I was about to take my leave of him and go, when he said, " Wait a moment, let me introduce you to my wife." He opened a door and I saw into another room. There in a blaze of light were two Christmas-trees ornamented with tinsel, and beside them, like a figure in a fairy-tale, stood a tremendous doll-like lady, stout, pink-cheeked, bright-eyed, like a fairy godmother or some such character out of a fairy-tale. A string crossed the ceiling of this room, and from it hung dried plants and shrubs.

66

"That divides the room into two rooms," said Alexey. On this side you may smoke, but not on that."

"That is your church!"

There was a large figure of the Holy Virgin there, and such a "holy corner as one sees in peasants' houses, with candles saved from Easter on the shelf below, lamp burning, various secrated" toys and household things.

con

He picked up a powder-box and opened the lid. "What do you think we have here?" he asked affectionately.

"Russian earth," said he with great solemnity. "We brought it with us.

Ah, Boris Pilniak wept when he called on us in Berlin and saw that box, and another writer

crossed himself, but what will you do?" asked Remizof, peering into my face watchfully.

I was silent, and smiled. I hope he understood.

4. MEREZHKOVSKY AND HIPPIUS

The Bolsheviks made Gorky their Dictator of art and literature. They had Merezhkovsky in their midst, a man of real authority, but they knew better than to offer the post to him. They preferred to honour one of themselves. Nevertheless, between Tolstoy and our day I suppose Merezhkovsky to be the most substantial figure in Russian literature. He is the dean of Russian letters, and one of the most respected men, not only among his own people but in Europe generally. Scholar, artist, thinker, he has been a man of great and manifold activity, notable in his latter years as a publicist, but famous in Europe for his Leonardo da Vinci and Julian the Apostate; famous in Russia for his powerful historical plays and religious and national essays.

He and his wife, "Hippius", who is also a poet and playwright, remained in Petrograd through the stormy years 1914-1919. Living within sight of the Taurus Palace and the Duma, they witnessed, as it were, from a little window, the tragedy of the

revolution. We followed the course of events by minutes," wrote Hippius, " for we lived by the railings of the park on the first floor of the last house in one of the streets leading to the palace. Six years-six ages-I looked out from that window, or from the balcony.. I watched the

old palace die after it had been resurrected in new life. I saw the city die. Yes, the whole city built by Peter, sung by Pushkin; dear, severe, and dreadful city-it died. The last record in my diary was the pitiful story of its agony."

Merezhkovsky is a short, vivid, alert man in the sixties. His face is pale, his eyes deep-set, but he does not bear the marks of the revolution in his body, which seems youthful. His mind has what seemed to me a boyish excitability. It fires rapidly like trains of powder. His wife is much younger, with a wreathed glory of copper-glinting hair above an open countenance. Hippius has, however, a slightly troubled expression, as if for some reason she had been constantly called upon to revise her previous opinions of men and things. She has always lived for and in the life of other human beings, whereas her husband, for the most part, has been in the realm of ideas and abstractions.

I spent a pleasant evening with them in Paris,

where they live very simply in a third-floor flat on the Avenue Bonnet, his own old Paris apartment preserved since before the War. Some philanthropist must pay the rent for the other literary celebrities in Paris. None of them seem to me to have more than the barest means of sustenance. Their literary income must be derived from the sale of foreign rights, and one knows what meagre sums that affords. Hippius, however, had had her play The Green Ring performed by the Neighbourhood Players in New York, and Merezhkovsky places his new books in Germany and France as they come out. He seemed rather chagrined because he had not found a publisher for his new book on Tutankhamen either in England or America. This volume is called The Birth of the Gods, and it has lately appeared in Paris.

I asked Merezhkovsky what he thought of the future, but I found him pessimistic, not believing that Bolshevism would soon come to an end. "It was what many thinkers feared," said he, Dostoieffsky when he wrote Demons; Solovyof when he wrote of the end of history. You have made a tour of the Soviet frontier, but where is that frontier? It is not simply geographical—it is in the human soul. The religious expression

of the Orient is becoming negative. The Devil has a power (Merezhkovsky called it Antichrist), which is still mobilising and concentrating. Perhaps we shall not live to see its ultimate defeat."

The Russian philosopher has the virtue of talking like a book. I recognised the Merezhkovsky style, so familiar in the old days in the Russkoe Slovo in his essays directed against Gorky and in defence of Dostoieffsky's ideas.

The danger in his method of prophecy is the tendency to fit in human history to a pre-ordained plan. It is safer to modify one's theories of human destiny by deductions from current events. There is an incalculability in life which has ever baffled science and falsified prophecy. Eternity, moreover, is painfully undramatic or at least, appears so to mortals who think of life as a five-act play.

One of Merezhkovsky's ideas is that the Bolshevik and the Burzhui are close akin; the one is the other turned inside out. By Burzhui he means the European business man in general, and he ventured the opinion that there was a secret sympathy between the two. Always, when Bolshevism is on the brink of the precipice, a hand is stretched out to save it, and that hand is a business hand. The world, therefore, can only be saved by a third party-what one might call