Nicholas Andrev met me at the Kremlin at 1 o’clock. Kameneff had placed
a car at our disposal for the afternoon. We went to several galleries,
beginning with the Kremlin. The palace of a Grand Duchess (opposite the
big bell) has been converted into a working people’s club. It was quite
clean and cared for, but only the Empire Swan furniture suggested it had
ever been a private habitation. We went downstairs to a private chapel,
painted in black and gold. This had been made into a modelling school,
and there were some very good things being done from life. The Spirit of
the Holy Ghost descending as a dove from above, and the golden rays of a
carved sun made a strange background. My bourgeois prejudice was just
for a moment shocked, until I remembered that in our own old fourteenth
century chapel at home Papa typewrites on the altar step. It has been
longer in disuse it is true, but still, one must be consistent. From
there we drove in the car to the house of Ostrouckof, who showed me his
room full of Ikons, one of which came out of St. Sofia. Some date back
to the fifth and sixth centuries. They were beautiful in design and
colour, and most interesting when he explained them to me. Downstairs he
had a modern motley collection. He showed us a Mattisse given to him by
Mattisse himself; it was a curious contrast after Ikons.
We drifted into some art schools, where soldiers and sailors were
working from life models, and the work they were doing was extremely
good. One of these schools was in the large house of a rich merchant.
The Soviet Government are pretty shrewd in the selection of houses for
various purposes. Although some of the big houses are
[Illustration: THE CHURCH OF SAINT BASIL AND THE RED SQUARE.
_p. 95._]
often given over for clubs or workplaces, only a really vulgar,
over-decorated house in impossibly bad taste is used for rough or dirty
work.
The exhibitions of proletarian art are very interesting, and deeply
imbued with the modern movement. There are crude drawings that show an
appreciation of form, and there is sculpture in wood that is often very
effective, and may lead to something good.
One of these exhibitions was in an exquisite house of beautiful
architecture that stood back from the street, in a garden that had run
to seed. The house had once belonged to the Princess Dolgorouki, but it
had passed into the hands of a Countess somebody, who had died. The
daughter _héritière_ had been turned out, but it was said that she was
still living in the basement. The ground floor consisted of a series of
small, beautifully proportioned rooms, with painted ceilings and carved
doors. One was a Chinese room and all were in exquisite taste. There
were some lovely Empire bronzes and old Dorée, and other objects of art.
The house seemed to be open to anyone who chose to come in. The old
cherry-satin upholstery of the French chairs was in limbo. I never felt
a place so small and full of ghosts. Perhaps, because it was so small,
it had the feeling of having been someone’s intimate home, not a
blatant place of entertaining.
As we wandered round a man joined us and, speaking to us in French,
asked if we were from France. His cap was drawn well over his eyes, and
the collar of his overcoat turned up over his ears. One could only see a
well-bred nose pinched with cold. He knew about the house and its
history, and which were the best bits of furniture. He was evidently a
cultured man, and but for the presence of Andrev, who always laughs at
me, I would have talked to him about himself. He was rather like a ghost
haunting a place he knew, and I imagine he was no Bolshevik, but one who
had known prosperous days.
I came away filled with sadness, and when Kameneff came to see me this
evening, I tried to tell him about it, and begged him to have the house
taken care of. He says that there is a committee that looks after all
the houses, but I think they have passed this one by.
Coming back from our wanderings we passed, in one of the squares, a
statue of Gogol, the Russian writer. I thought it a very fine piece of
work. Gogol, half wrapped in a cloak, looks down scrutinizingly in
bronze from his rough granite seat, and Andrev laughed at me for liking
it, and said that in Moscow it was scorned and had brought coals of
fire down on the artist’s head.
I was very surprised, and thought to myself that the standard of Russian
art must be very high: but in spite of this ridicule, I stuck to my
opinion. I even said that in London we had not a single statue as good
as that one. Later he admitted that he was the author of it.