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

SINGULAR APPEARANCE OF THE RIVER. 187

The Oka, which separates the city of the fair from the permanent city, is here more than four times the breadth of the Seine. Forty thousand men sleep every night upon its bosom, making themselves nests in boats, which form a kind of floating camp. From the surface of the aquatic city rises, at evening, the heavy murmur of voices that might be easily taken for the gurgling of the waves. All these boats have masts, and form a river-forest, peopled by men from every corner of the earth : their faces and their costumes are equally strange. The sight has struck me more than any other in the immense fair. Rivers thus inhabited remind one of the descriptions of China.

Some of the peasants in this part of Russia wear white tunic shirts, ornamented with red boi`dcrs: the costumes is borrowed from the Tartars. At nighttime, the white linen gives them the appearance of spectres moving in the dark. Yet, notwithstanding its many singular and interesting objects, the fair of Nijni is not picturesque : it is a formal plan rather than a graceful sketch. The man devoted to political economy, or arithmetical calculations, has more business here than the poet or the painter : the subjects relate to the commercial balance and progress of the two principal quarters of the world — nothing more and nothing less. From one end of Russia to the other I perceive a minute, Dutch-taught government, hypocritically carrying on war against the primitive faculties of an ingenious, lively, poetical, oriental people, a people born for the arts.

The merchandise of every part of the world is collected in the immense streets of the fair ; but it is