Journey Into the Mind's Eye

by Lesley Blanch

  It was as if, at last, something profoundly Slav had taken root in me, and was no longer a deliberately acquired attribute. But perhaps after all, it was just another example of the Traveller imposing his faculty of remote control.

  Occasionally I had the curious impression that not only was I guided by him, seeing all through his eyes, but that he chose, unexpectedly, to speak through me too. His old flippant tone sounded, replying to the earnest officials of the Intourist Bureau. In Moscow I had been visiting some new experimental nursery schools and the delightful Children’s Theatre. Perhaps this had bored the Traveller. He had seemed withdrawn for the last few days, as he seemed when I made half-hearted efforts to visit other progressive ventures. Now it was suggested that I should be shown yet another experiment in social welfare – a home of rest for prostitutes (described as being the last victims of Tzarist corruption). Their newly inaugurated rest-home was part of a programme for their rehabilitation and re-integration into a more wholesome way of life.

  ‘But I’d much rather see them at work,’ I hear myself reply, and behind my flippancy, the Traveller’s cynical tones sounded unmistakably. I was aghast. He had blotted my copy-book.

  Sternly putting the Traveller, like Satan, behind me, I made what amends I could by evincing the keenest interest in one particular day-nursery, chiefly because I had discovered it was installed in the former Kropotkin house, once the childhood home of Prince Peter, ‘the Anarchist Prince’. Everything about him intrigued me; I admired his idealism and envied his Siberian experiences. Through his Memoirs these had long been familiar to me, like his descriptions of life in aristocratic, patriarchal Moscow of the 1840’s. Now I wanted to see this setting of his youth.

  The sober elegance of the Old Equerries’ Quarter behind the Manège was typical of late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Moscow architecture. It was less grandiloquent than St. Petersburg and its classic nobility retained a feeling of the land – of country-house life. The yellow walls and white plaster work decorations were austere beside much of St. Petersburg’s splendour, but these old Moscow houses were dwellings for the aristocratic families such as Tolstoy describes in War and Peace, large in their concept of living, with style, with grandeur even, though very far from the febrile pulse of the northern city. Even in the Moscow I first knew one still felt the nearness of fields, of cabbage-patches and stables.

  In the lofty, beautifully proportioned rooms of the piano nobile, the gurgling and indulged infants were sliding about the fine marquetry floors, and I tried to imagine the young Prince Peter here, in this setting he had at last repudiated. Was it this very room, I wondered, that had witnessed his resolve to break with the abuses which prevailed in his aristocratic milieu? The manner in which his father treated his serfs, the emptiness and stagnation of life at Court, these things soon became intolerable to Kropotkin. The trajectory of his life and thought can be traced by the physical transition we see in his portraits. First, the handsome boy in Corps des Pages uniform; then the young man, already the light of idealism in his eyes, seeing far beyond the horizons of Siberia where he elected to work, seeing a world which he returned to achieve. At last, the white-haired visionary, gazing out through professorial steel-rimmed spectacles, seeing a new Russia forming, a Russia for which he had spent his whole life and fortune.

  Kropotkin’s Memoirs cover a vast span of nineteenth century Russian life, and years of convulsive change. As a page at Court, he had stood guard over the catafalque of the Emperor Nicholas I, Catherine the Great’s grandson. Sickened by the pomposity of Court, and the swagger of the Guards regiments, he had joined the Amur Cossacks (social suicide to chic St. Petersburg) and been posted to eastern Siberia. There, administrative reforms and scientific research as geologist and botanist filled his life, until at last he returned to become known as the Anarchist Prince, living and having his being among the revolutionaries. Banished from Russia he had joined the ranks of political exiles in Switzerland, at last settling in London.

  But as an old man, impoverished by his own idealism and by-passed by the surge of the Revolution, his untarnished beliefs had brought him back to Russia where, although Lenin was solicitous in sending the best doctors, he died, rather disillusioned and neglected, in 1921. He was accorded a national funeral; but the ironic aspects of this ceremony are worthy of recall. Some of the ‘Anarchist Prince’s’ anarchist friends, now incarcerated in the dread Boutirky prison (immortalized by Tolstoy in Resurrection) were, surprisingly, allowed out on parole, to follow the coffin of their leader: others, being listed to attend, were mysteriously declared unavailable by the Tcheka. The International was not played, since Kropotkin had particularly disliked it, so his mourners marched to Tchaikovsky’s Symphonie Pathétique, on the whole a good choice, for it was the last time banners proclaiming such dangerous sentiments as Where there is Authority there is no Liberty, or We the Anarchists demand to be freed from the prison of Socialism were seen in the new Russia – that Russia for which Kropotkin had laboured. It was, said one eye-witness, the last large-scale public manifestation against Bolshevism. It was also a wholly old-style Russian episode; as Russian as the Dekabrist débâcle, muddle-headed and ennobled by idealistic courage; as comically tragic as anything by Gogol in his most grotesque vein.

  •

  Gradually, I began to feel the Traveller was exercising too strong a personal influence over my choice of wanderings; I had become the instrument or means by which he revisited the scenes of a former life – these scenes being, as my governess remarked of those postcards he had sometimes sent me, ‘not always in the best of taste’.

  ‘Cubat – what is that?’ asked the guide, an earnest young person who knew nothing of the raffish ghost prompting my expedition. She could not tell me where this celebrated restaurant had stood nor if another, Ourouss, The Bear, was still standing.

  ‘You wish for a restaurant, for eating? We have. Where is book of food tickets?’ She smiled her wide, sweet smile, that expression of luminous softness which is so typical of Russian women, a softness upon which the Traveller liked to dwell. It is womanly rather than feminine, and triumphs over indifferent figures and unbecoming clothes. It is a quality that becomes increasingly rare among the more sophisticated women of other Western nations; a look which no régime has altered, which neither good times nor bad times change. I fancy it was also on the face of some of the most determined Nihilists and those terrorists who, hurling their infernal machines (so often home-made by faulty recipes, and not always reliable), were still doing it all for love – for love of an ideal, for universal brotherhood; only to be achieved by such means, or so it seemed to them. And thus they smiled softly – at their fellow-anarchists, their lovers, their frantic families and their victims too, in all probability; certainly at their judges and executioners, for they were exaltées and mystically sustained.

  I had so often heard the Traveller enlarging on the particular qualities of Russian women: but Russian men? Now I had begun to formulate my views on them, too. They were entirely unlike any others, by some unspoken, unmistakable quality apparent in their relation to women. It was not necessarily that they wooed them or won them in that slick fashion held to be the hall-mark of Latin lovers. Or that they possessed that animal, or hawk-like attraction of the desert Arab, quite another kind of conqueror. Was it that they retained some touchingly romantic quality? That for them, women were still a mysterious citadel – to be stormed, but to be loved, in every sense of the word? This could compass violence and cruelty too. At this time I was young and, I believe, pretty, and I had travelled considerably. I had many occasions to weigh up men of different races. Always I came back to the Slavs. When they looked at you, it was not with the rapid, professionalism of the Latin nor the all-possessive glance of the East; they looked into one’s eyes, and beyond, as if to know the woman behind the façade. In short, to understand the creature before them, with all her charms or frailties. Men do not like to be understood, Aunt Eudoxia had said; wit
h women it is otherwise.

  •

  ‘Cubat’s?’ persists my guide, anxious to offer me all her country. But I am unable to explain the depths of my triviality. How explain that I am recalling the Traveller’s accounts of uproarious nights spent there in the most extravagant company; the jeunesse dorée, army officers and such of the high-living merchant patrons as were suffered there, for even the depravities of the capital were not to be enjoyed in too mixed a society. The Traveller had been in one such establishment on that short, darkening afternoon in November – 1917. A historic moment. We had been in Corsica I remembered, when I asked him how he had spent that fateful day.

  He had laughed. ‘You see, history has a way of taking one unawares.’ To him, as to many others, it had seemed just another day. For him, it promised a rendezvous, one he had expected to enjoy particularly in an upstairs room the restaurant reserved for such purposes.

  He had lately encountered a ravishing creature whose temperament was only equalled in its intensity by the jealousy of her husband. But it was worth all the risks; the Traveller could think of nothing but her charms.

  ‘What a woman! What temperament! When I took her in my arms she fainted!’ So, hurrying along the strangely deserted streets, intent on rejoining this paragon of passion, he had not attached much importance to the sullen air which hung over the waiting city. Those were uneasy times. It was four o’clock and already the day was darkening to an icy, early twilight. But once within the glowing embrace of his inamorata all else was forgotten – even the indifferent service of a few scuttling waiters who seemed curiously absent-minded. Only after repeated ringings had they answered the bell. The champagne had not been properly iced and the caviare was not the kind they had ordered. A curious state of affairs. . . . Many hours later the lovers had called for the Gipsies, whose music, they thought, would round out the night suitably; but no one answered the bell they tugged with increasing fury.

  A most unaccustomed hush prevailed in the restaurant below, and, when the Traveller went to investigate, he found it empty. The tables were only half-laid and no staff were to be seen beyond the darkened dining-room. One chandelier blazed with bizarre brilliance in the foyer, illuminating a snoring figure that lay across the threshold muffled in his bear-skin pelisse. It was the doorman. The Traveller kicked him awake. He seemed surprised. He had not expected anyone to have remained, he said. Clutching an empty bottle of vodka he staggered to his feet.

  ‘Doesn’t the Barin know? The Revolution has begun! Didn’t the Barin hear gun-fire? No, perhaps not . . .’ He winked roguishly. ‘They’ve been shelling the Winter Palace,’ he went on, ‘but I reckon we’re safe enough here – they’ve other things to think about . . . and so have we . . . there is plenty to eat and drink’ – he smacked his lips. ‘I’ve locked all the doors and thrown away the keys. No one is going to get in here,’ he said proudly.

  Or get out, it seemed, for the heavily barred, iron-shuttered windows discouraged any exit. Only a meat cleaver could hack such bars apart. Clearly it was wisest to make the best of things. The doorman, belching contentedly and hugging a bottle of vodka, rolled himself up in his shuba and was instantly asleep. The Traveller having helped himself in the kitchens and cellar went back upstairs to rejoin his inamorata. Among other things, the Revolution was going to provide a marvellous silencer to any awkward questions irate husbands might pose.

  Not a very edifying anecdote for such a moment of high destiny; yet it had stuck in my mind, and I heard the Traveller laugh, saw again his malicious smile as he told me the tale. Now he was willing me to the place, doubly amused to be rousing my jealousy by even the echoes of a ghostly rendezvous; and also to affront the sterner moral code of a younger generation of Russians.

  •

  I had not been disappointed by my first sight of Russia: nothing was different to what I had imagined, for I had stayed within the horizons of my desires. Once, in the schoolroom, as I longed loudly for Russia, the Traveller had said: ‘You will always be a happy traveller; you have so steeped yourself in fantasies and past scenes that they have become part of yourself, more real than what is round you. Lucky Doucinka! Your journeys will always carry you back into this magic world of your own desires.’ And so it proved to be. Even taking a symbolic turn at the building of the grandiose Moscow subway – of wielding a shovel, among the ardent citizens, as a gesture of solidarity, did not impinge on those remote inner visions I cherished, where subways were unknown, and it was troïkas, troïkas all the way.

  I left Leningrad on the last boat before winter clamped down. Already there were early snows and ice-floes drifting south to harass the shipping. I felt no anguish at leaving, for I knew I should return. Siberia was still a hallucinatory dream, but that too would materialize, one day. The first step eastward had been made – the journey begun.

  CHAPTER XV

  Upon my return, a yet greater fervour for all things Russian caused even my most sympathetic friends some uneasiness.

  The political scene had long crystallized, with Russia emerging triumphantly as the U.S.S.R., but I still held to my subjective conception of the country, seeing it neither as Holy or Unholy Russia, but only as it had seemed to the Traveller when he recalled it for my delight. How much of that was truly his remembrance and how much of it his especial vision – a Russia which was remote from him too, but created rather than re-created, for the romantic illusions we both cherished – I never discovered.

  Meanwhile, both Russians and English attributed to me some mischievous designs I did not have. While the few Soviet citizens I encountered found my interest in them curious for one so obviously engaged in a bourgeois way of life, White Russians, particularly those of the Nansen passport generation, regarded this interest as a dangerous aberration, for they had thought my first visit to the U.S.S.R. would disillusion me. I now found myself excluded from several agreeable dinner-tables because both host and hostess were unsympathetic to my views, so loudly expressed, and, oh! fatal error, in front of the servants. ‘I do wish she wouldn’t . . . it only puts ideas into their heads,’ was the complaint of those who, knowing servants to have become a vanishing species, to be preserved, like wild life, or placated, like household gods, had not yet realized that in the heads of those same domestic workers, as they now preferred to be called, ‘ideas’ had been replaced by ultimatums.

  But I had, I felt, crossed the Irtysh, as the Russian saying goes (the Irtysh was a river which all political exiles to Siberia must cross on their way East: once across there was no turning back). In proffering even the most superficial acceptance of the new Russia I must also accept being eyed askance, cut even, as if I had unfurled the Red Flag outside the Junior Carlton Club.

  When, a few years later, I planned another visit to the U.S.S.R. I was rebuffed in my attempts to obtain a visa for the Caucasus; something which discouraged me sadly, for I felt my enthusiasm and purpose merited Soviet sympathy. I had fixed my sights high, planning a book on the Caucasian wars, but it was to be another twenty years before I was able to write it. Meanwhile, my rebuff had quite illogically enraged an old friend, born in Russia but who, brought up in England, expressed himself in the vernacular.

  ‘Refused you a visa to the Caucasus? Well of all the bloody cheek! Who the hell do they think they are?’ he said, scowling in the direction of the Soviet Embassy. ‘But serve you right for wanting to go to such an outlandish place,’ he added, revealing by this remark, how deeply he had assimilated the English spirit.

  •

  In the London of the ‘thirties there was a very marked prejudice against all things Russian, even cultural, unless it were, as I have recounted, those entrechâts and other steps performed by strictly White feet. To like Russia had not yet become chic. But in 1934, Colonel de Basil’s Ballet company exploded on London and, overnight, the mystique of ballet and balletomania came into being. The dancers came from performances in Paris and Monte Carlo; most of them were very young, being second generation Russi
an émigrés, but among them were a few who had been trained in Russia. Some had belonged to Diaghilev’s company: technicians, stage managers, designers, musicians, all of them Russians, a world of their own, turbulent and magnetic, glittering Harlequin figures for whose public and private lives the British public were soon avid. During their first unpampered seasons they lived in small dingy hotels round the British Museum, their narrow bedrooms stacked with steamer trunks. Massine was at the Savoy, but the rest were more modest. Their mothers (for they moved in family units), darned tights and fought among themselves for the supremacy of their children: some spoke nothing but Russian, and would stand in the wings throughout the performances, hissing encouragement, over-boiling like kettles at some fancied slight to their progeny. All of them had splendid tales to recount; tales of adventure, of accouchements in railway trucks, of abandonment in the steppes; of their own highly-coloured youth gilded by the attentions of some Grand Duke, perhaps. The fathers – for there were some among the matriarchy, were less apparent. Indeed, ballet fathers are seldom seen; it is ballet mothers who dominate, so that I have often wondered if the ballerina is not perhaps the flower of some immaculate conception.