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.
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.
But they who go out at the western gate take their chance of strange destiny. They are cast off from Russia and from that understanding of life that Russia breathes. They go to be the most unfortunate class in America, the simplest and therefore the most exploited; they go to do work fitted better to black slaves; their young women, though they do not know it, are often already sold into infamy whilst they breathe the “air of freedom” on the steamer; and often the men, contracted in gangs to the Argentine and Brazil to work on railways and plantations, are simply living merchandise for which the labour agent who engages them receives a substantial premium. They go to work as Russians never worked before, and to receive double the wages they would get in Russia, and then to realise that money buys little or no extra happiness. Or they go to settle on the land and form a Russian community, as the Dukhobors have done in Canada, the Molokans in California, the Adventists in the Dakotas and in the backwoods of America, to forget that they are not in Russia, to be as much in debt to the agricultural machine manufacturers as they were in arrears in the payment of rent and taxes in the old country, to perish of starvation in lean years, to be persecuted by educational and sanitary officials, and to be spurred on once more to seek a happier country. Others are destined to enter the choir-dance of the races with Jew and German and English and Irish, marrying the foreigner and merging the European in the new type—the coming American.
At Odessa, the southern gate of Russia, the pilgrims are embarking for Mount Athos and Palestine a thousand at a time, an unexpected delivery of bowed and aged men and women out of the depths of Russia. There you may see another of the continual movements of the people of Russia, an astonishing procession this to those who are absorbed in the commercial life of Russia, to those Jews and exiled Russians who write to the English papers that the outward signs of Russian religion are “the mummery of the Holy Synod.” At Odessa, and indeed on all the roads of Russia, there are many thousands of pious Russians, pack on back, staff in hand, on their way to the monasteries and holy places, to the sepulchre, to Kief, to the Hermitage of Father Seraphim, to New Athos, to many a little wayside shrine and monastery that only has its ten pilgrims where the great ones have their hundreds and their housefuls.
It has been said that with an Englishman the conversation always, sooner or later, turns to sport, with a Frenchman to woman, and with a Russian to the subject of Russia.
This is true of the educated classes of society; but the peasants do not talk of these things so much—the peasants’ talk nearly always turns to God and religion. The Russians are always en route for some place where they may find out something about God, and if there is a particularly animated conversation in the hostelry of a monastery, a third-class carriage, or a tea-shop or Russian public-house (traktir), it is almost always sure to be about religion.
The modern evangelical movement may almost be said to have had its birth in the famous but filthy public house, “Yama,” where originally over vodka and beer, and later more commonly over tea, the question of salvation was continually mooted. In the third-class carriage you will occasionally come across an old man who reads an antique Bible through iron-rimmed spectacles. He has heard that a new sect has been formed by some peasants in some remote village, and is off to discover “whether they have found anything.”
Then what of those who march in chains from prison to prison on the road? Often I have stopped my writing on a bright summer morning to listen to an appalling sound—the clank, clank, clank of fifty or sixty men in fetters—and I have looked out at a procession of unfortunate Russians, dust from head to foot, the sun flashing on the bright steel links on their legs and their bodies. They also belonged to the road. They move us to the depths of sorrow or to hoarse anarchy; but they are of the road. Their vague shuffled footmarks are the writing of the finger in the dust. They are symbolical. We also walk as they. Listen with “the third ear,” and you will hear the clangour of our chains as we tramp—
The world is like a theatre, is it not? The theatre should reflect the world and touch man to a remembrance of his mystery. He comes into it to be stirred by pity and fear, not simply to be amused between dinner and sleep. He comes into it as to a Communion Service, not merely to receive, but to partake. Such a theatre is the world, with its marches and processions, its lively and its heavy measures, its sacrifices, its words of ancient wisdom from the lips of priests, words of prophecy from oracles, the joyful choruses and jubilations, its sympathies and choruses of sadness, its ramified manifold movements and counter-movements. Most moving of all is the procession to the altar and the songs we sing carrying our emblems.
“Having been at home in many realms of the spirit,” it is good to realise this theatre in the heart. Having a personal knowledge of the road to Jerusalem and to America, and of the pilgrims and tramps on the various roads of Russia, having even been marched six days along the road under arrest on one occasion, it is good to realise all that is happening at one and the same time in Russia—the flocking to Jerusalem and to America, the trickling into Siberia and Mongolia and Turkestan and Persia, the tramping to the monasteries to find God, the tramping to cities and factories to get work, the third-class carriages of the trains crammed with people, the uproarious taverns where is all manner of exchange of rude ideas, the beautiful churches alight with candles and paintings, the little theatres and cinema shows as crammed as the churches, the bazaars and fairs, the prisons, the poor prisoners on the road clanking their chains.
Every common sight is charged with significance. This is the source of the Russian spirit and the genius of Russian literature and fine art. Thus, for instance, when you mention “smoke” to a Westerner he at once thinks of factory smoke and that which pains the eyes or darkens heaven. But to the Russian smoke is always
the smoke of the sacrifice, the smoke of our lives—the sighs and regrets and fears and aspirations of men and women, our crooked smokes, which, in the language of Shakespeare, mount upwards to the gods.
In such an atmosphere Russians can forget personal anger when looking at the chains on their convicts, and they can see in those chains emblems of human destiny. There is in Russia a whole beautiful sad literature about chains and fetters. Hermits and holy men have even taken to wearing chains voluntarily as one of their rites of world-negation. Dostoieffsky could find Siberia, after personal experience, to be the supreme place for the understanding of the world.
We are encompassed about by mystery. Every common sight is a rune, a letter of the Divine alphabet written upon all earthly things. Man’s heart is a temple with many altars, and it is dark to start with, and strange. But it is possible with every ordinary impression of life to light a candle in that church till it is ablaze with lights like the sky. That is the functions of ordinary sights—to be candles.
So the night of ignorance is lit up with countless stars. It is not less night but more, more beautiful—
At those places on the road where springs gush from the rocks the peasants have chalked the face of Jesus, so that the water seems to pour from His mouth. At these springs stop the pilgrims, the emigrants, the wayfarers, even the poor prisoners and their guards. That is one of the visions of Holy Russia.
Moscow, March 1914.
In a sense the tavern is also a theatre or a church. It is a place of life.
“I am glad you’ve come,” said a friend to me. “Keep your ears open; this is the very bottom; everything springs from here. This is the changing-house of the ideas of the common people.”
There is no “bar,” in the English sense. On the long wooden counter are bottles and glasses, and plates of sausage and ham. But you do not lounge there and gossip over your glass. The Russian public-house is all tables and chairs, like the accommodation for a smoking concert. But such dirty chairs and tables!
You sit down; you are attended by a waiter. There is an army of waiters serving for 30s. a month and no tips. They are in white blouses, white trousers, and white aprons, and they look as if they had strayed into the filthy hall in their night attire. On one wall is a square candle-lantern with the word TRAKTIR printed on it in decayed brown; on another wall is an immense gilt ikon. The doors creak heavily to and fro, admitting customers unreadily—how unlike the little swing doors of the American saloons, so easy to open that you may slip in as it were by accident. At almost all the tables are working-men and women drinking tea, vodka, or beer, talking loudly.[4] There are many cabmen in their round fur hats and voluminous blue cloaks; many market-women in their cottons, with soiled coloured kerchiefs on their heads. You see twenty people drinking tea to one drinking vodka—they pour the tea into the saucers, hold the saucers to their hairy mouths, and guzzle at the gratifying golden drink. But if you look about you will notice vodka-drinkers, some asleep, with their unkempt heads on the table (looking like tramps asleep in a free library); you see also men with red cheeks and fiery eyes not yet overcome by liquor, but ready to bawl and make a scandal at the least provocation. The atmosphere is heavy with the smoke of the vilest tobacco in the world (makhorka). A blind musician is playing the concertina, several people are singing, hawkers with pies, with Bibles, with shirts, with pencils, with old clothes, are going from table to table offering their wares. There is tremendous bargaining and long-drawn-out haggling on the part of people who, it would seem, do not really intend to buy, even at the last. There are beggars, cripples, blind men, dwarfs, asking for alms in the name of Christ. There are drunken hooligans trying to get drinks for nothing. There are antediluvian pilgrims hundreds of miles from home, not going to a shrine, but collecting coppers throughout all Russia for the building of a new church in their far-away native villages. You may even see upon occasion a peasant carrying a great church bell. You ask him why. He tells you the church of his village was by the will of God destroyed by a fire, and that only the bell remains, and he is collecting alms to build a new church and hang up the bell again.
Throughout the whole tavern all day and almost all night is a clamour of talking and an animated scene of gesticulating, unwashed, ragged men and women. Almost all the small business of hawkers, stall-keepers, and little traders is accomplished over vodka or tea in the traktir, but indeed the successful, even the millionaire, peasant merchant will step without a ruffle of dignity into the most miserable tavern of the city, and not be too proud to answer the taunts or questions of ragamuffins. That is part of Russia’s strength.
Then, the home is not all-absorbing in Russia, and even the poorest people like to spend the whole evening in the tavern drinking tea, talking, talking, talking. No one would reproach a Russian for lingering thus away from his wife and little ones. Not much money is spent, man for man. In three or four hours it often happens that a man spends no more than five copecks (a penny farthing), and has only purchased a little teapot of tea and a big teapot of hot water, the tavern’s substitute for the samovar.
Kuprin tells the tale of a tavern in Odessa famous for one of its ragged musicians, Sasha. He filled the public-house with the strains of the violin, and every night the place was packed with men and women. Every table was occupied, there was tea or beer or vodka everywhere, all the men were smoking makhorka, the windows were all shut, and the air was of that warm, dense, suffocating character that the Russian people like. A din as of Babel pervaded the hall, and no one except those near the music could hear Sasha’s tunes, yet every one felt that they were hearing.
Sasha would come in in the early hours of the evening, when people were few, would take his first mug of beer and then begin to play, mournfully, melancholily. His were sad, heart-aching tunes, full, as it were, of a world’s sorrow. He sat in his accustomed place and brooded over his violin, seemingly uninterested in everything but the soul of music.
The windows of the tavern were crusted with ice or clouded with steam, and the shadows of men and women passed incessantly, some lingering, some hurrying. But Sasha did not heed them, nor notice how many came in at the dark and dirty doorway from the street. Only when there got to be a crowd he began to put aside his own repertory of songs, and take up those that were suggested by the customers, that were shouted in his ear—
“Sasha, play Maroosia.”
“Sasha, play The Nightingale, play Spring has passed by.”
Then, till the small hours of the morning, he would play what people wanted him to—sad songs, gay songs, marches, dances, country measures—dances, dances, dances, every dance in Russia he played, and the tables were crushed back and a space made and the people danced.
Every night, every week, every month Sasha was there, and the crowd and the music and the air thick with makhorka smoke. Not that the nights were always the same. Events in the town, in Russia, had their echoes there. In the time of the South African War Sasha played twenty times a night the March of the Boers. During the festivities of the Franco-Russian Alliance he played the Marseillaise, which was fearfully popular with the dock-labourers. When the Japanese War broke out he played all those sad tunes about far Manchuria and fighting in a strange land.
Alas, the Japanese War made a great change in the tavern. Sasha was taken for a soldier and disappeared from ken. For a year and a half no word was heard from him or of him. He was given up for dead, and the tavern lost its old attraction. At last, however, one night in came Sasha, the same as ever, unhurt, untouched. He had been captured by the Japanese and held a year as a prisoner at Nagasaki. He had learned Japanese music. Not that anybody wanted it.
“Play us the old tunes, Sasha; play Maroosia, play To Odessa we sailed on the sea.” Sasha played that night all the old tunes.
The tavern became as of old.
But there was storm in the air. Every one was talking of revolution. Sasha began to play the Marseillaise again, and now with a different note from that in which he had played when friendship with France was being honoured. In came the police and stopped him. They forbade the playing of any Anthems whatsoever.
There was a pogrom in the town; hired ruffians appeared in the streets inciting the population to the murder of the Jews. Not once or twice Sasha himself was taken for a Jew and attacked.
Into the tavern came the same ruffians, and tried to stir up the drunkards to pillage and violence. Sasha was playing a tune of his own fancy when suddenly one of them, a converted Jew, jumped up and cried:
“The National Anthem! Brothers, the National Anthem in honour of our adored monarch. The National Anthem!”
“Anthem, Anthem,” cried his mates.
“No Anthems whatsoever,” said Sasha, repeating the words of the police-officer.
“What do you mean, you don’t obey, you filthy Jew?” answered the man.
“And you?” said Sasha.
“I? What do you mean?”
“I’m a filthy Jew. All right, what are you?”
“I’m Orthodox.”
“Orthodox! And for how much?”
The whole tavern laughed.
“Brothers,” said the ruffian, “shall we stand the blasphemy of this Jew against Throne and Church any longer?...”
There was a rush at Sasha. But he jumped up, and lifting his fiddle in a rage, smashed it on the head of the first who came up to him.
So Sasha was arrested as a revolutionary, and once more he disappeared. This time every one thought he had gone for ever. It would have seemed proper to wear mourning for him. The tavern changed in atmosphere. In Sasha’s place came another musician, one of those who had sat and listened to him in the old days and learned of him. One night, however, when they were playing the old tunes and the violin was gently crooning the song Expectancy, a voice from somewhere cried out nervously:
“Brothers, Sasha!”
All turned, and there stood the twice-raised Sasha, bearded, gaunt, and pallid. The people flocked around him and cried to him and called on him to play. But the same nervous, frightened voice cried out again:—
“His arm!”
All grew silent. Sasha’s left arm hung broken and twisted and nerveless from his shoulder.
“What is it, brother?” asked one.
“Muscle dried up, that’s all,” he answered.
“So—o.”
“Then that’s an end to Chaban,” said one of the crowd, referring to one of the most popular dances that Sasha played.
But Sasha took out of his pocket with his right hand a queer black wooden instrument which he had either made in prison or had had given to him, and he put it to his lips and began to play.
Then every one began to dance, and Sasha sat in his place, and all was as before. As Kuprin says at the conclusion of his tale, “Man is for Life, but Art is For Ever.”[5]
Such is the orgy unrehearsed. So a tavern can be a popular theatre. It can also be a church, a place of searching after God. In England you sit down in church but stand in the public-house; in Russia you stand in the church but sit in the tavern; it humanises it, makes it more like a home, makes it possible for the tavern to be upon occasion a kind of church.
It is a great national assembly-place.
In Russia you are not allowed to hold a public meeting without the special authorisation of the police and the presence of a police-officer. But in the tavern is a great informal accidental meeting; and a great deal is enacted there that the police have no power to stop. Thus, for instance, in recent years several sects have used the tavern as the place for their prayer meetings, and have had something equivalent to a Salvation Army gathering, not “round the corner,” but actually inside the public-house itself. The religious conspirators have come as it were accidentally, one by one, have ordered their tea, and have started an animated conversation into which, sooner or later, the whole houseful was drawn.
The most famous public-house in Moscow is the “Yama” (The Pit), in the street called Rozhdestvensky, a public-house which Tolstoy much wanted to visit, a tavern frequented not only by the common people but by scholars and seekers, especially by those who style themselves Bogoiskateli, seekers after God. Here appeared at times such well-known Russians as Solovyov, Bulgakof, Chertkof, Velikanof—it was the last who asked me to the “Yama,” and through whom I was able to hear a multifarious collection of the common people discuss religion and Russia and ghosts and the eternal questions.
From the “Yama” have sprung several interesting sects, for example, the Bezsmertniki, or deathless ones. Their doctrines, promulgated by a wretched consumptive who had both feet in the grave, was that it was possible to escape death. He held that health was faith in life, and that disease was faith in death. Death came simply from lack of faith. There were people living eternally but we did not know where to find them. The Bezsmertniki make pilgrimages to the East to seek those who have been living for ages. Alas! the founder died before the eyes of his followers. “He lacked faith,” said they, and the new religion continued. One of the most ardent of them is a frequent visitor of the “Yama,” Alexey Yegorovitch, a stocking-hawker.
So much trouble came from the discussions in the “Yama” that the public-house was closed by the Government. But as in the case of Sasha, so in the case of the “Yama” and the God-seekers. You can kill or mutilate the body, but you cannot kill the soul, the thing in itself. The “Yama,” crushed in one tavern, broke out in another.
I visited the “Yama” one Sunday. It was resuscitated in the “Bay” public-house in Malo-Golovinskaya by the Candlemas Gate. We sat down in the tavern at 12 o’clock, and over two glasses of tea talked for six hours and a half—our only other sustenance being occasional hot cabbage pies brought to us in trayfuls by a little serving-boy from the kitchen. The tavern swarmed with religious characters, home missionaries, propagandists, Bible-hawkers. There was a strong detachment of Old Believers; an old Baptist hawker of women’s hose; many stall-keepers from Sukareva Market; Velikanof, a friend of Pereplotchikof; Victor Karlovitch, greasy and fat, who believes in evil spirits and feels attracted to Theosophy.
The talk went on evil spirits and was enlivened by many stories. A mad woman had been taken to the New Jerusalem monastery near Moscow, and had had a fit in church. After the fit she was found to be in her right mind, and it was said that the unclean spirit had been caught as it came out of her, and was now preserved in a jar of spirit and exhibited to pilgrims as one of the sights of the monastery. Were there evil spirits or were there not? Was it not said that they passed out of Legion into the swine? Did not the devils cry from the bodies of the insane, giving witness to Christ as He passed them by?
Velikanof told an amusing story of two peasants and a steam-engine. One of them held that it was an unclean spirit that made the engine go foward; the other said it was just steam, no more, he knew.
“It is an unclean spirit,” the former repeated; “I’ll bet it is an unclean spirit.”
“How will you prove that it is?”
“I’ll bet you a quarter the engine won’t be able to pass the ikon of Mikhail the Ugodnik.”
“Very well; done!”
The ikon was brought to the railway lines. Presently thrum, thrum, thrum, the post-train left the village railway station. The first peasant stood himself on the lines and held the ikon in front of him with both hands. The other stood by and watched. The train came on, but when the engine-driver saw the peasant barring the way and apparently flagging the train, he brought his machine to a standstill and cried out to know what was the matter.
“You see,” said the peasant, “the engine dare not pass the ikon. The quarter is mine; let’s go and have a drink.”
Another visitor to the tavern told a sort of Ingoldsby legend of a ten-pound black cat whose favourite way of entering a house was by coming down the chimney. Another, a peasant workman, made the astonishing statement that if you make a candle from human fat and light it you can see all.
A long discussion was started on the difference between a man and an animal. The sole criterion set by Christ was, “By your fruits are ye known.” A man is he who can sacrifice his life to an ideal. An animal hungers and at once looks about to satisfy his hunger. But upon occasion a man says to his hunger, “No, I shall fast.” A man feels blessed when he suffers for conscience sake, but no animal feels blessed through suffering.
A contrast was drawn between Napoleon and Christ. Christ was offered the empire and crown of the world and knew that in Himself He had the power to take it, but He preferred to deny the world. In that He showed Himself the highest type of man. They of the world nailed Him upon the Cross and cried up to Him, “Save yourself.” He could have saved Himself, but He did not. He preferred to deny life. But Napoleon on the mountain fell down and worshipped Satan, and took for his portion the empire of the world. Napoleon was an animal taking what his stomach whispered to him.
The conversation went on—Russia’s great destiny was to carry the banner of the ideal, to sacrifice the material ends of life for the mystical. “Directly you make a step nearer to God you become aware of contradictions in terms in the life you see about you; when you get really near to God you enter into such a maze of contradictions and paradoxes that it is almost too much for the human brain,” said Velikanof, quoting from a book that was being widely discussed in Russia, The Pillar and the Foundation of Truth, by the priest Florensky. “It is for Russia to explore these contradictions and paradoxes.”
“Russia has long dwelt in these paradoxes,” said another. Russia offers to the world glorious paradoxes:—
“As a substitute for success it offers failure.
“As a substitute for fine clothes it offers rags; and for fine mansions it offers taverns and log-cabins.
“As a substitute for rich men it offers beggars.
“Instead of the march music of Progress it offers the choir dance of the Mystery.
“Instead of Progress itself it offers Communion.”
I told them my belief that Russia is the hope of Europe, that we are all looking to her, that she is the living East, the pole of mysticism, in opposition to America, the living West, the pole of materialism. This pleased the Bogoiskateli very much. They made quite sure it was not simply a compliment, and then one of them added:—
“Yes, Russia is the hope of Europe, and Moscow is the hope of Russia.” And another, an Old Believer, added to that:—
“And beyond the Preobrazhenskaya Zastava is the hope of Moscow”—it is there that the Old Believers have a vast and important settlement.
At half-past six the discussion broke up in the central part of the tavern and was left to be prolonged in separate groups. Perhaps later it again became general. I went out, and eight who accompanied me suggested that we go to another tavern two streets off and drink another glass of tea. This we did, and the talk went on and on as it goes on every day and hour in Russia, in every town or village—talk about God and the idea of Christ and suffering, of what is necessary and what not.
Russia is considered a country where speech is not free, and, indeed, listening to such meetings as ours there are often plain-clothes detectives. But the police could no more stop the mouths of the Russian people or the current of popular opinion than they could drain or hide the water of the ocean. In the monastery hostelry, in the third-class waiting-rooms, in third-class carriages, in the muddy and crowded market-square, in the tavern, the Russian is always to be found eagerly asking, seeking, informing, emphasising, making points of exclamation. All priests, policemen, post office officials, schoolmasters, squires, commercial travellers, and Russian-speaking foreigners will bear witness to how they have been pestered with simple Russians asking for an explanation of passages in the Bible, or asking questions about God. So Russia shows herself alive. Even the taverns, in which there is so much drunkenness and debauch, the Russians have made into something like free churches or open debating societies.