FEMALE PILGRIMS OF KIEV; RELIGIOUS FERVOUR OF THE COSSACKS--NOVO TCHERKASK, CAPITAL OF THE DON--STREET-LAMPS GUARDED BY SENTINELS--THE STREETS ON SUNDAY--COSSACK HOSPITALITY AND GOOD NATURE--THEIR VENERATION FOR NAPOLEON'S MEMORY.

Beyond Nakhitchevane, several valleys ab.u.t.ting on the basin of the Don, isolated hamlets, and a few stanitzas, diversify the country, and make one forget the sterility of the steppes, that spread out their gray and scarcely undulating surface to the westward. The banks of the Don which are seldom out of sight, are enlivened by clumps of trees, fishermen's huts, and herds of horses that seek there a fresher pasture than the desert affords. But except these animals, we saw not a single living creature; the heat was so intense, and the country is still so little inhabited, that most of the fields appeared to us in a state of wild nature. Nothing around us indicated the presence of man. In the country of the Don Cossacks, as elsewhere throughout Russia, the post road is barely marked out by two ditches so called, which you often drive over without perceiving them, and by distance posts two or three yards high.

This is all the outlay the government chooses to incur for the imperial post roads leading to the princ.i.p.al towns of the empire.

Before arriving in Novo Tcherkask, the capital of the Cossacks, we encountered another wandering party at least as curious as our gipsies.

Imagine our surprise when having pa.s.sed through a wide ravine, which for a long while shut in the road, we saw defiling over the steppes a countless string of small cars, escorted by I know not how many hundreds of women. We advanced, puzzled and curious to the last degree; and the more we gazed the more the numbers of these women seemed to multiply.

They were everywhere, in the cars, on the road, and over the steppes; it was like a swarm of locusts suddenly dropped from the sky. Most of them walked barefoot, holding their shoes in one hand, and with the other picking up fragments of wood and straw, for what purpose we could not conceive. Their carts were just like barrels with two openings, and were driven by themselves, for there was not the shadow of a beard among them. They were all returning, as they told us, from the catacombs of Kiev, to which they had been making a pilgrimage. Among them I remarked some old women who had scarcely a breath of life remaining. They seemed dreadfully fatigued, but at the same time very well pleased with their pious expedition.

Further on we met another procession of the same kind, which had already arranged its encampment for the night. Two fires, fed with those little chips of wood that had so much perplexed us, served to prepare the evening meal. All the pilgrims were busy, and formed the most varied groups. Some were fetching water in earthen pitchers, which they carried on their heads; others were kneeling devoutly, making the sign of the cross; and the genuflexions so frequent among the Russians and Cossacks; the oldest were feeding the fire and telling stories. It was an indescribable scene of bustle and noise, displaying a variety of the most picturesque att.i.tudes and physiognomies.

All the women were of Cossack race. There is much more of pious fervour in this nation than in the Muscovites. A slight difference of text between the Bibles of the two people has occasioned a very great one in their religious sentiments. The Cossacks call themselves the true believers, and abstain on religious grounds from the pipe, and from many other things which the Muscovites allow themselves without scruple. The natural integrity of their character is rarely sullied by hypocrisy.

They love and believe with equal ardour and sincerity.

At the extremity of a plateau, on the verge of a wide and deep valley, the town of Novo Tcherkask suddenly appeared to us, rising in an amphitheatre, and embracing in its huge extent several hills, the broad slopes of which descend to the bottom of the valley. All the towns we had previously seen, and which had shocked us by the extravagant breadth of their streets and their dearth of houses, were nothing in comparison with what now met our eyes. Seen from the point where we then stood, the whole town was like an enormous chess board, with the lines formed by avenues broader than the Place du Carousel in Paris. These lines, bordered at intervals by a few shabby dwellings, and separated from each other by open s.p.a.ces in which whole regiments might manoeuvre quite at their ease, some churches, and a triumphal arch erected in 1815 in honour of Alexander, are the only salient points of this desert which they call a capital, and the superficial dimensions of which are, without exaggeration, as great as those of Paris.

Novo Tcherkask, now the seat of all the public offices of the Don country, was founded in 1806 by Count Platof, who became so celebrated through the unfortunate French campaign of Moscow. Its very ill-chosen position forbids all chance of future prosperity. It is situated nearly eight miles from the Don, on a hill surrounded on all sides by the Axai and the Touzlof, small confluents of the river from which it is so fatally remote. Platof is said to have selected this site for the purpose of building a fortress; but his intentions have not been realised. Another most serious inconvenience for the town is the absolute want of good water. Wealthy persons use melted ice to make tea.

In the great square there are two very large bazaars with wooden roofs, in which are found all sorts of goods, and especially an abundant collection of military equipments for the use of the Cossacks. There is also a great a.r.s.enal, but quite dest.i.tute of arms. As for the other edifices, they are not worth mentioning, notwithstanding all the fine descriptions given of them by geographers.

But Novo Tcherkask has one precious thing to boast of--a thing unique in Russia--and that is an excellent hotel kept by a Frenchman, in which the traveller finds all the comforts he can desire. The n.o.bility who have strongly encouraged this establishment, have formed in it a casino, in which many b.a.l.l.s are given in the winter.

The Emperor Nicholas visited the Don Cossacks in 1837, and to this auspicious event the capital owed the good fortune of being supplied with lamps in the streets. But the lights went out when his majesty departed; and it is said, that in order to save the lamps from being stolen, the authorities had been obliged to make an armed Cossack stand sentry over each of them.

The population of Novo Tcherkask, formed by the union of four stanitzas, amounts to about 10,000. Staro Tcherkask, the old capital, now abandoned, has nothing to attract the traveller's attention, though Dr.

Clarke has bestowed on it the pompous t.i.tle of the Russian Venice.

Our arrival in the Cossack capital fell on a Sunday. As the windows of our hotel looked full on the only promenade in the town, the greater part of the population pa.s.sed in review before us. Every thing here bespeaks the nomade and warlike temper of the Cossacks. There is no copying of European fas.h.i.+on, no Frank costumes, no mixed population; every thing is Cossack, except a few Kalmuck figures, telling us of the vicinity of the Volga.

The Cossacks we had seen at Taganrok, had given us but a poor opinion of the beauty of the women of the country; we were, therefore, agreeably surprised at the sight of all the pretty girls that pa.s.sed continually before our windows. Even their costume, which we had thought ugly, now seemed not wanting in originality, and even in a certain piquancy. The young girls let their braided hair fall on their shoulders, and usually tie the braids with bright ribbons, that hang down to their heels. Some of them confine their tresses in a long bag made of a silk handkerchief, a style of head-dress by no means unbecoming.

It was really a very pretty sight to see the crowd of elegant officers and young women in gala attire that filled the footways, exchanging looks, smiles, and even soft discourse, as if they were in a ball-room.

The men are tall and handsome, and look remarkably well in uniform.

Bravery and n.o.ble pride are legible in their features and their eyes, as if they were still those fiery children of the steppes, who, before the days of Catherine II. acknowledged no other power than that of their ataman, freely chosen by themselves. Arms are at this day their sole occupation, just as they were a hundred years ago, and their organisation is still altogether military, as we shall see by and by.

What erroneous notions are entertained in France, of these good-natured, inoffensive, and hospitable Cossacks! The events of 1814 and 1815, have left a deep repugnance towards them in all French minds, and indeed it could hardly be expected it should be otherwise. But speaking of them as we found them in their own land, they do not deserve the aversion with which our countrymen regard them. There is no part of Russia where the traveller is more safe than in their country, nor does he anywhere meet with a more kindly welcome. The name of Frenchman, especially, is an excellent recommendation there. The portrait of Napoleon is found in every house, and sometimes it is placed above that of the great St.

Nicholas himself. All the old veterans who have survived the great wars of the empire, profess the greatest veneration for the French emperor, and these sentiments are fully shared by the present generation.

CHAPTER XVII.

ORIGIN OF THE DON COSSACKS--MEANING OF THE NAME--THE KHIRGHIS COSSACKS--RACES ANTERIOR TO THE COSSACKS--SCLAVONIC EMIGRATIONS TOWARDS THE EAST.

The origin of the Don Cossacks has, like that of the Tatars of Southern Russia, given rise to interminable discussions. Some have represented this people as an offshoot of the great Sclavonic stock; others consider it as only a medley of Turks, Tatars, and Circa.s.sians. Vsevolojsky adopts the former of these opinions, in his Geographical and Historical Dictionary of the Russian Empire. M. Schnitzler boldly decides the question, in his Statistics of Russia, by declaring that the Cossacks of the Don have proceeded from the Caucasus, and belong for the most part to the Tcherkess or Circa.s.sian nation.

Constantino Porphyrogenitus, a writer of the ninth century, mentions a country called _Kasachia_. "On the other side of the Papagian country,"

he says, "is Kasachia, and immediately afterwards are discovered the tops of the Caucasus." The Russian chronicles likewise mention a Circa.s.sian people subjugated in 1021 by Prince Mstizlav, of Tmoutarakan.

These, it must be owned, are very vague data, and the resemblance between two names is not warrant for our concluding that the Cossacks of our day and the Kasachians of the ninth century, are one and the same nation. Except the few words we have just cited, we have no other information respecting the latter people, and all the historical researches. .h.i.therto made, have failed to determine the real situation of Tmoutarakan. This town has been placed sometimes at Riazan, sometimes at the mouth of the Volga, on the site of Astrakhan, sometimes on the Asiatic sh.o.r.e of the Bosphorus. A stone, with a Sclavonic inscription, discovered at Taman, seemed for a while to have solved the problem. But it was afterwards fully demonstrated, that this grand historical discovery was only a hoax practised on the credulous antiquarians.

The Kasachia of the ninth century is thus but very imperfectly known to us; even with the help of Constantino Porphyrogenitus, it would be difficult to determine its position with any real precision; and when the Cossacks, now known to us, appear for the first time, 600 years afterwards, it would be rash and arbitrary in the extreme to declare them the descendants of a people so briefly mentioned by the Byzantine writer. This opinion will appear the less admissible, when it is considered that the country of the Cossacks, situated around the Sea of Azov, lay directly in the route of all those conquering hordes that issued from Asia to overrun and ravage Europe, and afterwards disappeared successively, without leaving any other trace of their existence than their name in the pages of history.

Is it likely that Kasachia was more fortunate? Is there any probability that its people, after 600 years of absolute obscurity, again arose out of the chaos of all those revolutions, to produce the Cossacks of our day? We cannot think so. Historical inquiries, and above all a knowledge of the regions extending between the Sea of Azov and the Caspian, prove beyond question that all those countries were never occupied by a nation having fixed habitations. We have ourselves traversed those Russian deserts, up to the northern foot of the Caucasus; and except the somewhat modern remains of Madjar, on the borders of the Kouma, we nowhere found any vestige of human occupancy, or any trace of civilisation. It is, therefore, by no means likely, that amidst all the convulsions of the Asiatic invasions, from the ninth to the fifteenth century, whilst so many races were disappearing completely, that a little remote nomade people shall have preserved for 600 years its nationality and its territory, without being swept away and absorbed by all those warlike hordes that must have pa.s.sed over it in torrents. This would be an historical fact perfectly unique in that part of the world; to us it appears in flagrant contradiction with historical experience.

We are of opinion then, that the Cossacks of our day have nothing in common with the Kasachia of Constantino Porphyrogenitus, and that we must look elsewhere for their origin and for the reason of their appellation.