In the first scene, a very beautiful one, with little village church and worshippers and beggars and lackeys, the bells are set a-ringing and you open the doors of the temple of your soul and admit the whole Russian world of the suffering. The stage becomes the forecourt of your heart, and the many people in the mystery commune with your sympathies. It must be said that from an English, even from a Celtic point of view, the story is rather desperate, somewhat unredeemed; the dream-picture that you see is rather the nightmare of some one who is too conscious of being ill himself—the epileptic Dostoieffsky. Dostoieffsky’s physical ills and personal down-heartedness are interesting in his biography, but blemishes in his artistic work. All those long novels were written as almost everlasting feuilletons, scribbled often while the printer’s devil was waiting, or writhed into black and white in the still hours of lonely poverty and feebleness, in dreary midnight hours in Petrograd. In order to understand them truly you need Dostoieffsky himself somewhere on the stage, or in the heart.
V
THE MOVEMENTS OF THE PEOPLES
Moscow, March 1914.
During the summer, in which I lived in a cottage in the Urals, there passed my window an endless procession of weary tramps, not in flocks or crowds, in hundreds or in fifties, but in twos and threes day by day. I saw them on the highway stamping their weak boots and bruised feet in the deep August dust, trudging forward patiently, patiently. They would come to the door, untie the black kettle that dangled from the pack on their shoulders, beg water to make tea, sit down to munch our peasant-wife’s pastry, resting their ragged elbows on the unvarnished table, holding a saucerful of hot tea in both hands, and sucking at it and breathing over it in manifest appreciation and satisfaction.
I would ask one of them, “What are you, brother, a pilgrim?”
“No, brother, we seek land,” he would answer. “Where we live it is too close—we live too near together; we are going to Siberia to get land.”
“And where do you come from?”
“From Tambovsky Government, from Penzensky, from Nizhegorodsky,” they would answer. From all the more crowded parts of Central Russia. They were perecelentsi, migratory Russians, children of the womb of nations, the race ever pushing out from the centre, extending Russia to the East and the South and the North.
Wherever you go to-day you find on the confines of the Empire, and indeed beyond the confines, the wandering poverty-stricken emigrant-tramp; in Siberia, in Russian Turkestan, in Mongolia, Persia, Turkey. Anon he grows tired, or he finds his happy valley and settles down, forming the nucleus of a new Russian colony, or adding to the strength of one already existent. After him comes the Russian army, claiming interests, and the Russian flag, claiming sovereignty or giving protection; but it must always be remembered that the movement is first of all natural, it is not merely aggressively imperial. It is not even encouraged by the Government; thousands of the tramps die of privation every year; thousands get thrown into prison for being, as is often the case, bez-passportny (without passports); the people they meet on the way call them fools going from bad conditions to perhaps worse—but the tramps go on. They say they seek a better land, but God alone knows what they really seek, what they imagine they may see at the next turning of the long long road.
If you stay at Chelyabinsk, the eastern gate of Russia, you may see thousands of these wanderers. And it is interesting to compare their type with those whom you see at Libava, the western gate of Russia.