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interesting to the traveller as a commercial and manufacturing
town or for the historical associations, like all the towns
which Napoleon’s winter campaign has made renowned.
The intellectual life in these provincial towns presents a
sad picture: it is cards and brandy, brandy and cards.
With the exception of Finland, Poland, and the
provinces on the Baltic, each of which has its own character,
all the intellectual life in Russia is concentrated in the
two capitals, St. Petersburg and Moscow.
At the very moment when the traveller at the frontier
takes the Russian railway train, there are three things
which meet him like messages from a strange world:
the language, which, with its rich and soft melody, has
not the least resemblance to any of the Western-European
tongues; the alphabet, of which some of the characters
are new to us and others have a different meaning than
in ours (as, for instance, H is used for N); and finally a
computation of time, which tears you away from your
customary almanac by rolling the time back for twelve
days, and thereby burns the bridge to the civilization
of Western and Southern Europe. Would that it were
only in these twelve days that Russia was behind the
rest of Europe!
St. Petersburg is generally the first place visited by
the traveller. St. Petersburg is, as said by Peter the
Great in his old comparison, the window which the
creator of modern Russia built towards the west. It must
be conceded that for by far the largest part of the year
the view through the window is obscured by frost
flowers. What Russia most needed in that time was an open
port. Archangel, in the north, was almost continuously
closed by ice. Kronstadt was added, but that also is
shut up for half the year. Since then the empire has
gained new harbors, such as Vladivostok, in the far east,
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