The fate of nations is unscrupulous in its means, uneconomical, stupid, and brutish. One could award mankind the following grades: A with a wonderful + for natural history or drawing, but for some reason always a C– in history and conduct. It turns out that those who become ringleaders are the most backward, malicious, and ungifted, and it turns out so because we have long wings and yet weak feet, it’s all in the feet, for certain dreams should sit on telegraph wires and not come down to earth.
Over the last quarter-century, three states, ours, the German, and the Italian, have fallen into a stinking chasm and greedily, readily, and almost gleefully (with the megalomania of martinets, with megaphones and gala performances on the squares of subjugated cities) they have dragged a dozen other countries along with them. All these are tragic truisms it wouldn’t be worth tallying, if in this case I was not guided by a definite purpose. The fact is that, through the unthriftiness of history, the Russian people have been treated twice to Tyutchev’s notorious feast, where they were served not only the okroshka1 of the Russian Revolution, but a second course, German blood sausage. The people of the 1880s might think that we lived in an oh-so-fascinating period, that we must have seen so much, and so on, but most of my contemporaries will surely agree with me that aside from a diabolical tedium, a humiliating dulling of the spirit, being forced to listen to the most vulgar choking out of the most vulgar phenomena at the fair of great men, and a completely unbearable quantity of utterly unjustified human suffering, history has given us nothing at all. Let us pause on this suffering…on this black ice under thought, where thought slips and falls. Safety is sweet, all agree,—and there’s even a cursed comfort in moaning and sighing—with a glass of tea, in the warmth of an American apartment, between the radiator and the radio—over the troubles in Europe. But (to return to the main point of these urgent lines), we now have a concrete opportunity to mend our ways—i.e., to quit our sympathizing sighs and offer those far off some real help.
We’re talking about the Russians in France, who have been caught unawares by grim elements essentially no different from the elements of hunger, oppression, and beastly law they’ve already endured once, twenty years ago. Many of them no longer have the strength to repeat what they’ve gone through, and one’s heart breaks when one thinks of these people, in most cases no longer young, for whom stoic contempt toward self-satisfied violence alone is no guarantee of survival. They are short of many of the usual things of life, growing scarcer with each day in the depleted air of a ravaged country; and besides all this, they need freedom—they must be rescued. The Tolstoy Foundation is holding an evening of Russian ballet for their benefit. They say watching the ballet is bliss for many—but it’s especially good when it glides against the blazoned background of a good deed.
* V. Sirin, “Pomogite, gospoda!,” Novoe russkoe slovo, Dec. 1, 1940, 3.