One bright sunshiny morning in early December, from the crest of a high hill on the Verkholensk road, we got our first view of the east-Siberian capital: a long compact mass of wooden houses with painted windowshutters; white-walled buildings with roofs of metallic green; and picturesque Russo-Byzantine churches whose snowy towers were crowned with inverted balloons of gold or covered with domes of ultramarine blue spangled with golden stars. Long lines of loaded sledges from the Mongolian frontier could be seen entering the city from the south; the streets were full of people; flags were flying here and there over the roofs of government buildings; and from the barracks down the river came faintly the music of a regimental band. Our driver stopped his horses, took off his hat, and turning to us, with the air of one who owns what he points out, said, proudly, “Irkutsk!” If he expected us to be impressed – as he evidently did – he was not disappointed; because Irkutsk, at that time and from that point of view, was a very striking and beautiful city. We, moreover, had just come from the desolate moss tundras and wild, lonely forests of arctic Asia and were in a state of mind to be impressed by anything that had architectural beauty, or indicated culture, luxury, and wealth. We had seen nothing that even remotely suggested a city in two years and a half; and we felt almost as if we were Gothic barbarians gazing at Rome. It did not even strike us as particularly funny when our Buryat driver informed us seriously that Irkutsk was so great a place that its houses had to be numbered in order to enable their owners to find them! To us, fresh from Gizhiga, Penzhina, and Okhotsk, a city with numbered houses was really too remarkable and impressive a thing to be treated with levity, and we therefore received the information with proper awe and in silence. We could share the native feeling, even if numbered houses had once been known to us.
Twenty minutes later, we dashed into the city at a gallop, as if we were imperial couriers with war news; rushed at break-neck speed past markets, bazaars, telegraph poles, street lamps, big shops with gilded sign-boards, polished droshkies drawn by high-stepping Orloff horses, officers in uniform, grey-coated policemen with sabres, and pretty women hooded in white Caucasian bashliks and finally drew up with a flourish in front of a comfortable-looking stuccoed hotel – the first one we had seen in more than twenty-nine months….
At Irkutsk, we plunged suddenly from a semi-barbaric environment into an environment of high civilization and culture; and our attempts to adjust ourselves to the new and unfamiliar conditions were attended, at first, with not a little embarrassment and discomfort. As we were among the first Americans who had been seen in that Far Eastern capital, and were officers, moreover, of a company with which the Russian Government itself had been in partnership, we were not only treated with distinguished consideration, but were welcomed everywhere with warm-hearted kindness and hospitality….
General Kukel…, introducing us to more beautiful women than we had seen, we thought, in the whole course of our previous existence, but said to every lady, as he presented us: “Mr. Kennan and Mr. Price, you know, speak Russian perfectly.” Price, with discretion beyond his years, promptly disclaimed the imputed accomplishment; but I was rash enough to admit that I did have some knowledge of the language in question, and was forthwith drawn into a stream of rapid Russian talk by a young woman with sympathetic face and sparkling eyes, who encouraged me to describe dog-sledge travel in northeastern Asia and the vicissitudes of tent life with the Wandering Koryaks. On this conversational ground I felt perfectly at home; and I was succeeding, as I thought, admirably, when the girl suddenly blushed, looked a trifle shocked, and then bit her lip in a manifest effort to restrain a smile of amusement not warranted by anything in the life that I was trying to describe. She was soon afterward carried away by a young Cossack officer who asked her to dance, and I was promptly engaged in conversation by another lady, who also wanted “to hear an American talk Russian.” My self-confidence had been a little shaken by the blush and the amused smile of my previous auditor, but I rallied my intellectual forces, took a firm grip of my Russian vocabulary, and, as Price would say, “sailed in.” But I soon struck another snag. This young woman, too, began to show symptoms of shock, which, in her case, took the form of amazement. I was absolutely sure that there was nothing in the subject-matter of my remarks to bring a blush to the cheek of innocence, or give a shock to the virgin mind of feminine youth, and yet it was perfectly evident that there was something wrong. As soon as I could make my escape, I went to General Kukel and said: “Will you please tell me, Your Excellency, what ‘s the matter with my Russian?”
“What makes you think there’s anything the matter with it?” he replied evasively, but with a twinkle of amusement in his eyes.
“It doesn’t seem to go very well,” I said, “in conversation with women. They appear to understand it all right, but it gives them a shock. Is my pronunciation so horribly bad?”
“You speak Russian,” he said, “with quite extraordinary fluency, and with a-a-really interesting and engaging accent; but – excuse me please – shall I be entirely frank? You see you have learned the language, under many disadvantages, among the Koryaks, Cossacks, and Chukchis of Kamchatka and the Okhotsk Sea coast, and – quite innocently and naturally of course – you have picked up a few words and expressions that are not – well, not…”
“Not used in polite society,” I suggested.
“Hardly so much as that,” he replied deprecatingly. “They’re a little queer, that ‘s all – quaint – bizarre – but it’s nothing! nothing at all! All you need is a little study of good models – books, you know – and a few months of city life.”
“That settles it!” I said. “I talk no more Russian to ladies in Irkutsk.”
When, upon my arrival in St. Petersburg, I had an opportunity to study the language in books, and to hear it spoken by educated people, I found that the Russian I had picked up by Kamchatkan camp-fires and in Cossack izbas on the coast of the Okhotsk Sea resembled, in many respects, the English that a Russian would acquire in a Colorado mining camp, or among the cowboys in Montana. It was fluent, but, as General Kukel said, “quaint – bizarre,” and, at times, exceedingly profane.
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