I CONVERSATIONS WITH RUSSIAN WRITERS I. KUPRIN I CALLED on Kuprin in Paris, for besides having edited a volume of his tales in translation I have a lively admiration of him as a writer. Like so many thousands before the revolution, I bought his works as they appeared and read them avidly. Suitably bound in unfading green, they are treasures of my bookshelf. His tales are very characteristic of the former life of his country, as humorous as Tchekof, and more detailed, more social. Now he is orphaned of his readers; he is little printed except in the pages of La Gazette Russe ; people steadily advertise for his works. It is a strange phenomenon : a writer as popular in Russia as Wells is here, and receiving formerly as large a return, a merchant prince of the literary world, and now a man without a country, and a writer without readers. I found him to be a most cheery exile, nevertheless. He lives on the outskirts of Paris in that Auteuil neighbourhood which harbours so many Russian writers and artists. He is fifty-four years old, rather younger than his years, broadfaced, bright-eyed, and as conversational as some of those talkative characters in his stories. He stepped right out of a Kuprin tale. He told me some of his adventures in the revolution. "I retreated out of Russia with the army of General Judenitch," said he; "though why I should call it of General Judenitch' I don't know, for we never saw anything of him, and I don't believe he ever joined it. I had to leave my villa at Gatchina-it was on the road of the armies. There was a moment when we could have marched into Petrograd, but we missed it. We had no general behind us. The panicstricken army pelted into Narva, where we starved and froze and died. And I have never been back to Gatchina. But what I left there! Autographed books and manuscripts, precious pictures, photographs! I had every book I loved bound specially in the way I thought fitted it. I have not heard of what happened to the villa from that day to this. I only brought one thing with me. What do you think it was?" I could not guess. Kuprin looked at me impressively. "My most sacred possession," said he," a portrait of Tolstoy signed by him.' "What has happened to your works in Russia ?" Oh, they spit at me; they can't bear me." But do they not print your works and sell them ? " No, only some of my earlier tales which were against the Government; they print them and distribute them as propaganda. I am very sorry. If I ever wrote against my country, I was wrong. Do you know, I have come to the conclusion that one should never write anything that shows one's country in a bad light. No genius ever writes ill of his country. Look at Kipling, for instance ! Ah, how admirable! Even Tolstoy-I mean Tolstoy the artist, before his mind was obsessed by ethical philosophy-he never really wrote ill of his people. I dare say that in the English army you come across the vice which I described as existent in the Russian army in 'The Duel '. But Kipling would not have mentioned it. I did. It was true, but I was wrong.' He spoke of his great and lasting admiration of Rudyard Kipling. He had always marvelled |