RUSSIA.

The brutality, drunkenness, and debauchery which accompany semi-barbarism, and of which the old Russian manners had more than a due proportion, continued to be characteristic of the people of that country until a very recent period; while their amiability, their plastic disposition, their highly imitative faculty in the arts, and their capabilities of improvement, are noted by many writers. Just emerged from savage life as a nation, they have been moulded and welded as one mass by the steady and undeviating policy of their sovereigns, among whom we have examples of vast mental powers and towering ambition, combined with the lowest depravity and the most shameless profligacy, exemplifying in the same individual the extremes of human nature.

Previous to Peter the Great, Russia was comparatively unknown, and in the Elizabethan age of England the Czar of Muscovy was considered only as a barbarian, whose subjects were far inferior in civilization to the Tartars of the Crimea. Indeed, it was not till the eighteenth century that the Russians were admitted within the pale of European politics, or their power reckoned as an element in the calculations of statesmen.

The most important, we might almost say the only lawgiver previous to Peter the Great, was Ivan III., who reigned in the early part of the sixteenth century. Among the laws of that period, which were all sanguinary, was one fixing the value of a female life, in case of death by misadventure, at half the life of a man. Slavery was the institution of the state, each child being the absolute property of its parent. The women were more enslaved than among the Asiatics, no law protecting them against their husband’s violence. A wife who killed her husband was to be buried alive up to the neck, and a guard was set around her to see that no one supplied her with food or the means of ending her sufferings.[271] Females lived in the strictest seclusion, and had no weight nor authority in the household. Their duties were to spin, to sew, and to do menial work.

Peter I. came to the throne, as most Russian sovereigns have done, either through intrigue or usurpation. Both before and after Peter, the will and caprice of the ruling power was paramount. He might appoint his successor, either during life or by will, and such appointment was often set aside by a more powerful competitor. In Peter’s public life, in his aspirations for the general welfare, in his self-devotion, in his conceptions of all that was wanting to his country’s elevation and greatness, and in his iron will and supernatural energy, he was a hero; in his private life, in his passions, his tastes and habits, he was on a level with the lowest of mankind.

Our object is the delineation of national characteristics, and individual propensities or delinquencies are unimportant except so far as they illustrate national character. It has been well observed that a people’s virtue or vice does not consist in the arithmetical increase or decrease of immoral actions, but in the prevailing sentiment of an age or people, which condemns or approves them. It is in this respect that the conduct of monarchs and courtiers becomes of importance in the estimate of national manners, especially in a despotism. The Czar of Russia is at once the religious and political leader of his people, and his personal conduct becomes the standard of their moral relations, offering encouragement and support to the good, or sanction and justification to the depraved.

Peter’s first wife, Eudoxia, was a woman of virtue and merit. Neither her youth nor beauty secured the affections of her husband. She did not escape the voice of slander. Gleboff, her alleged lover, was impaled by Peter, who went to see him writhing in his death agonies, when the wretched man avenged himself in the only way left him: he spat in the Czar’s face. Eudoxia was subsequently sent to a nunnery at Moscow by Peter’s orders, and at last took the veil under the name of Helena.

Scarcely had Peter attained the crown when he formed a connection with Catharine. The romantic history of her origin and elevation is too well known to repeat here. Her husband, a Swedish dragoon, was living; and she was the mistress first of Marshal Sheremeloff, then of Mentchikoff, in whose house Peter saw her, and whence he took her. She acquired great influence over the Czar’s untamed ferocity, and, to her infinite credit, this influence was always used to mitigate the fearful rigor of his punishments, and to soothe his otherwise implacably revengeful spirit. During the lifetime of her husband and of his first wife, Peter married her.

The pleasing traits of Catharine’s character were obscured by the irregularity of her life. Raised, by the affection of Peter, to the imperial throne, she set an example of dissoluteness to her subjects. There is ample reason for believing that she had several intrigues during Peter’s lifetime, but the case of Moens de la Croix is beyond question, and the discovery of her infidelity in this instance led to her separation from Peter and the death of her lover.

In 1724, after the campaign against the Turks, in which Catharine had accompanied the Czar, and had, by her spirit and example, kept up the courage of the army amid great difficulties and reverses, Peter determined on publicly crowning her; a ceremony very unusual in Russia, and almost tantamount to declaring her his successor.

Moens de la Croix was the young brother of Anne de la Croix, one of Peter’s early mistresses. He was Catharine’s chamberlain. His office brought him in close attendance on the empress, and an intimacy was established. This was for a time notorious to every one except Peter himself. At length, however, his suspicions were aroused, and, by setting spies on Catharine, he became a personal witness to her infidelity. The first explosion of his resentment was terrific, and he was on the point of executing both the empress and her paramour, but by the temperate advice of some of his friends, who counseled him to avoid a scandal, it was determined to arrest Moens on a false charge of conspiracy.

Moens and his sister were accordingly seized and confined in an apartment in the winter palace. Peter permitted nobody to approach them, and took them their food with his own hands. When they were examined as to the conspiracy, Moens, to save the empress with the public, confessed to every thing. He was accordingly condemned and beheaded. His sister was knouted and sent to Siberia.

Catharine had presented her lover with her miniature on a bracelet, which he always wore. As he walked to his death, he managed to deliver it, unperceived, to the Lutheran minister who accompanied him, with instructions to convey it back to the empress privately, which was accomplished. The Czar was a spectator of the execution, after which the head of the culprit was fixed on a stake, according to custom. To terrify Catharine the more effectually, Peter drove her round the head of her lover. Happily for her, she managed to preserve self-control during the torture of this horrid spectacle. After this the Czar only spoke to her in public.

At Peter’s death, Catharine ascended the throne of Russia by virtue of a pretended dying declaration of her husband. She went through a pantomime of sorrows and tears over his body, but, as soon as she was firmly seated, she abandoned herself to pleasure and voluptuousness, and had two lovers, Prince Sapicha and Loewenwolden, at the same time. “These two rivals equally strove to please her, and alternately received proofs of her tenderness, without suffering their happiness to be marred by jealousy.” The irregularity of the empress’s life, and her intemperate use of ardent liquors, hastened her death, which took place in her thirty-ninth year.

Peter himself was a wretched example of conjugal infidelity and low debauchery. His associates were often of the very lowest of the populace. It is true that in his time the highest were not much removed from their inferiors in decency of manners; while the inferiors often had the advantage, if not of intellectual cultivation, at least of practical intelligence, in which Peter took delight. He spent many of his hours drinking brandy and other liquors with sailors, carpenters, and artisans, irrespective of his temporary assumption of the working man’s pursuits. He consorted indiscriminately with women of all sorts and conditions. Eventually he contracted the venereal disease. From neglect, and the general depravity of his life, the disease became so aggravated that at last it proved the indirect cause of his death. He himself used to say that he had taken it from Madame Tchnertichoff, wife of the general and diplomatist of that name. Upon the fact being mentioned to her, whether casually or with malice prepense does not appear, she is reported to have replied very naÏvely that she had not given it to him, but that he, on the contrary, had such loose habits and low associates that he had given it to her.[272]

It was in 1722 that Peter was attacked with this malady, and while suffering from it he marched into Persia, and shared the fatigues of the meanest soldier throughout the campaign. The heat, drought, and constant dust increased the disease frightfully, and the pains became so excruciating that he could not conceal them from his immediate attendants. Still, however, he would not consult the court physician, but directed his servant to get advice as if for some one else. He then went to the hot baths of Plonetz, and apparently recovered. But it seems the disease was not cured; it was merely palliated by this treatment, and he was obliged, on a relapse, to have recourse to the regular physicians, and for three months his life was despaired of. At last he recovered; but now, in spite of all warnings, he resumed his usual habits of life, renewed his long and severe journeys, his public works, and his general activity of mind and body, while he in nowise amended other and more injurious pursuits and practices.

On November 5, 1724, while on a journey to Finland, he stopped at the port of Lachta. There, from the shore, he saw a small vessel full of soldiers and sailors which had struck upon a shoal. Perceiving their imminent danger, he shouted to them, but the boisterous wind drowned his voice. He sprang into a skiff, pulled out to the shoal, and, having reached the vessel, jumped into the water, got her off, and landed the passengers all safe. He neglected all the precautions necessary in the then state of his health, and was seized with violent fever, and at the same time his former pangs came on with all their old force. He was taken back to St. Petersburg, where he obtained partial relief from his sufferings. He employed one of his intervals of ease in celebrating the great festival of blessing the waters of the Neva, and by his intemperance in the festivities renewed his attack, and after a period of protracted agony, died on the 28th of January, 1725.

Peter is described as having been excessively libidinous in temperament, and his coarse promiscuous amours were made the common subject of his jocularity, even in the presence of Catharine. He was even addicted to abominable depravities, which are stated by contemporary writers to have been the common practice of the Russians at that time.[273] Peter at times gave way to fits of lust, in which, like a furious beast, he regarded neither age nor sex. Unnatural vices were punished in the Russian army at this time by an express military regulation, and the crime was a standing reproach with the people, who were said to have acquired it from the Greeks of the lower empire.[274]Anne, the successor of Peter and Catharine, had two publicly avowed lovers—Dolgorouki and Ernest John Biren. The latter was the better known, as his influence and importance during Anne’s reign were very great. Dolgorouki had become one of the deputies to announce to Anne her succession to the throne, which office he accepted, with the hope of being able to resume his former intimate relations with his future sovereign. When he entered the apartments, he found a man in mean apparel seated by the side of the princess. He ordered him to withdraw, and, upon his inattention to the order, took him by the arm to turn him out, when the empress stopped him. This unknown person was Biren, who became regent of the empire.[275]

Anne was not sunk in the same abyss of profligacy as her successor Elizabeth, nor in brutality as her ancestor Peter. She had been brought up in Courland, and had acquired some little refinement of ideas and manners. Gluttony and drunkenness were somewhat less in vogue at her court, but dissipation, ruinous gambling, and boundless extravagance were in full fashion. The whole court became a body of buffoons and jokers, and the most absurd and preposterous fashions of dress, the rudest and most boisterous romps and gambols were generally practiced. As a specimen of court manners, the practical joke played on Prince Galitzin, in which there was as much malice as fun, may be remembered.

Having given offense by changing his religion, the prince was compulsorily married to a girl of the lowest birth. A palace was built in his honor, but the material was ice, and all the furniture was composed of the same. The wedding procession, consisting of more than three hundred persons in their national costumes, who had been collected from all the provinces of Russia, passed along the streets. The newly-married couple were mounted in a pagoda on the back of an elephant. When the ball was over, the bride and bridegroom were conducted to their nuptial chamber, like the rest of the house, all of ice, and were there installed in an ice bedstead, and guards were posted at the door to prevent them escaping from the room before morning.

Anne died in 1740, and, after a short interregnum, Elizabeth, daughter of Peter I., came to the throne. She inherited all her father’s vices and sensuality, but none of his great qualities. Before she became empress, Elizabeth had outraged all propriety; had openly carried on an improper intercourse with the sub-officers and soldiers of the guards who had been quartered near her dwelling. The lust and drunkenness in which she wallowed indisposed her from all longings after greatness. But there were others who needed her name, and a conspiracy being formed, she became empress in spite of herself. Her chief paramour at the time was Grunstein, sergeant in the guards, who was elevated to the rank of major-general. The other soldiers and non-commissioned officers who had been the ministers of her lewdness were made officers. These individuals frequented the common public houses, got drunk, made their way into the houses of persons of condition, and committed all sorts of depredations with impunity. When the men who could boast of the empress’s favors became intolerable, they were drafted off to the army, as officers in regiments on service.

Elizabeth is said to have been privately married to Razamoffsky, as also to the well-known Chevalier d’Eon, who visited the court of Russia in the disguise of a woman, and undoubtedly enjoyed Elizabeth’s favors, whatever may be the truth about her marriage to him. Elizabeth withdrew herself for whole months from business, and was drunk for days or even weeks consecutively. She had a reputation for humanity; but, although she sentenced no one to death, not less than eighty thousand of her subjects were tortured or sent to Siberia during her reign. Her extravagance was such that when she died there were in her wardrobe some fifteen thousand dresses, thousands of pairs of sleeves, and several hundred pieces of French and other silks.

Catharine II. of Russia was, like Peter, a compound of the noblest intellectual endowments, with a moral organization of unsurpassed depravity. She has usually been considered a monster of lust; but she was no less infamous for her cruelty, and for the total absence of all those qualities and feelings which form the chief grace and beauty of woman’s inner life. Her favorite dining-room in the Tauric palace was adorned with pictures representing the sacking of Ohkzakoff and Ismail, in which the painter had surpassed the gloomy vision of a Carravaggio, and had depicted the assault, the carnage, the mutilation, and all the hideous details of such scenes. In these Catharine is said to have taken great delight. She hated music, and never could permit other sounds than those of drums, trumpets, and similar barbaric instruments within her hearing; and yet it is said that, in her outset in life as Princess of Anhalt Zerbst, she had a womanly heart, delicacy of taste, and refinement of intellect;[276] that it was not till long after her husband, Peter III., had insulted her by open neglect of her very winning person and youthful graces, and had abandoned her for the vulgar and ugly Princess Woronzoff, that she committed herself to the terrible career which she afterward pursued so steadily.

The Duchesse d’Abrantes, in her memoir of Catharine, tells us that her first lover, Soltikoff, was forced upon her as a matter of public policy by the crafty and unscrupulous Bestujeff, the able minister of Elizabeth, for the sake of procuring an heir to the Grand Duke Peter. Catharine remonstrated, and threatened to complain. “To whom will you complain?” asked the minister, coldly. Catharine submitted, and accepted the lover thus imposed upon her. At the time of this adultery for expediency sake, Catharine was deeply intent upon study, with a view to qualify herself worthily for her future destiny, disgusted as she was with the indecencies of the Russian court!

Subsequently, it was considered expedient to remove Soltikoff. Catharine had given birth to a child, and was not pleased with this dismissal; but the impassible Bestujeff only sneered at her remonstrances and professions of affection for the dismissed lover, and recommended her to choose another. This was a lesson she was not slow to carry out. The list of her paramours was little less numerous than that of Elizabeth.

After Catharine had caused Peter III. to be murdered, and had ascended the throne as empress in her own right, she abandoned herself to the fullest gratification of her passions, both royal and personal. Besides the vulgar crowd whom she selected as the recipients of her filthy favors, the world knew, as the public and recognized paramours, the names of Orloff, by whom she had a son called Count Bobruski, Wassilitchikoff, Potemkin, Louskoi, Mornonoff, and Zuboff.

These were appointed in a manner that was reduced to a system, and an etiquette was established as precise as that of naming a state minister. When Catharine was tired of her present favorite, one of her intimate friends was commissioned to look out for another. At other times, her notice having fallen on some young man who pleased her fancy, she signified her wishes to some female friend, and thereupon an entertainment was arranged at the lady’s house, which the empress honored with her presence, and thereby gained an opportunity of closer acquaintanceship with the chosen individual. He then received orders to attend at the palace, where he was introduced to the court physician, and examined as to his general health and physical condition. After this he was placed under the charge of a certain Mademoiselle Protasoff.[277] The various examinations having been successfully passed, the favorite was installed into the regular apartments of office, which were immediately contiguous to those of the empress. On the first day of his installation he received one hundred thousand rubles (about twenty-five thousand dollars) for linen, and an allowance of twelve thousand rubles per month; besides which, all his household expenses were defrayed. He was required to attend the empress wherever she went, and was not permitted to leave the palace without her permission. He might not converse familiarly with other women, and if he dined with his friends, it was imperative that the mistress of the house should be absent.

When a favorite had completed his term of service he received orders to travel, and from that moment all access to her majesty was denied. The favorites rarely rebelled against their destiny in this particular; but Potemkin and Orloff, who had far other views than those of dalliance, had the temerity to disobey the order, and succeeded in retaining power and the friendship of the empress long after their personal claims on her tenderness were at an end. On terminating the intimacy, the favorite usually received magnificent gifts. Potemkin, after he had ceased his functions as favorite, became pander to his royal mistress, thereby securing the double advantage of the favor of the empress and the patronage of the favorite, from whom he levied a handsome fee for the introduction. Potemkin and Orloff were at one period rivals, in which contest Orloff was at last defeated; but when Potemkin reached his pride of place, he became so necessary to Catharine in his higher capacity that he set up and pulled down the favorite of the hour as he pleased, and even ventured upon the most extravagant flights of insolence and personal disrespect to the empress. Orloff had been also the rival of Poniatowski, but his superior capacity and brutal energy of will made him respected and feared by Catharine long after she had ceased to like him.

The pecuniary results to the state, enormous as was the plunder, was perhaps the least of the evils sustained through this system of iniquity. The registered gifts to the twelve favorites amounted to upward of one hundred million dollars.[278] Lanskoi, who had held no political offices, and the whole of whose fortune was drawn from the flagitious profits of his post of dishonor, died, after less than four years of office, worth, in cash only, and exclusive of valuables, seven millions of rubles. Potemkin’s wealth, which was accumulated from all sources of public robbery and private extortion, was fabulous. At his death he owned two hundred thousand serfs; he had whole cupboards filled with gold coin, jewels, and bank-bills; he held thirty-two orders, and his fortune was estimated at sixty million dollars.[279]

In the closing days of Catharine’s reign she found a lower deep into which to plunge. When upward of sixty, she took into office, as her favorite, Zuboff, who was not quite twenty-five. She now formed the Society of the Little Hermitage. This was a picked company of wits and libertines, of both sexes, over whose scenes of debauchery and revelry the empress presided. An inner penetralia even of these orgies was established, and called the Little Society.

The pernicious influence of such an example, set for so long a period of time by a sovereign distinguished for ability, and whose reign had been rendered famous by its successful foreign enterprises, was the almost universal corruption of the Russian court and aristocracy of both sexes. The women, in imitation of her majesty, kept men, with the title and office of favorites. This was as customary as any other piece of fashion, and was recognized by husbands. Tender intrigues were unknown; strong passion was still more rare; marriage was merely an association. There was a club, called the club of natural philosophers, which was a society of men and women of the highest classes, the object of whose meetings was indiscriminate sexual intercourse. The members met to feast, and after the banquet they retired in pairs chosen by lot. This club was afterward put down by the Russian police, in common with all other secret societies. A hospital was founded by Catharine for fifty ladies affected with venereal disease. These were all to be taken care of; no question was permitted as to name or quality, and the linen of the establishment was marked with the significant word “discretion.”

Catharine’s end was sudden and frightful. She had grown corpulent, and her legs and body had swollen and burst. She moved about with considerable difficulty, although her imperious will would not allow her to give way in her career either of ambition or profligacy. She was at the Little Hermitage November 4, 1796, in remarkably high spirits, and even joked her buffoon, Leof Nauskin, among other things, as to his death and his fears thereupon. The next morning the dread messenger, of whose advent she had made sport, brought his orders for her. She fell into an apoplectic fit, and, after thirty-seven hours of insensibility, died unblessing and unblessed, to be succeeded by Paul, her detested son by her first lover Soltikoff.

The emperor, or as he was better known by Napoleon’s sobriquet, the mad Emperor Paul, was too remarkable for his eccentricities to make himself conspicuous for his gallantries. Even in this particular he preserved his eccentricity. He neglected his wife, an amiable and handsome woman, the mother of Alexander and Nicholas, for an ugly mistress, Mademoiselle Nelidoff, and for another, Mademoiselle Lapukhin, who would not accept his addresses, but to whom he nevertheless professed the patient devotion of Don Quixote. The most noteworthy circumstance, in this connection, of Paul’s life was the indirect effect of female frailty in procuring his murder. The enemies who subsequently plotted his downfall and destruction procured their return from banishment through the offices of a certain Mademoiselle Chevalier, a French actress who ruled Kutaisoff, who on his part ruled the Czar.

As we approach our own times, the description of historical characters becomes liable to the tinge of prejudice or partiality.

Alexander, the son and successor of Paul, was distinguished by the amenity of his disposition and the philosophical tone of his political theories. He was married at an early age by order of his grandmother Catharine, who in his case insisted on making him a good husband, and took numerous precautions for that purpose, all of which her example neutralized or belied. The selection made for him might, under the conditions of humble life or a free choice, have turned out happily. As it was, he preferred the society of the ladies of his court, and in particular of the Countess Narishkin, by whom he had three children. The countess proved inconstant, and all his children by her died, to Alexander’s deep grief.After the loss of these illegitimate children, the affections of Alexander were turned toward the empress, whose true worth he recognized when it was too late. She was struck with disease, and he was on a journey to Southern Russia to select a suitable spot for a residence for her, when he was seized with the fever of which he died.

If Alexander’s mild character had but little influence on his subjects, the name of his successor, Nicholas, has been identified with the very existence of the Russian people, as much as any sovereign since Peter the Great. His example and expressed will have had immense effect, both for good and evil. It is almost impossible to arrive at the true character of Nicholas at the present time, for the reasons just mentioned. In his private life as husband and father, and in his public life as ruler and politician, writers are diametrically opposed to each other. Party prejudice denies him all worth, or makes him a very Socrates. Golovin and authors of the democratic school affirm, in addition to his other offenses, that Nicholas had several illegitimate children, and also “that no woman could feel herself secure from Nicholas’s importunities;” while writers like Von Tietz, Jermann, and other panegyrists of the Russian court, describe Nicholas as an exemplary husband and father, a model to his subjects in his domestic relations. They allege farther, that the gross immorality which has been the chief feature of Russian society was very much discouraged, and rendered altogether unfashionable by the estimable manners of the imperial family.

Truth is rarely found in extremes. The prevalent usage among sovereigns in this century has been “to assume a virtue if they have it not,” and to maintain a respectable exterior for the sake of public opinion. So politic a ruler as Nicholas was not likely to reject this. He did all that could be done to bring virtue into good repute at court. But too many little incidents are told of him to justify a belief in his perfect spotlessness. The characters of individuals, even as rulers, would be unimportant to us were it not that in Russia society is in a transition state, and shows itself plastic in the hands of an energetic emperor. “The state! I am the state!” was perfectly true in the mouth of Nicholas. By his subjects he was held in an esteem little short of idolatry, and he was, in every sense of the word, the most remarkable man in his vast dominions.

Thompson, an English traveler, who has spoken very favorably of the personal worth of the Emperor Nicholas, says of the morality of the upper classes among the Russians, “Denied the advantages of rational amusement and innocent social enjoyments, deprived of those resources which, while they dispel ennui, elevate the feelings, the mind resorts to sensual indulgences and to the gratification of the passions for the purpose of finding recreation and relief from the deadening pressure of despotism. Immorality and intrigue are of universal prevalence, and (in a social sense) are hardly looked upon as criminal acts, while gambling and debauchery are the natural consequences of the tedious monotony from which all seek to escape by indulging in gross and vicious excitement.”

Under the system of serfage, now approaching its end, it was almost impossible that there should be such a thing as public morality in the lower classes. The Russians, both noble and serf, are false and dishonest to a proverb. Prostitution in such cases is a superfluous term: a woman had no right or opportunity to be virtuous.

The morality of St. Petersburg is undoubtedly of the lowest, and yet we have not met with any accounts of local prostitution there. It is a city of men, containing one hundred thousand more males than females.[280] Kelly says the women form only two sevenths (²/7) of the entire population, and calls it “an alarming fact.” The climate is unfavorable to female beauty, and it is generally conceded that the men are handsomer than the women. The German girls have an almost exclusive reputation for good looks in St. Petersburg. By reason of the disproportion of the sexes, it is said that ladies can not venture out unattended. This is etiquette among the higher classes of all Continental Europe, and the simple fact, without the reason, would not be surprising.

The attention to minutiÆ which distinguishes a despotism, and which is so remarkable a feature of Russian state craft, does not allow us to suppose there are no statistical papers on the subject of prostitution; on the contrary, it is perfectly well known that such are in existence. The secrecy which is scrupulously maintained in all public matters, and the watchful vigilance of the police over strangers, prevents them obtaining any information except on the most patent and notorious subjects. The remarks of travelers on Russian society are very vague and general, and unsupported by any of those details which could alone authenticate them.We have already alluded to the ancient Oriental seclusion of women among the Russians. This was so strict that a suitor never saw, or at least was presumed never to have seen, the face of his bride before marriage. In 1493, Ivan the Great told a German embassador who demanded his daughter in marriage for the Margrave of Baden, that Russians never showed their daughters to any one before the match was decided. Peter the Great abolished this lottery, and directed that the parties might see each other, but he still found it necessary to promulgate a strong ukase against parents compelling children to marry against their wishes.

The compromise of the ancient custom which has been brought about by this law is that the elders of the family usually pre-contract for the juniors: then succeeds the bridal promenade, at which the young people, if unknown to each other, are led accidentally to meet in the same walk. Having thus managed an interview, the father of the young man, if all the preliminaries have been satisfactory so far, sends to the bride’s father, and a general family meeting takes place, at which the arrangements are completed, the dowry determined, and then follows the betrothal. The elect pair kneel down on a fur mat and exchange rings. The preparations for the marriage are commenced, during which time the lovers have frequent opportunities of meeting and becoming better known to each other; this is a general period of visiting and parties. On the wedding-day the bridemaids unbraid the lady’s hair, and she receives her husband with flowing locks. This is a remnant of ancient Russian usage, when the greatest outrage that could be committed on a woman was to unbraid her hair. It is generally believed that among the lower orders the wife is bound to draw off her husband’s boots on the wedding-day, and also that the Russian peasant beats his wife at the commencement of her married life, so as to indicate supremacy. As to the substantial observance of the latter practice modern travelers differ, although it would seem that symbolically it is still maintained.[281]

A curious exhibition takes place on Whitsunday in the Petersburg summer garden, called “The Bride’s Fair.” All the marriageable daughters of the Russian tradesmen turn out on that day for a promenade. The young men, in their best attire, come forth to view them. The brides expectant do not limit their display to their charms, but second them by attractions of a more substantial character, adorning themselves with trinkets, jewels, or even now and then with silver tea-spoons, plate, and other valuables useful in housekeeping. This has been inveighed against as indicative of the prevalent indelicacy of the Russians, a sort of bride-market. Is it more reprehensible than many customs nearer home? It is now, however, falling into disuse.

The conjugal relations of the Russian nobility were extremely loose and indefensible during the time when vice was fashion, and virtue in a courtier would have been deemed condemnation of the higher powers. Then, and even down to the reign of the Emperor Nicholas, marriage was simply an affair of convenience—the husband living at Moscow or St. Petersburg, the wife in Paris or Italy; such separations frequently lasting for years.[282]

The Foundling Hospital at St. Petersburg, the Wospitatelnoi Dom, is the most magnificent foundation of the kind in Europe, and it pleases the authorities to give information upon its features. The endowments are enormous, owing to the munificence of successive sovereigns, who have made it a kind of state caprice. The annual expenditure exceeds five millions two hundred thousand rubles.[283] The number of children in this institution is commensurate with its wealth. Upward of twenty-five thousand are constantly enrolled on its books.

The lodge is open day and night for the reception of infants. The daily average of children brought is about twenty. The only question asked is if the child has been baptized, and by what name. If not baptized, the ceremony is performed by a priest of the Greek Church. At the time of leaving, the mother receives a ticket, the duplicate of which is placed around the child’s neck. The mortality which takes place among these helpless victims of sin and misfortune is enormous. Some die in the lodge when just received; more perish during the tedious ceremonies of their baptism, which last several hours. The total number of deaths among children in the asylum and those out at nurse is probably three thousand per annum, or about one in four of the whole number committed to its charge.[284]The children are given in care of wet nurses for about six weeks, when they are sent into the country until six years old. They are then brought back to the institution and educated in a superior manner; the girls being qualified as governesses in Russian families, and the boys as artisans in the imperial manufactories. In cases of special capacity, they receive a scientific or musical education.

An incident which is said to have occurred at this institution has gone the rounds of the press. The story is, that one of the young women having given birth to an infant, and the delinquent not being discovered, the Emperor Nicholas heard of the occurrence, and made a visit of inspection. Having summoned the pupils before him, he demanded to know the guilty one, adding that, if she came forward, she should be pardoned. No one obeyed the invitation, and he was going away, with threats of disgracing the whole body, when one girl, to save her companions, came forward, threw herself at his feet, and confessed her fault. Nicholas kicked her out of the way, exclaiming that it was too late.[285]

A Lying-in Hospital is one of the appendages of this establishment. Pregnant women may enter there four weeks before their confinement, and the strictest secrecy is maintained as to their name and character. Even the omnipotent Czar respects the privileges of the place.

The institution at Moscow is on a similarly gigantic scale, and is managed after the same fashion.

The empress is the mother of the foundlings, which, be it observed, are mostly the children of such as can not or do not desire to keep their offspring. Free access, on appointed days, is permitted to the parents of the children; and, under special circumstances, the empress will permit a child to be removed from the institution, if the parents prove their means and disposition to support it properly.

Kohl, who gives us particular, and even minute accounts of the management and arrangement of the public hospitals, makes no mention whatever of the syphilitic wards. The high system of efficiency in which the military infirmaries are maintained might have encouraged a hope for more detailed information on this subject.