Изображения страниц
PDF
EPUB

cession, had promulgated a fulminating edict against all who were so irreligious, unholy, and heretical as to shave or cut their beards, an ornament given by God, and which had been worn by all the holy prophets and apostles, and by the Saviour himself. Only such men as Julian the Apostate, Heraclius the heretic, Constantine the iconoclast, Olgerd the idol-worshiper, and Selim Amurath, the Mussulman, had forced their subjects to shave, while Constantine the Great, Theodosius the Great, and Vladimir the Great had all worn

were

of my men who had worn their beards all their lives now obliged to part with them, amongst whom one of the first that I met with, just coming from the hands of the barber, was an old Russ carpenter that had been with me at Camisbinka, who was a very good workman with his hatchet, and whom I always had a friendship for. I jested a little with him on this occasion, telling him that he was become a young man, and asked him what he had done with his beard. Upon which he put his hand in his bosom and pulled it out and showed it to me; further telling me that when he came home, he would lay it up to have it put in his coffin and buried along with him, that he might be able to give an account of it to St. Nicholas when he came to the other world, and that all his brothers (meaning his taken the same care."

beards.* Peter, in his eagerness to adopt fellow-workmen who had been shaved that day) had the usages of western Europe, chose to consider the beard as the symbol of what was uncivilized and barbarous. He was not content

with repealing the decree of Alexis, and saying that his subjects might shave, but he said that they must shave. For Peter himself it was easy; he had little beard, and even his mustache, which he allowed to grow, was always very thin. What had been begun in jest was soon done in ear

nest.

Decrees were issued that all Russians, the clergy excepted, should shave, but those who preferred to keep their beards were allowed to do so on condition of paying a yearly tax, fixed at a kopék (one penny) for the peasantry, and varying from thirty to a hundred rubles (from £12 to £42, a ruble being worth at that time about 8s. 4d.) for the other classes, the merchants, as being the richest and most conservative, paying the highest sum. On the payment of this duty they received a bronze token, which they were obliged always to wear about their necks, and to renew yearly. Many were willing to pay this very high tax in order to keep their beards, but most conformed to the Tsar's wishes, some through policy, some through "terror of having their beards (in a merry humor) pulled out by the roots, or taken so rough off, that some of the skin went with them." The Tsar would allow no one to be near him who did not shave. Perry writes:

"About this time the Tsar came down to Verónezh, where I was then on service, and a great many

* See also Chapter XXV., Part I.

Although the restrictions on the wearing of beards by the peasantry and the middle classes soon disappeared, yet, until the accession of Alexander II., all public officials were obliged to be shaved. This gradually became relaxed in practice, but it was only in the year 1875 that a decree was issued permitting the officers and soldiers of the army, except the Imperial Guard, to wear their beards when in service.

Soon after compelling his courtiers to shave their beards, Peter began a crusade against the old Russian dress. On the 9th of October, Lefort and Golovín, the only two members of the Great Embassy then in Moscow, entered the town in solemn

state.

"No one was allowed to appear except in German dress, which was especially meant to irritate Prince Ramodanófsky with the sight of what he liked not, for when it was told to him that the embassador Golovin had put on the German dress at Vienna, he answered: 'I do not believe Golovín to be such a brainless ass as to despise the garb of his fatherland.'”

66

A few months afterward, Peter himself gave a carnival entertainment, at which the boyár Sheremétief, who had just returned from his visit to Italy, appeared in full foreign dress, wearing the cross of Malta, which many envied him. The Tsar cut off, with his own hands, the sleeves of some of his officers which seemed to him to be too long. He said: See, these things are in your way. You are safe nowhere with them. At one moment you upset a glass, then you forgetfully dip them in the sauce. Get gaiters made of them." On the 14th of January, 1700, appeared a decree commanding all the courtiers and the officials, as well in the capital as in the provinces, to wear nothing but foreign clothing, and to provide themselves with such suits before the end of the carnival. This decree had to be repeated frequently throughout the year, and models of the clothing were publicly exposed. According to Perry, these patterns and copies of the decree were hung up at all the gates of the towns, and all who disobeyed these orders were obliged either to pay a fine, or "to kneel down at the gates of the city, and have their coats cut off just even with the ground, so much as it was longer than to touch the ground

[graphic][merged small]

when they kneeled down, of which there were many hundreds of coats that were cut accordingly; and being done with a good humor, it occasioned mirth among the people and soon broke the custom of their wearing long coats, especially in places near Moscow and those towns wherever the Tsar came." As this decree did not affect the peasantry, it was less difficult to put it into execution. Even the women were compelled to adopt foreign fashions, and to give up the old Russian costumes. Peter's sisters set the example. Here the women, as might perhaps be expected, were less conservative than the men. They saw, in the adoption

VOL. XXI.-16.

of foreign fashions of dress, a great opening to variety of costume. Decrees were even issued against high Russian boots, against the use of Russian saddles, and even of long Russian knives.

There is no absolute and real connection between costume and civilization. Shaved faces and short garments made the Russians no more civilized and no more European than they were before, although they made them conform in one respect to the usages of civilized people. It is the natural spirit of imitation, the desire not to be different from the rest of the civilized world, that induces peoples rising in the scale of civilization to

[graphic][ocr errors]

THE PRINCESS SOPHIA AS THE NUN SUSANNA IN THE NOVODEVITCHY MONASTERY.

adopt the fashion of the garments of more highly cultured nations, even though the new costume may be both unbecoming and in convenient. This we have seen in our own day among the Japanese. We see it also in the way peasant costumes constantly disappear, and even the neat white cap gives place to a tawdry imitation of a lady's bonnet, and the comfortable and convenient knee-breeches and long stockings to the awkward trowsers. At the same time, there is often a tendency to see in European dress something necessary to modern and western life; there is a tendency to the false reasoning that a man becomes civilized because he wears European garments. This tendency is sometimes seen in missionaries, who immediately put what they call Christian clothing on their new converts, to the great inconvenience of the latter; and I think this feeling had some influence on Peter when he changed the costume of Russia by an edict. Only in one way can

such an arbitrary and forced change be defended-that it might, perhaps, render the people more ready to accept western ideas. If they had violently broken with the traditions of their fathers in point of costume, they might be more easily led to break with them in other respects. Still, even without decrees of this kind, had people been left free to dress as they liked, as European notions and European habits crept into Russia, the change of dress would naturally follow. It had been begun before, and even a forced change of costume was no new idea. Yury Krýzhanitch, the learned Serbian Pan-slavist, to whom I have referred several times before, in his book on Russia which he wrote in his exile at Tobolsk from 1660 to 1676, set out a project for reforming Russian costume of very much the same sort as that adopted by Peter. He was in favor of the same violent measures, and had the same abhorrence to the clothing of every description worn by the

Russians and other Slavs. He accused it of being effeminate, uncomfortable, a hindrance to work and action, and a cause of great and unwarrantable expense. It is true that the Russians who appeared abroad in Russian clothing were laughed at in the streets, but so nowadays is any one stared at and pointed at in London or New York who appears in a costume different from that ordinarily worn. It is only in the East that all costumes pass without remark. The fashion of dress is one of the weak points of the highly cultured nations, and one on which they are most intolerant. It was natural that Peter, while imbibing foreign ideas, should in a way, too, imbibe foreign prejudices. Hence he preferred a short coat to a gown, a shaven chin to a beard, and a peruke to natural hair. Even with us it does not require such a very long memory to recall the time when Americans and English were as fanatical on some points as were the orthodox Russians of Peter's day. A full beard was looked upon almost as a mark of a revolutionist or a freethinker, and a mustache showed a tendency for adopting foolish foreign notions of all kinds. That prejudice, fortunately, has passed away, and people nowadays have even come to see that a great-coat down to the heels, of almost the same fashion as those which Peter had cut off at the gates, is more comfortable in a cold climate than a short jacket. The red shirt, the loose trowsers tucked into the high boots, and the sleeveless caftan of the peasant, is now a student fashion in Russia to show one's Slavophile feelings, and since the time of Catharine II.,

[graphic][subsumed][ocr errors][ocr errors][merged small][merged small]
[graphic][merged small][subsumed]

of low birth and yet was not a ship-carpenter, the only way in which he could make the recommendation to the Tsar was to inclose his project in a letter, directed to be delivered into the hands of the Tsar without being unsealed, and drop it on the floor of one of the public offices. This was the manner in which all denunciatory letters were delivered, and it may be imagined that it was a pleasure to Peter to find, not an accusation of crime, but a project for increas

ing the revenues of the state. Kurbátof was given the rank of secretary, and was appointed chief of the new municipal department.

Peter had been struck in Holland by the wealth, the comfort, and the independence of the middle classes; by the fact that it was from them that the government received the greater part of its revenues, and that on them depended the welfare of the state. At this time in Russia, the middle and the commercial classes, who were small in number and inhabited only the towns, were entirely in the hands of the Voievodes, or governors, who (as was even officially stated in the decree promulgating the reform we shall speak of) exhausted the patience and the pockets of the towns-people by exactions of every kind; by taking percentages on their bargains, by levying contributions in money and in kind, and by extorting bribes to do justice or to prevent injustice. Peter had seen that abroad the towns-people governed themselves by elected burgomasters and councilors. But even in Little Russia, such elective institutions already existed, under the name of the "Magdeburg Right." This it was resolved to apply to the whole of Russia, and in Moscow, as well as in the other towns, the merchants were permitted to choose good and honest men, one from every guild or ward, who should form a

[graphic]
[ocr errors]

THE TSAR CUTTING THE LONG SLEEVES OF THE BOYARS.

« ПредыдущаяПродолжить »