A tourist who wishes to see ‘the most characteristic’ sight in London should go to Marble Arch in Hyde Park on a Sunday. In all weathers – whether it is pouring with rain, or the season of yellow and black fogs, or in summer heat – from three in the afternoon, a tourist will find a large crowd gathered here to listen to the speakers. Some of them stand under banners embroidered with devices and have collected about themselves a sizeable audience; others have simply climbed onto the railings and are speaking ‘into empty space’. There is no-one listening to them, but the orators are not discomfited by this – they keep on speaking. Now one passer-by has stopped, then another, and soon a crowd coalesces around the speaker. It listens attentively; occasionally someone interjects a comment. If the orator does not speak with conviction, no-one will listen to him at all. Sometimes, the speaker's words arouse a profound interest – then the audience breaks up into a dozen groups, each centred around some ‘scribe’ who voluntarily takes upon himself the duties of a commentator. And the kinds of people you can see in that crowd! A workman, wearing his Sunday best, a soldier in his operetta-style red uniform, with a swagger stick under his arm (English soldiers are prohibited from carrying arms in the street), a sailor and his ‘sweetheart’ in her garish feathers, hand-in-hand, a clerk in a glossy top hat, a stern Dissenting pastor, and so on. The English set great store by their open assemblies: they have paid very dearly for their right to free speech. To this end, it is instructive to peruse the recently published ‘Life’ of the late Richard Carlile. As little as sixty years ago, a speech in Hyde Park could land you in prison for three years.

Even more curious than the orators themselves are the topics on which they speak in Hyde Park. One speaker denounces the latest government bill with figures at his fingertips; another explains how necessary the higher forms of industry are for England. Under one tree, a speaker expounds the meaning of surplus value, while next to him lectures a ‘Neo-Malthusian’ or a ‘Secularist’ or George Gaspari, who every Sunday for thirty years now has been explaining to the public what true ‘humanitarianism’ is and what are its benefits.

It happened eight years ago, when I had just arrived in London and was living at a pension or boarding house. These boarding houses, or, more precisely, the colourful personages who inhabit them, merit a few words. A most curious company gathers in the evenings in the drawing rooms, with their stereotypical and cheerless furnishings. Most are foreigners. First and foremost, without fail, there is a ruddy-cheeked German, a commercial traveller or bank clerk. He tries his hardest to anglicise his appearance: wears very high turndown collars which cause his head to resemble a whorl of red cabbage with its stalk wrapped in white paper, talks about sport, and even shaves off his curled-up Wilhelm moustache. In his free time, the German clerk talks to the other guests about Germany's military strength. If there are any young ladies living in the boarding house, the German will not fail to declaim to them, rolling his eyes, some sentimental verses of this kind:

The young man explains to the uncomprehending young ladies that this is very good poetry, though far from the best in German literature. The English misses purse their lips and reply with the stock phrase:

‘Is it? Very nice indeed!’

If the boarding house is located in the quarter bounded by Montague Street, [New] Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road, some of the lodgers will inevitably be Russians who have come ‘to the British Museum’: for the most part young Master's students, awkward, clumsy, and possessing only a theoretical knowledge of the English language.

One of the most savage and destitute places in London is, of course, the St Saviour Parish in Southwark, on the south bank of the Thames. The train bringing the tourist from Dover speeds over the roofs of this part of the city. The traveller sees only a thicket of round red chimneys that Heine once compared to teeth torn out by the roots. If it is a Monday, the eye is also struck by the motley rags hung out to dry on the roofs and in the courtyards. Southwark is a historic seat of poverty. Other districts of London, such as, for example, Bethnal Green, had once seen better days, or, like Park Lane, had a dark past and have only now become a holding pen for millionaires. But Southwark has always been a poor and savage quarter. In the time of Elizabeth, i.e. three centuries ago, the quarter's reputation was exactly the same as today. Only the scenery has changed a little. Once, for instance, Blackfriars Bridge, which leads from the north to the south bank, was covered with pikes on which were impaled the heads and arms of criminals and rebels.4 At the southern end of the bridge there once stood a gallows, upon which swayed always the tarred corpse of a man executed for taking part in strikes or secret labour unions. Here too could be seen in all its glory a huge unwieldy machine that resembled a well sweep, the ducking stool. A chair was attached to the arm of a lever suspended over the river. They used to tie cheating bakers to it and, to the crowd's general amusement, duck them three times over in the river. All this, of course, has long ago become the stuff of legends. In the sixteenth century, there also stood on the south bank near the bridge a tall round building without a roof, the famous Globe theatre, where Londoners gathered to watch, perhaps, a tragedy by Marlowe or Shakespeare or a comedy by the learned Ben Jonson. With equal pleasure, they came here to watch the bearbaiting or some good fight. Then the Globe vanished without a trace and another building appeared in its place, which also exists no longer but which left a profound mark on English literature.

At Christmas everything here froze over: no post, no horse trams, no people. The whole of London was eating pudding and singing:

This deliberate merrymaking, conscientiously timed for the 25th, was very tedious, which is why I was genuinely delighted to get the opportunity on the third day of Christmas to visit a sandwich dinner.

A sandwich is, basically, bread and butter. But in London slang, this word is used to designate special people who, like bread with butter, are covered with boards for pasting bills. These boards are attached to an iron ring through which the sandwich men put their heads. A third board is attached to the same ring on little metal mounts and placed above the sandwich man's head. All of this is extremely cumbersome, unwieldy and, above all, unnecessary, since all the pavements, house walls, omnibuses and restaurant tablecloths have already been appropriated by advertisers. But the same hidebound resistance to change that prompts the English to install door hammers when there are electric bells, to use wooden staircases when fires and the costliness of wood might have suggested to them the idea of iron ones – that same resistance daily makes them saddle this unnecessary yoke on the necks of many thousands of people.

I could never look at these toilers without pain. They walk past in a long file, one after another, with a slow, funereal pace. They cannot stand still, they must forever keep moving, forever keep shoving their boards in the faces of passers-by. The ring weighs down the shoulders, the head keeps jerking, there is no possibility of straightening out or taking any rest throughout the whole day. But the main torment is the humiliating incongruity between the placard-bearer and his placard.

A poster depicts lavish delicacies from a fashionable restaurant – while the sandwich man is hungry and gaunt.

A poster proclaims the virtue of the excellent Peter Robinson lacquered boots – while the sandwich man sports on his feet some kind of sieve instead of shoes. A poster reminds us that The Merry Wives of Windsor is on today at the Garrick Theatre – the sandwich man is sullen, wretched, and the word ‘merry’ on his poster seems like a cruel mockery.

The dance master Blackman's piano, accustomed to ringing waltzes and cakewalks, is now playing a solemn hymn; the mirrored walls reflect not whirling youths as heretofore, but white-bearded gentlemen, sallow-faced ladies and scrofulous young men, looking piously in their prayerbooks. This time, a Spiritualists’ meeting is underway in the dance master Blackman's hall.

In Germany, Spiritualism tries to attach itself to science. In France, it is rather successfully accessorised with décolletés, chansonettes and private boudoirs. In England, it has moved on to prayerbooks, psalms and sallow Misses of an uncertain age. C’est fatalité.

I happened on this meeting when it had already started. The attendees were on their feet and, looking into some books, were singing in unsteady chorus the praises of those ‘spirits’ who appear to the medium:

I don't remember any more, but even these lines are sufficient to detect that the enigmatic form of energy that manifests at Spiritualist séances has already had time to become canonised in England.

The medium himself – a squirming, dishevelled, extravagantly dressed gentleman with a worn-out face and manners pretending to the mysterious – offers a prayer from the pulpit to the spirit of all spirits, then blesses us majestically and begins his séance to the sound of music. He enters a trance. He gnashes his teeth, rolls his eyes and growls like the hero of a melodrama. From the first minute you know that you are faced with charlatanism, and of a tasteless, crude and coarse kind at that, calculated to appeal to the most uncivilised and uncouth public. Look around. You’ll see knitted brows, pursed lips – you’ll see faith and grim delight. More hymns, more prayers, more trances; the voluntary collection plate goes many rounds – and you find yourself back in the street with the impression that someone has mocked and insulted you, deceived you in a childish, unintelligent, ham-fisted way.

You need to know about the school-missish tenderness of the English towards every kitten, you need to recall the hundreds of pet names they lavish on ducklings, puppies and canaries, to understand their feverish interest in court proceedings where some runty mongrel figures as the hero.

Forget ducklings! I saw a most respectable gentleman finding compliments even for a crocodile in the zoological gardens, although I believe there are many people spending the night on the damp grass of Hyde Park who would gladly exchange places with this reptile.

‘Poor fellow!’, whispers a gangly Miss at the cage of a snarling lion, and the Animal Protection League in its notices begs street urchins in the name of Christ not to destroy birds’ nests or to hitch rides on carriages. And although you could not find a nest in London in a hundred years and the carriages here are such that there is no possibility of attaching oneself to them, it is nevertheless still customary for the League's instructions to elicit expressions of admiration and emotion.

Suddenly comes a sensational piece of news: Mr Coleridge, Secretary of the Anti-Vivisection Society, has announced at a public meeting that Professor Bayliss, who lectures in Physiology at University College, tortured and tormented a dog in front of his students without any apparent need, and cut open its maw though it struggled and trembled continuously in his hands. ‘The Professor did not even trouble to anaesthetise his unfortunate victim’, Coleridge said, and one can easily picture how many tears fell to the floor of the club where the speech was made.

Meanwhile, Mr Bayliss was not aware of anything. Only a newspaper report of Coleridge's speech alerted him to the accusation levelled against him. He is in court. And yesterday I had an opportunity to witness the formalities of a case of ‘libel and defamation of a good name’.

Coleridge's thin lips, tightly pursed in disdain, never once parted during the whole time. Pale, with arms crossed on his chest, he listened attentively to everything that was said in the courtroom. And what was said there was of a kind not calculated to please him at all.

The enormous English newspapers are full of endless articles framed in black. The Queen, who outlived several generations and during whose reign the country so radically changed its aspect, is dead. The period that England is living through at the moment – the period that has bred its cultured savages, its all-powerful gutter press and other phenomena – has left its mark on the obituaries too. The Queen's name is accompanied by strong adjectives, in the superlative degree to boot: she is ‘the greatest’, ‘the wisest’, ‘the most brilliant’, etc. The authors of the obituaries attribute even the recent rains to ‘heaven itself weeping for the greatest of monarchs’. They then proceed to speak of the grief-stricken Englishmen, of the ‘gloom of despair hanging over London’, of ‘the country's great loss’, etc. The court Pindar, the Poet Laureate Austin, speaks of the victories she achieved, of ‘Semiramis of the northern seas’.

I think our readers will find it interesting to pick through the piles of funerary literature and ascertain to what extent we foreigners, as people of a different parish, can accept these strong adjectives. First, let us go to the London Forum, to Hyde Park. It is Saturday, the second of February. Today, the Queen's remains will be carried through London and on to Windsor, where she will be buried alongside the Prince Consort. The endless park and all the streets converging on it are flooded by a living sea. All the shops, factories, houses, offices and banks are shut (on the initiative of the owners themselves). Hundreds of thousands of working people have now taken to the streets. Moreover, since yesterday trains have been bringing in provincials who have spent the whole night in the street. There are several million people in the park and the adjoining avenues. On the roofs, on the balconies, in the windows, on the ledges, everywhere one can drag some seats, there are thousands of spectators who have shown up with binoculars, with baskets full of victuals and with bottles of whisky.

‘Boom, boom, boom’, resounds the huge drum, and the windows of nearby houses tremble.

The trombone players are a pitiful sight, their eyes about to pop out with the strain.

One bleats the droning tune of a hymn; another shouts out in meaningless combinations: ‘repent’… ‘save yourselves’… ‘doom is nigh’… ‘eternity’… ‘the Lord’…; another, in a fit of some kind of frenzy, points to the skies, menacingly demanding something from the public.

The people gaze at the cold, foggy sky, see nothing there, and slowly turn away from the speaker.

It starts to rain. Dirty jets of water begin drumming on the horn players’ instruments. Umbrellas rise like innumerable scales over this whole clamorous, agitated, crazed mass of humanity – and soon it seems as if some huge, unknown beast is roaring and raging and howling, ready to fly in powerless fury at anyone calm and indifferent, who passes by at a steady pace…

I come nearer. The men's faces are feverish, red from the vodka, the yelling, the ecstatic gestures… They are dressed in ordinary soldiers’ uniforms with braid, epaulettes and chevrons.

The women – flat-chested, sallow, with billowing, dishevelled hair – do not lack for military distinctions either. Encircling their black hats is a red ribbon with the words:

‘The Salvation Army!’

Yes, these strange people, decked out like jesters, with the antics and gambols of holy fools, with the deafening clangour of their drums, pretend to the role of saviours and leaders of errant humanity. Drums and salvation! Clownish buffoonery and the holy tears of repentance! Military ranks and appeals to the God of equality and justice! What a wild combination of ideas! What blasphemy! Try to imagine more jarring, more mutually exclusive extremes! You couldn’t.

Such absurd conjunctions of the exalted and the offensively sordid, of worship and clowning, are not possible anywhere except the country of Darwin, Mill and Ruskin. Only the English are capable of this kind of cynicism: the cynicism that is entailed in the union of repentance – that most intimate, most bashful of spiritual acts – with theatrical gestures and military chevrons.

I met Frankie's father, Mr Hartnell, at the ‘Logos’ Club soon after my arrival in England. When I first heard this pretentious name, I was for some reason immediately reminded of a scene from ‘The Learned Ladies’ in which Trissotin introduces Vadius to the ladies and thrills them with his announcement that the latter knows Greek. I thought the ‘Logos’ was something like the academy of pedants proposed by Philaminte and Armande. ‘Nul n’aura de l’esprit, hors nous et nos amis!’

I was mistaken. The ‘Logos’ proved to be a regular English club: not the ‘Carlton’, which represents the fondest dream of every nouveau-riche brewer or brace manufacturer; not the ‘Athenaeum’ – a conclave of literary and political cardinals; not the ‘Savage Club’, where millionaires dressed up as for a ball turn up to play at bohemianism. No, the ‘Logos’ turned out to be a middle-of-the-road club with nothing pedantic about it except its name. One could occasionally meet a ruddy-cheeked lord there who for some reason considered himself a radical and was forever laughing at his own jokes, or a couple of politicians who had dropped by ‘for the connections’, just in case. But these were not the usual kind of visitors. The club's habitués were artists whose paintings had not yet begun to sell (this explains why such a mass of paintings adorned the club's walls), young novelists just spreading their wings, journalists, people of modest independent means, etc. These people were at times a bit too original and overdid their paradoxes a little; but on the whole they were an amiable set, not constrained by a worship of convention and therefore more akin in spirit to us Continentals. This is why the ‘Logos’ could boast such a motley collection of foreigners, ranging from the inhabitants of Ecuador to Norwegians. But if the ‘Logos’ differed from other clubs in its patrons, it did possess two things without which no Englishman would acknowledge such an establishment: soft, thick carpets and an abundance of deep armchairs to climb into and either pull your legs up or stretch them out to the brightly blazing fire – indeed, to climb into and adopt any position, even curl up into a ball.

Fear not, my reader, I shall not speak of Assyrian antiquities. It is true that there are many of them here, but there is nothing special about them for a layman such as myself. They are antiquities like any other: dusty, cracked, labelled and numbered. You look at them, express your admiration for propriety's sake, but in your soul you say: ‘I have already seen all this somewhere before’.

There are simply too many different kinds of rarities here. And it is well known that a rarity which can be found in abundance ceases to be a rarity.

There is, however, in the British Museum something more rare and valuable, which should elicit from you a shout of amazement and delight far exceeding all your previous exclamations!

This thing is small and inconspicuous. It is not even mentioned in the general catalogues. One needs to look long and diligently for it, but that is what makes it so much the rarer, so much the dearer.

Here is its little label. Read it:

‘Tcharka’.

I trust I do not need to translate this English word for you, especially as it is not English at all. The label is attached to a silver shot glass, and I can boldly declare that this shot glass is the only artefact in the British Museum that my homeland is represented by.

A museum which ought to offer a tangible demonstration of the heights of cultural creativity achieved by a given nation, of the degree of its spiritual flowering, of everything that this nation has attained thanks to its genius, at the price of its blood, tears and suffering, of all that it has, step by step, managed to win back from nature – this museum exhibits in its ‘Russia’ section a shot glass – and nothing more.

The Hottentots, the Papuans, the Negritos – every thread of theirs is under the glass, and there are so many of these threads that any European may form an accurate and detailed understanding of their lives. The whole Papuan, from cradle to grave, is in the palm of his hand. But if he asks what goes on in that huge country which has given him Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, is there really nothing more to point him to than our drunkenness?

‘Well, and what are their manners and customs?’ he will ask.

‘Tcharka’.