THAT IS WHAT a journey on the Trans-Siberian Railway is like, if you make it alone.
My own was mostly uneventful. The days seemed all the same; the hours shared with the horizon a quality of remote monotony. But of course every day was different, internally or externally. The first, for instance, was uncomfortably hot; but on the second morning the platform at Sverdlovsk, where they shot the Tsar, was whipped by a raw wind. For two days thereafter it was as if we had run into November overnight.
The Urals were left behind, and we crawled across the Black Soil Belt, where on the hedgeless and forlorn plains man and his beasts were dwarfed to the merest microscopic toys, and each little group of figures seemed a pathetic, unavailing protest against the tyrant solitude. The skies were dark. Rain lashed the streaky windows, and when we stopped at a station the wind made a desolate supplicating sound in the ventilators. In the villages very old, very hairy men, standing in thick black mud, stared up at us, from force of habit, without curiosity. Usually it is difficult to stop looking out of the windows of a train, however monotonous the landscape. You think ‘I will read now,’ but for a long time you cannot take your eyes away from the window, just as for a long time you are reluctant to put back the telephone receiver when your number does not answer. Brrr-brrr … brrr-brrr … brrr-brrr. … At any moment that aggravating sound may be superseded by a voice. At any moment those dull empty miles may show you something that it would be a pity to have missed. But here it was not like that; here there could be nothing worth waiting for. A grey cold blight had fallen on the world.
Nature when she is frankly hostile, when she is out to do you down, I do not mind. There is stimulus in the challenge of her extremer moods. But when she is drab and indifferent, as though herself despairing, I am oppressed. On the second day of this anomalous November I was driven to seek sanctuary in the communal meal at three o’clock.
Ugly women and uninspiring men; children who squawled, as children have a right to squawl, and sitting on their mothers’ laps put their tiny elbows in the tepid soup; Red Army Officers, dour men in blouse-like tunics of a dark khaki and high boots whose corrugated plasticity suggested Wardour Street; one seedy westernized Chinese from Moscow. …
We were all comrades: all equal: all brother-workers in the Five Year Plan: all actors (I reflected) in the most exciting drama of the modern world. … But none of this could have been deduced from our appearance. We sat and ate, with dull, heavy eyes. If you had been told to name the outstanding characteristic of this cross-section of the New Russia, you would have put it down as constipation. You would not have been far wrong.
I began to eat, without enthusiasm, synthetic caviar.
Then, all of a sudden, there he was, sitting opposite me; a tall, thin, pale youth, wearing horn-rimmed glasses and looking not unlike Mr. Aldous Huxley. I smiled, and he immediately told me the story of his life, in fluent though erratic English.
He was twenty-two. His home was in the south, in Baku, but he had run away from it four years ago to go on the stage in Moscow. He had studied the theatre (at the Government’s expense) in one of the Dramatic Institutes, and now he was being sent by the Commissariat of Culture to found a National Theatre in Outer Mongolia. He had started as an actor, but now he was a régisseur: ‘A – how do you call it? A conductor?’ ‘No. A producer.’ Nowadays everyone wanted to be a producer; the best producers got higher pay than the best engineers. Stanislavsky, for instance. … He told me about Stanislavsky.
He was extremely intelligent: he had an understanding of the theatre, and a feeling for it. His mind was alert, receptive and critical. ‘Here’, I said to myself (for travellers are always tying labels on to things), ‘is a representative of the younger intellectuals. It will be interesting to hear his criticisms of the Soviet regime.’
So it would have been. But he had none: not one. In an oration of some length, he expounded to me the doctrines of Karl Marx, or most of them. His faith in them, his pride in the way in which modern Russia was giving them practical expression, were at once touching and impressive. He spoke of Marx as if Marx was the only man who had ever exercised the power of reason; other philosophers were dismissed, not as inferior in quality, but as different altogether in kind. He mentioned Kant as if Kant was a sewing-machine, or a slow bowler: something functioning on another plane altogether. Here was orthodoxy carried to the pitch of fanaticism. I asked him whether the majority of his fellow-students (he lived in the ‘university town’ in Moscow and presumably saw a lot of his own generation) accepted the present state of affairs as enthusiastically as he did.
‘But of course!’ he cried. ‘All the students, all the young people, are very, very … loyal.’ His smile apologized for an epithet deriving from the bad old days of feudalism.
At first I was surprised. But gradually, as he talked, I saw that it was not only natural but inevitable that it should be so. The Soviet regime has not a few achievements to its credit, but also not a few failures; and in many, if not most of its aspects, the gap between ambition and achievement appears to the sophisticated mind rather comical than inspiring. The Mongolian impresario’s contemporaries are potentially its best critics – young men of humour and perception who were too young to be transfigured by the wave of enthusiasm which launched the first Five Year Plan, and who have grown up to find that what was boomed as a crusade looks at times very like a rearguard action. But they will not criticize; they sincerely believe that the present order is ideal. And indeed it would be surprising if they believed anything else, seeing that under its dispensation they receive food, lodging, an elaborate education, full encouragement to pursue their special bent, as well as various privileges; all this gratis. No wonder that they are fanatically orthodox. It is not they dare not say ‘Bo’ to the goose that lays the golden eggs; they have not even recognized it as a goose.
I saw a lot of Assorgim (that was his name), and we discussed at length a number of subjects, among which Marxism played an increasingly unimportant part, for I early realized that it would be impossible to tolerate the society of this youth without simulating conversion to his creed. I liked him best when he talked of the theatre, which he did most of the time. The only news from abroad which reaches the average Russian concerns strikes, riots, mutinies, and other phenomena symptomatic of the movement towards a World Revolution; the largest country in the world is also by far the most insular. I found it typical that my friend, although familiar in some detail with conditions in the Elizabethan playhouses, was dumbfounded to hear that in England and America neither actors nor theatres are supported by the State, as they all are in Russia.
He had a profound reverence for, and some appreciation of, Shakespeare, and he described to me at length the only two productions of what he called Gamlet that Moscow has seen since the Revolution. The first, by a nephew of Tchehov’s, was a fairly straightforward interpretation of the play, in which interest was centred on the conflict between the spiritual and the fleshly sides of Gamlet’s nature. The second was a very different matter. The producer, a man called Akimov, saw in Shakespeare the up-thrust of the New Bourgeoisie; he was not a court poet like Lyly, he was not a common man like Ben Jonson, he stood for the new middle class, the conquistadors who were destined to convert English society from feudalism to capitalism. And, naturally, he had put every ounce of his class-consciousness into Gamlet.
So Gamlet was played as comedy-melodrama, with a fat and merry actor in the lead, who usually came on to the stage on horseback, or at least surrounded by dogs. He was a gleeful upstart; his sole ambition was the throne, his only worry how to get it. The ‘To be or not to be’ speech he said while trying on a crown left on a restaurant table by the Player King. (I never quite understood about the restaurant.) As for the Ghost, that was simply a ruse on the part of Gamlet to terrify the ignorant soldiers into allegiance to himself, and to impress on them a belief in the King’s iniquity; the Prince produced his father’s voice by speaking into a flower-pot. Ophelia was a girl more remarkable for her social ambitions than for her virtue; she would be queen, or know the reason why. Piqued at Gamlet’s rejection of her advances, she got drunk, sang her mad song between hiccoughs, and went off on a necking party with the Fifth Gentleman. No one was surprised when she was found drowned. Claudius (or Clowdy, as we called him in Siberia) was drunk almost throughout the play.
One day Assorgim came into my compartment and wondered if he could ask me a favour? He meant to present a lot of different plays in Urga (which is the capital of Outer Mongolia), and some of them had English characters in them. He liked, when it was possible, to introduce songs into his plays; each group of characters ought to have a song of its own, it was nicer like that. In Moscow, unfortunately, they had only one song for the English characters to sing, and that was the song called ‘Tipperary’. Frankly, he was tired of it. Besides, was it modern? Was it representative? Was it correct?
I could not altogether conceal from him my suspicion that – in civilian contexts, at any rate – it was none of these things. This was a mistake on my part, for he implored me to teach him another song. This put me in a very awkward position, because I cannot sing at all, being indeed so utterly unmusical that I quite often have to be nudged and hustled to my feet when they play ‘God Save the King’, which always seems to me practically indistinguishable, except of course by an expert, from ‘Rule Britannia’.
Putting, however, a bold face on it, I told him that the song he wanted was the Eton Boating Song, which is the only song I have ever sung more than once. After a painful half-hour he had mastered some sort of travesty of this immortal ditty, and was translating the first verse into Russian. He took it away to teach it to his friend, who was a little twinkling man like a clown; and as he went he said:
‘I ’ave a play, and there are two Englishes in it. They are what you call clubmen. After long absence, much sorrow, great jobs of work, don’t you know, they meet again. They shake hands, because they are clubmen. And then’ (his voice grew anxious and wistful) ‘and then – and then – they could sing this song? You ’ave such a custom? Yes?’
He was so eager, so anxious to use his little bit of local colour. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘we have.’ After all, it was better than ‘Tipperary’.
He was a nice man, Assorgim. He was to leave the train at Verchne Udinsk, whence a motor road runs, or is believed to run, down to Urga. He asked me to go with him, and I very nearly did. But I knew the virtual impossibility of getting across that frontier into China, and not without an effort I allowed prudence to prevail. We parted with many expressions of mutual esteem, and I gave him all the biscuits I could spare. I often think of him, a distant gesticulating figure, teaching the Eton Boating Song to the inhabitants of Outer Mongolia.