Now you reason it out for yourselves: if only I had made an effort and stayed a week in Berlin instead of one day, the same in Dresden, and say about three days, or two at the very least, in Cologne, I should most probably have had another or even a third glimpse of the same things, but with a different eye, and should have obtained a more favourable impression of them.
Even a ray of sunshine, just an ordinary ray of sunshine, would have had a lot to do with it; if only the sun had shone over the cathedral as it in fact did shine when I arrived in the city of Cologne for the second time, the whole building would have appeared to me in its true light and not as it did that bleak and even somewhat rainy morning, fit only to provoke an outburst of wounded patriotism. It by no means follows, however, that patriotism is only born in bad weather.
And so you see, my friends, you cannot look at everything in two and a half months and never make a mistake, and I am unable to give you the most accurate information. I must willy-nilly be untruthful occasionally, and therefore…
But here you interrupt me. You tell me that this time you do not, in fact, want accurate information, that if need be you will find it in Reichard’s guidebook, and that, on the contrary, it would not be at all a bad thing if travellers aimed not so much at absolute truth (which they are almost never able to attain) as at sincerity, if sometimes they were not afraid to reveal some personal impression or adventure, even of the kind that did not redound much to their credit, and if they did not look up well-known authorities in order to check up on their own conclusions. You tell me, in short, that all you want are my own impressions, provided they are sincere.
Ah! say I, so what you want is just gossip, light sketches, fleeting personal impressions. That certainly suits me, and I shall immediately consult my diary. And I shall try to be as simple and frank as possible.
I only ask you to bear in mind that I shall often be wrong in the things I write about. Not wrong about everything, of course. One cannot be wrong about such facts, for instance, as that the Cathedral of Notre Dame is in Paris and so is the Bal Mabille. The latter fact in particular has been so thoroughly recorded by all Russians writing about Paris that it is almost impossible to doubt it. Even I shall not perhaps make a mistake about this, though strictly speaking, I cannot guarantee even this. Now, for example, they say that it is impossible to go to
Rome and not see St Peter’s. But just think: I have been in London, but never saw St Paul’s. Honestly, I did not. Never saw St Paul’s Cathedral. True enough, there is quite a difference between St Peter’s and St Paul’s, but all the same, it is somehow hardly decent for a traveller not to have seen it. There’s my first adventure for you, which does not redound much to my credit (that is to say, I did in fact see it perhaps, at a distance of some 500 yards, but I was in a hurry to get to Pentonville, did not bother and ignored it).
But let us be more to the point. And do you know – I did not just travel about and enjoy a bird’s-eye view of things (enjoying a bird’s-eye view of things does not mean looking down on them. It is an architectural term, you know). I stayed in Paris for a whole month – less the eight days I spent in London. And so I shall now write something about Paris for you, because I have, after all, had a much better look at it than I had at St Paul’s Cathedral or the ladies of Dresden. Well, here goes.
2
In a Railway Carriage
FRENCHMEN ARE NOT RATIONAL and would consider themselves most fortunate if they were.” This phrase was written by Fonvizin* as far
back as the last century, and heavens, how cheerfully he must have written it. I bet the sheer joy of it warmed the cockles of his heart when he was thinking it up. And who knows, perhaps all of us coming after Fonvizin, three or four generations at a stretch, read it not without pleasure. All such phrases, which put foreigners in their place, contain, even if we come across them now, something irresistibly pleasant for us Russians.
We keep this very secret, sometimes even secret from ourselves. For there are in this certain overtones of revenge for an evil past. Maybe this is a bad feeling, but somehow I am convinced it exists in almost everyone of us. Naturally enough, we kick up a fuss if we are suspected of it, and are not one bit insincere, and yet I should imagine Belinsky* himself was in this sense a Slavophile. I remember about fifteen years ago, when I knew Belinsky, how reverently (sometimes even oddly so) all that set used to bow down and worship the West, mostly France that is. France was all the fashion then – this was in ’forty-six.
And it is not that people adored such names as George Sand, Proudhon etc., and felt respect for those of Louis Blanc, Ledru-Rollin* and others. Oh no! People thought highly even of little pipsqueaks, bearing the most wretched names, who simply collapsed when they were put on their mettle later on. Even those were expected to perform great deeds in the future service to humanity. Some of them were talked about in a special reverent whisper… And what do you think?
In all my life I have never seen a man more passionately Russian than was Belinsky, though before him only Chaadayev* perhaps spoke with such bold and sometimes blind indignation about much in our native land and apparently despised everything Russian. There are certain reasons why I should remember and think of it now. But who knows, maybe Belinsky himself did not always consider that mot* of Fonvizin’s particularly scandalous.
Surely there are moments when people fail to appreciate the most appropriate and indeed legitimate tutelage. Oh, but for Heaven’s sake, don’t run away with the idea that to love one’s country means to revile the foreigner or that I think it does. I don’t think so at all and have no intention of thinking so, on the contrary even… Only it is a pity I have no time to explain myself somewhat more clearly.
By the way, please don’t think that I have forgotten Paris and launched myself into Russian literature instead, or that I am writing an article of literary criticism. It’s only because I have nothing else to do.
My diary tells me that I am now sitting in a railway carriage and am getting ready to see Eydtkuhnen tomorrow, to receive, that is, my first impression of a foreign country, and my heart even misses a beat occasionally. Shall I really see Europe at last, I who have vainly dreamt of it for almost forty years, I who, when still only sixteen, in dead earnest and like Nekrasov’s Belopyatkin,* “wished to flee to Switzerland”, but did not flee and am now about to enter “the land of holy miracles”,* the land for which I have yearned so long and from which I expected so much, and in which I believed so implicitly.
“Good heavens,” I kept thinking as I sat in the railway carriage, “how can we be called Russians? Are we really Russians in fact? Why does Europe make such a powerful and magic impression on all of us whoever we are? Why does it appeal to us so much? I don’t mean to those Russians who stay at home, those ordinary Russians whose name is Fifty Million, on whom we, all the one hundred thousand of us, look with disdain and whom our profound satirical journals make fun of, because they do not shave their beards.
No, I mean our privileged and patented little group.
After all, everything, literally almost everything we can show which may be called progress, science, art, citizenship, humanity, everything, everything stems from there, from that land of holy miracles. The whole of our life, from earliest childhood, is shaped by the European mould. Could any one of us have withstood this influence, appeal, pressure?
How is it that we have still not been finally metamorphosed into Europeans? And I think everyone will agree that we have not been metamorphosed – some with pleasure, others, of course, with fury because we have not yet reached metamorphosis. But that is another matter. I am merely speaking about the fact that we have not been metamorphosed even after being subjected to such an overwhelming influence, and am at a loss to account for it.
It could surely not have been our nannies and mammies that have preserved us from metamorphosis. It is sad and absurd, really, to think that but for Arina Rodyonovna, Pushkin’s nurse, we should perhaps have had no Pushkin. That is nonsense, is it not? Of course it is. And what if in fact it is not
