Letters from Russia (New York Review Books Classics)
Language: English
Pages: 640
ISBN: 0940322811
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The Marquis de Custine's record of his trip to Russia in 1839 is a brilliantly perceptive, even prophetic, account of one of the world's most fascinating and troubled countries. It is also a wonderful piece of travel writing. Custine, who met with people in all walks of life, including the Czar himself, offers vivid descriptions of St. Petersburg and Moscow, of life at court and on the street, and of the impoverished Russian countryside. But together with a wealth of sharply delineated incident and detail, Custine's great work also presents an indelible picture--roundly denounced by both Czarist and Communist regimes--of a country crushed by despotism and "intoxicated with slavery."
Letters from Russia, here published in a new edition prepared by Anka Muhlstein, the author of the Goncourt Prize-winning biography of Custine, stands with Tocqueville's Democracy in America as a profound and passionate encounter with historical forces that are still very much at work in the world today.
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exhibits the work of a powerful hand, it betrays also the conceptions of a head whose idea of the beautiful has failed to produce one single chef d’oeuvre. The Russian people are strong in arms, that is in numbers, but in the strength of imagination they are altogether deficient. Without genius for architecture, without taste for sculpture, they can heap together stones, and create objects enormous in dimension; but they can produce nothing harmonious, nothing great in the perfection of its
families. “By this social revolution, the result of a succession of political changes, hereditary rights are no longer attached to a race, but are transferred to individuals, to offices, and to estates. Formerly the warrior ennobled the land that he won; now it is the possession of the land which constitutes the noble; and what is called a noblesse in England, seems to me to be nothing more than a class that is rich enough to pay for wearing a certain dress. This monied aristocracy differs, no
the heart of the traveler. No sooner does he arrive on this unattractive coast, than he longs to leave it; he calls to mind, with a sigh, the remark of one of Catherine’s favorites, who, when the Empress complained of the effects of the climate of Petersburg upon her health, observed, “It is not God who should be blamed, madame, because men have persisted in building the capital of a great empire in a territory destined by nature to be the patrimony of wolves and bears.” My traveling companions
me if I kept at a proper distance from the furniture in which they had fixed their abode. The inns of Petersburg resemble caravansarais, where the traveler is simply housed, but not waited upon, unless by his own servants. Mine, being ignorant of the Russian language, is not only useless to me but troublesome, for I have to take care of him as well as myself! However, his Italian quickness soon discovered in one of the dark corridors of this walled desert, called Hotel Coulon, a footman, out of
never forget Paris, call the tract of the Islands the Russian Champs Elysées, but it is larger, more rural, and yet more adorned and more artificial than our Parisian promenade. It is also farther distant from the fashionable quarters, and includes both town and country. At one moment, you may suppose yourself looking upon real woods, fields, and villages; in the next, the view of houses in the shape of temples, of pilasters forming the framework of hot-houses, of colonnaded palaces, of theaters