“I did not like the man who sang Lensky to-night,” one of them would say. “He baa-ed like a sheep and his acting was poor.”
Or, “So-and-so’s voice is really almost as good as Chaliapin’s, except in the lowest notes, but of course Chaliapin’s acting is much more powerful.”
“Stepanovna,” I once said, “used you to go to the opera before the revolution?”
“Why, yes,” she replied, “we used to go to the Narodny Dom.” The Narodny Dom was a big theatre built for the people by the Tsar.
“But to the state theatres, the Marinsky opera or ballet?”
“No, that was difficult.”
“Well, then, why do you abuse the Bolsheviks who make it easy for you to go to what used to be the Imperial theatres and see the very best plays and actors?”
Stepanovna was stooping over the samovar. She raised herself and looked at me, considering my question.
“H’m, yes,” she admitted, “I enjoy it, it is true. But who is the theatre full of? Only school-children and our ‘comrades’ Communists. The school-children ought to be doing home-lessons and our ‘comrades’ ought to be hanging on the gallows. Varia and I can enjoy the theatre because we just have enough money to buy food in the markets. But go and ask those who stand in queues all day and all night for half a pound of bread or a dozen logs of firewood! How much do they enjoy the cheap theatres? I wonder, ah!”
So I said no more. Stepanovna had very decided notions of things. If she had been an Englishwoman before the war she would have been a militant suffragette.