Lviv

“ As the weeks went on, the rumors grew thicker and there began to come through to Poland, our land of the fields, the news that the country lands of the Ukraine were ablaze. Then it was heard that Kiev had fallen, then Lvov, the city of the Lion, and now there was naught between the savage band of warriors and the fair city of Krakow, save a few peaceful villages and fertile fields.
The Tartars came through the world like a horde of wild beasts. They left not one thing alive nor one green blade of wheat standing. ”

“ From the foot of the column dedicated to Sviataslof Vsevolovitch, on the spot where he vanquished the Swedes and Poles, that rises on one of the highest summits of the great hill on which Novgorod is built, the stranger may50 contemplate a prospect that might serve as a type of a Russian landscape in winter. In the plain below sleeps the Volga, silent and still to the senses in its winter dress; for the frost, one of nature’s forces, the most imposing from its effects, has already congealed the surface of its running stream into the solidity and quiescence of the plain. ”

“ Litwa has deserts;
There lie deep shades in woods of Bialowiez,
Where never rings the clang of foreign swords,
Nor sounds the haughty victor’s signal-word—
No, nor the groanings of our vanquished brothers.
There, in the midst of silent, pastoral joy,
And in thine arms, and on thy bosom, let me
Forget that there are nations in the world;
Or any worlds; we for ourselves will live—
Return, oh! speak, consent! ”

“ The citizens had often rebelled; they had accepted the protection of Lithuania, and had later meditated, and even for a time accomplished, a union with Poland. But they had had no strength to defend the liberty to which they had aspired. ... When Ivan advanced, determined, as he said, to reign at Novgorod as he reigned at Moscow, they were unable to repel or to endure a siege, and they surrendered themselves into his hand. Once he had pardoned them; now their independence was taken from them. Their assembly was dissolved; their great bell, the emblem of their freedom, was carried to Moscow. ”

“ Human sacrifices have been talked of. The worship of the dead inspired ideas which guide the savage everywhere. Men have preserved the custom of wife-capture, or buying brides from the fathers by paying the kalym; they practise agricultural communism. In a word, the life of these races of the Volga in the 19th century is the living commentary of the accounts of Nestor of the Russian Slavs of the 9th century. ”

“ After the great bulk of the people left at Saratov the ship’s human machinery ran with greater smoothness.
A trip on the Volga was supposed to be one of the great experiences of the rich traveller before the war. It is an experience anyone may be very glad and proud to have had. More of the heart and soul of Russia lies on each bank of this mighty river than can be found in Russia’s cosmopolitan cities. The country is low and fertile, except for the desert stretches of the lower reaches. The green of its grass is a bright emerald. ”

“ Life at Livadia in 1909 and in after years was simple and informal. We walked, rode, bathed in the sea, and generally led a healthful country life, such as the Tsar, eminently an outdoor man and a lover of nature, enjoyed to the utmost. We roamed the woods gathering wild berries and mushrooms which we ate at our al fresco teas, cooking the mushrooms over little campfires of twigs and dried leaves. The Emperor and his suite hunted a little, rode much, and played very good tennis. ”

“ At the beginning of his reign, in 1551, Ivan was preparing an expedition to Kazan, and in June of the following year he descended the Volga and laid siege to that city. It was captured after a brave defense, when a number of the people were massacred and the rest sold as slaves. This conquest was followed by that of Astrakhan in 1554; the Volga from its source to its mouth was thereafter a Russian river. The Cossacks of the Don also submitted to him.
The European countries bordering on Russia dreaded that country's growing power. ”

“ Its height was such that it commanded a view not only of the enemy's camp, which was not more than a mile distant, but of the whole of the country up to Dium and Phila and the far-extended line of the sea coast. The soldiers' spirits rose when they saw the whole weight of the war, the entire military strength of the king and the hostile country so near them. They pressed the consul to lead them at once against the enemy, but he allowed them one day's rest after the toils of the march. The next day, leaving a detachment to guard the camp, he led them out to battle. ”

“ This fight for Livonia was really a battle for the empire of the north-west, in which the hegemony of the Slav nations was to be lost or won.
Now for this enterprise, Poland could only reckon on her own efforts. Sweden had allied herself with her, but solely as far as Livonia was concerned, and within Livonian borders. All Sweden saw in Batory's new plan of campaign was an excuse for keeping herself free. She appealed to the letter of her treaty, and claimed to act independently. When Denmark was sounded, she declined; her relations with Ivan were growing pacific. ”

“ Clean all the streets of Kiev town, take down the wonder-working crosses of the Holy Temples—but leave upon the domes the tall fiery darts of Ilya lest Falcon the Hunter should still be alive—and build stalls for horses in the churches. Cleanse also your palaces of white stone and prepare beds without number, for our host is great. Brew sweet liquors, for our thirst is also great, and let cask stand upon cask in noble array. For in less than two days Tsar Kalin and his great host shall walk the streets of Kiev, and our master shall wed the Princess Apraxia. ”

“ Of all your army fighting young Cossacks
Not one has escaped from our hands.
See, Pole! A Cossack is dancing, is dancing
Upon a grey horse after thee!
When he stands with his musket thy heart sinks in anguish
In great fear of death thou dost flee.
We own the whole land e’en as far as Sluch river,
Kostiana! As far as thy Hill—
O rude and uncourteous! Poles caused our revolting
So mourn they their lost Ukraine still.
65As a thunder-cloud brooding on Vistula’s river
The Poles lie, expelled from Ukraine.
As long as we live they shall no more leave Poland,
They shall not come nigh us again. ”

“ There is Ukraina. Where on the summits of the Carpathians old oaks and pines murmur, and the native Hutzul in white embroidered shirt and red breeches plays on his trimbeeta amid his grazing flocks in the mountain meadow; where on a dark night thunder roars and the lightning plays on the white breasts of beech-trees; where Dobush 12sleeps with his robber Oprishki, in a rocky cave under the Chorna-Hora, waiting for the summons to arise once more against the enemies of the Ukraine—
There is the Highland of the Ukrainian. ”

“ Petersburg, I have already described a Polish restaurant there which was sharply divided by an invisible but impassable line into two camps, both violently Polish, and both so hostile to each other that the girls of one would not speak or eat with the girls of the other, nor even with the men. Warsaw displayed a similar division in almost every street. Very likely it is the price that Poles pay for the strong individuality which has given them so many poets, artists, and musicians. ”

“ Prince George Lvov, one of the most admirable of Russian public workers, who organised relief during the famines and led the Civil Red Cross in the Japanese War, passes from Lemberg to East Prussia, or from Warsaw to the Caucasus, seeing as much as can come under one pair of eyes, and returning to Petrograd and Moscow to find ways of meeting each new need. Nicholas Lvov, a former Vice-President of the Duma, whose brother has fallen and whose eldest boy has been killed by shrapnel before Cracow, passes constantly between Petrograd and Galicia. ”

“ Petersburg story—New outbreak of the quarrel over Bobtail and Falcon—The intervention of Robak—The Seneschal's speech—The wager—Off for mushrooms.
Who among us does not remember the years when, as a young lad, with his gun on his shoulder, he went whistling into the fields, where no rampart, no fence blocked his path; where, when you overstepped a boundary strip, you did not recognise it as belonging to another! For in Lithuania a hunter is like a ship upon the sea; wherever he will, and by whatever path he will, he roams far and wide! ”

“ The Pale of Settlement was now accurately defined: it consisted of Lithuania [1] and the South-western provinces, [2] without any territorial restrictions, White Russia [3] minus the Villages, Little Russia [4] minus the crown hamlets, New Russia [5] minus Nicholayev and Sevastopol, the government of Kiev minus the city of Kiev, the Baltic provinces for the old settlers only, while the rural settlements on the entire fifty-verst zone along the Western frontier were to be closed to newcomers. ”

“ At Livadia, fearless of anarchists, he wandered about the village with his wife and children, talked familiarly with the Tartar peasants, and often visited the villas of his friends. There was a guard at the gate and a sentinel at the door of the cottage, but he never had an escort when he went out for his walks or drives.
There are thousands of more spacious and pretentious country villas in Russia; there are hundreds of thousands in the United States more beautiful, more luxurious and better equipped than that in which he lived and died. ”

“ Where treads her foot a recent grave up-grows.
O woful sight! But yet a heavier doom
Foretold to Litwa from the German side,—
The shining helmet with the ostrich plume,
And the wide mantle with the black cross dyed.
For where that spectre's fearful step has passed,
Nought is a hamlet's ruin or a town,
But a whole country to the grave is cast
O thou to whom is Litwa's spirit dear!
Come, on the graves of nations sit we down;
We'll meditate, and sing, and shed the tear. ”

“ And now came another wave of invasion, bloody and overwhelming. The Avars, from the north of China, swept over Asia, seized all the provinces on the Black Sea, overran Greece, and took possession of most of the country between the Volga and the Elbe. The Sclavonians of the Danube, however, successfully resisted them, and maintained their independence. Generations came and went as these hordes, wild, degraded and wretched, swept these northern wilds, in debasement and cruelty rivaling the wolves which howled in their forests. ”

“ Breezy, picturesque Yaroslavl, with its dainty, independent cabbies, who object to the mud which must have been their portion all their lives, and reject rare customers rather than drive through it; with its churches never to be forgotten; its view of the Volga, and its typical Russian features! It was a fitting end to our Volga trip, and fully repaid us for our hot-cold voyage with the samovar steamer against the stream, though I had not believed, during the voyage, that anything could make up for the tedium. ”

“ These are the dictates of nature, which only an artificial point of honour can overcome.
But, for the full enjoyment of Slavic popular poetry, we must exact still more from the reader. He must not only divest himself of his habitual ideas and views, but he must adopt foreign views and prejudices, in order to understand motives and actions; for the Oriental races are far from being more in a state of pure nature than ourselves. He will have to transport himself into a foreign clime, where the East and the West, the North and the South, blend in wonderful amalgamation. ”

“ Two hundred thousand workmen flock from all parts of Russia to its banks. Fifteen thousand ships and 500 steamboats plough its waters. Kostroma, Nijni-Novgorod, Kazan, Simbirsk, Samara, Saratof, Astrakhan, are filled with noise and movement. The whole life of Russia seems concentrated on the Volga. ”

“ The mountain fastnesses and precipices of the Urals, the green slopes of the Caucasus, the Siberian wastes, the grey shores of the Baltic and the sunny shores of the Euxine—the Volga and the Don, and even the sacred steppes—to him they are all beautiful, to him they reflect the image of his soul and his feelings. ”

“ Jenkinson, the Englishman, starting thence. in 1558, with his flotilla of galleys, for the Far East, was to see a renewal of the period of the floating caravans despatched by the Princes of Kiev on the 'Voyage to Greece.' But all around, even to the neighbouring river basin of the Kliazma, save for Vladimir, where some remnants of vanished splendours still remained, the conquest had laid the country waste and scattered it with ruins. The population in the country parts still clung to the soil. In the towns no one was left, save the soldiers, who were everywhere. ”

“ Italian songs are glorious, but the singing of the Ukrainian is also a precious pearl in the common treasury of mankind. It was born out of the beauty of the Ukraine, and it is beautiful; it was born on the steppes, and as the steppes it is wide; it was born in battles, and it is free; it was born of the tear of a lonesome girl, and it rends the heart; it was born of the thoughts of the Kobzars and its harmonies are pregnant with thoughts—
This is Ukrainian Song. ”

“ In February, 1557, a Livonian deputation made its appearance at Moscow, begged for further delay, and was dismissed. Ivan refused to see the envoys himself, desired Adachev to pack them off, and organized a punitive expedition. It was swift and cruel. Towards the close of the year, an army, largely made up of Tartars, and commanded by Schah-Ali, the late Tsar of Kazan, invaded Livonia, and ravaged the country in a frightful manner. Not a feature was lacking. Women were abused till they died, children were torn from their mother's wombs, houses were burnt down, crops were destroyed. ”