The World of Yesterday

by Stefan Zweig

  I passed the two weeks I spent in Soviet Russia in a constant state of heightened tension. I observed and listened; I marvelled at the country, I was repelled, fascinated, intrigued; my feelings swung between hot and cold. Moscow itself was a city of contradictions—here was magnificent Red Square with its great walls and onion domes, wonderfully Tatar and oriental, Byzantine, redolent of old Russia. Next door to it, like a foreign horde of American giants, stood ultra-modern high-rise buildings. Nothing quite went together—the old smoke-blackened icons and bejewelled altars of the saints drowsed only a hundred yards from Lenin’s corpse in his glass casket, clad in a black suit and freshly made up, whether in our honour or not I have no idea. Close to a few shiny new motor cars, bearded, dirty izvoshiks whipped their thin little horses on, clicking their tongues. The grand opera house where we writers spoke was a brilliant sight in the fine old Tsarist style, with a proletarian audience present, and crumbling buildings stood in the suburbs like grubby, desperate old men leaning against each other for support. Everything had been old, lethargic and rusty for too long. Now, putting on a sudden spurt, it wanted to be modern, indeed ultra-modern, right up to date with the latest technology. This haste made Moscow seem over-full, overpopulated, and as if it were living in a state of frantic confusion. There were crowds of people everywhere, in all the shops, outside the theatres, and they all had to wait. Everything was over-organised and so failed to work properly. The new bureaucracy, which was supposed to impose order, was still enjoying itself writing memos and making out permits, and everything was delayed. On the great evening of the Tolstoy celebrations, which were supposed to begin at six, nothing got under way until half-past nine, and when I left the opera house feeling exhausted, the other speakers were still holding forth at length. Western Europeans were sure to arrive an hour early for every reception and appointment. Time ran away through your fingers, yet every second was filled with observation and discussion, all of it at fevered pace, and you felt gradually infected by the mysterious Russian inflammation of the intellect, with its wild desire to unburden itself of feelings and ideas in the heat of the moment. Without quite knowing why, you felt mildly excited yourself. It was something to do with the new, restless atmosphere; maybe you were developing a Russian soul.

  Much of what I saw was magnificent, in particular Leningrad, a city planned by princes with audacious minds, a place of broad avenues and mighty palaces—yet at the same time still the oppressive St Petersburg of the White Nights, and known to Raskolnikov.1 The Hermitage museum was truly impressive, and I shall never forget the sight of troops of workmen, soldiers and peasants, hats reverently held in their hands just as they would have taken them off respectfully before icons in the old days, tramping with their heavy shoes through former imperial halls and looking at the pictures with secret pride, as if saying—all this is ours now, and we will learn to understand it. Teachers led round-cheeked children through the halls, art commissars explained Rembrandt and Titian to peasants who listened rather self-consciously, looking timidly up from under their heavy eyelids when details were pointed out. Here, as elsewhere, there was a touch of absurdity in this honest and well-meant effort to turn ‘the people’ overnight from illiterates into connoisseurs able to appreciate Beethoven and Vermeer—but the effort made by one party to the transaction to convey an instant idea of the highest artistic values, and by the other to understand them, gave rise to some impatience on both sides. Children at school were allowed to paint the wildest, most extravagant pictures; girls of twelve had the works of Hegel and Sorel,2 whom I myself did not know at this time, on the desks in front of them. Cabbies who could hardly read had books in their hands, just because they were books and books meant education, so it was an honour and a duty for the new proletariat to get educated. We often found ourselves smiling when we were shown round perfectly ordinary factories and were expected to gaze in wonderment, as if we had never seen such marvels in Europe and America. “Look, electric!” one worker told me proudly, pointing to a sewing machine and obviously expecting me to break into exclamations of astonishment. Because the Russian people were seeing these technical things for the first time, they humbly thought they had all been thought up and invented by the Revolution and Little Fathers Lenin and Trotsky. So although we were secretly amused, we smiled and admired everything. This new Russia, we thought, resembled a large, wonderfully talented and good-natured child, and we wondered—will it really learn such wide-ranging lessons as quickly as it thinks? Will the great plan go on developing, or will it fail and relapse into the old Russian apathy of Oblomov?3 Sometimes you felt confident that all would be well, sometimes you doubted it. The more I saw of Russia the less sure I could feel.

  But was I the one in a state of indecision, or was it something in the Russian nature, even in the mind of Tolstoy, whom we had come to celebrate? On the train journey to his estate of Yasnaya Polyana I discussed him with Lunacharsky. “Yes, what was he really?” Lunacharsky said to me. “A revolutionary or a reactionary? Did he himself know? Like a real Russian, he wanted everything too quickly; after thousands of years he wanted to change the whole world in the twinkling of an eye. Just like us now,” he added, smiling, “and with a single prescription, again just like us. It’s a mistake to think of us Russians as patient. Our bodies are patient, and so even are our souls. But we think more impatiently than any other nation, we want to know every truth, we want to know the truth, and we want to know it now. How that old man tormented himself in search of it!” And indeed, as I walked round Tolstoy’s house at Yasnaya Polyana, I kept thinking the same thing—how that great old man had tormented himself! I saw the desk where he sat to write his immortal works, and he had left it to make shoes—not very good shoes, either—in the unassuming room next door. I saw the door and the staircase through which he had tried to escape this house and his indecision. There was the gun with which Tolstoy, an enemy of all war, had killed enemies in war. The entire problem of his existence forced itself upon me graphically in that low-built white manor house. But the aura of tragedy was dispelled by our walk to his last resting place.

  I saw nothing finer or more moving in Russia than Tolstoy’s grave. That illustrious place of pilgrimage lies out of the way, alone in the middle of the woods. A narrow footpath leads to the mound, nothing but a rectangle of soil raised above ground level, with no one guarding or keeping watch on it, only two huge trees casting their shade. Leo Tolstoy planted those trees himself, so his granddaughter told me beside his grave. When he and his brother Nikolai were boys, they had heard one of the village women say that a place where you planted trees would be a happy one. So they planted two saplings, partly as a kind of game. Only later did the old man remember that promise of happiness, and then he expressed a wish to be buried under the trees he had planted. And his wish was carried out. In its heart-rending simplicity, his grave is the most impressive place of burial in the world. Just a small rectangular mound in the woods with trees overhead, no cross, no tombstone, no inscription. The great man who suffered more than anyone from his own famous name and reputation lies buried there, nameless, like a vagabond who happened to be found nearby or an unknown soldier. No one is forbidden to visit his last resting place; the flimsy wooden fence around it is not kept locked. Nothing guards that restless man’s final rest but human respect for him. While curious sightseers usually throng around the magnificence of a tomb, the compelling simplicity of this place banishes any desire to gape. The wind rushes like the word of God over the nameless grave, and no other voice is heard. You could pass the place without knowing any more than that someone is buried here, a Russian lying in Russian earth. Napoleon’s tomb beneath the marble dome of Les Invalides, Goethe’s in the grand-ducal vault at Weimar, the tombs in Westminster Abbey are none of them as moving as this silent and movingly anonymous grave somewhere in the woods, with only the wind whispering around it, uttering no word or message of its own. I had been in Russia for fourteen days, and I still felt the same inner ten
sion, a slight daze of intellectual intoxication. What actually moved me so much? I soon worked it out—it was the people and their impulsive goodwill. All of them, from the first to the last, were convinced that they were participating in a great endeavour for the good of all humanity; they all felt sure that while they might have to put up with deprivations and restrictions, it was all in the service of a higher cause. The old Russian sense of inferiority to the rest of Europe had turned to an ecstasy of pride in being ahead, in advance of everyone else. “Ex oriente lux”4—they were bringing salvation from the East. They honestly and genuinely thought that they had seen the one true light, and it was given to them to do what others only dreamt of. When they showed you the least little thing their eyes shone: “We made that.” And the whole nation identified itself with that “we”. The cabbies who drove you around would point their whips at some new building, grinning broadly: “We built that.” The Tatar and Mongol students in the lecture halls came out to meet us, proudly showing off their books. “Darwin!” one proclaimed. “Marx!” said another. They were as proud as if they had written the works of Marx and Darwin themselves. They all wanted to show us something, explain it to us, they were so glad that someone had come to see their work. All of them—this was years before Stalin—had boundless faith in a European. They looked at you with trust in their eyes, and shook your hand in hearty, fraternal fashion. But at the same time even the least among them made it clear that while they might like you, there was no special reason to show anyone respect, for we were all brothers, to be addressed as tovarish, comrade. It was the same among the writers. We were all gathered in the house that had once belonged to Alexander Herzen, not just Europeans and Russians but also Tungus, Georgian and Caucasian writers; every Soviet state had sent its delegate to the Tolstoy centenary. It was impossible to converse with most of them, but we understood each other all the same. One of them would get to his feet, come over to me, mention the title of one of my books and indicate his heart, meaning that he liked it very much. Then he would take my hand and shake it as if to show his approval by dislocating all my joints. Even more touchingly, they all had presents to give. The economy was still in a very bad way; they had nothing valuable left, but everyone found something to give a visitor as a memento—a worthless old engraving, a book that I couldn’t read, a piece of peasant carving. It was easier for me, of course, since I could respond with precious items that hadn’t been seen in Russia for years—a Gillette razor blade, a fountain pen, a few sheets of good white notepaper, a pair of soft leather slippers—so that I travelled very light on my way home. The tongue-tied but impulsive reception they gave us, with a depth and warmth unknown at home, was overwhelming. Back in Europe, a writer never really came into contact with all classes of society, and spending time with these people was an irresistible temptation to many of the foreign writers visiting Russia, where they were acclaimed. They had never been hailed in quite that way by the vast majority at home, so they thought they had to respond in kind by praising the regime under which their books were read and they were so popular. It is only human nature, after all, to answer generosity with generosity, exuberance with exuberance. I must admit that while I was in Russia I myself was often close to bursting into paeans of praise and becoming an enthusiastic admirer of the Russians’ own enthusiasm.

  I owe my resistance to that intoxicating frenzy not so much to my own strength of mind as to a stranger whose name I still do not know, and never will. It happened after a party where some students were present. They surrounded me, embraced me, shook my hand. Their enthusiasm was heart-warming, and I looked with pleasure at their lively faces. A little company of four or five of them escorted me home, with the girl student who was acting as my interpreter translating everything they said for me. Only when I had closed the door of my hotel room behind me was I really alone, for the first time in twelve days, because foreigners were always accompanied, carefully guarded, carried along on warm waves of emotion. I began undressing and took off my coat. As I did so I felt something crackle inside it. I put my hand in my pocket. It was a letter. A letter in French, but it had not arrived by post. Someone in the crowd must have slipped it into my pocket during all those embraces.

  It was an unsigned letter, very clever and humane, not written by a White Russian but bitterly critical of the ever-increasing curtailment of liberties in Russia over recent years. “Don’t believe everything they tell you,” wrote my unknown correspondent. “Whatever you are shown, never forget that they’re not letting you see much. Remember that the people who talk to you are not usually saying what they want to say, only what they are allowed to tell you. We are all under surveillance, you too. Your interpreter passes on everything you say. Your telephone is bugged, they watch every step you take.” He added a whole list of examples and details. I was not in a position to check those, but I burnt his letter as he asked—“Don’t just tear this up, please, because the separate scraps would be retrieved from your waste-paper basket and fitted together.” And for the first time I began to think about it soberly. It was indeed a fact that in the midst of all this honest warmth and delightful comradeship, I had never once had a chance of talking frankly to anyone tête-à-tête. My ignorance of the language had prevented me from really getting into touch with ordinary people. Then again, what a tiny part of this vast country I had seen in these two weeks! If I were to be honest with myself and others, I had to admit that my impression, moving and inspiring as it had been in many ways, could not be objective. And that accounts for the fact that while almost all other European writers who came back from Russia at the time immediately published a book either enthusiastically endorsing the regime or strongly condemning it, I wrote only a couple of articles. I did well to keep my distance, because three months later much in Russia was not the way I had seen it, and a year later, thanks to rapid change, the facts would have given the lie to every word I might have written earlier. All the same, at almost no other time and place in my life did I feel the current of contemporary events flowing more strongly than I did in Russia.

  My suitcases were fairly empty when I left Moscow. I had given away what I could spare, and the only acquisitions of my own that I brought back were two icons that hung in my room for a long time. But the most valuable thing I took home was my friendship with Maxim Gorky, whom I had met in person for the first time in Moscow. I saw him again him two or three years later in Sorrento, where he was staying for the sake of his frail health, and spent three unforgettable days in his house there.

  This first meeting of ours in Russia was really a very strange affair. Gorky knew no foreign languages, I knew no Russian. By all the dictates of logic we should have been condemned to face one another in silence, or keeping a conversation going only through the skills of our mutual and much-esteemed friend Maria, Baroness Budberg, who acted as interpreter. But not for nothing was Gorky one of the most brilliant storytellers in the history of literature—narrative was not only an artistic form of expression for him, it was a function of his entire nature. When he was telling a story he lived in the narrative, was transformed into the narrative, and without understanding what he was saying I understood him through the activity of his mobile face. In himself he simply looked—well, I would have to say ‘Russian’. There was nothing striking about his features; you could have taken this tall, thin man with yellow, straw-coloured hair and broad cheekbones for a peasant in the fields, a driver in his cab, a cobbler in a small way of business, an unkempt vagabond—he was nothing but one of the common people, the concentrated quintessence of Russian humanity. You would have passed him without a second thought in the street, never noticing anything special about him. Only when you sat facing him and he began to tell a story did you realise who and what he really was, because he spontaneously became the person he was portraying. I remember his description—I understood it even before it was translated—of a hunchbacked, weary little old man he had once met in his wanderings. He instinctively bowed his head, his s
houlders slumped, his eyes, bright blue and shining when he had begun to speak, grew dark and tired, his voice faltered; without knowing it he had turned into the old hunchback. And if he had a funny story to tell he burst out laughing, leant back in a relaxed attitude, with a glint in his eyes. It was indescribably delightful to listen to him as he presented the setting and people around him with sweeping, graphic gestures. Everything about him was simple and natural—his way of walking, sitting, listening, his exuberant high spirits. One evening he dressed up as a boyar, buckled on a sword, and at once majesty came into his eyes. His eyebrows arched commandingly, he strode energetically up and down the room as if he planned to proclaim some grim ukase, and next moment, after taking off his fancy dress, he was laughing as childishly as a peasant boy. His vitality was miraculous; one of his lungs was in such a bad way that he kept alive in defiance of all the laws of medicine, but an extraordinary will to live and an iron sense of duty kept him going. He worked on his great novel every morning, writing in his classic calligraphic hand, he answered hundreds of questions sent by young writers and workers from his native Russia. To me, being in his company meant meeting Russia—not Bolshevik Russia, not the Russia of the past or of today, but the great, strong, dark soul of the eternal Russian people. Privately, he had not quite made up his mind which way to go in those years. As a former revolutionary, he wanted society to change and had been a personal friend of Lenin, but he still hesitated to commit himself entirely to the Party, “to be a priest or pope”, as he put it. Yet his conscience pricked him for not being with the Russian people in the years when every week called for new decisions.