The Puppet Show of Memory

by Maurice Baring

What I used to enjoy more than anything in Russia were the summer afternoons on the river near Sosnofka, where the flat banks were covered with oak-trees, ash, willow, and thick undergrowth; and where every now and then, perch rose to the surface to catch flies, and the kingfishers skimmed over the surface from reach to reach. Sometimes I used to take a boat and row past islands of rushes, and a network of water-lilies, to where the river broadened; and I reached a great sheet of water flanked by a weir and a mill. The trees were reflected in the glassy surface, and nothing broke the stillness but the grumbling of the mill and the cries of the children bathing.

Near the village, all through the summer night (this was in June 1914), I used to hear song answering song, and the brisk rhythm of the accordion; or the interminable humming, buzzing burden of the three-stringed balalaika; verse succeeded verse of an apparently tireless song, and the end of each verse seemed to beget another and give a keener zest to the next; and the song waxed faster and madder, as if the singer were intoxicated by the sound of his own music.

But the peculiar manifestations of the beauty of nature in a flat and uniform country are not enough to account for the fascination of Russia. Beauty is a part of it, but it is not all. Against these things in the other scale you had to put dirt, squalor, misery, slovenliness, disorder, and the uninspiring wooden provincial towns, the dusty or sodden roads, the frequent grey skies, the long and heavy sameness.

The advocatus diaboli had a strong case. He could have drawn up a powerful indictment, not only against the political conditions, and the arbitrary and uncertain administration, but also against the character of the people; he could mention the moral laxity, the extravagant self-indulgence, the lack of control, the jealousy which hounded any kind of superiority; and looked with suspicion on all that was original or distinguished; the dead level of mediocrity; the stereotyped bureaucratic pattern which you could not escape from. The Russians, he would say, had all the faults of the Orient without any of its austerer virtues; Russia, he would say, was a nation of ineffectual rebels under the direction of a band of corrupt and time-serving officials. The indictment was true, but however glaring the faults which Russian moralists, satirists, and politicians used so frequently and so loudly to deplore, the faults that used to make foreigners in Russia so angry at times, they seemed to me the negative results of positive qualities so valuable as to outweigh them altogether.

During my stays in Russia I saw some of the worst as well as some of the best aspects of the country and its people. The net result of all I saw and all I experienced was the sense of an overpowering charm in the country, an indescribable fascination in the people. The charm was partly due to the country itself, partly to the manner of life lived there, and partly to the nature of the people. The qualities that did exist, and whose benefit I experienced, seemed to me the most precious of all qualities; the virtues the most important of all virtues; the glimpses of beauty the rarest in kind; the songs and the music the most haunting and most heart-searching; the poetry nearest to nature and man; the human charity nearest to God.

This is perhaps the secret of the whole matter, that the Russian soul is filled with a human Christian charity which is warmer in kind and intenser in degree, and expressed with a greater simplicity and sincerity, than is to be met with in any other people; it was the existence of this quality behind everything else which gave charm to Russian life (however squalid the circumstances might be), poignancy to its music, sincerity and simplicity to its religion, manners, intercourse, music, singing, verse, art, acting—in a word to its art, its life, and its faith.

Never did I realise this so much as one day when I was driving on a cold and damp December evening in St. Petersburg in a cab. It was dark, and I was driving along the quays from one end of the town to the other. For a long time I drove in silence, but after a while I happened to make some remark to the cabman about the weather. He answered gloomily that the weather was bad and so was everything else too. For some time we drove on in silence, and then in answer to some other stray remark or question of mine he said he had been unlucky that day in the matter of a fine. It was a trivial point, but somehow or other my interest was aroused, and I got him to tell me the story, which was a case of bad luck and nothing serious; but when he had told it, he gave such a profound sigh that I asked whether it was that which was still weighing upon him. Then he said “No,” and slowly began to tell me a story of a great catastrophe which had just befallen him. He possessed a little land, and a cottage in the country, not far from St. Petersburg. His house had been burnt. It was true the house was insured, but the insurance was not sufficient to make an appreciable difference. He had two sons; one went to school, and the other had some employment in the provinces. The catastrophe of the fire had upset everything. All his belongings had perished. He could no longer send his boy to school. His second son, in the country, had written to say he was engaged to be married, and had asked his consent, advice, and approval. “He has written twice,” said the cabman, “and I keep silence (i ya molchu). What can I answer?” I cannot give any idea of the strength, simplicity, and poignancy of the tale as it came, hammered out slowly, with pauses between each sentence, with a dignity of utterance and a purity of idiom which used to be the precious privilege of the poor in Russia. The words came as if torn out from the bottom of his heart. He made no complaint; there was no grievance, no whine in the story. He stated the bald facts with a simplicity which was overwhelming. In spite of all, his faith in God and his consent to the will of Providence was unshaken, certain, and sublime.

This happened in 1911. I have forgotten the details; but I knew I had been face to face with a human soul, stripped and naked, and a human soul in the grip of a tragedy. This experience, which brought one in touch with the divine, is one which, I think, could only in such circumstances occur in Russia. I wrote this in the year 1913 when I was summing up my impressions on Russian life, and trying to analyse the nature of the fascination the country had for me. When I had finished, I echoed the words which R. L. Stevenson once addressed to a French novelist: “J’ai beau admirer les autres de toute ma force, c’est avec vous que je me complais à vivre.”

In the spring of 1914 I went back to Russia for the last time before the war. I spent over a month by myself at Sosnofka, writing a book, an outline of Russian literature, and bathing every afternoon in the river where the sweetbriar grew on the banks by the willows, and the kingfisher used every now and then to dart across the oily-looking water.

It was a wonderful spring. The nightingales sang all day long in the garden; and all night long people were singing in the village. Nature was steeped in beauty and calm. It was a month of accidental retreat before tremendous events and the changing of the world.