The following story was told me of the effects of eating rye in a bad condition. The scenes described took place in a village not far from Moscow. The poorest people ground the unripe, rotten grain, and made it into a travesty of the black bread which they usually use. This bread was rankly intoxicating and the poor creatures who ate it were absolutely insane for a while. They danced naked through the villages, attacked each other with knives, screaming like savages the while. Even little children were made drunk. Many died, falling down suddenly in the midst of their frenzy. Generally speaking, after about two hours of this excitement the poor creatures dropped off into a sudden and profound sleep, from which they woke sober and in their right minds. Many, alas! awoke no more.
One of the under-nurses in the Imperial household had a friend who lived in a village with her mother; the friend did the Russian drawn thread work most beautifully. I saw some of it one day, and sent her an order. I showed it to several people and got her orders. I even sent a good deal of it to England and Ireland, and got her better prices than she had got from the shops for articles she had worked. She was soon enabled to take in a couple of girls as apprentices, and had a little establishment. Her cottage was comfortable, and she and her mother lived in a degree of comfort which they had not before known. One day the maid came to tell me that her friend was married and could do no work. I thought it rather a pity for her to give up her work, as the Russian winters are long, and I thought she would find time hang heavily on her hands and said so. The girl said she could not work at present, as she was too tired in the evening when she was finished ploughing. I was amused, and said I had never heard of a woman driving the plough, and she then told me she was not driving, but dragging it with a cow.
naked girls from russia
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All the children of the clergy receive free education in special clerical schools, and later on, some of them, in seminaries; and it was by the description of the abominable educational methods which prevailed in these schools in the forties and fifties that POMYALÓVSKIY (1835-1863) acquired his notoriety. He was the son of a poor deacon in a village near St. Petersburg, and had himself passed through one of these schools and a seminary. Both the lower and the higher schools were then in the hands of quite uneducated priests-chiefly monks-and the most absurd learning by rote of the most abstract theology was the rule. The general moral tone of the schools was extremely low, drinking went on to excess, and flogging for every lesson not recited by heart, sometimes two or three times a day, with all sorts of refinements of cruelty-was the chief instrument of education. Pomyalóvskiy passionately loved his younger brother and wanted at all hazards to save him from such an experience as his own; so he began to write for a pedagogical review, on the education given in the clerical schools, in order to get the means to educate his brother in a gymnasium. A most powerful novel, evidently taken from real life in these schools, followed, and numbers of priests, who had themselves been the victims of a like "education," wrote to the papers to confirm what Pomyalóvskiy had said. Truth, without any decoration, naked truth, with an absolute negation of art for art's sake, were the distinctive features of Pomyalóvskiy, who went so far in this direction as even to part with the so-called heroes. The men whom he described were, not sharply outlined types, but, if I may be permitted to express myself in this way, the "neutral-tint" types of real life: those indefinite, not too good and not too bad characters of whom mankind is mostly composed, and whose inertia is everywhere the great obstacle to progress.
Over and over again he returns to the idea of the necessity of an ideal in the work of the novel-writer. "The cause of the present opinion (in Russian Society) is," he says, "the neglect of idealism. Those who have exiled from life all romanticism have stripped us so as to leave us quite naked: this is why we are so uninteresting to one another, and so disgusted with one another." (A Mistake, I. 151.) And in The Reader (1898), he develops his aesthetic canons in full. He tells how one of his earliest productions, on its appearance in print, is read one night before a circle of friends. He receives many compliments for it, and after leaving the house is tramping along a deserted street, feeling for the first time in his existence the happiness of life, when a person unknown to him, and whom he had not noticed among those present at the reading, overtakes him, and begins to talk about the duties of the author.
Ivan had grown up in a society where red banners announced"Thank you, comrade Stalin, for our happy childhood."(20) The warbroke out when he turned seventeen. One day German soldiers arrived in hisvillage and, while he watched from a hiding place, one of them bayoneted hisbaby brother, Kolka, then posed for a trophy photo. On hearing this story,Tania, the nurse who had saved his life, was reminded of her own village.When it had been retaken by the Soviet army, two young girls were found dead,shot by the Russian polizei, collaborators of the Germans. For many,childhood in the Stalin era was not a happy experience.
If Russia suffers from a political illness, for Makine it followsthat the ideas of liberty and order, as they are conceived in Russia, mustalso be warped. Olga reminisced to Li: "You remember, at school, beforethe revolution, the plank of wood that the principal fastened to the backs ofthose who didn't sit straight. So that they'd hold themselveserect.... And then, one fine day, no more planks! The newspapers spoke ofliberty and emancipation."(116) Olga remembered her first masked ballthat first springtime after the backs of schoolgirls had been liberated: 2ff7e9595c
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