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laugh. Or, “You, down there, don’t forget to take off
your boots when you go to bed at night,” — and more
nonsense of equal value. He speaks just as we do to
children of six or seven years, when we want to make
them laugh.
We go inside and see a real play. At the best theatre,
Suvórof is given, a national play in three acts. It is now
two o’clock in the afternoon, and the piece has already
been played four times since nine o’clock in the
morning. It takes about an hour. The auditorium is as
simple as possible — a shed; the seats are unplaned,
wooden benches, like those used at the Passion play in
the Tyrol. The audience is made up of very simple
people: servants, peasant men and women from the
vicinity; petty tradesmen and their wives, from the
suburbs. They wait in silence, Russian silence, till
the curtain rises.
Suvórof is the popular national hero of Russia. A
short distance from the theatre stands a bad academical
statue of him, in ancient Roman costume, with bare legs,
which resembles almost anything, only not at all,
externally, a careless Russian general. Thus the actor, hoarse
as he is, has more of the real Suvórof than the statue.
This great man was, in reality, a genuine Russian
eccentricity, undoubtedly the only genius among the generals
of Russia. While Kutúzof, the loiterer, whom Tolstoï,
from philosophic-religious reasons, has glorified and
idealized in “War and Peace,” was a nullity, who
appropriated Barclay de Tolly’s plan of the campaign, and for
whom circumstances conquered, Suvórof was a real
military genius, irresistible even at the head of only a mere
handful of men. His crossing the Alps from Italy to
Switzerland was undertaken under greater difficulties
than either that of Hannibal or of Bonaparte.
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