Russian girl

“ She is always at the height of her passion, never at its approach. Compare her with Anna Karenina. The Russian woman is flesh and blood, nerves and temperament, has heart, brain, body and mind where the English girl is flat and crude as a face painted on a playing card; she is without depth, without range, without intricacy. But as we say this we know that we have missed something. We have let the meaning of the play slip through our hands. We have ignored the emotion which has been accumulating because it has accumulated in places where we have not expected to find it. ”

“ While in France a young girl is more demure still! Where a married woman is concerned in Russia, a man generally kisses her hand—which suits the Russian as much as it renders ridiculous the Frenchman when he tries to imitate. ”

“ But I have never ceased to think of that girl. I have written to her, but I can not direct the epistle because her name is one of those nine-jointed Russian affairs, and there are not letters enough in our alphabet to hold out. I am not reckless enough to try to pronounce it when I am awake, but I make a stagger at it in my dreams, and get up with the lockjaw in the morning. ”

“ It is just the same as a talent, one must be born with it. So far as I can judge by myself, by the people I have seen in my time, and by all that is done around us, this faculty is present in Russians in its highest degree. Russian life presents us with an uninterrupted succession of convictions and aspirations, and if you care to know, it has not yet the faintest notion of lack of faith or scepticism. ”

“ The nose and the cheeks and the eyebrows, all the features, each taken separately, were coarse and heavy, like the furniture and the stove in the "travellers' room," but taken all together they gave the effect of something harmonious and even beautiful. Such is the lucky star, as it is called, of the Russian face: the coarser and harsher its features the softer and more good-natured it looks. The man was dressed in a gentleman's reefer jacket, shabby, but bound with wide new braid, a plush waistcoat, and full black trousers thrust into big high boots. ”

“ We are now speaking only of the women of Little Russia; but those of Great Russia retain the national costume called serafine, which is very picturesque, and is still worn at court on special occasions.
The women of Little Russia, accustomed to field labour from their childhood, and usually marrying at the age of fifteen or sixteen, are old before they have reached their thirtieth year; indeed, one can hardly say when they cease to be young, since they never exhibit the bloom of youth. Whether a Russian woman's age be fifteen, twenty, or thirty, it is all one in the end. ”

“ The Russian woman is, as a rule, very intelligent and well read, a charmer, even if she has no claims to any particular beauty; she is often the man’s superior; and in spite of being sometimes a successful butterfly, she is at the same time capable of the greatest attachment and of the most profound devotion. ”

“ In reality, she is not domesticated at all and would far sooner be following her lover—the one chosen for the day—down the street with a flag. Here you have the reason why a Russian woman appeals to us. She is rarely beautiful—some of them would themselves admit the deficiency—but she is never an embarrassment. ”

“ “But I've still better things about children. I've collected a great, great deal about Russian children, Alyosha. There was a little girl of five who was hated by her father and mother, ‘most worthy and respectable people, of good education and breeding.’ You see, I must repeat again, it is a peculiar characteristic of many people, [pg 265] this love of torturing children, and children only. To all other types of humanity these torturers behave mildly and benevolently, like cultivated and humane Europeans; ”

“ In Russia we have no classes to combat each other, one holding the power of wealth, and the other mighty with the strength of numbers. We have only an unclean bureaucracy in the face of a people as great and as incorruptible as the ocean. No, we have no classes. But we have the Russian woman. The admirable Russian woman! I receive most remarkable letters signed by women. So elevated in tone, so courageous, breathing such a noble ardour of service! The greatest part of our hopes rests on women. ”

“ The men, though treating them with exquisite politeness and gallantry, in reality think little about them, and find more pleasure in hunting, smoking, gaming, and drinking, than in lavishing on them those attentions to which they have many just claims. The Russian ladies have generally little beauty; their bloom, as I have said, is gone at twenty; but if they can boast neither perfect features nor dazzlingly fair complexions, there is, on the other hand, in all their manners remarkable elegance, and an indescribable fascination that sometimes makes them irresistible. ”

“ For a year and a half almost the only specimens of womanhood that I had seen were squat and swarthy Bulgarian girls, frowsy Armenians, or Turkish women closely veiled in their yashmaks. It was no wonder that this lovely Russian, with her delicate, refined beauty and her frank and gracious manner, made a profound impression upon me, and set my heart beating quickly with mingled surprise and delight. ”

“ The habit of living in the world of fashion and in a perpetual state of parade had taken such inveterate hold on her, that, without thinking of it, she used to dress three or four times a day, just as if she were among the salons of Moscow. I learned from her that the Russian ladies are as fond of play as of dancing, and that many ruin themselves thereby. ”

“ Nowhere are men and women chums as they are in Russia.
“A woman student in Russia may receive visitors all day and most of the night, discuss all vital subjects with them, go with men when and where she pleases, and yet she will not be criticised, and no landlady would dream of insinuating that there was anything wrong with her morals. What is more, there wouldn’t be anything wrong with them. The standard of morals in the student class is phenomenally high, and the average intelligent Russian woman’s mind is as pure as it is broad. ”

“ Russians are always interesting: they are the only women about whom you feel that you know very little; they are the only women who, in this chatterbox of a generation tout en dehors as it is, preserve some of the vague charm of mystery ”

“ I was born in Russia, and in moments such as these it is never the women of the other countries where I have lived who appear before me, never French women, or Germans, or Scandinavians, but always and only the Russian women, because it is only they who harmonise with nature and unite with her in an indefinable sense of unity and enjoyment. ”

“ Woman's Lot in Russia.—Here and there the popular songs hear traces of the griefs which in the rough furrows of daily life the Russian woman finds it prudent to conceal. "Ages have rolled away," says the poet Nekrasof; "the whole face of the earth has brightened; only the sombre lot of mowjik's wife God forgets to change." And the same poet makes one of his village heroines say, apropos of the enfranchisement of the serfs, "God has forgotten the nook where He hid the keys of woman's emancipation." ”

“ It would be ruinous to a young lady's reputation to be caught in a tête-á-tête with a young man within two steps of the ball-room. But all this prudery extends no further than outward forms, and it would be a grand mistake to suppose that there is more morality in Russia than elsewhere. Genuine virtue, such as is based on sound principles and an enlightened education is not very common there. Young girls are jealously guarded, because the practice is in accordance with the general habits and feelings of the country, and little reliance is placed in their own sense of propriety. ”

“ We want the creatures who bear us and our children to be superior to us and to everything in the world. When we are young we adore and poeticize those with whom we are in love: love and happiness with us are synonyms. Among us in Russia marriage without love is despised, sensuality is ridiculed and inspires repulsion, and the greatest success is enjoyed by those tales and novels in which women are beautiful, poetical, and exalted; and if the Russian has been for years in ecstasies over Raphael's Madonna, or is eager for the emancipation of women, I assure you there is no affectation about it. ”

“ But for dancing, of which they are passionately fond, their lives would pass away in almost absolute immobility, for lolling in a carriage is not what I call putting oneself in motion. There is scarcely any country where women walk less than in Russia, and nowhere do they lead more artificial lives. We had a Russian family for two months at Clarofka, returning from the waters of the Caucasus, and waiting until the sledging season was fully set in, to get back to Moscow. ”

“ The Russian women, it has been truly written, like the gentlewomen of other European countries, who are reared in the lap of luxury, can employ and practise all the accomplishments and seductive arts that most enchant society, and employ them well! They have great vivacity of mind, much grace of manner, and possess the most subtle and exquisite taste in dress; yet the domestic virtues are but little cultivated under the double-headed Eagle, and marriages are too often mere matters of convenience ”

“ The ladies are most amiable and polite; they are, however, often accused of want of sincerity, but, in my opinion, unjustly so. We are too apt to judge foreigners by ourselves, and think that they ought not to utter sentiments that they do not feel; but the fact is, what they mean only as expressions of every-day civility, we translate literally into those of regard, and hence our false estimate of their character. A Russian lady will say, on your being introduced, “that she is delighted at having the advantage of your acquaintance,” “that she has much esteem for you,” and so on ”

“ A tall, graceful figure, well set off by her picturesque peasant dress, tiny hands, delicate and white, a clear, fresh complexion, deep violet eyes with long black lashes, wavy auburn hair, and small white teeth just visible between a pair of lips that seemed made alone for kisses, while her features had that sweet, half-sad expression that is the birth-gift of every Russian woman, rich or poor. ”

“ The Russian women we have hitherto seen, though they cannot be called pretty, have generally very pleasant faces. Their voices are sweet and low, and the gentleness of their manner is very prepossessing. It is impossible, however, not to feel that so much timidity probably originates in the [153] harsh treatment they experience in their homes, for the men, though humble and cringing when addressing their superiors, are coarse and boorish to their inferiors. ”

“ Among the higher ranks, whose blood is mingled with that of Georgians, Circassians, and Poles, there are some women of extraordinary beauty; but the Russian females are in general short, clumsy, round-faced and sallow. ”

“ The great fact about Nina, at the end, when everything has been said, must always be her youth. That Russian youthfulness is something that no Western people can ever know, because no Western people are accustomed, from their very babyhood, to bathe in an atmosphere that deals only with ideas. ”

“ In the conversation and actions of the Russian ladies, there is hardly any thing of that softness and delicacy which distinguishes the sex in other parts of Europe. Even their exercises and diversions have more of the masculine than the feminine. The present empress, with the ladies of her court, sometimes divert themselves by shooting at a mark. ”

“ If it does nothing but portray the dignified composure of Russian womanhood in the presence of unspeakable affronts, it will have justified its publication by adding to the diadem of virtue a few more jewels to glorify the crest of motherhood. If it performs no other service than to place upon the pale face of tragic possibility the red-pink blush of romantic probabilities, it will have justified its presence in the society of the learned by the sincerity of its purpose and the candor of its appeal to the conscience of the world. ”

“ But most wore the common Russian blouse of dark brown canvas, buttoned up close to the neck, and gathered round the waist by a leather belt.
Many women were there, too, but as a rule they were not working women from the mills. Some may have been artisans or the wives of artisans, but most were evidently journalists, doctors, or students, from the intellectual middle classes, which in Russia produces the woman revolutionist—the woman who has played so fine a part in the long struggle of the past, and was now elated above human happiness by the hope of victory. ”

“ Woman in the fulfilment of her natural function—woman as a mother—is that which appeals most to the direct consciousness of the Russian. Hence the artificial barrier, which the postulate of purity had raised between the man and woman of western Europe, falls away, and the Russian beholds woman as unity, as nature. ”

“ Amongst the higher ranks, Russians of both sexes are quite remarkable for their charm of manner and peculiar talents for society. The extraordinary kindness we received from every family whose acquaintance we made during our stay in the Crimea, quite endeared these kind people to us, and personal experience enables us to say that Russian friendship does not limit itself to charming manners alone. ”