day before the vessel arrived a man had died of it and Vassily
Vassilitch saw the funeral. It took place about midnight. From one of
the huts came the _klak_, _klak_, _klak_, of the nailing up of the
coffin. The coffin issued from the little village borne on a dog-drawn
hearse, then followed the priest in his gilded raiment, the frantic
widow, the mourners. “Holy God,” they sang, “Holy Strong One, Holy
Immortal,” and the dogs all whined and howled. In the bitter shadowy
night they bore the corpse away, over grey earth and rags of snow, far
away to the side of a black tumbling river, and the midnight sunshine
gleamed on all the snowy mountain peaks, catching the light from the
horizon where the sun seemed poised.
Vassily Vassilitch showed me a copy he had made of a diary kept by a
Russian peasant who had died of scurvy. Two Russian peasants settled on
a desolate part of the island to spend the winter and hunt. It was
somewhat pathetic that the man doomed to die should have had the idea of
keeping a log-book. The story tells much of Russian patience,
simplicity, tenderness, pluck. I only quote a few entries from the
diary:—
_November 30._—Bear came to door of hut and began to gnaw the
carcase that was there. Snatched my gun, but he saw me and was off
and I dare not follow in the dark.
_December 5._—Daylight was short. Hardly got a shot before it was
dark. Eve of the day of my angel. In the evening drank tea. Washed
my body at a basin for want of a bath. Changed my linen. Lighted
lamp before the ikon.
_February 1._—Cloudy and windy. Shot some seals. Had great
difficulty in bringing them home. We have colds. Northern lights.
_February 28._—Heavy weather. Both seriously ill. Extraordinary
pain. First the toes ache as if frozen, then it goes into the legs,
into the knees and muscles. Man must lie down. Over his whole body
and arms a rash breaks out.
In March the scurvy was too much for him; the diary is continued by the
hand of his mate, who writes on April 16:—
To-day Kulebakin (the former writer of the diary) was in pain and
delirium, but afterwards calmly and peacefully gave back his soul to
God. Weather cloudy to clear. No water. Dug the grave. All by myself
now. No one to talk to now. It is sad.
_April 21._—Lighted a candle and burnt incense over Kulebakin, and
then carried him to the grave. Bright and sunny day. No water.
_April 23._—The ice has cleared. Hung a torn shirt on the mountain
instead of a flag. I still wait on the chance of some one coming
from the settlement. It is very dreary. Pain in the legs. Walk with
difficulty. Need to gather strength against illness. Nothing to eat
but bread.
At this point the diary comes entirely to an end, and it might have
seemed the writer was dead, but a peasant came from the settlement,
rescued him, and carried him back, and he returned to Russia and
recovered. The astonishing thing is he came back again to Nova Zemlia,
and wintered and hunted, repeating the experiment. A tough fellow!
One of the sights of Nova Zemlia is the cemetery, with its tumbled and
broken crosses. The dead sleep there in the Russian faith even as they
sleep far away in tropical Turkestan and the pleasant borders of Persia.
Not only a nation stretching from West to East, these Russians, but
diving four or five thousand miles from North to South. How do they
support life in the Far North? They have to have their vodka there.[2]
There is a big supply of it on the ship for them. It will not, however,
be sold to them till all the business of fur-selling is accomplished and
the cargo brought on board, and the ship is ready to steam away. The
sale of vodka begins only after the second blast of the hooter. The day
after the boat leaves the island there is an orgy of drinking, and in a
short while all the vodka disappears and there ensue months of enforced
sobriety.
The island has a loving and striving priest who wrestles with the people
for their souls.
Vassily Vassilitch came upon him sobbing. There had been a case of
cheating on the island.
“I try to make them good men and women,” said the priest; “I pray for
them. I pray with them, and yet see how they cheat and drink and forget
all that they learn!”
Vassily Vassilitch went right round the island calling at the various
points where there were inhabitants, painting a little, talking to the
people. It is a wonderful island, a continuation of the Urals, very rich
in metals, very mountainous. There were no trees, however, and though
there were bright and beautiful flowers and birds and butterflies it was
ever bleak and wind-swept. There was not a mosquito or hornfly in the
island even in July.
Coming home the ship passed through a field of icebergs. Vassily
Vassilitch for the first time in his life saw a mirage. It gave him the
idea that all that he had seen on the island was really a mirage, a
dream, an insubstantial pageant; that life itself was such.
When he heard the last of the growling and snapping of the twelve or
fifteen bears tied up on deck and stepped off on to the pier and sat
once more in an Archangel _droshky_, clattering over the cobbles of the
muddy town, he felt indeed that all that he had seen and heard was
something folded and hidden away in the everyday, a wonderful,
fantastic, even absurd and improbable dream.
“Some time, perhaps, after we die and awake elsewhere, we shall look
back on life and say the same of it,” said he.
Footnote 2:
Before the vodka prohibition. How they get on now it would be
difficult to say.
IV
AT THE THEATRE
MOSCOW, _March 1914_.
At Moscow, at one of the meetings of the Religious and Philosophical
Society, I met Namirovitch Danchenko, the manager of the Theatre of Art,
and he invited me to see five or six pieces of the repertory. This gave
me great pleasure and interest.
An interesting figure in the stalls of the theatre on the first night I
was there was Maxim Gorky, who had unexpectedly returned after eight
years’ involuntary exile, and now was looking at the theatrical
presentation of Dostoieffsky’s novel, _The Possessed_, against which he
had been writing from abroad in such a way as to provoke all literate
Russia to discussion. His hair cut short, his black blouse put aside for
European jacket and waistcoat and collar, the tramp-author looked
somewhat shorn of the mystery of his personality. As he tripped quickly
past me, in one of the _entr’actes_, in his light evening boots it was
easy to think he used to be a more real character in _sapogi_. For the
rest, he did not look in bad health, was even a little flushed with
colour. But his face was nervous, self-conscious. I should say it is not
by any means the old Gorky that has returned.
There was considerable excitement in the theatre amongst those who knew
of the novelist’s presence, Moscow being crazy to welcome Gorky with
banquets and speeches and newspaper headlines, but being unable to do
so, because Gorky’s health will not stand excitement, and because he can
remain happily in Russia only on condition that he keeps quiet.
I was sitting next to M. Lakiardopulo, the secretary of the theatre.
“You know how he has been slating us,” whispered he to me. “There was a
time when on such an occasion Gorky would have stood up in his seat and
addressed the house, saying, ‘Why do you come to see such a thing? It is
no good; it is reactionary, and only helps to put back the progress of
Russia.’ But he is afraid to do it now. He is not sure of the Russia to
which he has returned.”
Around Gorky and the spirit of Dostoieffsky rage for the time being all
the questions of the hour in Russia—Apollo _versus_ Dionysus, Progress
and Westernism _versus_ Life understood as a religious orgy; Materialism
_versus_ Mysticism. How weak is the power of the West may be seen in the
guise of its champion—Gorky with his foot in his grave, Gorky, whose
wonderful literary gift Italy and Greece have withered.
But Gorky, frustrate as he seems, has effectually raised the question
and set Russia thinking and differentiating.
I have a strange, strange feeling about Moscow (says he), a mournful
feeling.... Were the Moscow streets and the Moscow people like this
before, or do I only remark it now because I have seen what it is
like in the West? There, in Italy, amidst the brilliance and
magnificence of Nature, in the magnificent chaos of cities buzzing
with automobiles, humming with factories, you feel at least that Man
is not losing himself; you feel he is the master, the centre. His
voice is full-sounding, it is ever in one’s ears, the voice of one
who is master of earth and master of his life. But in Moscow! On the
streets I feel the people are all voiceless. The pavements are
populous, lively, noisy; there are people of all kinds going to and
fro, but the actual human voice of mankind seems to be utterly
silent. The people are all gloomy, melancholy, above all, angry. The
women have widows’ faces.... Is it possible it was like this when I
was here before?
Gorky, despite his experience in what may be called the absolute
West—America[3]—has come back enchanted with the West. The idea accepted
in the revolutionary days that the West was good, the West was Russia’s
bright destiny providentially lighted before her for her to follow, has
died out almost unremarked. Gorky alone, all these eight years, has
nursed it, and he has been writing stories and dramas which fall flatter
and flatter on the ears of Russia. The Theatre of Art alone has refused
in turn each of his last eight plays! No wonder the faces seem to him
preoccupied.
He cannot understand why the Theatre of Art, in its working out of a new
life for the theatre in general, should take _The Brothers Karamazof_
and _Besi_ (_The Possessed_). Were there not new writers who would
breathe the new ideals and new hopes of Russia into the work of the
stage? Dostoieffsky was a genius, but in Gorky’s opinion an evil
genius—the evil genius—the evil genius of Russia which Russia must
overcome, an abscess on the Russian body. Dostoieffsky was profoundly
national, yes, but he expressed the Asiatic side of the Russian. “If
Russians give themselves up to Dostoieffsky they will become like
China,” said he. “In each of us sits a Dostoieffsky—we have to overcome
him.”
Well, the great fact of this month is that Gorky’s protest has had the
fullest publicity, and has been discussed at many hundred public
meetings and in numberless newspaper articles, and yet the great mass of
the people have supported the Theatre of Art and Dostoieffsky—even
although the performance of _The Possessed_ is but a poor experiment.
The difference between Eastern and Western literature may be aptly
contrasted. I read last summer in the letter of an American to an
English publisher something of this kind:—
Mr. So-and-So’s novel may be a success with you, but we shan’t be
able to do much with it over here as it ends on a note of failure;
the reader must be quite sure that the hero and heroine, whatever
troubles they may have at the beginning, are going to win through in
the end. Anything that ends on a curse or a suicide or hysteria is
almost sure to fall commercially dead over here.
Now the Russian considers failure and despair and cursing and suicide as
a glory, and success to be a reproach—the likely destiny of Jews or
earth-swallowers. America and the West prize the whole, the sound, the
substantial banking account, the ideal marriage, domestic bliss, correct
collars and ties, creases where they should be on the right sort of
attire, that glamour of materialism which Mr. Bennett so satisfactorily
renders in his descriptions of hotel apartments and the clothes of the
soulless. But Russia, even Gorky in his best days, prizes the barefooted
tramp, the consumptive and disease-stricken, the imbecile, the
improvident, the man who has no sense of the value of money, the
poverty-stricken student of Chekhof’s _Cherry Garden_ who can refuse
money, saying, “Offer me two hundred thousand, I wouldn’t take it. I am
a free man. And none of all that you value so highly is any use to me. I
can do without it on the way to higher truth.”
The grandeur of the West, Gorky’s “magnificent chaos of cities buzzing
with automobiles and humming with factories” only prevent, _tolko
meshait_, as Russians say so constantly. Man’s voice is loud because he
has to overcry noisy machines; it is loud also because, like a child, he
is wildly excited over his toys. It is unjustifiably loud.
But Gorky, like a fond savage, would give up broad lands and a fair
birthright for coloured beads and toys.
Round about _Besi_ rages also the question of the future of the theatre.
Moscow is likely to become the literary capital of Europe; it is already
the theatrical capital. Whatever it is working out is likely in time to
affect the whole stage of Europe.
Almost every one in Russian literature has contributed something towards
the question of the new development of the theatre. Strange to say, it
is a question of the theatre and the producer, not a question of the
dramatist. That is a starting-point.
The two fundamental ideas which are in contrast are again that of East
_versus_ West, Materialism _versus_ Mysticism. One party derives the
theatre from the puppet-show and the elaborated Punch and Judy show,
suggests a theatre of dolls or types, and above all things heralds “the
glorious cinema” as the womb of the theatre-to-be—that is the Western
notion of the theatre, a show to arrest passers-by, divert them and coax
coppers from them. The other party derives the theatre from the ancient
mystery, and requires that in the theatre of the future the audience
shall collaborate with those on the stage, the foot-lights shall be
disenchanted, there shall be mystical dancing and singing and horror and
exaltation—this is the Eastern notion.
The latter seems at first glance far removed from possible realisation
in the present, a dream of the impractical even romantic and absurd. But
when we remember that church and theatre were once one and the same, all
plays being holy, and that our Mass or Communion Service was in a sense
a survival of the Holy Mystery wherein not only the actors, _i.e._ the
priests and those who serve at the altar, took part but also the people
themselves, then it is seen to be not quite so remote.
The Shaw plays are remarkable examples of the developed Punch and Judy
show, where various bizarre dolls with funny faces reel off amusing
speeches, all of which are just audibly prompted by the man who holds
the strings. He tries to create the illusion that the dolls are flesh
and blood—for that reason he sometimes will have even a
doll-representation of himself on the stage, as in the case of Mr.
Tanner in _Man and Superman_. And if we are deceived for a moment or an
hour and the illusion succeeds and we discuss the acts of Punch and
Judy, and Judy’s mother, and the Counsel for the Prosecution, and Toby,
and the Judge, as if they were real people, yet when we get home we
reflect after all it was all Shaw—“awfully clever, very funny, but it
was the man behind the red curtain talking all the while; we must tell
so-and-so they ought to go.”
The Ibsen play is more or less a game of chess; again observe the
skilful moving of puppets on a board. His drama is specialised
intellectually. It is interesting to keen minds, but not diverting, not
so elementary as Shaw. _Peer Gynt_, however, is a mystery play, or could
be taken as such; there are parts in it not only for the prime actors
but for everybody in the theatre. The sad fact is that the theatre
audiences are heavy. They are not quite so heavy in Russia as in
England, for no one here considers his dinner as of any importance
beside being at the theatre; and indeed if you are not punctual at the
Theatre of Art you find the doors are closed and you cannot get in. But
all the same the people are heavy, clinging to their seats as if in them
they had found refuge. The moderns are not the Greeks. The minds and
souls of the modern Russians are at the disposal of the Hierophant of
the Mystery, but the bodies are more enslaved by gravity than lead. So,
in the near future at least, there can be no active collaboration
between audience and actors, no real disenchantment of that line of
lamps separating the stage from the world. Perhaps in time choruses will
be devised for audiences—even now in English music-halls where the
people sing the choruses of the popular songs there is a witness of the
possibility of the realisation of such an idea. Perhaps in time a part
of the public may take part in dances or may march with banners and
emblems, or opportunity may be given to public characters of the day to
make their exits and their entrances, and make speeches not to be found
in the books of words. But all this belongs to the thrice-interesting
future, not to the tantalising present moment.
All that the theatre is doing now is to put the dramatist in his place
and give scope to the producer and the Master of Ceremonies. The Theatre
of Art, the Moscow Free Theatre, and in London, as a beginning,
Granville Barker’s theatre, are all working for a new, large, vital
stage. In a sense it is futuristic work, for it takes no inspiration
from the past, unless from ancient Greece. It regards all the work of
the last few thousand years as makeshift. It will work out something
worthy of Man, something noble and enduring. Then again Man will have a
voice, and not that gay, confident, business cry to which Gorky has
fondly given his ear. And that brings me back to _Besi_ (_The
Possessed_), at which I was sitting with Gorky in front of me and the
genial secretary at my side.
_Besi_, or, as it is entitled in the programme, _Nikolai Stavrogin_, is
an example of the present work of the Theatre of Art. The theatre that
will produce _Pickwick Papers_ as a play and can set one of its own
staff to work out the libretto is not in need of dramatists at present.
_Nikolai Stavrogin_ was arranged by Namirovitch Danchenko, and it is a
presentment in some fifteen or twenty scenes of the vital portions of
Dostoieffsky’s novel. It assumes that the public has read the book and
knows it well, and so, subtly, makes the person sitting in his seat
collaborate, by supplying in his mind the missing links. The performance
commences at 8 P.M. and finishes about 12.30. All the while you are
considering failure—death to all Americans.
In the first scene, a very beautiful one, with little village church and
worshippers and beggars and lackeys, the bells are set a-ringing and you
open the doors of the temple of your soul and admit the whole Russian
world of the suffering. The stage becomes the forecourt of your heart,
and the many people in the mystery commune with your sympathies. It must
be said that from an English, even from a Celtic point of view, the
story is rather desperate, somewhat unredeemed; the dream-picture that
you see is rather the nightmare of some one who is too conscious of
being ill himself—the epileptic Dostoieffsky. Dostoieffsky’s physical
ills and personal down-heartedness are interesting in his biography, but
blemishes in his artistic work. All those long novels were written as
almost everlasting _feuilletons_, scribbled often while the printer’s
devil was waiting, or writhed into black and white in the still hours of
lonely poverty and feebleness, in dreary midnight hours in Petrograd. In
order to understand them truly you need Dostoieffsky himself somewhere
on the stage, or in the heart.
Footnote 3:
Gorky went to America to raise money to help the Revolutionary Party
in Russia, but was hounded out of the country as an immoral man. The
newspapers started a campaign against his private life, and despite
American sympathy for the cause of “liberty” he was forced to leave
the country. No hotel would take him in.
V
THE MOVEMENTS OF THE PEOPLES
MOSCOW, _March 1914_.
During the summer, in which I lived in a cottage in the Urals, there
passed my window an endless procession of weary tramps, not in flocks or
crowds, in hundreds or in fifties, but in twos and threes day by day. I
saw them on the highway stamping their weak boots and bruised feet in
the deep August dust, trudging forward patiently, patiently. They would
come to the door, untie the black kettle that dangled from the pack on
their shoulders, beg water to make tea, sit down to munch our
peasant-wife’s pastry, resting their ragged elbows on the unvarnished
table, holding a saucerful of hot tea in both hands, and sucking at it
and breathing over it in manifest appreciation and satisfaction.
I would ask one of them, “What are you, brother, a pilgrim?”
“No, brother, we seek land,” he would answer. “Where we live it is too
close—we live too near together; we are going to Siberia to get land.”
“And where do you come from?”
“From Tambovsky Government, from Penzensky, from Nizhegorodsky,” they
would answer. From all the more crowded parts of Central Russia. They
were _perecelentsi_, migratory Russians, children of the womb of
nations, the race ever pushing out from the centre, extending Russia to
the East and the South and the North.
Wherever you go to-day you find on the confines of the Empire, and
indeed beyond the confines, the wandering poverty-stricken
emigrant-tramp; in Siberia, in Russian Turkestan, in Mongolia, Persia,
Turkey. Anon he grows tired, or he finds his happy valley and settles
down, forming the nucleus of a new Russian colony, or adding to the
strength of one already existent. After him comes the Russian army,
claiming interests, and the Russian flag, claiming sovereignty or giving
protection; but it must always be remembered that the movement is first
of all natural, it is not merely aggressively imperial. It is not even
encouraged by the Government; thousands of the tramps die of privation
every year; thousands get thrown into prison for being, as is often the
case, _bez-passportny_ (without passports); the people they meet on the
way call them fools going from bad conditions to perhaps worse—but the
tramps go on. They say they seek a better land, but God alone knows what
they really seek, what they imagine they may see at the next turning of
the long long road.
If you stay at Chelyabinsk, the eastern gate of Russia, you may see
thousands of these wanderers. And it is interesting to compare their
type with those whom you see at Libava, the western gate of Russia.
Through Libava pass the greater number of those who are going to
America. Every ten days the Russo-Asiatsky Lloyd embarks a thousand or
two thousand emigrants, every week vessels sail for London and Hull
carrying Russians who have booked by the Cunard and the White Star and
other lines. From Russia there pass over to America more colonists than
from any other country in the world—upwards of 275,000 people every
year. A great number of these are Jews and Poles and Lithuanians. For
many years the number of actual Russians had been few; but in 1913 there
were of Russians alone more than of any other nationality in the world.
They are richer Russians these. They have money to show to the
inspectors at Ellis Island; they have trunks full of clothes. They could
not carry their burdens on their shoulders; they have come to the port
in trains. They are not melancholy and dusty and bearded like the
tramps, but bright-eyed, well dressed, so as to pass muster at the
inspection. They are making a bold bid for new life; they have had the
courage to pay for the new life with all the old; to take a jump in the
dark, and trust God. They do not belong eternally to the road; and they
are not carrying the cross on their backs, as are those melancholy
tramps of Siberia.
The Siberian emigrants stop at many factories and mines and do a few
days’ work, and are perchance shot down like dogs, at a place like the
Lena gold-washings, or they settle in a fever-stricken swamp and are
swept away by pestilence. But for the most part they come to no harm,
dying eventually of old age, full of memories, poverty-stricken all
their lives, and yet in a spiritual sense rich, confessing always that
they were strangers, seeking something better than that they were
leaving behind.