BRACERS Record Detail for 19654
To access the original letter, email the Russell Archives.
"I am here at last, in this city which has filled the world with history, which has inspired the most deadly hatreds and the most poignant hopes."
This was number 5 in a sequence of eight Russia letters. In the Autobiography, however, it became number 2 as the letters that Malleson wrote are not published there.
The city BR refers to is Petrograd, Soviet Russia, although the letter was not written there or on the date written on the letter. It was written after his return from Russia on 30 June 1920.
The number "5" was added in ink to this ts. carbon.
The original letter ended up in the possession of Ottoline Morrell. It is number 1563 in the numbered sequence of letters to here (document .001563, record 18770).
There are three other transcriptions of this letter:
Document .052467, record 99953 (ribbon copy of this transcription);
Document .052458, record 99934 (different typing);
Autobiography chapter "Russia", document .007050F2, pp. 149-50, record 116401.
BR TO CONSTANCE MALLESON, 12 MAY 1920
BRACERS 19654. AL. Texas, Morrell papers. Auto. 2: 105–6; App. V.2, Papers 15
Edited by S. Turcon. Reviewed by K. Blackwell
5.3
I am here at last, in this city which has filled the world with history, which as inspired the most deadly hatreds and the most poignant hopes. Will it yield me up its secret? Shall I learn to know its inmost soul? Or shall I acquire only statistics and official facts? Shall I understand what I see, or will it remain an external bewildering show? In the dead of night we reached the empty station, and our noisy motors panted through the sleeping streets. From my window, when I arrived, I looked out across the Neva to the fortress of Peter and Paul.4 The river gleamed in the early northern dawn; the scene was beautiful beyond all words, magical, eternal, suggestive of ancient wisdom. “It is wonderful,” I said to the Bolshevik who stood beside me. “Yes,” he replied, “Peter and Paul is now not a prison, but the Army Headquarters.”
I shook myself. “Come, my friend,” I thought, “you are not here as a tourist, to sentimentalize over sunrises and sunsets and buildings starred by Baedeker: you are here as a social investigator, to study economic and political facts. Come out of your dream, forget the eternal things. The men you have come among would tell you they are only the fancies of a bourgeois with too much leisure, and can you be sure they are anything more?” So I came back into the conversation, and tried to learn the mechanism for buying an umbrella at the Soviet Stores, which proved as difficult as fathoming the ultimate mysteries.
The twelve hours that I have so far spent on Russian soil have chiefly afforded material for the imp of irony. I came prepared for physical hardship, discomfort, dirt, and hunger, to be made bearable by an atmosphere of splendid hope for mankind. Our communist comrades, no doubt rightly, have not judged us worthy of such treatment. Since crossing the frontier yesterday afternoon, I have hada two feasts and a good breakfast, several first-class cigars, and a night in a sumptuous bedroom of a palace where all the luxury of the ancien régime has been preserved. At the stations on the way, regiments of soldiers filled the platform, and the plebs was kept carefully out of sight. It seems I am to live amid the pomp surrounding the government of a great military Empire. So I must readjust my mood. Cynicism if called for, but I am strongly moved, and find cynicism difficult. I come back eternally to the same question: What is the secret of this passionate country? Do the Bolsheviks know its secret? Do they even suspect that it has a secret? I wonder.
- 1
[document] Document 200649. The handwritten letter ended up in the possession of Lady Ottoline Morrell (Letter no. 1564, Rec. Acq. 69), even though BR writes in the Autobiography that this and other letters were “antedated letters to Colette”. When Julian Vinogradoff (Ottoline’s daughter) wanted to publish the letters in 1955, BR refused permission, writing that “These were not personal letters to your mother, but were sent to various people” (1 April 1955; BRACERS 13763).
- 2
Petrograd. May 12, 1920. The letter was not written from Russia but after BR returned on 30 June 1920. The only letter he wrote to Colette from Russia was on 22 May 1920 (BRACERS 19661). He did, however, write a journal while in Russia and there is an entry for this day which he drew on, but only slightly, to write this letter (33 in Papers 15).
- 3
5. The number is a handwritten addition. This is the second letter written by BR in this Russian sequence of letters written after his return to England. Letters numbered 2–4 were written by Colette. BR renumbered this one “2” in his Autobiography.
- 4
fortress of Peter and Paul The former prison which during BR’s visit to Russia was being used as the Army Headquarters.
Textual Notes
- a
had By the time the letter was published in the Autobiography in 1967, the word had been replaced by “made”, which makes no sense.
