After awhile, Kameneff let drop a suggestion which did not fall on barren ground—he threw it out apparently casually, but in order, I believe, to see how I reacted to it. I had just been telling him that I had all my life had a love of Russian literature, Russian music, Russian dancing, Russian art, and he said, “You should come to Russia.”
I said that I had always dreamed it—and that perhaps—who knows—someday....
He said, “You can come with me, and I will get you sittings from Lenin and Trotsky.”
I thought he was joking, and hesitated a moment, then I said: “Let me know when you are going to start, and I will be ready in half an hour.”
He offered to telegraph immediately to Moscow for permission.
August 18th.
Krassin arrived at 10 a.m., and found me reading the papers, sitting on the seat outside the door. Like Kameneff, he stayed till 1 o’clock. He has a beautiful head, and he sat almost sphinx-like, severe and expressionless most of the time. We talked of course, but his French is less good than Kameneff’s, and we broke into occasional German—it was a good mix-up, but we said all we wanted to say.
Kameneff had talked to him about me, and had told him of the project of my going to Moscow. I said nothing about it until he mentioned it.
What impresses me about these two men is their impassive imperturbability, their calm, and their patience. I suppose it is the race, or else that they learnt calm when they were prisoners in Siberia. It is such a contrast to almost every other sitter, who is restless, hurried and fidgety. Krassin is sphinx-like; he sits erect, his head up, and his pointed, bearded chin sticking defiantly out at an angle, and his mouth tightly shut. He has no smile like Kameneff, and his piercing eyes just looked at me impassively while I worked. It was rather uncanny.
Krassin is a Siberian. He explained to me that his father was a Government local official when he married his mother who was a peasant, and one of twenty-two children. He himself was the eldest of seven, and was brought up in Siberia.