Great Cities Through Travelers' Eyes Page 22

  Transported with delight at this beautiful spectacle, which was the more gratifying from the memory of the melancholy objects we had hitherto seen, we could not suppress our joy, but, with a simultaneous movement, exclaimed, ‘Moscow, Moscow!’ At the sound of this long-wished-for name, the soldiers rushed up the hill in crowds, discovering new wonders at every step. One admired a noble château on our left, the elegant architecture of which displayed more eastern magnificence; another directed his attention towards a palace or temple; but all were struck with the superb picture which this immense town afforded. The Moskva flows through smiling meadows and having fertilized the country, passes through the capital, separating an immense group of houses built of wood, of stone and of brick, and constructed in a style in which were united the different sorts of architecture peculiar to every nation. The walls painted of different colours, the cupolas gilded or covered with lead or slates, the terraces of the palaces, the obelisks, and above all the spires, presented to our eyes the reality of one of those famous cities of Asia which hitherto we had believed only to exist in the rich imagination of the Arabian poets.…

  On 15th September we approached the city, which had no walls, a simple parapet of earth being the only work which constituted the outer enclosure. Nothing indicated that the town was inhabited and the road by which we arrived was so deserted that we saw neither Russian nor even French soldier. No cry, no noise was heard. In the midst of this awful solitude we pursued our march, a prey to the most utmost anxiety, and that anxiety was redoubled when we perceived a thick smoke, which arose in the form of a column from the centre of the town. Eager to know the cause of this conflagration we in vain endeavoured to find someone who might satisfy our irrepressible curiosity, and the impossibility of satisfying it increased our impatience and augmented our alarm.

  1839 MARQUIS DE CUSTINE

  The French nobleman and Romantic novelist Astolphe-Louis-Léonor, Marquis de Custine (1790–1857), is best known for his account of a visit to Russia in 1839. Though himself a reactionary, he was appalled at Russian autocracy and described its pernicious effects; nevertheless, he was impressed by the physical beauty of Moscow.

  A multitude of spires gleamed alone above the dust of the road, the undulations of the soil and the misty line that nearly always clothes the distance, under the summer sun of these parts.… Before the eye spreads a landscape, wild and gloomy, but grand as the ocean; and to animate the dreary void, there rises a poetical city, whose architecture is without either a designating name or a known model.

  To understand the peculiarity of the picture, it is necessary to remind the reader of the orthodox plan of every Greek church. The summit of these sacred edifices is always composed of several towers, which vary in form and height, but the number of which is five at the least…. The middle steeple is the most lofty; the four others respectfully surround this principal tower. Their form varies; the summits of some resemble pointed caps placed upon a head; the great towers of certain churches, painted and gilded externally, may be severally compared to a bishop’s mitre, a tiara adorned with gems, a Chinese pavilion, a minaret and a clergyman’s hat. They often consist of a simple cupola, in the shape of a bowl, and terminating in a point….

  Bright chains of gilded or plated metal unite the crosses of the inferior steeples to the principal tower; and this metallic net, spread over an entire city, produces an effect that it would be impossible to convey, even in a picture. The holy legion of steeples, without having any precise resemblance to the human form, represent a grotesque assemblage of personages gathered together on the summits of the churches and chapels, a phalanx of phantoms hovering over the city.

  The exteriors of the mystic domes…remind the stranger of a cuirass of Damascus steel; and the sight of so many scaly, enamelled, spangled, striped and chequered roofs, shining in the sun with various but always brilliant colours, strikes him with the most lively astonishment. The desert, with its dull sea-green tint, is, as it were, illuminated by this magical network of carbuncles. The play of light, in the aerial city, produces a species of phantasmagoria, in broad day, which reminds one of the reflected brilliance of lamps in the shop of a lapidary. These changing hues impart to Moscow an aspect altogether different from that of the other great European cities. The sky, when viewed from the middle of such a city, is a golden glory, similar to those seen in old paintings.…

  After passing Petrovski, the enchantment gradually disperses, so that by the time of entering Moscow, we feel as if waking from a brilliant dream to a very dull and prosaic reality – a vast city without any real monuments of art, that is to say, without a single object worthy of a discriminative and thoughtful approbation. Before so heavy and awkward a copy of Europe, we ask, with wonder, what has become of the Asia, whose apparition had struck us with admiration so short a time before? Moscow, viewed from without as a whole, is a creation of sylphs, a world of chimeras; when inspected close at hand and in detail, it is a vast trading city, without regularity, dusty, ill paved, ill built, thinly peopled; in short, though it unquestionably exhibits the work of a powerful hand, it betrays also the conceptions of a head whose idea of the beautiful has failed to produce one single chef-d’oeuvre.…

  Nevertheless, amid the chaos of plaster, brick and boards that is called Moscow, two points never cease to attract the eye – the church of St Basil, and the Kremlin – the Kremlin, of which Napoleon himself was only able to disturb a few stones! This prodigious fabric, with its white irregular walls, and its battlements rising above battlements, is in itself large as a city. At the close of day when I first entered Moscow, the grotesque piles of churches and palaces embraced within the citadel rose in light against a dimly portrayed background, poor in design and cold in colouring, though we are still burning with heat, suffocating with dust and devoured by mosquitoes. It is the long continuance of the hot season which gives the colour to southern scenery; in the north, we feel the effects of the summer, but we do not see them; in vain does the air become heated for a moment, the earth remains always discoloured.…

  On first entering the city of Moscow, I forgot poetry, and even history; I thought only of what I saw, which was not very striking, for I found myself in streets similar to those in the outskirts of all great cities: I crossed a boulevard which resembled other boulevards, and then, after driving down a gentle descent, found myself among straight and handsome lines of houses built of stone. At last I reached the Dmitriskoi-street, where a handsome and comfortable chamber had been engaged for me in an excellent English hotel. I had, at Petersburg, been commended to Madame Howard, who without this introduction would not have received me into her house. I took care not to reproach her for being so scrupulous, for it is owing to this precaution that one can sleep comfortably in her establishment. The means by which she has succeeded in maintaining there a cleanliness rarely seen anywhere, and which is an absolute miracle in Russia, is her having had erected, in her courtyard, a separate building, in which the Russian servants are obliged to sleep.…

  The first thing that struck me in the streets of Moscow was the more lively, free and careless bearing of the population as compared with that of Petersburg. An air of liberty is here breathed that is unknown to the rest of the empire. It is this which explains to me the secret aversion of the sovereigns to the old city, which they flatter, fear and fly. The emperor Nicholas, who is a good Russian, says he is very fond of it: but I cannot see that he resides in it more than did his predecessors, who detested it.

  1931 BERNARD PARES

  Distinguished British historian of Russia Bernard Pares (1867–1949) was a liberal critic of the Soviet Union, but romantically hoped that the industrialization of the 1930s represented an empowerment of the Russian people, as he described in his book Moscow Admits a Critic (1936).

  Within an hour of my arrival at the hotel I was wandering freely about the streets and mixing with the crowds of holiday makers. Some of my friends have refused to believe that I was not followed through
out. I have a nose for that kind of thing from earlier times, so I was rather on the watch for anything of the kind; but there was nothing whatever to notice, and almost from the first the whole idea disappeared from my mind. I went out by myself, whenever I felt inclined to, and strayed casually in any direction that suggested itself.…

  My first feeling…was one of surprise at the simplicity of it all. Petersburg, Petrograd or Leningrad – whichever you like to call it – was a place that I always hated: in fact, I should not have been sorry for the plough to go over it. Moscow was, and still is, a home – someone else’s home it may be, but anyhow a home – and here one knows that one is at the heart of the Russian people, which, whatever it is called, is still the Russian people. When I was a student in Moscow in 1898, I used, for the sheer sake of the sense of home in it, to walk through the Kremlin every day; and now, though the Kremlin has returned to its early role as a fortress – this time the fortress of Communism – I was constantly walking past it and all round it, and from my hotel I had a full view into it. There it stood, just as before, though now turned to different uses. The only notable difference was that a large gilt star was fixed to the top of each of the main gates or pinnacles, but this one soon gets used to.…

  I was constantly roaming the streets in this way, going through the big shops, watching the streams of buyers and noting the great accumulation of stores of every kind. My general impression was almost the same as that of the busy Christmas purchasing season in London, from which I had just come. The Moscow ‘Selfridge’ or ‘Army and Navy Stores’ might here belong to the State – and why should that be regretted? – but there was the same plenty of all the most useful things and the same busy buying. I nowhere noticed a superfluity of luxuries. There were signs of attention to smartness, but the general impression was one of well-being. I was quite aware, both from what I knew before and from what I heard in Moscow, that it was totally different two years ago, and, indeed, there was a general sense of satisfaction, novelty and even surprise in the general mood.

  Familiar snatches of Russian conversation floated past me as I walked along the streets. It was the ordinary sort of talk which I might have heard in London – frank, open and familiar, and on subjects of everyday interest. One knew of the earlier theoretical attack on the family and its various appearances in legislation, but here were the families as they used to be before, father and mother perhaps holding their children by the hand and taking their pleasure together.… The people were neatly dressed, especially the children, and the general impression was that they were also well fed (I notice this particularly at a workers’ club).…

  I have always felt at home in great crowds of the common folk…for it is the great underground Russia that always fascinated me in the past. Personal worries, and even personal distinctiveness, disappear when you are thus ‘in the lap of the people’. You share equally in its geniality, and every chance neighbour is a friend. Once you have the language, all the sights and sounds are common to you as to anyone else, including the posters on the streets, which were, here most numerous. They are short, easily readable sentences in white letters on a red ground, and they are all over the place. I noted down several of them in the great Park of Rest and Culture, the new playground of the city on the west side, where, in spite of a miserable thaw and drizzle, which had upset all the plans for skating competitions, everyone seemed good tempered and all were enjoying themselves…. ‘Greetings to a New Year and new triumphs’; ‘Hurrah for the best friend of physical culture – our native, beloved Stalin’; ‘What October has done for me’; ‘We must have soap’; ‘Russia is growing and getting strong’; one of the commonest of all is ‘The cadres settle everything.’…

  Certainly there was, in all I saw, no suggestion whatever of a sullen and disgruntled people wondering when it could be relieved of a hated government. We must remember, of course, the wholesale deportations from Moscow on the introduction of the internal passport system in December 1932. Everyone who lives in Moscow now, and that means three million people or more, has to earn the right to do so by taking a hand in the vast work of construction which is everywhere in progress. That is, they are all playing a part in the big movement; and it is also quite clear that if one speaks only of Moscow, and I spent the whole of my month there, they are already profiting by doing so.

  I kept on asking myself the question: how much of all this is the people, or, in other words, to what extent the circle of public support around the government has widened – both as compared with what I learned from other visitors of two years ago and, perhaps far more, as compared with my own instinct so well remembered out of pre-revolution times. To what extent was the government a foreigner to the people? In the times of Tsardom I had never failed to feel its almost complete isolation. The ministers of those times, and more especially in the last days of Tsardom, were for the most part obviously haphazard choices from a very narrow and by no means distinguished circle. I was, of course, one of those who longed to see the Russian public, as a whole, make its way into the precincts of government, and in 1917 for a very short time I had that satisfaction.

  But even then there was the much less definable barrier though a very real one, which separated the Russian intelligentsia from the great mass of the Russian public.… Educated Russians of all sorts, and this applied to officials, officers, schoolmasters and revolutionary propagandists, seemed to me to regard the working folk far too much as recipients of any of the various lessons which they wished to teach them. I have to say that in Moscow today this frontier seems to have disappeared altogether, and in my many visits to public offices and great institutions government and people were of the same stock.

  MUMBAI

  (BOMBAY)

  The ancient west Indian coastal city of Mumbai, built on a group of islands, was known by Europeans as Bombay from the 16th century. Held by Portugal from 1503 to 1661, when it was passed to the English crown, it became a headquarters of the British East India Company.

  With the British holding increasing sway over India, in the mid-19th century Bombay began to thrive (and the islands united), and the 1860s saw a huge growth in its cotton industry. It was already an important port for those travelling between Europe and India, a role which grew rapidly after the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869.

  In 1896 a serious outbreak of plague and consequent population decline led to a degree of economic stagnation, although it also became the most Westernized city in India, which contributed to its emerging role as a focus for Indian nationalism. Since independence in 1947, it grew to become the largest city in India and was renamed Mumbai in 1995.

  1786 WILLIAM FRANCKLIN

  The junior East India Company soldier William Francklin (1763–1839) visited on his way from Bengal to Persia in 1786, assessing the city and its defences with a military eye, though the ‘fish’ he describes is more mysterious. He later became a distinguished scholar of Indian history and culture.

  The island of Bombay is in the possession of the English East India Company; it is situated on the coast of Conkan, in lat. 19 north, and long. 72.38 east; it was granted, as part of the marriage portion with the Infanta of Portugal, to Charles II. The harbour is capable of containing three hundred sail of ships with the greatest safety: there is also a most excellent dock, in which ships of his Majesty’s squadron, and others, are repaired, refitted and completely equipped for sea. They build also here all sorts of vessels; and the workmen in the yard are very ingenious and dexterous, not yielding to our best shipwrights in England. This island is very beautiful, and as populous for its size as any in the world; merchants and others coming to settle here from the different parts of the Deccan, Malabar and Coromandel, as well as the Gujarat country. Among those of the latter place are many Parsi families; these are descended from the remains of the ancient Gubres, or worshippers of fire; most of the country merchants, as well as the menial servants of the islands, are of this faith. They are very rich, and have in their hands the man
agement of all mercantile affairs.…

  The island of Bombay is about eight miles in length, and twenty in circumference: the most remarkable natural curiosity the island produces is a small fish; this fish, according to the description of a gentleman who has seen it, and from whom I received my information, is in form somewhat like a mussel, about four inches long, and has upon the top of its back, and near the head, a small valve, on the opening of which you discover a liquor of a strong purple colour, which, when dropped on a piece of cloth, retains the hue. It is found chiefly in the months of September and October, and it is observed the female fish has not this valve which distinguishes the sexes. It is not improbable to suppose that this fish is of the same nature as the ancient Murex, or shell-fish, by which the Romans attained the art of dyeing to such perfection, and is similar to that found formerly on the coasts of Tyre.

  The Company’s forces at this Presidency consist of eight battalions of sepoys, a regiment of European infantry, and a corps of European artillery and engineers. During the late long and very severe war, the Bombay troops have distinguished themselves in a peculiar manner, and the campaign of Bedanore and the sieges of Tellicherri and Mangalore will long remain testimonials of high military abilities, as well as of their bravery and patience under severe duty. The breed of sheep on this island is very indifferent, and all the necessaries of life are much dearer than in any other part of India.

  1853 BAYARD TAYLOR

  The American man of letters Bayard Taylor (see page 118) experienced colonial Bombay in the last years of British East India Company rule; the British crown assumed direct rule in 1858.