Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/118

 94 popular song, 'A face as white as the white snow, and eyes as red as poppies.'

From the shores of the Bosphorus, Olga's ladies brought back, if not the kila itself, one form of that head-dress, at all events—that adopted by the ancient Muscovite Sovereigns, with the viazy, long strings of pearls falling down to the shoulders on each side. This head-dress occurs among the ancient Greek colonists on the Black Sea, and in a tenth-century evangelistary preserved in the Gotha Library, Theophania, Empress of Germany, and her son Otho III., are represented with costumes strongly resembling those of the boïars and boïarines of the sixteenth century.

In this case, then, names and things do not exactly correspond, and a peculiarity of all conquests is the creation of appearances frequently rendered illusory by an appropriative action as ephemeral as it is shallow. As regards the Russian women of the period now under consideration, it is at Byzantium that we must look for the secret of their ways and their outward appearance. Byzantine asceticism ruled them and wrapped them round. Though, during the woman's growing years, it allowed a certain development of her body and blossoming of her physical charms, it commanded, once she was married, that these charms should be hidden from all eyes save her husband's. The wife's hair must be concealed, her form must disappear under her load of wide and floating garments, worn one above the other. She must not wear a belt, save with her sorotchka, an indoor dress in which she would never show herself before strangers. But, by an inversion common in the case of ideas of this sort, the belt must always be worn with the sorotchka, and any neglect of this duty would cause a scandal.

In habits thus constituted, secular convenience was often mixed up with religious conventions. The full garments corresponded with the prevailing habit of body. The idleness and lack of exercise common to both sexes in the upper classes made the men stout and full-bellied and the women fat, at a very early age; and the peculiarity thus associated with an ideal life of luxury ended by becoming an element of beauty—one still valued in the case of the St. Petersburg coachmen and amongst middle-class women in Russia.

Let not my readers scorn, on this account, the female charms which tempted the Russian contemporaries of Ivan the Terrible! The Muscovite lady of the sixteenth century, in spite of her excessive embonpoint and her thick and ungraceful accoutrements, was assigned a place of honour in Jost Amman's 'Gynæceum; or, Theatrum Mulierum' (1586). 'Qualem vix similem Gallia culta dabit! …' The taste for dress, the