Tales of the Wilderness

The English reading public knows next to nothing of contemporary Russian Literature. In the great age of the Russian Realistic Novel, which begins with Turgeniev and finishes with Chekhov, the English reader is tolerably at home. But what came after the death of Chekhov is still unknown or, what is worse, misrepresented. Second and third- rate writers, like Merezhkovsky, Andreyev, and Artsybashev, have found their way into England and are still supposed to be the best Russian twentieth century fiction can offer.

The names of really significant writers, like Remizov and Andrey Bely, have not even been heard of. This state of affairs makes it necessary, in introducing a contemporary Russian writer to the English public, to give at least a few indications of his place in the general picture of modern Russian Literature.

The date of Chekhov's death (1904) may be taken to mark the end of a long and glorious period of literary achievement. It is conveniently near the dividing line of two centuries, and it coincides rather exactly with the moment when Russian Literature definitely ceased to be dominated by Realism and the Novel. In the two or three years that followed the death of Chekhov Russian Literature underwent a complete and drastic transformation. The principal feature of the new literature became the decisive preponderance of Poetry over Prose and of Manner over Matter-a state of things exactly opposite to that which prevailed during what we may conveniently call the Victorian age. Poetry in contemporary Russian Literature is not only of greater intrinsic merit than prose, but almost all the prose there is has to such an extent been permeated with the methods and standards of poetry that in the more extreme cases it is almost impossible to tell whether what is printed as prose is really prose or verse.

Contemporary Russian Poetry is a vigorous organic growth. It is a self-contained movement developing along logically consistent lines. It has produced much that is of the very first order. The poetry of Theodore Sologub, of Innocent Annensky, [Footnote: The reader will notice the quotations from Annensky in the first story of this volume.] of Vyacheslav Ivanov, and of Alexander Blok, is to our best understanding of that perennial quality that will last. They have been followed by younger poets, more debatable and more debated, many of them intensely and daringly original, but all of them firmly planted in the living tradition of yesterday. They learn from their elders and teach their juniors-the true touchstone of an organic and vigorous movement. What is perhaps still more significant-the level of minor poetry is extraordinarily high, and every verse-producer is, in varying degrees, a conscious and efficient craftsman.

The case with prose is very different. The old nineteenth century realistic tradition is dead. It died, practically, very soon after Chekhov. It has produced a certain amount of good, even excellent, work within these last twenty years, but this work is disconnected, sterile of influence, and more or less belated; at the best it has the doubtful privilege of at once becoming classical and above the age. Such for instance was the case of Bunin's solitary masterpiece The Gentleman from San Francisco, and of that wonderful series of Gorky's autobiographical books, the fourth of which appeared but a few months ago. These, however, can hardly be included in the domain of Fiction, any more than his deservedly famous Reminiscences of Tolstoy. But Gorky, and that excellent though minor writer, Kuprin, are the only belated representatives of the fine nineteenth century tradition. For even Bunin is a poet and a stylist rather than a story teller: his most characteristic "stories" are works of pure atmosphere, as diffuse and as skeletonless as a picture by Claude Monet.

The Symbolists of the early twentieth century (all the great poets of the generation were Symbolists) tried also to create a prose of their own. They tried many directions but they did not succeed in creating a style or founding a tradition. The masterpiece of this Symbolist prose is Theodore Sologub's great novel The Little Demon[Footnote: English translation.] (by the way a very inadequate rendering of the Russian title). It is a great novel, probably the most perfect Russian novel since the death of Dostoyevsky. It breaks away very decidedly from Realism and all the traditions of the nineteenth century. It is symbolic, synthetic, and poetical. But it is so intensely personal and its achievements are so intimately conditioned by the author's idiosyncrasies that it was quite plainly impossible to imitate it, or even to learn from it. This is still more the case with the later works of Sologub, like the charming but baffling and disconcerting romance of Queen Ortruda.

The other Symbolists produced nothing of the same calibre, and they failed to attract the public. The bestsellers of the period after 1905 were, naturally enough, hybrid writers like Andreyev. The cheap effect of his cadenced prose, his dreary and monotonous rhetoric, his sensational way of treating "essential problems" were just what the intelligentsia wanted at the time; it is also just what nobody is likely to want again. Another writer of "problem stories" was Artsybashev. His notorious Sanin (1907) is very typical of a certain phase of Russian life. It has acquired a somewhat unaccountable popularity among the budding English intelligentsia. From the literary point of view its value is nil. Artsybashev and Andreyev were very second-rate writers; they had no knowledge of their art and their taste was deplorably bad and crude, but at least they were in a way, sincere, and gave expression to the genuine vacuum and desolation of their hearts. But around them sprung up a literature which sold as well and better than they did, but was openly meretricious and, fortunately, ephemeral. If it has done nothing else the great Revolution of 1917 has at least done one good thing in making a clean sweep of all this interrevolutionary (1905- 1917) fiction.

All this literature appealed to certain sides of the "intellectual" heart, but it could not slake the thirst for fiction. It was rather natural that the reading public turned to foreign novelists in preference to the native ones. It may be confidently said that three- quarters of what the ordinary Russian novel-reader read in the years preceding the Revolution were translated novels. The book-market was swamped with translations, Polish, German, Scandinavian, English, French and Spanish. Knut Hamsun, H. G. Wells, and Jack London were certainly more popular than any living Russian novelist, except perhaps the Russian Miss Dell, Mme. Verbitsky. In writers like Jack London and H. G. Wells the reader found what he missed in the Russian novelists-a good story thrillingly told. For no reader, be he ever so Russian, will indefinitely put up with a diet of "problems" and imitation poetry.

While all these things were going on on the surface of things and sharing between themselves the whole of the book-market, a secret undercurrent was burrowing out its bed, scarcely noticed at first but which turned out to be the main prolongation of the Russian novel. The principal characteristic of this undercurrent was the revival of realism and of that untranslatable Russian thing "byt," [Footnote: "Byt" is the life of a definite community at a definite time in its individual, as opposed to universally human, features.] but a revival under new forms and in a new spirit. The pioneers of this movement were Andrey Bely and Remizov. There was little in common between the two men, except that both were possessed with a startlingly original genius, and both directed it towards the utilization of Russian "byt" for new artistic ends.

Andrey Bely was, and is, a poet rather than a novelist. His prose from the very beginning exhibits in its extreme form the Symbolist tendency towards wiping away the difference between poetry and prose: in his later novels his prose becomes distinctly metrical, it is prose after all only because it cannot be devided into lines; it can be devided into feet very easily. But, though such prose is essentially a hybrid and illegitimate form, Bely has achieved with it things that have probably never been achieved with the aid of anything like his instruments. The first of the series of his big novels appeared in 1909: it is the Silver Dove, a story of Russian mystical sectarians and of an intellectual who gets entangled in their meshes. At its appearance it sold only five hundred copies. His next novel Petersburg (1913) had not a much greater success. The third of the series is Kotik Letaev (1917). The three novels form a series unique in its way. Those who can get over the initial difficulties and accustom themselves to the very peculiar proceedings of the author will not fail to be irresistibly fascinated by his strange genius. The first novel, the Silver Dove, is in my opinion the most powerful of the three. It combines a daring realism, which is akin to Gogol both in its exaggerations and in its broad humour, with a wonderful power of suggestion and of "atmosphere." One of its most memorable passages is the vast and elemental picture of the Wind driving over the Russian plain; a passage familiarised to satiety by numerous more or less clever imitations. Petersburg is a "political" novel. It is intended to symbolise the Nihilism, the geometrical irreality of Petersburg and Petersburg bureaucracy. The cold spirit of system of the Revolutionary Terrorists is presented as the natural and legitimate outcome of bureaucratic formalism.

A cunningly produced atmosphere of weird irreality pervades the whole book. It is in many ways a descendant of Dostoyevsky-and has in its turn again produced a numerous family of imitations, including Pilniak's most characteristic tales of the Revolution. Kotik Letaev, the last and up to the present the least imitated of Bely's novels, is the story of a child in his very first years. In it the "poetical" methods of the author reach their full development; but at the same time he achieves miracles of vividness and illusion in the realism of his dialogue and the minute, but by no means dry, analysis of the movements of his hero's subconscious Ego. In spite of the enormous difference of style, methods, and aims Bely approaches in many ways the effects and the achievements of Proust.

Remizov is very different. He is steeped in Russian popular and legendary lore. His roots are deep down in the Russian soil. He is the greatest living master of racy and idiomatic Russian. He has also written prose that elbows poetry, and that was looked upon with surprise and bewilderment until people realised that it was poetry. But his importance in the history of the Russian Novel is of another kind. It is firstly in his deliberate effort to "deliteralize" Russian prose, to give it the accent, the intonation, and the syntax of the spoken language. He has fully achieved his ends; he has created a prose which is entirely devoid of all bookishness and even on the printed page gives the illusion of being heard, not seen.

Few have been able to follow him in this path; for in the present state of linguistic chaos and decomposition few writers have the necessary knowledge of Russian, the taste and the sense of measure, to write anything like his pure and flexible Russian. In the hands of others it degenerates into slang, or into some personal jargon closely related to Double Dutch.

Remizov, however, has been more influential in another way, by his method of treating Russian life. The most notable of Remizov's "provincial" stories [Footnote: In the second edition it is called "The Story of Ivan Semenovich Stratilatov." ] _The Unhushable Tambourine _was written at one time with Bely's The Silver Dove, in 1909. At the time it met with even greater indifference: it was refused by the leading magazine of the literary "party" to which the author belonged, and could appear only some years later in a collection of short stories. But it at once became known and very soon began to "make school." Remizov's manner was to a certain degree a reversion to the nineteenth century, but to such aspects of that century that had before him been unnoticed. One of his chief inspirers was Leskov, a writer who is only now coming into his own. Remizov's Tambourine and his other stories of this class are realistic, they are "representations of real life," of "byt", but their Realism is very different from the traditional Russian realism. The style is dominated not by any "social" pre-occupation, but by a deliberate bringing forward of the grotesque. It verges on caricature, but is curiously and inseparably blended with a sympathy for even the lowest and vilest specimens of Mankind which is reminiscent of Dostoyevsky. It would be out of place here to give any detailed account of Remizov's many-sided genius, of his Tales of the Russian People, of his Dreams (real night-dreams), of his books written during the War and the Revolution (Mara and The Noises of the Town). In his later work he tends towards a greater simplicity, a certain "primitiveness" of outline, and a more concentrated style. Remizov's disciples, as might be expected, have been more successful in imitating the grotesqueness of his caricatures and the vivid and intense concentration of his character painting than in adopting his sympathetic and human attitude or in speaking his pure Russian.

The first of the new realists to win general recognition was A. N. Tolstoy, who speedily caught and vulgarised Remizov's knack of creating grotesque "provincial" characters. He has an easy way of writing, which is miles apart from Remizov's perfect craftsmanship, a love for mere filth, characteristic of his time and audience, and water enough to make his writings palatable to the average reader. So he early became the most popular of the literary novelists of the years before the Revolution.

A far more significant writer is Michael Prishvin. He belongs to an older generation and attracted some attention by good work in the line of descriptive journalism before he came in touch with Remizov. A man of the soil, he was capable of following Remizov's lead in making his Russian more colloquial and less bookish, without slavishly imitating him. He was unfortunately too much absorbed by his journalistic work to give much time to literature. But he wrote at least one story which deserves a high rank in even the smallest selection of Russian stories-The Beast of Krutoyarsk (1913). It is the story of a dog, and is far the best "animal" story in the whole of Russian literature. The animal stories of Rudyard Kipling and Jack London were very popular in Russia at that time, but Prishvin is curiously free from every foreign, in fact from every bookish, influence; his story smells of the damp and acid soil of his native Smolensk province, and even Remizov was to him only a guide towards the right use of words and the right way of concentrating on his subject.

Prishvin stands alone. But in the years 1913-1916 the Russian literary press was flooded with short stories modelled on the Unhushable Tambourine. The most promising of these provincialists was E. Zamyatin, whose stories [Footnote: Uyezdnoe, which may be rendered as "something provincial."] are as intense and packed with suggestive ugliness as anything in Remizov, but lack the master's unerring linguistic flair and his profound and inclusive humanness. Zamyatin's stories are most emphatically made, manufactured, there is not an ounce of spontaneity in them, and, especially in the later work where he is more or less free from reminiscences of Remizov, they produce the impression of mosaic laboriously set together. They are overloaded with pointedly suggestive metaphor and symbolically expressive detail, and in their laborious and disproportionate elaborateness they remind you of the deliberate ugliness of a painting by some German "Expressionist." [Footnote: Zamyatin was during the war a shipbuilding Engineer in the Russian service at Newcastle. He has written several stories of English life which are entirely in his later "expressionist" manner (The Islanders, Berlin, 1922)].

When the Revolution came and brought Russia that general impoverishment and reversion to savagery and primitive manners which is still the dominant feature of life in the U.S.S.R., literature was at first faced with a severe crisis. The book market was ruined. In the years 1918-1921 the publication of a book became a most difficult and hazardous undertaking. During these years the novel entirely disappeared from the market. For three years at least the Russian novel was dead. When it emerged again in 1922 it emerged very different from what it had been in 1917. As I have said, the surface "literature" of pre-Revolutionary date was swept away altogether. The new Realism of Remizov and Bely was triumphant all along the line. The works of both these writers were among the first books to be reprinted on the revival of the book-trade. And it soon became apparent that practically all the young generation belonged to their progeny. The first of these younger men to draw on himself the attention of critics and readers was Pilniak, the author of the present volume, on whom I shall dwell anon in greater detail.

In Petersburg there appeared a whole group of young novelists who formed a sort of professional and amicable confraternity and called themselves the "Serapion Brothers." They were all influenced by Remizov; they were taught (in the very precise sense of the word- they had regular classes) by Zamyatin; and explained the general principles of Art by the gifted and light-minded young "formalist" critic, Victor Shklovsky. Other writers emerged in all ends of Russia, all of them more or less obssessed by the dazzling models of Bely and Remizov.

All the writers of this new school have many features in common. They are all of them more interested in Manner than in Matter. They work at their style assiduously and fastidiously. They use an indirect method of narrating by aid of symbolic detail and suggestive metaphor. This makes their stories obscure and not easy to grasp at first reading. Their language is elaborate; it is as full as possible of unusual provincial words, or permeated with slang. It is coarse and crude and many a page of their writings would not have been tolerated by the editor of a pre-Revolution Russian magazine, not to speak of an English publisher. They choose their subjects from the Revolution and the Civil War. They are all fascinated by the "elemental" greatness of the events, and are in a way the bards of the Revolution. But their "Revolutionism" is purely aesthetical and is conspicuously empty of ideas. Most of their stories appear on the pages of official Soviet publications, but they are regarded with rather natural mistrust by the official Bolshevik critics, who draw attention to the essentially uncivic character of their art.

The exaggerated elaborateness and research of their works makes all these writers practically untranslatable; not that many of them are really worth translating. Their deliberate aestheticism-using as they do revolutionary subjects only as material for artistic effect- prevents their writings from being acceptable as reliable pictures of Russian post-Revolutionary life. And it is quite obvious that they have very few of the qualities that make good fiction in the eyes of the ordinary novel-reader.

There are marked inequalities of talent between them, as well as considerable differences of style. Pilniak is the most ambitious, he aims highest-and at his worst falls lowest. Vyacheslav Shishkov, a Siberian, is notable for his good Russian, a worthy pupil of Remizov and Prishvin. Vsevolod Ivanov, another Siberian, is perhaps the most interesting for the subjects he chooses (the Civil War in the backwoods of Siberia), but his style is, though vigorous, diffuse and hazy, and his narrative is lost in a nebula of poetically-produced "atmosphere."

Nicholas Nikitin, who is considered by some to be the most promising of all, is certainly the most typical of the school of Zamyatin; his style, overloaded with detail which swamps the outline of the story, is disfigured by the deliberate research of unfamiliar provincial idioms. Michael Zoshchenko is the only one who has, in a small way, reached perfection in his rendering of the common slang of a private soldier. But his art savours too much of a pastiche; he is really a born parodist and may some day give us a Russian Christmas Garland.

The most striking feature of all these story-tellers is their almost complete inability to tell a story. And this in spite of their great reverence for Leskov, the greatest of Russian story-tellers. But of Leskov they have only imitated the style, not his art of narrative. Miss Harrison, in her notable essay on the Aspects of the Russian Verb, [Footnote: Aspects and Aorists, by Jane Harrison, Cambridge University Press, 1919.] makes an interesting distinction between the "perfective" and "imperfective" style in fiction. The perfective is the ordinary style of an honest narrative. The "imperfective" is where nothing definitely happens but only goes on indefinitely "becoming." Russian Literature (as the Russian language, according to Miss Harrison) has a tendency towards the "imperfective." But never has this "imperfective" been so exclusively paramount as now. In all these stories of thrilling events the writers have a most cunning way of concealing the adventure under such a thick veil of detail, description, poetical effusion, idiom, and metaphor, that it can only with difficulty be discovered by the very experienced reader. To choose such adventures for subjects and then deliberately to make no use of them and concentrate all attention on style and atmosphere, is really a tour de force, the crowning glory and the reductio ad absurdum of this imperfective tendency.

These extremities, which are largely conditioned by the whole past of Russian Literature, must naturally lead to a reaction. The reading public cannot be satisfied with such a literature. Nor are the critics. A reaction against all this style is setting in, but it remains in the domain of theory and has not produced work of any importance. And it is doubtful whether it will. If even Leskov with his wonderful genius for pure narrative has failed to influence the moderns in any way except by his mannerisms of speech, the case seems indeed desperate. Those who are most thirsty for good stories properly told turn their eyes westwards, towards "Stevenson and Dumas" and E. A. T. Hoffmann. Better imitate Pierre Bénois than go on in the way you are doing, says Lev Lunts, one of the Serapion Brothers, in a violent and well-founded invective against modern Russian fiction. [Footnote: In Gorky's miscellany, Beseda. N3, 1923.] But though he sees the right way out pretty clearly Lunts has not seriously tried his hand at the novel. [Footnote: As I write I hear of the death of Lev Lunts at the age of 22. His principal work is a good tragedy of pure action without "atmosphere" or psychology (in the same Beseda, N2).] A characteristic sign of the times is a novel by Sergey Bobrov, [Footnote: The Specification of Iditol. Iditol being the name of an imaginary chemical discovery.] a "precious" poet and a good critic, where he adopts the methods of the film-drama with its rapid development and complicated plot, and carefully avoids everything picturesque or striking in his style. But the common run of fiction in the Soviet magazines continues as it was, and it is to be feared that there is something intrinsically opposed to the "perfective" narrative in the constitution of the contemporary Russian novelist.

The tinkling of postillion-bells broke the stillness of the crisp winter night-a coachman driving from the station perhaps. They rang out near the farm, were heard descending into a hollow; then, as the horses commenced to trot, they jingled briskly into the country, their echoes at last dying away beyond the common.

Polunin and his guest, Arkhipov, were playing chess in his study. Vera Lvovna was minding the infant; she talked with Alena for a while; then went into the drawing-room, and rummaged among the books there.

Polunin's study was large, candles burnt on the desk, books were scattered about here and there; an antique firearm dimly shone above a wide, leather-covered sofa. The silent, moonlit night peered in through the blindless windows, through one of which was passed a wire. The telegraph-post stood close beside it, and its wires hummed ceaselessly in the room somewhere in a corner of the ceiling-a monotonous, barely audible sound, like a snow-storm.

The two men sat in silence, Polunin broad-shouldered and bearded,

Arkhipov lean, wiry, and bald.

Alena entered bringing in curdled milk and cheese-cakes. She was a modest young woman with quiet eyes, and wore a white kerchief.

"Won't you please partake of our simple fare?" she asked shyly, inclining her head and folding her hands across her bosom.

Silent and absent-minded, the chess-players sat down to table and supped. Alena was about to join them, but just then her child began to cry, and she hurriedly left the room. The tea-urn softly simmered and seethed, emitting a low, hissing sound in unison with that of the wires. The men took up their tea and returned to their chess. Vera Lvovna returned from the drawing-room; and, taking a seat on the sofa beside her husband, sat there without stirring, with the fixed, motionless eyes of a nocturnal bird.

"Have you examined the Goya, Vera Lvovna?" Polunin asked suddenly.

"I just glanced through the History of Art; then I sat down with

Natasha."

"He has the most wonderful devilry!" Polunin declared, "and, do you know, there is another painter-Bosch. He has something more than devilry in him. You should see his Temptation of St. Anthony!"

They began to discuss Goya, Bosch, and St. Anthony, and as Polunin spoke he imperceptibly led the conversation to the subject of St. Francis d'Assisi. He had just been reading the Saint's works, and was much attracted by his ascetical attitude towards the world. Then the conversation flagged.

It was late when the Arkhipovs left, and Polunin accompanied them home. The last breath of an expiring wind softly stirred the pine- branches, which swayed to and fro in a mystic shadow-dance against the constellations. Orion, slanting and impressive, listed across a boundless sky, his starry belt gleaming as he approached his midnight post. In the widespread stillness the murmur of the pines sounded like rolling surf as it beats on the rocks, and the frozen snow crunched like broken glass underfoot: the frost was cruelly sharp.

On reaching home, Polunin looked up into the overarching sky, searching the glittering expanse for his beloved Cassiopeian Constellation, and gazed intently at the sturdy splendour of the Polar Star; then he watered the horses, gave them their forage for the night, and treated them to a special whistling performance.

It struck warm in the stables, and there was a smell of horses' sweat. A lantern burned dimly on the wall; from the horses' nostrils issued grey, steamy cloudlets; Podubny, the stallion, rolled a great wondering eye round on his master, as though inquiring what he was doing. Polunin locked the stable; then stood outside in the snow for a while, examining the bolts.

In the study Alena had made herself up a bed on the sofa, sat down next it in an armchair and began tending her baby, bending over it humming a wordless lullaby. Polunin sat down by her when he came in and discussed domestic affairs; then took the child from Alena and rocked her. Pale green beams of moonlight flooded through the windows.

Polunin thought of St. Francis d'Assisi, of the Arkhipovs who had lost faith and yet were seeking the law, of Alena and their household. The house was wrapped in utter silence, and he soon fell into that sound, healthy sleep to which he was now accustomed, in contrast to his former nights of insomnia.

The faint moon drifted over the silent fields, and the pines shone tipped with silver. A new-born wind sighed, stirred, then rose gently from the enchanted caverns of the night and soared up into the sky with the swift flutter of many-plumed wings. Assuredly Kseniya Ippolytovna Enisherlova was not asleep on such a night.

The day dawned cold, white, pellucid-breathing forth thin, misty vapour, while a hoar-frost clothed the houses, trees, and hedges. The smoke from the village chimneypots rose straight and blue. Outside the windows was an overgrown garden, a snow-covered tree lay prone on the earth; further off were snow-clad fields, the valley and the forest. Sky and air were pale and transparent, and the sun was hidden behind a drift of fleecy white clouds.

Alena came in, made some remark about the house, then went out to singe the pig for Christmas.

The library-clock struck eleven; a clock in the hall answered. Then there came a sudden ring on the telephone; it sounded strange and piercing in the empty stillness.

"Is that you, Dmitri Vladimirovich? Dmitri Vladimirovich, is that you?" cried a woman's muffled voice: it sounded a great way off through the instrument.

"Yes, but who is speaking?"

"Kseniya Ippolytovna Enisherlova is speaking", the voice answered quietly; then added in a higher key: "Is it you, my ascetic and seeker? This is me, me, Kseniya."

"You, Kseniya Ippolytovna?" Polunin exclaimed joyfully.

"Yes, yes ... Oh yes!... I am tired of roaming about and being always on the brink of a precipice, so I have come to you ... across the fields, where there is snow, snow, snow and sky ... to you, the seeker.... Will you take me? Have you forgiven me that July?"

Polunin's face was grave and attentive as he bent over the telephone:

"Yes, I have forgiven," he replied.

* * * * * * *

One long past summer, Polunin and Kseniya Ippolytovna used to greet the glowing dawn together. At sundown, when the birch-trees exhaled a pungent odour and the crystal sickle of the moon was sinking in the west, they bade adieu until the morrow on the cool, dew-sprinkled terrace, and Polunin passionately kissed-as he believed-the pure, innocent lips of Kseniya Ippolytovna.

But she laughed at his ardour, and her avid lips callously drank in his consuming, protesting passion, only to desert him afterwards, abandoning him for Paris, and leaving behind her the shreds of his pure and passionate love.

That June and July had brought joy and sorrow, good and ill. Polunin was already disillusioned when he met Alena, and was living alone with his books. He met her in the spring, and quickly and simply became intimate with her, begetting a child, for he found that the instinct of fatherhood had replaced that of passion within him.

Alena entered his house at evening, without any wedding-ceremony, placed her trunk on a bench in the kitchen, and passing quickly through into the study, said quietly:

"Here I am, I have come." She looked very beautiful and modest as she stood there, wiping the corner of her mouth with her handkerchief.

Kseniya Ippolytovna arrived late when dusk was already falling and blue shadows crept over the snow. The sky had darkened, becoming shrouded in a murky blue; bullfinches chirruped in the snow under the windows. Kseniya Ippolytovna mounted the steps and rang, although Polunin had already opened the door for her.

The hall was large, bright, and cold. As she entered, the sunrays fell a moment on the windows and the light grew warm and waxy, lending to her face-as Polunin thought-a greenish-yellow tint, like the skin of a peach, and infinitely beautiful. But the rays died away immediately, leaving a blue crepuscular gloom, in which Kseniya Ippolytovna's figure grew dim, forlorn, and decrepit.

Alena curtseyed: Kseniya Ippolytovna hesitated a moment, wondering if she should give her hand; then she went up to Alena and kissed her.

"Good evening", she cried gaily, "you know I am an old friend of your husband's."

But she did not offer her hand to Polunin.

Kseniya Ippolytovna had greatly changed since that far-off summer. Her eyes, her wilful lips, her Grecian nose, and smooth brows were as beautiful as ever, but now there was something reminiscent of late August in her. Formerly she had worn bright costumes-now she wore dark; and her soft auburn hair was fastened in a simple plait.

They entered the study and sat down on the sofa. Outside the windows lay the snow, blue like the glow within. The walls and the furniture grew dim in the twilight. Polunin-grave and attentive-hovered solicitously round his guest. Alena withdrew, casting a long, steadfast look at her husband.

"I have come here straight from Paris", Kseniya explained. "It is rather queer-I was preparing to leave for Nice in the spring, and was getting my things together, when I found a nest of mice in my wardrobe. The mother-mouse ran off, leaving three little babes behind her; they were raw-skinned and could only just crawl. I spent my whole time with them, but on the third day the first died, and then the same night the other two.... I packed up for Russia the next morning, to come here, to you, where there is snow, snow.... Of course there is no snow in Paris-and it will soon be Christmas, the Russian Christmas."

She became silent, folded her hands and laid them against her cheek; for a moment she had a sorrowful, forlorn expression.

"Continue, Kseniya Ippolytovna", Polunin urged.

"I was driving by our fields and thinking how life here is as simple and monotonous as the fields themselves, and that it is possible to live here a serious life without trivialities. You know what it is to live for trivialities. I am called-and I go. I am loved-and I let myself be loved! Something in a showcase catches my eye and I buy it. I should always remain stationary were it not for those that have the will to move me....

"I was driving by our fields and thinking of the impossibility of such a life: I was thinking too that I would come to you and tell you of the mice.... Paris, Nice, Monaco, costumes, English perfumes, wine, Leonardo da Vinci, neo-classicism, lovers, what are they? With you everything is just as of old."

She rose and crossed to the window.

"The snow is blue-white here, as it is in Norway-I jilted Valpyanov there. The Norwegian people are like trolls. There is no better place than Russia! With you nothing changes. Have you forgiven me that July?"

Polunin approached and stood beside her.

"Yes, I have forgiven", he said earnestly.

"But I have not forgiven you that June!" she flashed at him; then she resumed: "The library, too, is the same as ever. Do you remember how we used to read Maupassant together in there?"

Kseniya Ippolytovna approached the library-door, opened it, and went in. Inside were book-cases behind whose glass frames stood even rows of gilded volumes; there was also a sofa, and close to it a large, round, polished table. The last yellow rays of the sun came in through the windows. Unlike that in the study, the light in here was not cold, but warm and waxy, so that again Kseniya Ippolytovna's face seemed strangely green to Polunin, her hair a yellow-red; her large, dark, deep-sunken eyes bore a stubborn look.

"God has endowed you with wonderful beauty, Kseniya, Ippolytovna,"

Polunin said gravely.

She gave him a keen glance; then smiled. "God has made me wonderfully tempting! By the way, you used to dream of faith; have you found it?"

"Yes, I have found it."

"Faith in what?"

"In life."

"But if there is nothing to believe in?"

"Impossible!"

"I don't know. I don't know." Kseniya Ippolytovna raised her hands to her head. "The Japanese, Naburu Kotokami, is still looking for me in Paris and Nice... I wonder if he knows about Russia.... I have not had a smoke for a whole week, not since the last little mouse died; I smoked Egyptians before .... Yes, you are right, it is impossible not to have faith."

Polunin went to her quickly, took her hands, then dropped them; his eyes were very observant, his voice quiet and serious.

"Kseniya, you must not grieve, you must not."

"Do you love me?"

"As a woman-no, as a fellow-creature-I do," he answered firmly.

She smiled, dropped her eyes, then moved to the sofa, sat down and arranged her dress, then smiled again.

"I want to be pure."

"And so you are!" Polunin sat down beside her, leaning forward, his elbows on his knees.

They were silent.

Kseniya Ippolytovna said at last: "You have grown old, Polunin!"

"Yes, I have grown old. People do, but there is nothing terrible in that when they have found what they sought for."

"Yes, when they have found it.... But what about now? Why do you say that? Is it Alena?"

"Why ask? Although I am disillusioned, Kseniya, I go on chopping firewood, heating the stove, living just to live. I read St. Francis d'Assisi, think about him, and grieve that such a life as his may not be lived again. I know he was absurd, but he had faith, And now Alena-I love her, I shall love her for ever. I wish to feel God!"

Kseniya Ippolytovna looked at him curiously:

"Do you know what the baby-mice smelt like?"

"No, why do you ask?"

"They smelt like new-born babies-like human children! You have a daughter, Natasha. That is everything."

The sun sank in an ocean of wine-coloured light, and a great red wound remained amidst the drift of cold clouds over the western horizon. The snow grew violet, and the room was filled with shadowy, purplish twilight. Alena entered and the loud humming of the telegraph wires came through the study's open door.

By nightfall battalions of fleeting clouds flecked the sky; the moon danced and quivered in their midst-a silver-horned goddess, luminous with the long-stored knowledge of the ages. The bitter snow-wind crept, wound, and whirled along in spirals, loops, and ribbons, lashing the fields, whining and wailing its age-old, dismal song over the lone desolate spaces. The land was wretched, restless, and forlorn; the sky was overcast with sombre, gaping caverns shot through with lurid lines of fire.

* * * * * * *

At seven o'clock the Arkhipovs arrived.

Kseniya Ippolytovna had known them a long time: they had been acquaintances even before Arkhipov's marriage. As he greeted her now, he kissed her hand and began speaking about foreign countries- principally Germany, which he knew and admired. They passed into the study, where they argued and conversed: they had nothing much to talk about really. Vera Lvovna was silent, as usual; and soon went to see Natasha. Polunin also was quiet, walking about the room with his hands behind his back.

Kseniya Ippolytovna jested in a wilful, merry, and coquettish fashion with Arkhipov, who answered her in a polite, serious, and punctilious manner. He was unable to carry on a light, witty conversation, and was acutely conscious of his own awkwardness. From a mere trifle, something Kseniya Ippolytovna said about fortune-telling at Christmas, there arose an old-standing dispute between the two men on Belief and Unbelief.

Arkhipov spoke with calmness and conviction, but Polunin grew angry, confused, and agitated. Arkhipov declared that Faith was unnecessary and injurious, like instinct and every other sentiment; that there was only one thing immutable-Intellect. Only that was moral which was intelligent.

Polunin retorted that the intellectual and the non-intellectual were no standard of life, for was life intelligent? he asked. He contended that without Faith there was only death; that the one thing immutable in life was the tragedy of Faith and the Spirit.

"But do you know what Thought is, Polunin?"

"Yes, indeed I do!"

"Don't smile! Do you not know that Thought kills everything? Reflect, think thrice over what you regard as sacred, and it will be as simple as a glass of lemonade."

"But death?"

"Death is an exit into nothing. I have always that in reserve-when I am heart-broken. For the present I am content to live and thrive."

When the dispute was over, Vera Lvovna said in a low voice, as calm as ever:

"The only tragic thing in life is that there is nothing tragical, while death is just death, when anyone dies physically. A little less metaphysics!"

Kseniya Ippolytovna had been listening, alert and restless.

"But all the same," she answered Vera Lvovna animatedly, "Isn't the absence of tragedy the true tragedy?"

"Yes, that alone."

"And love?"

"No, not love."

"But aren't you married?"

"I want my baby."

Kseniya Ippolytovna, who was lying on the sofa, rose up on her knees, and stretching out her arms cried:

"Ah, a baby! Is that not instinct?"

"That is a law!"

The women began to argue. Then the dispute died down. Arkhipov proposed a game of chance. They uncovered a green table, set lighted candles at its corners and commenced to play leisurely and silently as in winter. Arkhipov sat erect, resting his elbows at right angles on the table.

The wind whistled outside, the blizzard increased in violence, and from some far distance came the dismal, melancholy creaking and grinding of iron. Alena came in, and sat quietly beside her husband, her hands folded in her lap. They were killing time.

"The last time, I sat down to play a game of chance amidst the fjords in a little valley hotel; a dreadful storm raged the whole while," Kseniya Ippolytovna remarked pensively. "Yes, there are big and little tragedies in life!"

The wind shrieked mournfully; snow lashed at the windows. Kseniya stayed on until a late hour, and Alena invited her to remain overnight; but she refused and left.

Polunin accompanied her. The snow-wind blew violently, whistling and cutting at them viciously. The moon seemed to be leaping among the clouds; around them the green, snowy twilight hung like a thick curtain. The horses jogged along slowly. Darkness lay over the land.

Polunin returned alone over a tractless road-way; the gale blew in his face; the snow blinded him. He stabled his horses; then found Alena waiting up for him in the kitchen, her expression was composed but sad. Polunin took her in his arms and kissed her.

"Do not be anxious or afraid; I love only you, no one else. I know why you are unhappy."

Alena looked up at him in loving gratitude, and shyly smiled.

"You do not understand that it is possible to love one only. Other men are not able to do that," Polunin told her tenderly.

The hurricane raged over the house, but within reigned peace. Polunin went into his study and sat down at his desk; Natasha began to cry; he rose, took a candle, and brought her to Alena, who nursed her. The infant looked so small, fragile, and red that Polunin's heart overflowed with tenderness towards her. One solitary, flickering candle illumined the room.

There was a call on the telephone at daybreak. Polunin was already up. The day slowly broke in shades of blue; there was a murky, bluish light inside the rooms and outside the windows, the panes of which were coated with snow. The storm had subsided.

"Have I aroused you? Were you still in bed?" called Kseniya.

"No, I was already up."

"On the watch?"

"Yes."

"I have only just arrived home. The storm whirled madly round us in the fields, and the roads were invisible, frozen under snow ... I drove on thinking, and thinking-of the snow, you, myself, Arkhipov, Paris ... oh, Paris...! You are not angry with me for ringing you up, are you, my ascetic?... I was thinking of our conversation."

"What were you thinking?"

"This.... We were speaking together, you see.... Forgive me, but you could not speak like that to Alena. She would not understand ... how could she?"

"One need not speak a word, yet understand everything. There is something that unites-without the aid of speech-not only Alena and me, but the world and me. That is a law of God."

"So it is," murmured Kseniya. "Forgive me ... poor old Alena."

"I love her, and she has given me a daughter...."

"Yes, that is true. And we ... we love, but are childless... We rise in the morning feeling dull and depressed from our revels of overnight, while you were wisely sleeping." Kseniya Ippolytovna's voice rose higher. "'We are the heisha-girls of lantern-light,' you remember Annensky? At night we sit in restaurants, drinking wine and listening to garish music. We love-but are childless.... And you? You live a sober, righteous and sensible life, seeking the truth.... Isn't that so?' Truth!" Her cry was malignant and full of derision.

"That is unjust, Kseniya," answered Polunin in a low voice, hanging his head.

"No, wait," continued the mocking voice at the other end of the line; "here is something more from Annensky: 'We are the heisha-girls of lantern-light!'... 'And what seemed to them music brought them torment'; and again: 'But Cypris has nothing more sacred than the words I love, unuttered by us' ..."

"That is unjust, Kseniya."

"Unjust!" She laughed stridently; then suddenly was silent. She began to speak in a sad, scarcely audible whisper: "But Cypris has nothing more sacred than the words I love, unuttered by us.... I love ... love.... Oh, darling, at that time, in that June, I looked upon you as a mere lad. But now I seem small and little myself, and you a big man, who defends me. How miserable I was alone in the fields last night! But that is expiation.... You are the only one who has loved me devotedly. Thank you, but I have no faith now."

The dawn was grey, lingering, cold; the East grew red.