People's life, my friend, has always seemed to me more interesting, original, more free, less subject to general patterns.

On the same day I was able to observe the Serbian people to some extent. On the day of the royal name day, there is a folk festival in the area of Topcider, near Belgrade. Topcider is a park that turns into a forest in places. Urban residents also gather in this park, and mainly "villagers" and "villagers". Serbian folk festivities are very different from Russian folk festivities. A lot of people gather, the whole park is filled. The first thing that caught my eye was that there were no drunks among the people. At that time, [as] Russian folk festivities, of course, were still unthinkable without drunks and outrageous. People were having fun in separate groups. A group of revelers hired "musicians", of which there were many, usually three or four people, who began to play somewhere under a tree, in a clearing, and those who hired danced and danced. Then they went to the side where the tables stood, sat down at them and drank a glass of beer. Of course, it is not a Slavic drink, but a German one, but it has conquered all of Europe. The Germans themselves drink beer from morning to evening. I have seen how even four- or five-year-old children were given beer. For all their hostility to the Germans, the Serbs borrowed beer from them and are destroying it zealously. In the Serbian folk festival, my friend, I was struck by amazing modesty, general decency, even silence. In fact, there are no "disorderly cries", no ugly drunken songs. Only unpretentious music is heard. Most of the people were modestly walking in the park. Our people, in fact, never walk in the sense that we do in order to "breathe fresh air", to admire the "beauties of nature". Even the word "walk" has received a reprehensible connotation in its meaning. From the word "gulyat" we had derivatives - "zagulal", "walking", "reveler", etc. But among the Serbs, at least on the name day of the Serbian king, I saw people walking around.

It was also impossible not to notice the predominance of national costumes, especially among women. In our country, the national costume is already beginning to be artificially invented not by the people, but by the intelligentsia. And the villagers, especially the villagers, at any festivities, hurry first of all to throw off their village clothes and dress in the city clothes, to resemble if not the masters, then at least the master's maids. Among the Serbs, "srpska narodna noshna" turns out to be highly respected by the people themselves: the inhabitants of the surrounding villages came to the solemn folk festivities in their national costumes. I will not describe to You, my Friend, Serbian costumes. I'm not an expert in this business, I don't know what to call and how to describe. In this respect, my soul is completely devoid of all femininity. I will only mention that Serbian women wear special jewelry made of gold and silver coins. Sometimes there are a lot of these coins. They hang from head to shoulders, connected to each other. The Serbs told me that these ornaments are, so to speak, generic: they are passed down from generation to generation, and therefore among the coins there are very ancient ones that already have a positive numismatic value.

Before evening, the king arrived in Topcider. He was dressed simply in a white jacket and rode in an open carriage. [For a while] the king rode through the park among his walking and celebrating people. It turned out to be a very simple unity of the king with the people.

I really liked this Serbian folk festival. The Slavic soul of the people was felt, meek, modest, serious and chaste. The Serbian people live as if in the midst of two hostile worlds. On the one hand, there is the Teutonic world, which does not tolerate Slavic independence; On the other hand, there is the fanatical Muslim Turkish world. One should be surprised at how, in the centuries-old struggle with the Turk and the Teuton, the Serb not only retained his originality, his nationality, but was also ready to die rather than lose all this. Before the present war, many of us were as if embarrassed by the fact that they had the misfortune to be born of a Russian father and mother. The Serbs were not ashamed of their nationality before, and for their identity they entered into an unequal struggle with the age-old enemy, the Germans, in order either to die or to remain Serbs. In our country, the national idea seems to grow out of war. With the Serbs, on the contrary, war itself is a direct consequence of their always living national idea. Remember, Friend, the anthem of the Serbian people militant for their nationality!

Who loves his Fatherland And who is a Serb at heart, Let him hurry with a sword in his hands For an open battle! Fight!

Now the Turkish and Serbian borders do not touch each other. The enemy, about whom the Serbs sang, was driven away:

For five centuries we were in slavery. They bore a heavy burden.

There still remained an enemy not only of the Serbian people, but of the entire Slavs. If this enemy dies, if he is pacified by the peoples of Europe, then the Slavs will breathe a sigh of relief and freedom. On the name day of the Serbian King, I felt that the Western Slavs were still alive and firmly holding on to their national independence.

Seventh Letter. On the Rhine

The Rhine, my dear Friend, is the German Volga. The name fits the Rhine - German, as the name of the "Russian river" is for the Volga. It is not in vain that the Germans want the Rhine to belong to them all the way to the mouth. Germans like to sing "Wacht am Rhein"; the Russians sing "Down Mother Volga" everywhere. And yet I think that the Volga is a less historical river than the Rhine. We rather have a historical river - the Dnieper. Indeed, is much in our Russian history connected with the Volga? The upper part of the Volga still sounds like the historical names of Yaroslavl, Kostroma, and when I went down beyond the Lower - as if I had left Russia, ancient historical Russia, more and more new cities went, foreign speech was heard. How long has Russian culture touched the Volga region? And has it touched everywhere even now? The Rhine is a real historical German river. On the Rhine, you seem to be involuntarily immersed in the history of the German nation. When you talk about the Rhine, you just want to call it gray. At the word "Rhine" somehow immediately pops up in the mind not only the Middle Ages, but also more ancient history, up to and including the notes on the Gallic war of Julius Caesar.

As soon as I got to Mainz, I felt that I was standing on the old historical soil. The German capital Berlin is not a historical city. And the place where people have been living for a thousand years, where a long and varied history of human life has taken place - there you always experience something special. That is why you feel completely different in the Moscow Kremlin than in the Senate Square in Petrograd. Ancient Germanic cities have one striking feature: they have parts that are called Altstadt, an ancient city. Here the buildings are extremely crowded. Crooked, irregular alleys, often no more than two arshins wide. Sometimes galleries are thrown from one side of the lane to the other. For some reason, it is customary in our country to consider narrow streets a sign of the East. Petrograd residents reproachfully nod at Moscow for its narrow streets. But not to mention Moscow, even in Constantinople I have not seen such narrow alleys as in Frankfurt, Mainz or Cologne. For hours in Mainz I wandered through these sometimes semi-dark alleys, and I remembered times long gone. And the ancient Mainz Cathedral, which you can't get to, is built all around! Houses are glued to the cathedral itself. However, European leveling stubbornly fights against everything ancient and original. The old German cities present an extremely variegated picture. As if another picture was superimposed on one picture, not at all similar to the first. In some places, old colors break through the new picture. Such an impression is perhaps especially produced by Mainz from the side of the Rhine. New buildings stretch along the shore, built in the manner of boxes. After all, European culture did not create any other architectural form for human habitation, except for the form of a box either placed on the ground with its long side, or raised upwards and resting only on the ground with its short side. From behind such boxes, the massive figure of the ancient cathedral peeks out with its Gothic towers. Boxes, of course, are not interesting, do not remind you of anything, do not make you dream about anything. I wanted to be in the ancient city; I tried to settle in one of the narrow alleys, in a house with gradually narrowing floors, and I climbed almost to the top floor, which consisted almost entirely of one room.

I am often surprised, my Friend, at how European culture wants to introduce a common rather boring pattern throughout the globe. As soon as I think that somewhere, for example, in Alexandria, in Cairo, in the country of the pharaohs, there are European hotels and restaurants, I become annoyed and offended.