Russia in 1839 -Empire of the Czar: A Journey Through Eternal Russia

APPENDIX.345

APPENDIX TO CHAP. XXVL

The reader will now be able to enter in some measure into the feeling produced by the sight of the great Russian fortress; but a painter alone could impart any definite conception of its form. Art has no name by which to characterise the architecture of this infernal citadel; the style of its palaces, prisons, and churches have nothing in common with any known order of building. The Kremlin is neither Gothic, classic, moresque, nor yet pure Byzantine : it is neither like the Alhambra, nor the monuments of Egypt, India, China. Greece, or Rome. If the expression may be allowed, it is built in the Czaric style. Ivan is the ideal of a tyrant; the Kremlin is the ideal of a tyrant's palace. The Czar is the inhabitant of the Kremlin ; the Kremlin is the house of a Czar. I have little taste for newly-coined words, and least of all for those of my own coining : but Czaric architecture is a descriptive term necessary to the traveller ; no other could picture what it pictures to the thoughts of those who know practically the meaning of the word czar.

Dream on some day, when under the influence of fever, that you tread the abodes of the strange beings that come and go before your eyes, and you may form some idea of this city of the giants, whose edifices thus rise in the midst of a city of men. The Kremlin has been imagined by M. de Lamartine, who, without having seen it, has painted it in his descriptions of the city of the antediluvian giants, in his Fall of an Angel, a work that, notwithstanding the rapidity with which it was composed, or perhaps owing to that inspired rapidity, contains beauties of the highest order, and may be designated as poetry in fresco.

The Russians are, of all civilised people, those among whom the sentiment of equity is the most weak and the most vague. Thus, in giving the surname of Terrible to Ivan IV., a title which they had previously accorded as one of eulogy to his grandfather, Ivan III., they have done jnstiee neither to the glorious monarch nor to the tyrant. The following is from Karamsin : —

" It is to be remarked that, in the memory of the people, the