Discovering Russia on Foot

by Algernon Blackwood

Books of travel one reads more and more with a sense of weariness, for the art of making one see and feel the countries described is surely an exceedingly rare one. There are often pages of fine description, there are adventures, there is the interest of obstacles and difficulties overcome, and there are⁠—maps. And in the end the reader’s mind becomes itself a composite map in which the various countries lie jumbled up together with colours like a patchwork quilt. For, as a rule, the writer describes the detail of the scenery instead of the more valuable interpretative effect the scenery produces upon himself. Yet it is this latter that makes one see and feel the country, and the writer should boldly tell about himself, without false modesty. Then, if he has the poet’s heart in him as well, he introduces living pictures into our mind. We close the book, having really travelled with him. He has widened our experience and feeling, not merely added to our knowledge of facts and names and distances, however finely described. It is, we claim, the poet’s rare prerogative to accomplish this very high achievement. It is a keen delight to recognise it, for the emotion roused in reading such a book is the same as the emotion that good poetry stirs; and whether you come across it in its simplest form, as in the Man-Eaters of Tsavo, in more passionate, vivid shape, as in Masefield’s Multitude and Solitude, or in its still more highly-finished aspect, as in Hilaire Belloc’s wonderful presentment of the very souls of towns and places, the result is one and the same: the thrill and beauty of good poetry.

In Undiscovered Russia, Mr. Stephen Graham has written a haunting book of travel that might equally well have been in the form of poetry, for, from beginning to end, it is a genuine poem. He did this a year ago in his delightful Vagabond in the Caucasus. He has done it again in Undiscovered Russia, only with more passion, greater skill and a finer perception of the beauty of scenery and of human nature than before. He has told us of his long journey on foot for many weeks (some of it in shoes of birch-bark!) from Archangel on the White Sea down to Rostov on the Don in a long, beautiful poem of adventure and delight that sets this book among the very best of its rare kind. And he has done this well because he felt it deeply, and gives his feelings with an honest modesty that is both engaging and illuminating. “I love Russia. She is something more to me than my native land. I have lived among beautiful people leading serene and tranquil lives far from the Western hurly-burly. These have been so mystically pure that I could never be quite sure that they had not foreseen my coming in a dream. England knows not such. To me they are a revelation of love.” Here speaks the poet who feels the thing from within himself, not merely observes it from outside. “You wish to see Russia as it remains in the old unknown parts,” a woman said to him; “then you should go to the North, for there all that Russia ever was is conserved in the forests as in ice⁠—in the provinces of Archangel and Vologda⁠—where there are no railways and no intercourse with the advanced world of the twentieth century.” And he went, slept with the peasants and the hunters, lived with the boatmen and the bargemen, tramped with revolutionary students, and took into his own heart the strange, wild spirit of this enormous country that he has now given out in this volume of thrilling beauty and delight. You see with him the weird wonder of the northern White Night, where for two months the sun is above the horizon; you feel the awful mystery of the leagues of untrodden forest; you catch fish with him at midnight on the broad Dwina while the sun shines hotly on the waters; you hear the balalaikas twang in villages so remote from civilisation that the people have but a single, common surname, applied also to the hamlet itself; and you share strange gospels, taste ancient superstitions, hear the footfall of forest ghosts and devils, or go into the heart of it to pluck the flower of happiness that blossoms at midnight on the Eve of St. John. “I gave my heart to Russia. She is a woman. Behind her eyes are forests of pines and unexplored darkness; in her hand she carries blossoms. She is the mother of nations.” “How do you feel Russia?” Vassily Vassilievitch, the painter, whose pictures add so greatly to the book, enquired of him. “Do not answer ‘good’ or ‘bad’ or ‘interesting’; you understand what I mean.” And Mr. Graham’s answer was like this: “I feel her old, fragrant, melancholy, like the black earth.”

One feels, in reading these pages, that the volume is peculiarly well named, and that the real Russia is as yet almost entirely undiscovered to Western eyes. Joseph Conrad and Stephen Graham have both explained a part of her; and it is highly interesting to read the latter’s chapters on the Colony of Exiled Revolutionary Students at Liavlia, side by side with the wonderful psychological study in Under Western Eyes. Mr. Graham’s sojourn with these students is an interlude of vivid and instructive interest. They were banished for periods of months or years to the safety of this remote place, where they lived a comparative freedom under the eyes of the police, and Mr. Graham dwelt among them as one of themselves. “My first impression was that I had come to a convict settlement, but as none of the exiles had been convicted definitely of a crime, the term was evidently inappropriate. Every one of the prisoners had been brought to trial before the martial courts and had been found ‘Not Guilty’⁠—not guilty, but also not innocent, for they had evidently dabbled in terrorism and propagandism, and though no case could be made out against them, it would have been dangerous to release them.… The Government had banished them "under administrative order" to this forest-girdled village, where further plotting would be absurd, and escape impossible.” Each one received a small monthly sum for food and clothing, and they could hunt, fish, receive their friends and make merry. They did all this, and in so doing largely forgot their secret terrible ambitions. Mr. Graham suggests that much of the student movement is due to idle brooding and the like. He tells Tchekof’s typical story of the Russian who went to buy a pistol to shoot his wife and her lover with, and, seeing a net for catching quails on the shop counter, bought that instead and forgot all about his private evils. This contradictory element in the Russian character, which is so intensely perplexing to Europeans, is further very fully dealt with in Maurice Baring’s detailed study of The Russian People, where, in his chapter on “the Russian character,” he ascribes much of it to the influence of climate. “It leads him, firstly, to battle with the hostile forces of nature in order to live, and consequently develops in him qualities of tenacity, energy and strength; and secondly, it leads him to bow down and submit to the overwhelming and insuperable forces of nature, against which all struggle is hopeless. Thus it is that he develops qualities of patience, resignation and weakness. This, again, accounts for that mixture in the Russian which more than all things puzzles the Western European, namely, the blend of roughness and good-nature, of kindness and brutal insensibility.” And both writers agree that the Russian peasant is essentially humane and gentle, and more humane than Europeans of the same class. He will calmly beat a man to death for stealing a horse, yet will also show a compassionate and generous hospitality that is tender in the last degree. It is a curious and deeply interesting chapter in human nature, and those who feel the spell of it should read carefully Mr. Baring’s treatment and explanation of the paradox.

There are many things in Undiscovered Russia we should like to dwell upon, or at least to mention, but the wonderful adventures this “vagabond” encountered would lose their charm and interest in the process of condensation. It would be to spoil the flavour of a remarkably interesting book of travel. Mr. Graham’s experiences with the pilgrims, with the monks in lonely monasteries, with the police when he was arrested, and with many another figure of mystery, terror and beauty which flits across his enchanted stage⁠—these must be sought in the original. And, meanwhile, we wish greater strength to his wandering feet, increasing power to feel beauty and interpret it, and a yet greater expansion of that love which he clearly feels for the suffering millions of this strange country he seeks to make his own. His field is a big one, and he is well qualified to exploit it for our benefit. Undiscovered Russia deals, as he says himself, with but a fringe of it. And greater discoveries lie, we feel convinced, for him ahead.