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

ASPECT OF THE COUNTRY.243

I cany with me my bed, which is a masterpiece of Russian industry. If I break down again before I reach Moscow, I shall have time to make use of this piece of furniture, and shall applaud myself for my precaution.

I am now writing at Yedrova, between Great Novgorod and Valdai. There are no distances in Russia — so say the Russians, and all the travellers have agreed to repeat the saying. I had adopted the same notion, but unpleasant experience obliges me to maintain precisely the contrary. There is nothing but distance in Russia : nothing but empty plains extending farther than the eye can reach. Two or three interesting spots are separated from each other by immense spaces. These intervals are deserts, void of all picturesque beauty: the high road destroys the poetry of the steppe ; and there remains nothing but extension of space, monotony, and sterility. All is naked and poor; there is nothing to inspire awe as on a soil made illustrious by the glory of its inhabitants,— a soil like Greece or Judea, devastated by history, and become the poetical cemetery of nations ; neither is there any of the grandeur of a virgin nature; the scene is merely ugly; it is sometimes a dry plain, sometimes a marshy, and these two species of sterility alone vary the landscape. A few villages, becoming less neat in proportion as the distance from Petersburg increases, sadden the landscape instead of enlivening it. The houses are only piles of the trunks of trees, badly put together, and supporting roofs of plank, to which in winter an extra cover of thatch is M 2