September 30th.
Kameneff came to see me in the morning with his watch in his hand, he had twenty minutes. It was paralysing, one cannot talk under such conditions. I confined myself to presenting him with a list of things I want done! Small wonder he comes so seldom to see me. When he does come everyone in the house knows it, and one by one they come to my door and ask to see him, each wanting something of him, while his car which waits at the door is borrowed for an errand. It is very discouraging for him.
Borodin took me to “Prince Igor” this evening, it combined the opera with the ballet. In the box next to us was a party of Afghans and with them a Korean. Down in the stalls one man was in a smoking coat and evening shirt, the first I have seen. He was very conspicuous.
October 1st.
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
