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

292JELOGNAIA STREET.

feet broad, and separated by a stripe of the ordinary flint pavement on which the shaft horse runs. Two of these roads, that is to say, four lines of wood, run the length of the Perspective Newski, one on the left, the other on the right of the street, without touching the houses, from which they are separated by raised flags for the foot passengers. This beautiful and vast perspective extends—gradually becoming less populous, less beautiful, and more melancholy —to the undetermined limits of the habitable city, in other words, to the confines of the Asiatic barbarism by which Petersburg is always besieged; for the desert may be found at the extremity of its most superb streets.

A little below the bridge of AniskofF is the street named Jelognaia, which leads to a desert called the square of Alexander. I doubt whether the Emperor Nicholas has ever seen this street. The superb city created by Peter the Great, and beautified by Catherine II., and other sovereigns, is lost at last in an unsightly mass of stalls and workshops, confused heaps of edifices without name, large squares without design, and in which the natural slovenliness and the inborn filthiness of the people of the land, have for one hundred years permitted every species of dirt and rubbish to accumulate. Such filth, heaped up year after year in the Russian cities, serves as a protestation against the pretension of the German princes, who flatter themselves that they have thoroughly polished the Slavonian nations. The primitive character of these people, however disguised it may have been by the yoke imposed upon it, at least shows itself in some of the corners of the cities ; and if they