Speaking about fairs, one cannot remain silent about an extremely attractive institution of recent times, which proves that the fair merchants look after not only their own interests, but are also not averse to doing good things for the benefit of the smaller brotherhood, those working people who fuss about loading and unloading goods from morning to night and bend their backs at the hard work of the fair; We are talking about people's canteens and tea houses, recently established at the initiative of the fair committee, and for the last several years, they have been under the masterful management of a member of the committee, a Moscow merchant and hereditary honorary citizen P. M. Kalashnikov. There are several of these canteens (also known as teahouses), and they are located in areas most convenient for working people. Their general management is excellent; costing society very little, they bring undoubted and enormous benefit to their existence; from them and in them, a large portion of buckwheat porridge with butter and a cup of excellent cabbage soup is sold to workers for 5 kopecks, and for 3 kopecks. pour a good cup of tea, add boiling water and a few lumps of sugar. If we add to this that several hundred thousand such portions are sold during the fair, then it will be clear how the working people, who in former times were fed all sorts of rubbish at an incredibly expensive price by various culinary shops, should relate to this institution. During our stay in Nizhny, we visited people’s canteens more than once and always admired the beautiful, orderly order with which this business is conducted, as well as the cleanliness that distinguishes the very, so to speak, kitchen of the canteens, and the merits of the food they sell.
But enough about Nizhny and its fairs. It’s time for the reader to go “down Mother Volga” on one of those handsome steamships that wait at the piers, blowing their characteristic whistles from time to time. If the reader is staying in one of the hotels of the lower bazaar, for example in Birzhevaya, then the piers of the company “Caucasus and Mercury” and “Airplane” are just a stone’s throw away, but if he is staying at the upper bazaar, somewhere near the Kremlin, or if, wanting to be closer to the fairs, he is staying in one of the fair hotels, then he will have to travel quite a distance, in the first case down the exit, in the second along the dusty haystacks of the fair and through the long
— 80 ny raft bridge. So off to the boat, reader! We only recommend that you take care to take a bunk on the right side of the ship, since then, even in bad weather, you will have in front of you through the cabin window unparalleled views of the right bank in those cases when staying on the decks turns out to be unsuitable.
Chapter 1.
From Yalizhny to Kazan,
The road between Nizhny and Kazan is of double interest: not to mention the beauty of the entire right bank, the village is studded with trading and rich villages that can compete in general terms with such Uzbek cities as Vasilsurek, Vozmodemyansk and Cheboksary. These are, for example: located near Nizhniy-_Underground, famous throughout Russia for its cucumbers; prothe shipbuilding-minded village of Kadnitsy; village
Anhydrous, famous for the manufacture of fishing tackle and anchor supplies; then further Rabotki is a village famous throughout the Volga as the capital of river pilots, sailors, stokers, etc. In ancient times, all of these were, as it were, camps of lower-ranking freemen, all of this traded in robbery and robbery. The villages of Lyskovo and Murashkino had especially close friendships with the robbers; the following communities were not far behind them: Slopinets, Yurkino, Tatinets and Rabotki; Almost to our time, a well-known proverb on the Volga has survived: Talinets and Slopinets are the breadwinner of a thief. The notorious Vanka-Cain, whose name in people's memory is preserved almost on par with the name of Stenka Razin, also robbed in these same places. In the same area, on the left bank of the Volga, stretched the famous Kerzhensve l'sa - a permanent refuge for families who sought better shelter from the vigilant supervision of the authorities. Before reaching Isad (the second pier from Nizhny), on the right side,