Chapter 38Russian Cabbage SoupRUSSISCHE KOHLSUPPE
📖 This chapter with the German alongside →
There I meant to visit a women's-rights friend and writer, Elisabeth Lichatscheff, who had been begging me to for years, and on this occasion to have a look at Petersburg. — What a new world surrounded me here. Only slowly could I gain touch and find my footing. But how singular the entry into the harbour, with the giant gold dome of St. Isaac's above it and all the other many-coloured church domes.
The Hermitage, later, almost overwhelmed me.
The Lichatscheff and her sister (two young widows) lived in the former gardener's house of the Stroganov Palace on the Stroganovskaya; behind it lay an enormous decaying park. The little house stood on an arm of the water, and the street was hemmed on both sides with privet hedges. Warmer welcome and more dirt I have seldom seen. The two ladies lived together with seven great white Russian wolfhounds, which tore one another to pieces. So in every room a dog was shut up. The good beasts had not been brought up house-clean and wallowed on all the armchairs and sofas. One ate off an oilcloth cover, in very primordial fashion, but plentifully. I wondered at the cheap prices of meat: the pound of beef at twelve and fourteen kopecks.
That was 1907 — today1, thanks to the war, it costs perhaps six times as much. And after the Bolshevik revolution it cost forty roubles!
The best morsels went, of course, to the dogs. But the feeding of man and beast was very time-consuming.
In the afternoons much company came, students, women students, officials, artistes, a motley society. — Sometimes we then went with them to the variety theatre, or to hear some celebrity, such as the singer Chaliapin2 as Mephistopheles. Really everything went topsy-turvy, yet it was interesting. My excursions into the city and the museums I mostly undertook alone, after I had once tried it in company. Only St. Isaac's and the many-coloured Church of the Atonement3 did we view as a threesome, and I was amused there at all the bobbing and kneeling and crossing-of-themselves of the sisters, otherwise so completely freethinking with their mouths. They were very curious weeks in the villa of dogs.
Then finally I went for a fortnight more to Moscow — painted there, on the Ivan Veliky4 at the Kremlin, the view over the hundreds of gold cupolas that had once so carried Napoleon away. I also made an excursion with a merchant Nosl to a famous monastery of the surrounding country, from which, years before, Herr Nosl had sent me a wooden spoon for my “spoon collection” (after a picture of it in the Zeitgeist) and had attached to it the remark: “How gladly I would show you these curiosities in person some day.” Well, I took him at his word.
I regretted only that I could not see Moscow and the silhouette of the Kremlin in winter as well.
When I came back, my hostesses received me with open arms — but my bed had still not been made, and the washing-water not emptied out! Some of the dogs had really torn one another to pieces and were bandaged daily — the whole house smelled of carbolic.
But Elisabeth had come back from the Caucasus shortly before my arrival, and the glorious apples and pears from there, which lay on the table in my room, sent up their scent against it all.
As often as I could, I went to the Hermitage and to the other imperial collections. The Kerch room, with its Greek-Asiatic excavations, and the Tauride Venus made the deepest impression on me.
And the woollen nightcap of Peter the Great at Peterhof, on his bed made ready for the night!
Yes, I came back from this northern journey of mine richly laden with deep impressions. But I had forgotten to have my passport visaed in Moscow, and had to get out at Wirballen, spend the night, and demand a telegraphic review for heavy money.
With a heavy cold, I came back at the beginning of October 1907 to “Waldfrieden” in Schmargendorf.
Notes
Sources, identifications, and points where the German carries something English cannot. Added by this project; not in the original.
- ↑today — The book's clock, caught ticking twice. "Today" is the wartime writing present of the earlier chapters; the next sentence, in the past tense, already looks back over the revolution of November 1917 — a later retouch. This is the clearest layering of the memoir's composition yet. The chapter around it was written mid-war ("thanks to the war" — the same present as the fallen d'Humières of chapter 33 and the burned Bergen of chapter 36), but the Bolshevik sentence cannot have been written before November 1917 and reads like an insertion made much closer to the 1926 printing: it switches tense (kostet … kostete) and piles a second escalation onto a sentence that was already complete. Forty roubles the pound against twelve kopecks is the hyperinflation of the civil-war years doing the arithmetic.
- ↑Chaliapin — Feodor Chaliapin (1873–1938), the great Russian bass; the devil — in Gounod's Faust and Boito's Mefistofele both — was his signature role, and hearing him sing it in Petersburg in 1907 was hearing the part at its source. (Feodor Chaliapin)
- ↑Church of the Atonement — Her Sühnekirche is the Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood, the expiatory church raised on the spot where Alexander II was assassinated in 1881 — the "many-coloured" domes are its mosaic onion cupolas. (Church of the Savior on Blood)
- ↑Ivan Veliky — The Ivan the Great bell tower, tallest point of the Kremlin, whose gallery gives the classic panorama over Moscow's gilded domes — the view that met Napoleon in 1812, before the fire. The picture she painted from it is untraced. That makes three unrecorded works from this one northern journey — the Björnson sketch and the Aulestad music room in the last chapter, and now a Moscow panorama from the Ivan Veliky. Ivan Welicki is her spelling, kept in the German. The climb itself was a standard tourist feat; painting from the gallery was not, and a canvas of the Kremlin's "hundreds of gold cupolas" would be recognisable at once if it ever surfaces.