A terrible monastery, where you take candles and go down into
the bowels of the earth to see where monks martyred themselves, is
here; and poor simple-minded pilgrims walk many hundred miles to kiss
these tombs. Their devotion is pathetic. We had to walk in a
procession of them, and I know that each of them had his own
particular disease and his own special brand of dirt. The beggars
surrounding the gate of this monastery are too awful to mention, yet
it is reputed to be the richest monastery in all Russia.
In Kiev we heard "Hamlet" in Russian, and the man who played Hamlet
was wonderfully good, surprisingly good. You don't know how strange it
sounded to hear "To be or not to be" in Russian! The acting was so
familiar, the words so strange. The audience went crazy over him, as
Russian audiences always do. We watched him come out and bow
thirty-nine times, and when we came away the noise was still
deafening.
They make a sort of candy in Kiev which goes far and away above any
sweets I ever have seen. It is a sort of candied rose. The whole rose
is there. It is a solid soft pink mass, and it tastes just as a
tea-rose smells.
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