Читать книгу Travels in the Steppes of the Caspian Sea, the Crimea, the Caucasus, &c - Xavier Hommaire de Hell - Страница 20

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Petty Larceny.—"Highway robbery and burglary, with violence, are things wholly unknown in the greater part of Russia. The peasants laugh when they see foreigners travelling about with swords, pistols, and a whole arsenal of weapons. The Russian trader journeys from one end of the empire to the other, often with all he is worth in the world, and does not think it necessary even to carry a knife in his pocket; yet one never hears of their being robbed by force on the highways, at least in the parts of the country with which I was more intimately acquainted. Cases of the kind do indeed occur in the southern provinces, adjoining the Turkish dominions, and in Siberia, where so many malefactors are settled, and where there is often extreme distress. Some may be disposed to ascribe this unfrequency of highway robbery to the great remoteness of the villages from each other, and to the severity of the climate, which must deter rogues from remaining much in the open air, especially at night. But even in summer, and in the more populous regions, where the villages are tolerably close together, highway robbery is equally rare, and the absence of this crime seems to me attributable rather to the character of the people themselves, to whom the practice seems repugnant and unnatural. It were to be wished that they had the same instinctive aversion to robbery without violence, but this unfortunately is not the case. As I was a frequent sufferer from the nimbleness of their fingers, I had occasion enough to ponder on the causes of this striking propensity of theirs, and I came to the conclusion, paradoxical as it may perhaps seem, that it arises not so much from want of moral feeling as from want of intellectual cultivation. Most of the common folk who are given to this vice (for among educated persons it is as rare and is reputed as infamous as in any other country) see no harm at all in pilfering, and are, therefore, prone to practise it whenever they have an opportunity. I am fully persuaded that these people, who are often the most good-natured and even honest-hearted fellows, would desist from the practice if they were once taught to regard it in a different light, and were made conscious of its impropriety. This is a case as to which primary instruction, village schools, and church sermons, in the vernacular tongue, would deal most happily and beneficially for the morals of the nation. But village schools are rare, and sermons or religious instruction of any kind, are rarer still; books there are none, and if there were any the populace could not read them. What means then have they of becoming enlightened as to themselves and the things around them, and of correcting the views and notions handed down to them from generation to generation? Centuries ago they worked out for themselves their own system of ethics, if I may so speak, and they now make the best they can of it. Certain things, for instance, such as household furniture and the like, are regarded as sacred; the owners may leave them all night in the street, and be sure of finding them again in the morning, whereas there are a thousand other things which they cannot watch too carefully, though far less serviceable, and consequently less tempting. On the former there is a sort of interdict laid by tacit consent, whereas the latter are looked upon as common property. The same man who will not hesitate to pick another's pocket, or to filch something from his table, will never, even though quite safe from detection, open a closed door, or put his hand in at an open window to take any thing out of a room. He would call this 'stealing' (vorit,) and that has an ugly sound even in Russian ears, and is considered a great sin. But the first-mentioned little matters he looks on as allowed, or at least not forbidden, and he applies to them the endearing diminutive vorovat, a pretty, harmless word, not at all associated with the odious idea of thieving properly so called. To put this matter in a clearer light I will relate two little incidents that came under my own personal observation.

"I was once in the house of a common chapman on an affair of business, in which he behaved like an upright worthy man. We had finished the transaction between us, and were sipping our tea, when an old man with an open, honest-looking countenance, but very poorly clad, came in and offered the chapman a silver spoon for sale. After some chaffering the latter bought the spoon at a price much below its worth, and said, banteringly, as he paid over the money: 'Sukin tu sin, tu vorovat.' 'You pilfered it, you son of a b——.' (This last phrase, as I have elsewhere remarked, is practically equivalent to 'my good friend,' or the like.) The old man looked at him with a roguish twinkle of the eye, laid his hand on his breast, and said very gravely: 'Niet sudar, Bog podal,' 'No, sir, God bestowed it,' and then went quietly about his business. I often took pains to come at the special meaning of this 'Bog podal,' by a series of indirect questions, and every time I became more and more assured that by many persons the phrase was understood as signifying a sort of divine permission to steal.

"The second anecdote is perhaps still more characteristic. In the year 1816 I was on my way with a German friend to the country-seat of Count S. We thought we were the only persons in our little open carriage who understood the German language, in which we conversed, when, to our surprise, our long-bearded ishvorshtik (coachman) joined in the discourse with great fluency, though his German was somewhat broken. Observing our astonishment, he told us that he had been in Germany, and had served in a detached corps of the army, which had been organised in the form of a landwehr, or local militia: he had passed a summer in Saxony, and seen Leipsig, Dresden, Wittenberg, &c. All this he told us with an air of no small self-complacency. 'And how did you like Germany?' said I. 'Why, pretty well,' he answered, 'only for one thing that I could not abide at all.' He might have settled there advantageously, and his colonel would have given him his discharge, as the corps was to be disbanded; but this one thing he talked of was not to be got over, and so he had preferred to return home. 'And what was this thing that stuck so in your stomach?' 'Sir,' said he, turning to us with one eye half shut, and speaking almost in a whisper, 'Sudar, vorovat ne velat,' 'Sir, they won't allow a body to do a wee bit of pilfering.' We were not a little confounded by this unexpected reply, and my friend, who had not been long in Russia, was beginning to lecture him on the enormity of such principles, when the coachman, who had no mind to hear a long sermon, laughingly cut short the preacher's harangue, and gave him to understand that he was wandering wide of the mark. 'O, you don't understand me, sudar, I don't mean stealing; of course not; I know very well it is a bad thing; I only mean vorovat, which surely ought to be allowed everywhere; leastways it ought to be allowed to a poor soldier.'

"The world is ruled by opinion: we should therefore try to set this governing power right, where we can, and where that may not be one, we should at least make the best use we can of it in the state in which we find it. Russia affords one striking exemplification of this wise system of compromise with reference to the subject we have been discussing. It is a received opinion among the populace, as I have said, that a man may filch a little from a stranger without being guilty of downright dishonesty, but to rob one's own master, is a grievous and unpardonable sin. Hence, the surest way of protecting yourself against a house-thief, when you once know him, is to take him into your service. From that moment you are not only safe from any larceny on his part, but you have secured besides the best watch against all other thieves, since it is a point of honour with him to prevent all acts of peculation that might entail suspicion on himself; and he knows practically all the tricks and stratagems against which he must be on his guard. An officer of high rank in the Russian army, a German by birth, told me, that once when his battalion had to encamp for several weeks together along with a Cossack pult, he and his men had like to be stripped of all they had by a continual course of thieving. Every morning brought a disastrous list of clothes missing, horse trappings carried off, &c. &c. More sentinels were placed, strict vigilance was observed, but every precaution failed. Almost at his wit's end, the officer complained to the hetman of the pult, and was advised by him to withdraw all his own sentries, and to make one of the Cossacks mount guard in his own quarters, and in every division of those occupied by his men. The German could not help thinking the proposed measure very like committing the fold to the custody of the wolf, but as he knew nothing better he could do, he adopted it, and from that moment all the thieving was at an end. The Cossacks always laid themselves down at nightfall right before the doors of the quarters and stables, and the officer never again heard even of any attempt to annoy him or his men. Such is the force of opinion, and of the manner in which these people (and all of us, too, if we will but own it) are in the habit of seeing things."—Von Littrow.

Von Littrow remarks that we ought not to be too hasty in laying to the account of moral depravity the nimbleness of finger of the Russian peasant, but consider whether even among the most civilised people there are not some relics of the olden barbarism, some striking deviations from moral propriety, which OPINION is pleased to look on with indulgence. Books change owners in the German universities by a surreptitious process, for which a slang word has been adopted. This kind of vorovat is called "shooting" (schiessen) and some very learned professors we are told, plume themselves on the skill with which they contrive to "shoot" rare specimens of natural history, &c. There are men otherwise of great probity and worth, who we fear are not always scrupulously careful to return a borrowed umbrella.

Russian Servants.—"Where a German would think himself very well off with the attendance of one woman servant, a Russian tradesman, in like pecuniary circumstances, keeps at least four; but the German's one servant does quite as much as the Russian's four put together. In the houses of the wealthy, the number of menservants amounts to fifty, sixty, and even a hundred or more. There is an intendant and a maître-d'hôtel, a couple of dozen of pages and footmen, the master of the house's own men, the lady's own men, and again own men for the young gentlemen and for the young ladies; then come the butlers, caterers, hunters, doorkeepers, porters, couriers, coachmen, and stable-boys, grooms and outriders, cooks and under-cooks, confectioners, stove-lighters, and chamber-cleaners, &c. &c., not to mention the female servants of all sorts. But the worst of the thing is the continual increase of this numerous body; for it is a matter of course in Russia that every married man who enters service takes his wife with him; his children, too, belong to the house and remain in it; nay, his kith and kin, if not actually domesticated in the establishment, take up their abode in it for days and weeks together, without demur; besides which, the friends and acquaintances of the servants may drop in when they please, and partake of bed and board. 'When I married,' said a wealthy Russian to me, 'I made up my mind to have no more of these good-for-nothing people in my house than were unavoidably necessary for myself and my wife, and I therefore restricted myself to forty, but after the lapse of three or four years, I remarked, to my great astonishment, that this number was already almost doubled.' In any other country, some three or four of these fellows would be thought enough to wait at table even in the best appointed houses; but in Russia, where dinner parties often consist of forty or fifty persons, there must be a servant behind every chair, or the whole set out would be considered extremely shabby. It was formerly the custom generally, and it is so still in the country-houses of the great, to have a footman constantly stationed in each of the rooms of the numerous suite of apartments, and one or two lads outside, their business being to do the office now performed by bells. An order given by the lord of the mansion in the innermost apartment, was transmitted from room to room, and from door to door, until it reached the last of the train, who fetched the article called for, and so it was passed from hand to hand until it reached the gosudar (the lord).

"A Polish countess told me, that she once called on Count Orloff on business, and while they were conversing, the count desired the servant who stood by the door, to call for a glass of water. The man disappeared for a moment to speak to his next neighbour, and immediately returned to his post; half-an-hour elapsed, and no water came. The thirsty count had to repeat the order, and turning to the countess, he said, 'See what a poor man I am; I have more than a hundred and twenty servants in this house alone, and if I want a glass of water, I cannot have it.' The countess smiled at the poor man, and told him that if he was a good deal poorer, and had but one servant, he would be better attended on. The Countess Orloff, his daughter, who inherited his whole fortune, is said to have upwards of 800 servants of both sexes in her palace at Moscow, and to maintain a special hospital for them."—Von Littrow.