ST. PETERSBURG IN WINTER.

Thames Star, Volume VII, Issue 2559, 20 March 1877, Page 3

ST. PETERSBURG IN WINTER.

I was told when I first came that I could not judge of St. Petersburg at all till I had seen it in' its winter garb. Well, the winter has set in with a vengeance, and I cannot say that the place is ltd me at all more attractive. It is . always snowing. With rare intervals of slush, it will probably snow and freeze frpm now till next April* The Neva •is blocked op with almost unbroken sheets Of ice. There" were people walking on it to day; and I suppose if this weather goes .on, "sledges will cross it before another iweek is over. In fact, we have regular seasonable Russian weather. Snow always sounds pretty upon paper, and is a fertile subject of poetic metaphors; but in real practical life it is an nuisance. Happily for us, in London have so little of the infliction that we can hardly realise what it is to live in countries where snow is the order of the day. If you are to stop at home it doe's not much matter where you •re so long as you are warm,; Hut if you want to $o Nout, you seem to me to'be as badly off m St. Petersburg as you could be. in any civilised community. Biding on horseback is out of the question, and walking for pleasure is nearly so. If you haver not heavy ' furs' on you are frozen to death, nipped by the ice-cold . wind, sent home to bed with toothache or rheumatism, or congestion of the lungs ;' if you muffle yourself up warmly, you are obliged to crawl along at a snail's pace, groaning beneath a load of wraps, one of the chief advantages of which is that it breaks your fall as often—and it happens vsry often—-as you slide at full' length upon the' slippery pavement. In fact, if you wish to do'anything more than cross the street, you must fide in a sledge ; and flejghing, whatever may be its other advantages, most certainly does not supply the place of active exercise. There is on© arcade in St. Petersburg—a cross between theLowther and the Burlington, and in- 7 • ferior to both—up and down which think you can walk r in three minutes ; but literally there- is no other place that I know of where you can walk, in St. Petersburg during the winter months with any -approach to comfort. Before I ever experienced a northern winter I uj*4:to imagine that skating must be a popular pursuit in' countries where it froze invariably for months together,

I .own I entertained a private conviction : that skating, like hunting, or rowing in a bba'f-race, was one of those pleasures which, to nine of its devotees out of ten, is greater in the'anticipation or the re rospect that in the performance. Still I thought that skating was tbe natural pastime of ipe-bound countries. . Experience 1 of northern winters has entirely dispelled the illusion. Herein St. Petersburg, for instance, skating was quite unknown till it was introduced a few years ago by some English residents, since then it has become somewhat of a fashionable amusement with the court and the high society of the capital. But the Russian public has never taken to it at all. " Moreover, I should in fairness add that, though tin re are vast fields of ice within close reach of the capital, they are so caked on with frozen snow that it is difficult to si;ate over them for any-distance, In fact, so far as I can see, persons whose evil destiny, compels them to reside at St. Petersburg this winter have nothing in. the way of outdoor exercise or amusement to look forward to for the next five months except a scries of chilly drives up and down the quays and the Newski Prospekt. The only breaks in their hibernal existence will be during those not unfrequent intervals when the cold becomes so intense that nothing short of necessity will take you out at all. It is cold enough now, but it has not ret come to the period when passers-by dash handfuls of snow into your face to stop incipient mortification of the nose. I saw a gentlemen rubbing a lady's face with snow in the streets the other evening, but then I am afraid they both were drunk, and had. no clear conception of what they were about. The bear, who, according to a popular belief, buries himself in a hole as soon as the snow sets in, and suclcs his paws and sleeps from November I to May, takes, I think, a more"rational view than any other denizen of the Russian Empire; but short of sucking his paws, morally if not literally, it is not easy to say what a stranger can do in St. Petersburg, supposing him to grow tired of the solitude of his own room. Cafe's there are none; there is not a readingroom which, so far as I know, is available to the general public ; and the restaurants are wretched and comfortless. Altogether, a snowy day in St. Petersburg seems to me duller for a stranger—and in so saying I am saying a good deal—than a rainy day in London. —Leisure Hour..