The Puppet Show of Memory

by Maurice Baring

The question has often been repeated, not only by Russians in exile, but by foreigners who have lived in Russia, and I have often found myself asking it. The country has little obvious glamour and attraction. In Russia, as Gogol says, the wonders of Nature are not made more wonderful by man; there are no spots where Nature, art, and time combine to take the heart with beauty; where association, and even decay are indistinguishably mingled; and Nature is not only beautiful but picturesque; where time has worked magic on man’s handiwork, and history has left behind a host of phantoms.

There are many such places in France and in England, in Italy, Spain, and Greece, but not in Russia. Russia is a country of colonists, where life has been a perpetual struggle against the inclemency of the climate, and where the political history is the record of a desperate battle against adverse circumstances. Russia’s oldest city was sacked and burnt just at the moment when it was beginning to flourish; her first capital was destroyed by fire in 1812; her second capital dates from the seventeenth century; stone houses are rare in the country, and the wooden houses are frequently destroyed by fire. It is a country of long winters and fierce summers, of rolling plains, uninterrupted by mountains and unvariegated by valleys.

But the charm is there. It is felt by people of different nationalities and races; it is difficult, if you live in Russia, to escape it, and once you have felt it, you will never be quite free from it. The melancholy song, which Gogol says wanders from sea to sea over the length and breadth of the land, will echo in your heart and haunt the corner of your brain. It is impossible to analyse charm, for if charm could be analysed it would cease to exist; and it is difficult to define the character of places where beauty makes so little instantaneous appeal, and where there is no playground of romance, and few ghosts of poetry and of history.

Turgeniev’s descriptions of the country give an idea of this peculiar magic. For instance, the story of the summer night, when on the plain the children tell each other bogy tales; or the description of that other July evening, when out of the twilight, a long way off on the plain, a child’s voice is heard calling: “Antropka—a—a,” and Antropka answers: “Wha—a—a—a—a—at?” and far away out of the immensity comes the answering voice: “Come ho—ome, because daddy wants to whip you.”

Those who travel in their arm-chair will meet in Turgeniev with glimpses, episodes, pictures, incidents, sayings and doings, touches of human nature, phases of landscape, shades of atmosphere, which contain the secret and the charm of Russia. All who have travelled in Russia not only recognise the truth of his pictures, but agree that the incidents which he records with incomparable art are a common experience to those who have eyes to see. The picturesque peculiar to countries rich in historical traditions is absent in Russia; but beauty is not absent, and it is often all the more striking from its lack of obviousness.

This was brought home to me strongly in the summer of 1913. I was staying in a small wooden house in Central Russia, not far from a railway, but isolated from other houses, and at a fair distance from a village. The harvest was nearly done. The heat was sweltering. The country was parched and dry. The walls and ceilings were black with flies. One had no wish to venture out of doors until the evening.

The small garden of the house, gay with asters and sweet-peas, was surrounded by birch trees, with here and there a fir tree in their midst. Opposite the little house, a broad pathway, flanked on each side by a row of tall birch trees, led to the margin of the garden, which ended in a steep grass slope, and a valley, or a wooded dip; and beyond it, on the same level as the garden, there was a pathway half hidden by trees; so that from the house, if you looked straight in front of you, you saw a broad path, with birch trees on each side of it, forming a proscenium for a wooded distance; and if anybody walked along the pathway on the farther side of the dip, although you saw no road, you could see the figures in outline against the sky, as though they were walking across the back of a stage.

Just as the cool of the evening began to fall, out of the distance came a rhythmical song, ending on a note that seemed to last for ever, piercingly clear and clean. The music came a little nearer, and one could distinguish first a solo chanting a phrase, and then a chorus taking it up, and finally, solo and chorus became one, and reached a climax on a high note, which grew purer and stronger, and more and more long drawn-out, without any seeming effort, until it died away.

The tone of the voices was so high, so pure, and at the same time so peculiar, strong and rare, that it was difficult at first to tell whether the voices were tenors, sopranos, or boyish trebles. They were unlike, both in range and quality, the voices of women one usually heard in Russian villages. The music drew nearer, and it filled the air with a majestic calm. Presently, in the distance, beyond the dip between the trees, and in the middle of the natural stage made by the garden, I saw, against the sky, figures of women walking slowly in the sunset, and singing as they walked, carrying their scythes and their wooden rakes with them; and once again the phrase began and was repeated by the chorus; and once again chorus and solo melted together in a high and long-drawn-out note, which seemed to swell like the sound of a clarion, to grow purer, more single, stronger and fuller, till it ended suddenly, sharply, as a frieze ends. The song seemed to proclaim rest after toil, and satisfaction for labour accomplished. It was like a hymn of praise, a broad benediction, a grace sung for the end of the day: the end of the summer, the end of the harvest. It expressed the spirit of the breathless August evening.

The women walked past slowly and disappeared into the trees once more. The glimpse lasted only a moment, but it was enough to start a long train of thought and to call up pictures of rites, ritual, and custom; of rustic worship and rural festival, of Pagan ceremonies older than the gods.