from 1912 until the summer of 1914 i spent the greater part of the year in russia. i was no longer doing journalistic work, but i was still writing books on russian life and literature. the longer i stayed in russia, the more deeply i felt the fascination of the country and the people. in one of his books gogol has a passage apostrophising his country from exile, and asking her the secret of her fascination. “what is,” he says, “the inscrutable power which lies hidden in you? why does your aching, melancholy song echo forever in my ears? russia, what do you want of me? what is there between you and me?”
the question has often been repeated, not only by russians in exile, but by foreigners who have lived in russia, and i have often found myself asking it. the country has little obvious glamour and attraction. in russia, as gogol says, the wonders of nature are not made more wonderful by man; there are no spots where nature, art, and time combine to take the heart with beauty; where association, and even decay are indistinguishably mingled; and nature is not only beautiful but picturesque; where time has worked magic on man’s handiwork, and history has left behind a host of phantoms.
there are many such places in france and in england, in italy, spain, and greece, but not in russia. russia is a country of colonists, where life has been a perpetual struggle against the inclemency of the climate, and where the political history is the record of a desperate battle against adverse circumstances. russia’s oldest city was sacked and burnt just at the moment when it was beginning to flourish; her first capital was destroyed by fire in 1812; her second capital[431] dates from the seventeenth century; stone houses are rare in the country, and the wooden houses are frequently destroyed by fire. it is a country of long winters and fierce summers, of rolling plains, uninterrupted by mountains and unvariegated by valleys.
but the charm is there. it is felt by people of different nationalities and races; it is difficult, if you live in russia, to escape it, and once you have felt it, you will never be quite free from it. the melancholy song, which gogol says wanders from sea to sea over the length and breadth of the land, will echo in your heart and haunt the corner of your brain. it is impossible to analyse charm, for if charm could be analysed it would cease to exist; and it is difficult to define the character of places where beauty makes so little instantaneous appeal, and where there is no playground of romance, and few ghosts of poetry and of history.
turgeniev’s descriptions of the country give an idea of this peculiar magic. for instance, the story of the summer night, when on the plain the children tell each other bogy tales; or the description of that other july evening, when out of the twilight, a long way off on the plain, a child’s voice is heard calling: “antropka—a—a,” and antropka answers: “wha—a—a—a—a—at?” and far away out of the immensity comes the answering voice: “come ho—ome, because daddy wants to whip you.”
those who travel in their arm-chair will meet in turgeniev with glimpses, episodes, pictures, incidents, sayings and doings, touches of human nature, phases of landscape, shades of atmosphere, which contain the secret and the charm of russia. all who have travelled in russia not only recognise the truth of his pictures, but agree that the incidents which he records with incomparable art are a common experience to those who have eyes to see. the picturesque peculiar to countries rich in historical traditions is absent in russia; but beauty is not absent, and it is often all the more striking from its lack of obviousness.
this was brought home to me strongly in the summer of 1913. i was staying in a small wooden house in central russia, not far from a railway, but isolated from other houses, and at a fair distance from a village. the harvest was nearly done. the heat was sweltering. the country was parched[432] and dry. the walls and ceilings were black with flies. one had no wish to venture out of doors until the evening.
the small garden of the house, gay with asters and sweet-peas, was surrounded by birch trees, with here and there a fir tree in their midst. opposite the little house, a broad pathway, flanked on each side by a row of tall birch trees, led to the margin of the garden, which ended in a steep grass slope, and a valley, or a wooded dip; and beyond it, on the same level as the garden, there was a pathway half hidden by trees; so that from the house, if you looked straight in front of you, you saw a broad path, with birch trees on each side of it, forming a proscenium for a wooded distance; and if anybody walked along the pathway on the farther side of the dip, although you saw no road, you could see the figures in outline against the sky, as though they were walking across the back of a stage.
just as the cool of the evening began to fall, out of the distance came a rhythmical song, ending on a note that seemed to last for ever, piercingly clear and clean. the music came a little nearer, and one could distinguish first a solo chanting a phrase, and then a chorus taking it up, and finally, solo and chorus became one, and reached a climax on a high note, which grew purer and stronger, and more and more long drawn-out, without any seeming effort, until it died away.
the tone of the voices was so high, so pure, and at the same time so peculiar, strong and rare, that it was difficult at first to tell whether the voices were tenors, sopranos, or boyish trebles. they were unlike, both in range and quality, the voices of women one usually heard in russian villages. the music drew nearer, and it filled the air with a majestic calm. presently, in the distance, beyond the dip between the trees, and in the middle of the natural stage made by the garden, i saw, against the sky, figures of women walking slowly in the sunset, and singing as they walked, carrying their scythes and their wooden rakes with them; and once again the phrase began and was repeated by the chorus; and once again chorus and solo melted together in a high and long-drawn-out note, which seemed to swell like the sound of a clarion, to grow purer, more single, stronger and fuller, till it ended suddenly, sharply, as a frieze ends. the song seemed to proclaim rest after toil, and satisfaction for labour[433] accomplished. it was like a hymn of praise, a broad benediction, a grace sung for the end of the day: the end of the summer, the end of the harvest. it expressed the spirit of the breathless august evening.
the women walked past slowly and disappeared into the trees once more. the glimpse lasted only a moment, but it was enough to start a long train of thought and to call up pictures of rites, ritual, and custom; of rustic worship and rural festival, of pagan ceremonies older than the gods.
as another verse of what sounded like a primeval harvest hymn began, the brief glimpse of the reapers, erect and majestic in the dress of toil, and laden with the instruments of the harvest, the high quality of the singing:
“the undisturbed song of pure concent,”
made the place into a temple of august and sacred calm in the quiet light of the evening. the sacerdotal figures that passed by, diminutive in the distance, belonged to an archaic vase or frieze. the music seemed to seal a sacrament, to be the initiation into an immemorial secret, into some remote mystery—who knows?—perhaps the mystery of eleusis, or into still older secrecies of which eleusis was the far-distant offspring. a window had been opened on to another phase of time, on to another and a brighter world; older than virgil, older than romulus, older than demeter—a world where the spring, the summer, and the autumn, harvest-time, and sowing, the gathering of fruits and the vintage, were the gods; and through this window came a gleam from the golden age, a breath from the morning and the springtide of mankind.
when i say that the singing called up thoughts of greece, the thing is less fantastic than it seems. in the first place, in the songs of the russian peasants, the greek modes are still in use: the dorian, the hypo-dorian, the lydian, the hypo-phrygian. “la musique, telle qu’elle était pratiquée en russie au moyen age” (writes m. soubier in his history of russian music), “tenait à la tradition des religions et des m?urs pa?ennes.” and in the secular as well as in the ecclesiastical music of russia there is an element of influence which is purely hellenic. it turned out that the particular singers i heard on that evening were not local, but a guild of women reapers who had come from the government of tula to work[434] during the harvest. their singing, although the form and kind of song were familiar to me, was different in quality from any that i had heard before; and the impression made by it unforgettable.
nature in russia is, broadly speaking, monotonous and uniform, but this does not mean that beauty is rare. not only magic moments occur in the most unpromising surroundings, but beauty is to be found in russian nature and russian landscape at all times and all seasons in many shapes.
for instance: a long drive in the evening twilight at harvest-time, over the immense hedgeless rolling plains, through stretches of golden wheat and rye, variegated with millet, still green and not yet turned to the bronze colour it takes later; when you drive for miles over monotonous and yet ever-varying fields, and when you see, in the distance, the cranes, settling for a moment, and then flying off into space.
later in the twilight, continents of dove-coloured clouds float in the east, the west is tinged with the dusty afterglow of the sunset; and the half-reaped corn and the spaces of stubble are burnished and glow in the heat; and smouldering fires of weeds burn here and there; and as you reach a homestead, you will perhaps see by the threshing-machine, a crowd of dark men and women still at their work; and in the glow from the flame of a wooden fire, in the shadow of the dusk, the smoke of the engine and the dust of the chaff, they have a rembrandt-like power; the feeling of space, breadth, and air and immensity grows upon one; the earth seems to grow larger, the sky to grow deeper, and the spirit is lifted, stretched, and magnified.
russian poets have celebrated more frequently the spring and winter—the brief spring which arrives so suddenly after the melting of the snows, with the intense green of the birch-trees, the uncrumpling fern; woods carpeted with lilies of the valley; the lilac bushes, the nightingale, and later the briar, which flowers in profusion; and the winter: the long drives in a sledge under a leaden sky to the tinkle of monotonous bells; a whistling blizzard with its demons, that lead the horses astray in the night; transparent woods black against an immense whiteness; or covered with snow and frozen, an enchanted fabric against the stainless blue; or, when after a night of thaw, the brown branches emerge once more covered with airy threads and sparkling drops of dew.
[435]
the sunset and twilight of the winter evening after the first snow had fallen in december used to be most beautiful. the new moon, like a little sail on a cold sea, tinged with a blush as it reached the earth, flooded the snow with light, and added to its purity; the snow had a blue glint in it and showed up the wooden houses, the red roofs, the farm implements in a bold relief; so that all these prosaic objects of everyday life assumed a strange largeness and darkness as they loomed between the earth and the sky.
what i used to enjoy more than anything in russia were the summer afternoons on the river near sosnofka, where the flat banks were covered with oak-trees, ash, willow, and thick undergrowth; and where every now and then, perch rose to the surface to catch flies, and the kingfishers skimmed over the surface from reach to reach. sometimes i used to take a boat and row past islands of rushes, and a network of water-lilies, to where the river broadened; and i reached a great sheet of water flanked by a weir and a mill. the trees were reflected in the glassy surface, and nothing broke the stillness but the grumbling of the mill and the cries of the children bathing.
near the village, all through the summer night (this was in june 1914), i used to hear song answering song, and the brisk rhythm of the accordion; or the interminable humming, buzzing burden of the three-stringed balalaika; verse succeeded verse of an apparently tireless song, and the end of each verse seemed to beget another and give a keener zest to the next; and the song waxed faster and madder, as if the singer were intoxicated by the sound of his own music.
but the peculiar manifestations of the beauty of nature in a flat and uniform country are not enough to account for the fascination of russia. beauty is a part of it, but it is not all. against these things in the other scale you had to put dirt, squalor, misery, slovenliness, disorder, and the uninspiring wooden provincial towns, the dusty or sodden roads, the frequent grey skies, the long and heavy sameness.
the advocatus diaboli had a strong case. he could have drawn up a powerful indictment, not only against the political conditions, and the arbitrary and uncertain administration, but also against the character of the people; he could mention the moral laxity, the extravagant self-indulgence, the lack of control, the jealousy which hounded any kind of superiority; and[436] looked with suspicion on all that was original or distinguished; the dead level of mediocrity; the stereotyped bureaucratic pattern which you could not escape from. the russians, he would say, had all the faults of the orient without any of its austerer virtues; russia, he would say, was a nation of ineffectual rebels under the direction of a band of corrupt and time-serving officials. the indictment was true, but however glaring the faults which russian moralists, satirists, and politicians used so frequently and so loudly to deplore, the faults that used to make foreigners in russia so angry at times, they seemed to me the negative results of positive qualities so valuable as to outweigh them altogether.
during my stays in russia i saw some of the worst as well as some of the best aspects of the country and its people. the net result of all i saw and all i experienced was the sense of an overpowering charm in the country, an indescribable fascination in the people. the charm was partly due to the country itself, partly to the manner of life lived there, and partly to the nature of the people. the qualities that did exist, and whose benefit i experienced, seemed to me the most precious of all qualities; the virtues the most important of all virtues; the glimpses of beauty the rarest in kind; the songs and the music the most haunting and most heart-searching; the poetry nearest to nature and man; the human charity nearest to god.
this is perhaps the secret of the whole matter, that the russian soul is filled with a human christian charity which is warmer in kind and intenser in degree, and expressed with a greater simplicity and sincerity, than is to be met with in any other people; it was the existence of this quality behind everything else which gave charm to russian life (however squalid the circumstances might be), poignancy to its music, sincerity and simplicity to its religion, manners, intercourse, music, singing, verse, art, acting—in a word to its art, its life, and its faith.
never did i realise this so much as one day when i was driving on a cold and damp december evening in st. petersburg in a cab. it was dark, and i was driving along the quays from one end of the town to the other. for a long time i drove in silence, but after a while i happened to make some remark to the cabman about the weather. he answered gloomily[437] that the weather was bad and so was everything else too. for some time we drove on in silence, and then in answer to some other stray remark or question of mine he said he had been unlucky that day in the matter of a fine. it was a trivial point, but somehow or other my interest was aroused, and i got him to tell me the story, which was a case of bad luck and nothing serious; but when he had told it, he gave such a profound sigh that i asked whether it was that which was still weighing upon him. then he said “no,” and slowly began to tell me a story of a great catastrophe which had just befallen him. he possessed a little land, and a cottage in the country, not far from st. petersburg. his house had been burnt. it was true the house was insured, but the insurance was not sufficient to make an appreciable difference. he had two sons; one went to school, and the other had some employment in the provinces. the catastrophe of the fire had upset everything. all his belongings had perished. he could no longer send his boy to school. his second son, in the country, had written to say he was engaged to be married, and had asked his consent, advice, and approval. “he has written twice,” said the cabman, “and i keep silence (i ya molchu). what can i answer?” i cannot give any idea of the strength, simplicity, and poignancy of the tale as it came, hammered out slowly, with pauses between each sentence, with a dignity of utterance and a purity of idiom which used to be the precious privilege of the poor in russia. the words came as if torn out from the bottom of his heart. he made no complaint; there was no grievance, no whine in the story. he stated the bald facts with a simplicity which was overwhelming. in spite of all, his faith in god and his consent to the will of providence was unshaken, certain, and sublime.
this happened in 1911. i have forgotten the details; but i knew i had been face to face with a human soul, stripped and naked, and a human soul in the grip of a tragedy. this experience, which brought one in touch with the divine, is one which, i think, could only in such circumstances occur in russia. i wrote this in the year 1913 when i was summing up my impressions on russian life, and trying to analyse the nature of the fascination the country had for me. when i had finished, i echoed the words which r. l. stevenson once[438] addressed to a french novelist: “j’ai beau admirer les autres de toute ma force, c’est avec vous que je me complais à vivre.”
in the spring of 1914 i went back to russia for the last time before the war. i spent over a month by myself at sosnofka, writing a book, an outline of russian literature, and bathing every afternoon in the river where the sweetbriar grew on the banks by the willows, and the kingfisher used every now and then to dart across the oily-looking water.
it was a wonderful spring. the nightingales sang all day long in the garden; and all night long people were singing in the village. nature was steeped in beauty and calm. it was a month of accidental retreat before tremendous events and the changing of the world.
i knew nothing of public events, but i was suddenly seized with the desire to go home. i debated whether to go or not. i had finished my book, but as i meant to come back to russia in august it seemed perhaps foolish to go. i thought i would leave it to chance. i decided to take the sortes shakespearian?. i opened a volume at random, and my pencil fell on the phrase: “pack and be gone” (comedy of errors, iii. 2, 158). i waited another day and repeated the experiment. my pencil again fell on the same line. then i settled to go. i started one evening, and in the morning when i arrived at the friedrichsstrasse station at berlin, i saw in the newspapers the news of the assassination of the austrian archduke. i might have said: “incipit vita nova,” but i didn’t. i didn’t even think it. i was merely conscious of a small cloud on an otherwise stainless sky.