While he was standing there helplessly with half-closed eyes, he remarked on my name being
TROTSKY AT THE FRONT.
spelt in the same way as that of the playwright. I explained that I had married a direct descendant. He was interested and said, “The School for Scandal” and “The Rivals,” had been translated and were occasionally acted here in Russian. He then got on to Shakespeare. I wish I could recall the words in which he described his appreciation, exclaiming finally: “If England had never produced anything else, she would have justified her existence.” We disagreed as to Byron and Shelley. He, like others I have met here, preferred Byron, and insisted in spite of my assertions to the contrary that Byron was the greater Revolutionary of the two. He was surprised that I loved Swinburne. He said he would have thought me too much of this world to love the spirituality of Swinburne. I said: “One has one’s dreams.” He gave a sigh. “Yes,” he said, “we all have our dreams——”
When, at the end of the evening, I was dissatisfied with my work and feeling suicidal I asked him:
“May I come back and work to-morrow night?”
“And the night after,” he answered, and added laughing, that he would rig the place up as a studio for me, and that I could do General Kameneff after I’d finished him. General Kameneff (who is no relation to Leo Kameneff) is the Commander-in-Chief, and was a very distinguished Tsarist officer. I hear that he strongly warned the War Ministry against advancing too far towards Warsaw, and foretold the débâcle that has since been fulfilled. But he was not listened to, perhaps because of his Tsarist tradition. Probably his opinion is more respected now. Trotsky asked me if I would like to do Tchicherin, and I explained that never before had I worked under such difficult conditions, and that although I had made efforts for Lenin and himself I did not feel like doing it again for anyone else. He was quite indignant and said: “What difficulty have you had in working here?” True it was a perfectly good room and excellent light, but Tchicherin would not move out of his Commissariat and that would mean new conditions to adapt oneself to, nor does anyone understand the difficulties of moving the finished work back to the Kremlin. Trotsky swept my excuses aside: “Of course you must do Tchicherin—it is almost a diplomatic obligation on his part to be done.”
It was a quarter to midnight when I prepared to stop work and looked desperately at the clock: “What about this order—how am I to be home