BR TO CONSTANCE MALLESON, 2 JUNE 1920
BRACERS 19656. TLS. McMaster. The Problem of China, pp. 18–20; Auto. 2: 107–8; App. V.4, Papers 15
Edited by S. Turcon. Reviewed by K. Blackwell

On the Volga.
June 2, 19201,2

8.3

Our boat travels on, day after day, through an unknown and mysterious land. Our company are noisy, gay, quarrelsome, full of facile theories, with glib explanations of everything, persuaded that there is nothing they cannot understand and no human destiny outside the purview of their system. One of us lies at death’s door,4 fighting a grim battle with weakness and terror and the indifference of the strong, assailed day and night by the sounds of loud-voiced love-making and trivial laughter. And all around us lies a great silence, strong as Death, unfathomable as the heavens. It seems that none have leisure to hear the silence, yet it calls to me so insistently that I grow deaf to the harangues of propagandists and the endless information of the well-informed.

Last night, very late, our boat stopped in a desolate spot where there were no houses, but only a great sandbank, and beyond it a row of poplars with the rising moon behind them. In silence I went ashore, and found on the sand a strange assemblage of human beings, half-nomads, wandering from some remote region of famine, each family huddled together surrounded by all its belongings, some sleeping, others silently making small fires of twigs. The flickering flames lighted up gnarled bearded faces of wild men, strong patient primitive women, and children as sedate and slow as their parents. Human beingsa they undoubtedly were, and yet it would have been far easier for me to grow intimate with a dog or a cat or a horse than with one of them. I knew that they would wait there day after day, perhaps for weeks, until a boat came in which they could go to some distant place where they had heard — falsely perhaps — that the earth was more generous than in the country they had left. Some would die by the way, all would suffer hunger and thirst and the scorching midday sun, but their sufferings would be dumb. To me they seemed to typify the very soul of Russia, unexpressive, inactive from despair, unheeded by the little set of westernizers who make up all the parties of progress or reaction. Russia is so vast that the articulate few are lost in it as man and his planet are lost in interstellar space. It is possible, I thought, that the theorists may increase the misery of the many by trying to force them into actions contrary to their primeval instincts, but I could not believe that happiness was to be brought to them by a gospel of industrialism and forced labour.

Nevertheless, when morning came, I resumed the interminable discussions of the materialistic conception of history and the merits of a truly popular government. Those with whom I discussed had not seen the sleeping wanderers, and would not have been interested if they had seen them, since they were not material for propaganda. But something of that patient silence had communicated itself to me, something lonely and unspoken remained in my heart through all the comfortable familiar intellectual talk. And at last I began to feel that all politics are inspired by a grinning devil, teaching the energetic and quick-witted to torture submissive populations for the profit of pocket or power or theory. As we journeyed on, fed by food extracted from the peasants, protected by an army recruited from among their sons, I wondered what we had to give them in return. But I found no answer. From time to time I heard their sad songs or the haunting music of the balalaika; but the sound mingled with the great silence of the steppes, and left me with a terrible questioning pain in which occidental hopefulness grew pale.

L.5

• 1

  [document] Document200651. Colette wrote that this letter was “so much quoted in garbled extracts”(document 200690). The handwritten letter was in the possession of Lady Ottoline Morrell (Letter no. 1565, 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.” He also pointed out to her that this letter had “already been published in a slightly different form” in The Problem of China (1922) (1 April 1955; BRACERS 13763). In that book the letter appears as part of the text of the chapter “Questions”; it is not presented as a letter. In the manuscript for this book, BR copied the text in his hand from one of the documents described above, changing the verb tense in the first paragraph, and adding an introductory sentence (Problem of China ms., Rec. Acq. 1027).

• 2

  On the Volga. June 2, 1920 This letter was not written from Russia but after BR returned on 30 June 1920. Colette had read it many times by 5 July 1920, finding it “most wonderful” (BRACERS 113207). 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, although there is no entry for this day. From 30 May onwards, BR’s comments were very brief (33 in Papers 15).

• 3

  8. Letter number. This is the fourth letter written by BR in the Russian sequence of letters. Letters numbered 2–4 were written by Colette as was letter 7.

• 4

  One of us lies at death’s door Clifford Allen who was suffering from pneumonia. For information on him, see BRACERS 19046, n.7.

• 5

  L. The handwritten initial signifies BR; it was chosen to represent him in their “literary” letters book project (see BRACERS 19585, n.6).

Textual Notes

• a

  Human beings editorially corrected from Humans being (BRACERS 99939 here) and in document .052461.