Isabel Florence Hapgood

“ His plots are complicated and entangled, he introduces a throng of acting personages. In reading his romances, one seems to hear the roar of the crowd, and the life of a town is unrolled before one, with all its bustle, its incessantly complicated and unexpected encounters, and relations of people one to another. Like a true child of the town, Dostoévsky does not confine himself to fashionable drawing-rooms, or to the educated classes; he is fond of introducing the reader to the dens of poverty and vice, which he invests, also, with their own peculiar, gloomy poetry. ”

“ Petersburg is handsome, grand, impressive. Moscow is beautiful, poetic, sympathetic, and pervaded by an atmosphere of ancient Russia, which is indescribable, though it penetrates to the marrow of one's bones if he tarry long within her walls. Emperor Peter's new capital will not bear comparison, for originality, individuality, and picturesqueness with Tzar Peter's Heart of Holy Russia, to which the heart of one who loves her must, perforce, often return with longing in after days,--"white-stoned golden-domed, Holy Mother Moscow." ”

“ The forests stand motionless, inspired, full of darkness, and cast forth a vast shadow. Calm and quiet are the pools; the coldness and gloom of their waters is morosely hemmed in by the dark green walls of gardens. The virgin copses of wild bird-cherry and black cherry trees stretch forth their roots towards the coolness of the springs, and from time to time their leaves whisper as though in anger and indignation, when a lovely little breeze, and the wind of the night, creeping up for a moment, kisses them. ”

“ I stood among the pillars, a little removed from the principal aisle, one afternoon near sunset, listening to the melodious intoning of the priest, and the soft chanting of the small week-day choir at vespers, and wondering, for the thousandth time, why Protestants who wish to intone do not take lessons from those incomparable masters in the art, the Russian deacons, and wherein lies the secret of the Russian ecclesiastical music. That simple music, so perfectly fitted for church use, will bring the most callous into a devotional mood long before the end of the service. ”

“ Dostoévsky to lancet-like thrusts, penetrating the very soul; Turgéneff to tender touches, which produced soft, melting outlines. It was long before they could reconcile themselves to Tolstóy's original mode of painting a vast series of miniature portraits on an immense canvas. But the effect of this procedure was at last recognized to be the very acme of throbbing, breathing life itself. Moreover, it became apparent that Tolstóy's theory of life was, that great generals, statesmen, and as a whole, all active persons who seem or try to control events, do nothing of the kind. ”

“ The head of the fashionable coachman is crowned with a becoming gold-laced cap, in the shape of the ace of diamonds, well stuffed with down, and made of scarlet, sky-blue, sea-green, or other hue of velvet. His fur-lined armyak, reaching to his feet,--through whose silver buttons under the left arm he is bursting, with pads for fashion or with good living,--is secured about his portly waist by a silken girdle glowing with roses and butterflies. ”

“ O, ye do not know the Ukraína night! Look upon it; from the midst of the sky gazes the moon; the illimitable vault of heaven has withdrawn into the far distance, has spread out still more immeasurably; it burns and breathes; the earth is all bathed in silvery light; and the air is wondrous, and cool, and perfumed, and full of tenderness, and an ocean of sweet odors is abroad. ”

“ The part of the Fair which is most interesting to foreigners in general, I think, is the great glass gallery filled with retail booths, where Russians sell embroidery and laces and the handiwork of the peasants in general; where Caucasians deal in the beautiful gold and silver work of their native mountains; where swarthy Bokhariots sit cross-legged, with imperturbable dignity, among their gay wares, while the band plays, and the motley crowd bargains and gazes even in the evening when all the other shops are closed. ”

“ One day he is permitted to ride about the town, and although all old people have been ordered to keep out of sight, he espies one aged cripple, and thus learns that his father has grossly deceived him, in asserting that no one ever becomes old or ill in his kingdom. He forthwith becomes a Christian, and flees to the desert. Then comes his wail to "Mother Desert Most Fair," as she stands "afar off in the valley": "O Desert fair, receive me to thy depths, as a mother her own child, and a pastor his faithful sheep, into thy voiceless quiet, beloved mother mine!" ”

“ For some mysterious reason, the picturesque nurses, with their pearl-embroidered, diadem-shaped caps, like the kokoshniki of the Empress and Court ladies, their silver-trimmed petticoats and jackets patterned after the ancient Russian "soul-warmers," and made of pink or blue cashmere, never have any children in their charge in winter. Indeed, if we were to go by the evidence offered by the Nevsky Prospekt, especially in cold weather, we should assert that there are no children in the city, and that the nurses are used as "sheep-dogs" by ladies long past the dangerous bloom of youth and beauty. ”

“ Romanticism established, as its first principles, freedom of creation and nationality of poetry, and these principles survived romanticism itself. Now, while romanticism preached freedom of creation, it circumscribed this freedom by selecting as subjects for poetical compositions chiefly the extraordinary sides of life, its majestic moments. Its heroes were always choice, powerful natures, who suffered profoundly because of the lot of all mankind, and were capable of gigantic conflicts against the whole world. ”

“ I imagined that I descried in the blue dusk of the distant steppe Ilya of Murom approaching on his good steed Cloudfall, armed with a damp oak uprooted from Damp Mother Earth, and dragging at his saddle-bow fierce, hissing Nightingale the Robber, with one eye still fixed on Kieff, one on Tchernigoff, after his special and puzzling habit, and whom Little Russian tradition declares was chopped up into poppy seeds, whence spring the sweet-voiced nightingales of the present day. ”

“ There are women in Russian hamlets
With a dignified calmness of face;
With a beautiful strength in their movements,
With mien and glance of an empress in grace.
A blind man alone could ignore them;
And he who can see them must say:
"She passes—'tis as though the sun shineth!
She looks—'tis giving rubles away!"
A noble-minded, splendid peasant woman, who has worthily fulfilled all the duties of her hard lot, at last becomes a widow. The manner of it; the quaint folk-remedies employed to heal the sick man; the making of the shroud by the bereaved wife ”

“ A framework supporting thick screens of golden rye straw extended far out over the stream. A door upstream swung open at will for ambitious swimmers. It was a solitary spot. The peasant girls pitching hay in the meadows beyond with three-pronged boughs stripped of their leaves were the only persons we ever saw. Clad in their best scarlet cotton sarafani and head kerchiefs, they added greatly to the beauty of the landscape. Haying is such easy work compared to the rest of the summer labors, that the best gowns are donned as for a festival. ”

“ We now come, chronologically, to a writer who cannot be assigned either to the old sentimental school of Karamzín, or to the new romantic school of which Púshkin was the first and greatest exponent in Russian literature; to a man who stood apart, in a lofty place, all his own, both during his lifetime and in all Russian literary history; whose name is known to every Russian who can read and write, and whose work enjoys in Russia that popularity which the Odyssey did among the ancient Greeks. ”

“ The Tatar quarter alone seemed to possess the requisite mystery and "local color." Here whole streets of tiny shops, ablaze with rainbow-hued leather goods, were presided over by taciturn, olive-skinned brothers of the Turks, who appeared almost handsome when seen thus in masses, with opportunities for comparison. Hitherto we had thought of the Tatars only as the old-clothes dealers, peddlers, horse-butchers, and waiters of St. Petersburg and Moscow. Here the dignity of the prosperous merchants, gravely recommending their really well-dressed, well-sewed leather wares, bespoke our admiration. ”

“ There is one point to be noted about Nekrásoff which was somewhat neglected by the critics during his lifetime. No other Russian poet of that day was so fond of calling attention to the bright sides of the national life, or depicted so many positive, ideal, brilliant types with such fervent, purely Schilleresque, enthusiasm as Nekrásoff. And most significant of all, his positive types are not of an abstract, fantastic character, clothed in flesh and blood of the period and environment, filled with conflicting, concrete characteristics—not one of them resembles any other. ”

“ The friendly policemen smiled impartially upon Vanka and us, as they helped to pack us in the drosky.
Tula as we saw it on our way out, and as we had seen it during our morning stroll, did not look like a town of sixty-four thousand inhabitants, or an interesting place of residence. It was a good type of the provincial Russian town. There were the broad unpaved, or badly paved, dusty streets. There were the stone official buildings, glaring white in the sun, interspersed with wooden houses, ranging from the pretentious dwelling to the humble shelter of logs. ”