Читать книгу Peter and Alexis. The Romance of Peter the Great онлайн

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The Tsar’s pride is the interminably long, straight Nevsky Prospect, which cuts through the town. The street is still quite waste amid solitary marshes, yet it is already planted with three or four rows of lime-trees, like an avenue. It is kept very clean, being swept every Saturday by captive Swedes.

Many of these geometrical lines of imaginary streets are almost without houses. Waymarks alone stand there; others, already built on, bear traces of the plough and furrows of recent cultivation.

Though the houses are erected of brick, according to Vitruvius’ directions, yet so hurried and precarious has been the work that they threaten to fall. When a carriage passes they tremble. The swampy soil has no resistance. The Tsar’s enemies predict that some time the whole town will be engulphed.

One of our companions, the old Baron Loewenwold, the High Commissioner of Livonia, an amiable and clever man, told us a number of curious incidents about the beginning of the town. In order to raise the first earth rampart of the Peter and Paul fortress, dry earth was needed; none was to be had anywhere near, all being marsh, mud and moss. Then they devised the plan of carrying the soil for the bastions from distant places in old bast sacks and mats, or even simply in the skirts of their tunics. At this Sisyphean labour two-thirds of the poor wretches perished; more especially in consequence of the godless peculation and faithlessness of those in whose keeping they were. For months they never saw any bread, which is often difficult to procure even for money in this forlorn place. They lived on cabbage and turnips, suffered from diarrhoea and scurvy, swelled with hunger, froze in their earthen habitats, which resembled the holes of animals, and died like flies. The erection of the fortress on the Pleasure Island (appropriate name!) cost the lives of hundreds of thousands who were driven here by force like cattle from all parts of Russia. In fact this unnatural city, this pleasant “Paradise,” as the Tsar called it, is built on human bones! They pay no ceremonies here either to the living or the dead. I myself have seen in various parts of the town the body of a workman wrapped in a mat, carried on a pole by men, or, bare as it was, simply laid on a sledge and taken to the cemetery, where it was buried without any rite. Such a number of the poor folk die here daily that there is no time to give them all Christian burial.