. All the Russias; travels and studies in contemporary European Russia, Finland, Siberia, the Caucasus, & Central Asia. brought to mindby a few days spent among the merchant princes of Moscow. The Russian has an affection for things which are new, there-fore when he enters the great Square of the Kremlin his enthu-siasm vents itself upon the gorgeous green and gold memorialof Alexander III. The foreigner, on the other hand, though heis charmed with the towers on the wall embowered in trees, de-lighted with the quaint monastery and the nunnery where theTsaritsas are buried, dazzled by the treas
. All the Russias; travels and studies in contemporary European Russia, Finland, Siberia, the Caucasus, & Central Asia. brought to mindby a few days spent among the merchant princes of Moscow. The Russian has an affection for things which are new, there-fore when he enters the great Square of the Kremlin his enthu-siasm vents itself upon the gorgeous green and gold memorialof Alexander III. The foreigner, on the other hand, though heis charmed with the towers on the wall embowered in trees, de-lighted with the quaint monastery and the nunnery where theTsaritsas are buried, dazzled by the treasury, and duly impressedby the Great Palace, is not halted by emotion until he finds him-self in the painted gloom and amid the buried patriarchs of thelittle Cathedral of the Assumption, fraught with recollections,teemingwithworshippers, bursting with tombs and pictures frompavement to cupola, as Dean Stanley said. But his emotionis not for these. Then it is because the Tsar is crowned amidthese infinite riches in a little room ? Not at all. It is becausethe Tsar crowns himself there. He is so incomparably greater. o THE TWO MOSCOWS 35 than all other men that nobody but himself can hallow and ordainhim King. So exalted and remote and sacred is he that not eventhe chief servant of God is high enough to place the crown uponhis brow. Therefore, in the holiest spot of the Holy City, amidall the pomp of the living and all the solemnity of the dead, sur-rounded by the royalty of the world, while bells clash and cannonroar and multitudes throng without, the hereditary heir of theRomanoffs—though but a trace of real Romanoff blood is left—•crowns and consecrates himself Emperor and Autocrat of all theRussias, and—for the whole list is well worth recalling—of Mos-cow, of Kiev, of Vladimir, of Novgorod ; Tsar of Kazan, ofAstrakhan, of Poland, of Siberia, of Kherson-Taurida, of Grusi;Gosudar of Pskov; Grand Duke of Smolensk, of Lithuania, ofVolynia, of Podolia and of Finland ; P
Size: 1168px × 2139px
Photo credit: © Reading Room 2020 / Alamy / Afripics
License: Licensed
Model Released: No
Keywords: ., bookauthortolstoyl, bookcentury1900, bookdecade1900, bookyear1902
