He might as well have asked for a pint of bitter for all the chance he had of getting room to pass. Half the passengers were yelling praestiti and the other half were yelling to the shouters to stop yelling.
Nevertheless we made progress until we reached the centre of the car. There we were pushed into a side current. I was by that time so exhausted that I would have signed on for three years in the French Foreign Legion on condition that I be removed at once from the hellish place. But the doctor had lost not an atom of his revolutionary enthusiasm.
‘The situation is such,’ he began.
Losing my temper at last, I interrupted him and yelled:
‘Yes. The situation is such and a bloody awful situation it is.’
‘It is a crisis of transport,’ he yelled, either not understanding what I had said owing to the general tumult, or else indifferent to what I had said. ‘This crisis faces all the great cities of the Union. In Leningrad it is very severe especially. Now Leningrad great industrial city. Many more factories than before revolution. At dinner time and knock-off great pressure on transport.’
‘Why not organise the crowds?’ I yelled.
‘No understand crowd organisation,’ he shouted. ‘What means it?’
‘Why not make the people take their turns and not overcrowd the trams?’
‘Not enough trams,’ he yelled.
‘Make more,’ I shouted in fury.
‘No time,’ he cried.
‘Utter rot,’ I screamed. ‘Time is wasted here by the mile.’
‘No materials,’ he screamed in reply.
‘Then you had better go bankrupt,’ I whispered, as my voice had broken.
He also was exhausted, so we remained silent until the end of our tram journey. In some un-explainable manner we managed to get off, only two stations farther .than we wished. I crawled over to the pavement and almost shed tears with exhaustion and irritation. A Rugby player feels just like that when he has gone down to a forward rush and then crawls out of the loose scrum with his body squashed, as if it had been over-run by a herd of cattle.
‘Where are we now?’ I gasped
‘This street,’ he said, ‘was formerly called the Nevsky Prospeckt.’
‘Astonishing!’ I cried, as I looked up and down the magnificent thoroughfare. ‘It is hardly recognisable from the Overcoat.’
‘What overcoat?’
‘Gogol’s.’
‘Oh! You mean XcVzPL’
He mentioned the name of the story in Russian.
‘Yes. It looked so magnificent in literature. In reality I must tell you that it looks drab and devoid of romance.’
‘But now,’ he said, ‘you must understand it is changed. It is October Street.’
I said no more. But as I looked I thought it would have been more kind to change its name into December Street, that dead month smelling of the tomb. In its prime it must have been magnificent. Even yet, in its degradation, the domed churches, that are scattered here and there along its length, thrill the imagination. Wide, with gorgeous shops that were stocked with all the luxuries of the world, it was a fitting parade ground for all the grandeur of Tsarism, that most sensual and voluptuous of aristocracies.
Although the thoroughfare of the Nevsky was visible for a mile, I could not see a single motor car. A child could play with safety in the very middle of the street. A blind man could feel his way across without a stick. What desolation! It was painful for me to remember that this great street acted as a centre for my imagination, when forming a picture of the life portrayed in Russian literature, as environment for the splendid personages of Tolstoy, as contrast for the starved idiots of Dostoievsky. And now it was merely an empty roadway, full of holes, flanked by pavements that were rotting away and lined with houses that looked like tenements of the worst quality.
‘This street,’ said the doctor, ‘is now uninteresting. More interesting from the social point of view are the new workers’ quarters where the new socialist life is being built. Formerly this street was interesting, because of the bourgeois parasites who enjoyed themselves here, by satisfying the lusts of their bodies. Now there is no bourgeoisie. This street is dead. Formerly in workers’ quarters there was only despair and darkness. Now there is great life and positive social activities. The situation is such as I say.’
Then he added:
‘It is like a clock. The pendulum swings.’
‘Quite true,’ I said. ‘Rome is now inhabited by Italians. Alexandria is rather like a dunghill. Carthage is extinct. Explorers dig for the great Aztec cities.’
‘Please explain,’ he said uncomfortably.
‘I mean,’ I said, ‘that Gibbon spoke truly when he said that all things that have in them a beginning have in them the elements of decay.’
‘Who is Gibbon?’
‘A famous English historian.’
‘He is a bourgeois,’ said the doctor curtly. ‘Here it is not decay but growth.’
‘It looks to me,’ I said, ‘more like the growth of an ulcer as far as this street is concerned.’
‘You no understand,’ he said. ‘The situation is such. In New York when they wish build skyscraper, not only they knock down old house, but they dig very deep for foundation of new very tall house. So here, it was not only necessary knock down Tsar, but also sweep away all sign of Tsar life. Then build Socialism.’
‘Then you admit Leningrad is going to decay.’
‘No. It shall become not as formerly pleasure city like Paris, but great industrial city, like Manchester.’
‘I doubt it. You cannot put life into a corpse. This city is the corpse of Tsarism. Even as a museum it would not be of sufficient world interest to maintain. After all Tsarism was not a civilisation. It was merely a temporary experiment in government by an awakening national consciousness.’
‘Yes?’ said the doctor. ‘Foreigners observe our Union in such a manner. You look for one minute and then you judge. Perhaps it would be better to see all city first and then judge.’
‘Ridiculous,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t take a year to examine a horse’s mouth. I am not an economist or a sociologist or a politician. It is no use showing me the city in detail and giving me figures and facts. I could see nothing and learn nothing. I know merely by intuition. I feel essences. I do not see surfaces. I comprehend the whole, in my own manner, for my own purpose, without knowing the composition of the various parts. Your ship, Kronstadt, the Soviet navy at exercise, the docks, this street, as well as the history of Russia from the time this city was built on land conquered from the Swedes, through the Japanese war, which meant Russia’s failure to expand through the Pacific, through the Great War, which meant Russia’s failure to expand along the Baltic coast into Europe, on to the Revolution, when Russia retired on Moscow in order to weave a new plan of expansion, all tell me that this city of Leningrad is doomed. So why should I look at the houses in order to convince myself of the truth of a conviction with which I left home. It would even be dangerous for me to do so. I might prove myself to be wrong. Dreadful thought, because I am never wrong. Russia’s road is not this way. It has merely been an observation post, a . . .’
‘You are mad,’ said the doctor. ‘Or, perhaps you are joking. Yes?’
‘Not exactly,’ I said. ’I was just giving you an example of what a scoundrel could write, if he set out to make a book called, let us say, Lies About Russia’
‘Of course,’ said the doctor. ‘That is a joke.’
‘I hope an excellent one,’ I replied.
We arrived at the doctor’s house. It was a large building divided into flats. Formerly it had been elegant but it had fallen into disrepair and also, I fear, into disrepute. Its former elegance was still manifest but it had begun to resemble a finely-built man of quality who has taken to drink and forgets to shave, or to take a bath or to keep his clothes in order. Like the rest of Leningrad, the house was also a relic of Tsarism. It once had inhabitants, vague people whose existence I could bare
ly imagine as I climbed the gorgeous staircase. They had gone away, to the grave, to the cabarets and brothels of Western Europe. Strange beings had taken their place. And these new things were not really inhabitants of the house. They were merely billeted therein; a rather savage and undisciplined soldiery who did not keep their billets clean. Those that I met on the stairs were ragged, haggard and melancholy.
When we reached our floor, we entered by a magnificent doorway into a large room where there was nothing whatsoever. It was a beautiful room and it seemed to look at us with contempt and anger. Empty rooms always give one that impression of contempt and hostility. We passed through it into another room which was also empty, except for some piles of rubbish. This astonished me, as I had heard there was a housing crisis in Leningrad. But apparently these rooms had formerly been used as drawing and reception rooms. Nobody now wanted such rooms. They were left empty as unsuitable for the needs of the masses.
We then entered a corridor which was very long and dark. We entered the doctor’s room. That room was also of considerable beauty, furnished in a manner that gave an impression of elegance, but of a certain kind. The furniture must have been extremely expensive at one time, but it now looked out of place, since the room was used as a bedroom. It was heavy and rather like the musty, ornate stuff found in French antique shops.
I looked out through the window on to a courtyard that was surrounded by great barracks of tenement houses. On this flagged space there were children at play. A lane opened off the court at one end. And opposite the mouth of the lane there was an arch cut into the wall of the tenements. People kept crossing the courtyard, back and forth from the lane to the arch, appearing and disappearing. Other people emerged from the sides, through dark doors and moved towards the lane or towards the arch, appearing and disappearing; or coming from the lane or the arch, they entered by the dark doors, moving at angles to the route of the others, who were moving straight across, disappearing and appearing. It was exactly like a scene in a macabre Russian film, where the people, photographed from a height, look like ants and move in a curious manner, brooding, their arms hidden in their sleeves or held rigid by their sides, performing mass movements that are apparently without purpose. In life it was even more impressive and terrifying than on the screen.
It reminded me also of the delightfully romantic places inhabited by the desolate characters in Dostoievsky’s work. And I was delighted that Dostoievsky worked from reality and had not distorted life as his enemies have claimed. For this court and all I had seen of Russia since my arrival was exactly as Dostoievsky had depicted it in his magnificent writings, all the slovenliness, the insanity, the poverty, the melancholy, the wild passions that goaded people, forcing them to rise up and escape from the tortures of incomprehensible immensity by the performance of some wild feat.
But it is always so. When a writer of supreme genius imprisons, within the confines of his art, the body and soul of his people, shabby intellects accuse him of having distorted reality. Of course, there existed also the artificial civilisation depicted by the polite and clever Tchehov and by Turgenev. It lived in this heavy room and looked down into this courtyard on Dostoievsky’s brooding maniacs. But it held aloof. It did not belong. It deplored life and begged for death. The brooding maniacs granted its wish and destroyed it. It has gone, wringing its delicate hands and uttering gentle platitudes in a sad voice about culture. But Dostoievsky’s people remain. To do what? What wild feat of genius shall their future disclose, could they but issue from that flagged dungeon where they march to and fro?
I was held by that gloomy courtyard as by a magnet. Intellectually, it was the most exciting thing I had seen for a long time. And my fixed idea about the conquest of Europe by the Russians was fed by this gloomy place until it assumed the intensity of accomplished fact. It seemed that they were already massing for that descent on Europe, as they marched back and forth, in and out, gloomy, with downcast heads, shabby, in need of loot, massing for that conquest of the world which Dostoievsky foretold in The Idiot.
The war of the idiots?
A policeman strolled into the courtyard, stood, watched, swung his baton and walked out again.
The doctor was a trifle irritated when I told him that I loved the court and that I was excited by its sordid romance.
‘We shall change all that,’ he said. ‘New workers’ houses are being built. But now we shall go. My wife is not at home. Later we shall come back, when we get room for you at hotel.’
As we were leaving, his sister-in-law came in. She blushed deeply on being introduced. She was a young Jewess, not pretty, but with great charm. Although she spoke English very well, she bolted through shyness after saying a few words.
‘My wife belongs to a bourgeois family,’ said the doctor as we went downstairs.
Chapter VIII
The Doctor’s Wife
I Got a room at the Europa Hotel off the Nevsky. Then I returned to the doctor’s house. On the way he said to me:
‘The situation is such. In Soviet Union, sexual relations have been re-organised on rational system, so to speak. My wife and I live together on this basis. While we find mutual existence, so to say, socially useful to both of us, we are married. Afterwards, either for one or other personal wish, we become separate citizens. I meet her in train one day. We both like. Next day we marry. She is such a type, fond of marriage. Already she marry five times. How long we marry I know not. So life is.’
Later he said:
‘I hope you like her. Relations are so. Continual acquaintance with one woman excites desire for other women. Already I begin to think there are, perhaps, in Soviet Union, women more socially useful to me than my wife.’
I don’t quite understand you,’ I said. ‘But at least I beg of you to understand that I am a traveller and travellers are notoriously interested in temporary amusement, hardly ever in the liquidation of anybody else’s matrimonial liabilities by the assumption of heavy responsibilities of their own.’
‘Comrade,’ said the doctor, ‘you make use of a word which no longer exists in the Soviet Union, so to speak, matrimonial.’
‘It’s pleasant to hear that,’ I said.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I think all men all over the world, bourgeois as well as proletarian, are delight because such word would not exist. But here it is reality, except among such unliquidated slave classes, such as uncollectivised peasants, unsocialised Esquimos, nomadic Gypsies and people of old regime. Among young generation and liquidated members of old social formations there is only biological attractions or such personal formations, which lead in bourgeois societies to homosex and female sex, what you call Lesbian.’
‘Brilliant,’ I said.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Please understand that situation is such.’
‘But it’s nothing new,’ I said. ‘It’s merely a rather odd and Germanic re-statement of a situation which already existed before the Revolution among the more enlightened of Western Europeans.’
It shall be so,‘ he said irrelevantly.
When we got back to the apartment, we found the doctor’s wife, his sister-in-law, his brother-in-law, his father, his mother, four cousins and various other personal and social relations, together with three members of the ship’s crew, making in all twenty souls, judging them from the point of view of the old regime, or twenty citizens, according to the canons of the new regime.
The doctor’s father was the most interesting of these citizens. I was received by him in his own room, which he inhabited with his wife according to the old custom. He was a venerable and distinguished looking man of sixty, a Jew of the educated class. He asked me at once for the exact date of the outbreak of the World Proletarian Revolution. Being unable to give him the exact date for such a doubtful event, I parried by saying that the World Proletarian Revolution was undoubtedly relative, in its outbreak, to the development of the Soviet Union. When the economic position of the latter reached a point higher than the highest point in th
e graph of the economic position of the world proletariat, a world revolution would immediately break out. The old man was Satisfied with my reply and showed me his books. He had an interesting collection, but they showed me that he erred gravely in the direction of social fanaticism. He had a craze for books that exposed the barbarism of the Tsarist regime.
I was impressed by the pre-revolutionary binding and illustration. While the binding could not be compared with better class French work, nor the illustrations with that of English craftsmen, nor the printing with either (it would be difficult to produce excellent work with the cumbersome Russian lettering) they had reached a high degree of skill. It was pleasant also to handle old books and feel the atmosphere of luxury, peace and culture they exuded, after the desolating experience of having spent several hours in Leningrad. Unlike other relics of past civilisations, old books do not inspire one with melancholy thoughts, for the reason that they improve with age. Since they are detached from life, even while the life they depict is still potent, so they retain their vitality after that life has passed away.
The old man hardly ever stirred out. He had only a vague idea of current events. Yet he was extremely interested in politics, but only theoretically. In practice, the Revolution had meant nothing to him; certainly not in respect of the new matrimonial relationships. It was pleasant to see the quiet, old fashioned way he treated his wife. A perfectly bourgeois couple.
The doctor’s wife was of quite a different type. She was a beautiful woman, of exquisite refinement. She united the best qualities of Jewish women with that generosity of nature which is the most pleasant characteristic of Russian women. Subtle in movement, in speech and in gesture, she astonished me by the degree of feminine culture she possessed. Her sister was very different, more serious, if anything more nervous, less exciting as a woman, but more lovable for her gentleness and for the virginal modesty of her manners and appearance. She conversed with me for an hour, acting as interpreter for her sister, with an elegance that was captivating.
I Went to Russia Page 9