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Title: Return from the U.S.S.R.
U.K. title: Back from the U.S.S.R.
Original French title: Retour de l'U.R.S.S.
Author: Gide, Andr (1869-1951)
Translator: Bussy, Dorothy (1865-1960)
Date of first publication: 1937
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   New York: Knopf, 1937
   [first U.S. edition]
Date first posted: 7 September 2016
Date last updated: 7 September 2016
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #1351

This ebook was produced by Al Haines


PUBLISHER'S NOTE

Italics in the original printed edition are indicated _thus_.

As part of the conversion of the book to its new digital
format, we have made certain minor adjustments in its layout.
All of the author's original text has been included.

We have made one correction to the printed text, changing
"cannon" to "canon" in the following passage: "if Whitman
had been forced to write it by order and in conformity
with an accepted canon". The French original is "si Whitman
avait t forc de l'crire par ordre et conformment  un
canon admis".






  RETURN
  FROM THE U.S.S.R.

  _by_
  _ANDR GIDE_



  _Translated from the French by_
  DOROTHY BUSSY


  _NEW YORK_ - ALFRED - A - KNOPF
  1937




  _Manufactured in the United States of America_

  FIRST AMERICAN EDITION

  ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED AS _Retour de l'U.R.S.S._
  BY LIBRAIRIE GALLIMARD




  I DEDICATE THESE PAGES
  TO THE MEMORY OF

  _EUGNE DABIT,_

  BESIDE WHOM, WITH WHOM,
  THEY WERE LIVED AND THOUGHT




The Homeric Hymn to Demeter _relates how the great goddess, in the
course of her wanderings in search of her daughter, came to the court
of Keleos.  No one recognized the goddess under the borrowed form of a
humble wet-nurse; and Queen Metaneira entrusted to her care her
latest-born child, the infant Demophoon, afterwards known as
Triptolemus, the founder of agriculture._

_Every evening, behind closed doors, while the household was asleep,
Demeter took little Demophoon out of his comfortable cradle and with
apparent cruelty, though moved in reality by a great love and desirous
of bringing him eventually to the state of godhood, laid the naked
child on a glowing bed of embers.  I imagine the mighty Demeter bending
maternally over the radiant nursling as over the future race of
mankind.  He endures the fiery charcoal; he gathers strength from the
ordeal.  Something superhuman is fostered in him, something robust,
something beyond all hope glorious.  Ah, had Demeter only been able to
carry through her bold attempt, to bring her daring venture to a
successful issue!  But Metaneira becoming anxious, says the legend,
burst suddenly into the room where the experiment was being carried on
and, guided by her mistaken fears, thrust aside the goddess at her work
of forging the superman, pushed away the embers, and, in order to save
the child, lost the god._




CONTENTS

FOREWORD

RETURN FROM THE U.S.S.R.

APPENDICES

I. Speech Delivered on the Occasion of Maxim Gorki's Funeral

II. Speech to the Students of Moscow

III. Speech to the Men of Letters of Leningrad

IV. The Struggle against Religion

V. Ostrovski

VI. A Kolkhoz

VII. Bolshevo

VIII. The Besprizornis




FOREWORD

Three years ago I declared my admiration, my love, for the U.S.S.R.  An
unprecedented experiment was being attempted there which filled our
hearts with hope and from which we expected an immense advance, an
impetus capable of carrying forward in its stride the whole human race.
It is indeed worth while living, I thought, in order to be present at
this rebirth, and worth while giving one's life in order to help it on.
In our hearts and in our minds we resolutely linked the future of
culture itself with the glorious destiny of the U.S.S.R.  We have
frequently said so.  We should have liked to repeat it once again.

Already, without as yet having seen things for ourselves, we could not
but feel disturbed by certain recent decisions which seemed to denote a
change of orientation.

At that moment (October 1935) I wrote as follows:


"It is largely moreover the stupidity and unfairness of the attacks on
the U.S.S.R. that make us defend it with some obstinacy.  Those same
yelpers will begin to approve the Soviet Union just as we shall cease
to do so; for what they will approve are those very compromises and
concessions which will make some others say: 'There!  You see!' but
which will lead away from the goal it had at first set itself.  Let us
hope that in order to keep our eyes fixed on that goal we may not be
obliged to avert them from the Soviet Union."

_Nouvelle Revue Franaise_, March 1936


Resolving, however, to maintain at all costs my confidence until I had
more to go upon, and preferring to doubt my own judgment, I declared
once more, four days after my arrival in Moscow, in my speech in the
Red Square on the occasion of Gorki's funeral: "The fate of culture is
bound up in our minds with the destiny of the Soviet Union.  We will
defend it."

I have always maintained that the wish to remain true to oneself too
often carries with it a risk of insincerity; and I consider that if
ever sincerity is important, it is surely when the beliefs of great
masses of people are involved together with one's own.

If I had been mistaken at first, it would be better to acknowledge it
at once, for in this case I am responsible for all those who might be
led astray by this mistake of mine.  One should not allow feelings of
personal vanity to interfere; and indeed, such feelings are on the
whole foreign to me.  There are things more important in my eyes than
myself, more important than the U.S.S.R.  These things are humanity,
its destiny, and its culture.

But was I mistaken at first? Those who have followed the evolution of
the Soviet Union during a lapse of time no longer than the last year or
so can say whether it is I who have changed or whether it is not rather
the Soviet Union.  And by the Soviet Union I mean the man at its head.

Others, more qualified than I am, will be able to tell us whether
possibly this change of orientation is not in reality only apparent and
whether what appears to us to be a derogation is not a necessary
consequence of certain previous decisions.

The Soviet Union is "in the making"; one cannot say it too often.  And
to that is due the extraordinary interest of a stay in this immense
country which is now in labour; one feels that one is contemplating the
parturition of the future.

Good and bad alike are to be found there; I should say rather: the best
and the worst.  The best was often achieved only by an immense effort.
That effort has not always and everywhere achieved what it set out to
achieve.  Sometimes one is able to think: not yet.  Sometimes the worst
accompanies and shadows the best; it almost seems as if it were a
consequence of the best.  And one passes from the brightest light to
the darkest shade with a disconcerting abruptness.  It often happens
that the traveller, according to his own preconceived notions, only
grasps one side or the other.  It too often happens that the friends of
the Soviet Union refuse to see the bad side, or, at any rate, refuse to
admit the bad side; so that too often what is true about the U.S.S.R.
is said with enmity, and what is false with love.

Now my mind is so constructed that its severest criticisms are
addressed to those whom I should like always to be able to approve.  To
confine oneself exclusively to praise is a bad way of proving one's
devotion, and I believe I am doing the Soviet Union itself and the
cause that it represents in our eyes a greater service by speaking
without dissimulation or indulgence.  It is precisely because of my
admiration for the Soviet Union and for the wonders it has already
performed that I am going to criticize, because of what we had expected
from it, above all because of what it had allowed us to hope for.

Who shall say what the Soviet Union has been to us?  More than a chosen
land--an example, a guide.  What we have dreamt of, what we have hardly
dared to hope, but towards which we were straining all our will and all
our strength, was coming into being over there.  A land existed where
Utopia was in process of becoming reality.  Tremendous achievements had
already made us exacting.  The greatest difficulties appeared to have
been got over, and we entered joyfully and boldly into the sort of
engagement this land had contracted in the name of all suffering
peoples.

Up to what point should we likewise feel ourselves involved in case of
failure?  But the very idea of failure cannot be entertained.

If certain tacit promises have not been kept, what should be
incriminated?  Should we throw the responsibility on the first
directives, or rather on subsequent deviations and compromises, however
explicable these may be?


I give here my personal reflections on the things that the Soviet Union
takes pleasure and a legitimate pride in showing, and on what, side by
side with these things, I was able to observe.  The achievements of the
U.S.S.R. are usually admirable.  Whole regions have already taken on
the smiling aspect of happiness.  Those who approved me for leaving the
Governor's motor-car in the Congo, in order to seek contact with all
and sundry and thereby to learn something, can they reproach me for
having had a similar end in view in the U.S.S.R. and for not letting
myself be dazzled?


I do not hide from myself the apparent advantage that hostile
parties--those for whom "their love of order is indistinguishable from
their partiality to tyrants"[1]--will try to derive from my book.  And
this would have prevented me from publishing it, from writing it, even,
were not my conviction still firm and unshaken that, on the one hand,
the Soviet Union will end by triumphing over the serious errors that I
point out, on the other, and this is more important, that the
particular errors of one country cannot suffice to compromise a cause
which is international and universal.  Falsehood, even that which
consists in silence, may appear opportune, as may perseverance in
falsehood, but it leaves far too dangerous weapons in the hands of the
enemy, and truth, however painful, only wounds in order to cure.


[1] Tocqueville: _On Democracy in America_ (Introduction).




RETURN FROM THE U.S.S.R.


_1_

Entering into direct contact with a people of workers in factories,
workshops, and yards, in gardens, homes of rest, and "parks of
culture," I had moments of intense joy.  I felt the establishment of a
sudden sympathy between these new comrades and myself; I felt my heart
expand and blossom.  This is why I look more smiling--more laughing
even--in the photographs that were taken of me out there, than I am
often able to be in France.  And how often too the tears would start to
my eyes--tears of overflowing joy, of tenderness and love!  In that
rest-home for the Donbass miners, for instance, in the immediate
neighbourhood of Sochi....  No, no!  There was nothing artificial
there, nothing that had been prepared beforehand.  I arrived one
evening unexpectedly, without having been announced, but there and then
they won my confidence.

And that impromptu visit I paid to the children's camp near Borzhom--a
modest, an almost humble place, but the children in it, radiant with
health and happiness, seemed as though they wanted to make me an
offering of their joy.  What can I say?  Words are powerless to grasp
so deep and simple an emotion....  But why mention these rather than so
many others?  Poets of Georgia, intellectuals, students, and, above
all, workmen, how many inspired me with the liveliest affection!  I
never ceased to regret my ignorance of their language.  And yet their
smiles, their eyes, spoke so eloquently of sympathy that I began to
doubt whether much more could have been added by words.  It must be
said too that I was introduced everywhere as a friend, and what all
these looks expressed as well was a kind of gratitude.  I wish I could
deserve it still better than I do; and that is another motive that
urges me to speak.


What they like showing you best are their greatest successes.  Of
course, and quite naturally; but numberless times we came unexpectedly
upon village schools, children's playgrounds, clubs, which no one
thought of showing us and which were no doubt indistinguishable from
many others.  It was those that I especially admired, precisely because
nothing had been prepared in them for show.


The children in all the pioneer camps I visited are handsome, well fed
(five meals a day), well cared for--made much of, even--and merry.
Their eyes are frank and trustful; their laughter has nothing spiteful
or malicious in it; they might well have thought us foreigners rather
ridiculous; not for a moment did I catch in any one of them the
slightest trace of mockery.

This same look of open-hearted happiness is often to be seen too among
their elders, who are as handsome, as vigorous, as the children.  The
"parks of culture" where they meet in the evening after the day's work
is over are unquestionable successes; the finest of them all is the one
at Moscow.

I used to go there often.  It is a pleasure-resort, something like a
Luna Park on an immense scale.  Once inside the gates, you feel
yourself in a foreign land.  These crowds of young men and women behave
with propriety, with decency; not the slightest trace of stupid or
vulgar foolery, of rowdiness, of licentiousness, or even of flirtation.
The whole place is pervaded with a kind of joyous ardour.  In one spot
you find games being organized; in another, dances; they are generally
started, led, and directed by a man or woman captain, and are carried
out with perfect order.  Immense chains are formed in which anyone may
join, but there are always many more spectators than performers.  In
another place there are popular dances and songs, accompanied usually
by a simple accordion.  Elsewhere, in an enclosure, to which
nevertheless the access is free, the devotees of physical exercise show
their acrobatic skill in various ways; a professional trainer
superintends the more dangerous movements, advises, and guides; farther
on are gymnastic apparatus, bars and ropes; everyone awaits his turn
patiently with mutual encouragements.  A large space of ground is
reserved for volley-ball; and I never tired of watching the strength,
grace, and skill of the players.  Farther on, you come upon the section
of quiet amusements--chess, chequers, and quantities of trifling games
which demand skill or patience; some of these were unfamiliar to me and
extremely ingenious, as were many other devices for exercising
strength, suppleness, or agility which I had never seen and cannot
attempt to describe, though certainly some of them would become popular
with us.  Enough occupations were here to fill hours of one's time.
Some were for adults, some for children.  The smallest of these latter
have their own separate domain where they are supplied with little
houses, little boats, little motor-cars, and quantities of little tools
adapted to their size.  In a broad path following on from the quiet
games (there are so many candidates for these that sometimes you have
to wait a long time before finding a free table), wooden boards are set
up on which are posted all sorts of riddles, puzzles, and problems.
All this, I repeat, without the smallest vulgarity; these immense
crowds behave with perfect propriety and are manifestly inspired with
good feeling, dignity, and decorum--and that, too, without any effort
and as a matter of course.  The public, without counting the children,
is almost entirely composed of working people who come there for
sports-training, amusement, or instruction (for reading-rooms,
lecture-rooms, cinemas, libraries, etc., are also provided, and there
are bathing-pools on the Moskva).  Here and there too, in the immense
park, you come upon a miniature platform where an impromptu professor
is haranguing--giving object-lessons, or instruction in history or
geography, accompanied by blackboard illustrations--sometimes even in
medicine or physiology, with copious reference to anatomical plates.
Everybody listens with intense seriousness.  I have already said that I
never anywhere caught the smallest attempt at mockery.[1]

But here is something better still--a little outdoor theatre, the
auditorium of which is packed with some five hundred spectators,
listening in religious silence to an actor who is reciting Pushkin
(parts of _Eugene Onegin_).  In another corner of the park, near the
entrance, is the parachute ground.  This is a sport which is highly
appreciated in the U.S.S.R.  Every two minutes or so, one of the three
parachutes is launched from the top of a tower some hundred and thirty
feet high and lands its occupant somewhat roughly on the ground.  On
with you!  Who'll venture next?  Volunteers press forward, wait for
their turn, line up in queues.  And still I haven't mentioned the great
open-air theatre where, for certain performances, close upon twenty
thousand spectators assemble.

The Moscow park of culture is the largest and best provided with
various attractions; the one in Leningrad is the most beautiful.  But
every town in the Soviet Union now possesses a park of culture, besides
children's playgrounds and gardens.

I also visited of course a good many factories.  I know and constantly
say to myself that the prosperity and happiness of the generality
depend on their good management.  But I am not qualified to speak of
this.  It has been done by others, to whose encomiums I refer you.  My
domain is the psychological side of things; it is of this
especially--of this almost solely--that I mean to treat.  If I glance
indirectly at social questions, it will still be from a psychological
point of view.


With increasing years, I feel less, far less, interested in scenery,
however beautiful, and more and more in men.  The peoples of the Soviet
Union are admirable--those of Georgia, of Kakhetia, of Abkhasia, of
Ukraine (I mention only those I saw), and even more so to my mind,
those of Leningrad and the Crimea.

I was present in Moscow at the Festival of Youth in the Red Square.
The ugliness of the buildings opposite the Kremlin was concealed by a
mask of streamers and greenery.  The whole thing was splendid and
even--I make haste to say it here, for I shan't always be able to--in
perfect taste.  The admirable youth of the Soviet Union, gathered
together from the north and south, from the east and west, were here on
parade.  The march past lasted for hours.  I had never imagined so
magnificent a sight.  These perfect forms had evidently been trained,
prepared, selected; but how can one fail to admire a country and a
rgime capable of producing them?

I had seen the Red Square a few days previously on the occasion of
Gorki's funeral.  I had seen the same people, the same and yet how
different!--more like, I imagine, the Russians of the time of the
Tzars.  They filed past the catafalque in the great Hall of Columns
uninterruptedly, interminably.  This time they did not consist of the
handsomest, the strongest, the most joyful representatives of the
Soviet peoples, but of an indiscriminate concourse of suffering
humanity--women, children (children especially), old people sometimes,
nearly all of them badly dressed and some looking in the depths of
poverty.  A silent, dreary, respectful, and perfectly orderly
procession which seemed to have come up out of the past--a procession
which lasted certainly much longer than the other, glorious one.  I too
stayed there a long time watching them.  What was Gorki to all these
people?  I can hardly imagine.  A master?  A comrade?  A brother?  At
any rate, someone who was dead.  And on all these faces--even on those
of the youngest children--was imprinted a sort of melancholy stupor,
but also, but above all, a force, a radiance of sympathy.  There was no
question here of physical beauty, but how many of the poor people I
watched passing by presented me a vision of something more admirable
than beauty--how many I should have liked to press to my heart!
Nowhere, indeed, is contact with any and everyone so easily
established, so immediately, so deeply, so warmly, as in the U.S.S.R.
There are woven in a moment--sometimes a single look suffices--ties of
passionate sympathy.  Yes, I think that nowhere is the feeling of a
common humanity so profoundly, so strongly felt as in the U.S.S.R.  In
spite of the difference of language, I had never anywhere felt myself
so fully a comrade, a brother; and that is worth more to me than the
finest scenery in the world.

And yet I will speak of the scenery too, but not till I have related
our first meeting with a party of Komsomols.[2]


It was in the train that was taking us from Moscow to Ordzhonikidze
(formerly Vladikavkaz).  It is a long journey.  Michael Koltzov, in the
name of the Union of Soviet Writers, had put a very comfortable special
car at our disposal.  All six of us--Jef Last, Guilloux, Herbart,
Schiffrin, Dabit, and myself, together with our woman interpreter,
faithful comrade Bola--were settled in unlooked-for comfort.  Besides
our compartments of sleeping-berths, we had at our disposal a car which
we could use as a sitting-room and in which our meals were served.
Nothing could have been better.  But what we didn't like so much--what
we didn't like at all--was that we were unable to communicate with the
rest of the train.  At the first stopping-place we had got out on the
platform and assured ourselves that a particularly delightful company
occupied the next-door car to ours--a holiday party of Komsomols on
their way to the Caucasus, with the intention of scaling Mount Kazbek.
We at last managed to get the dividing doors opened and there and then
got into touch with our charming neighbours.  I had brought with me
from Paris a number of little toys necessitating patience and a steady
hand (variations of the old game of pigs in clover), and very different
from anything that is to be found in the U.S.S.R.  They help me on
occasion to get into touch with people whose language I don't know.
These toys were passed round.  Young men and girls tried their hands at
them and weren't satisfied till they had vanquished every difficulty.
"A Komsomol," they said, laughing, "will never allow himself to be
beaten."  Their railway car was small and stuffy and the day was
particularly hot; we were all stifling, squashed up against each other
as tight as could be; it was delightful.

I should say that to a good many of them I was not altogether a
stranger.  Some of them had read one or two of my books (generally
_Travels in the Congo_) and as, after my speech in the Red Square, all
the papers had published my photograph, they at once recognized me and
seemed extremely touched by the interest I showed in them, though no
more than I myself was by the expression of their sympathy.  An
animated argument soon arose.  Jef Last, who understands Russian very
well and speaks it too, explained that they thought the little toys I
had introduced were charming, but they wondered whether it was quite
becoming that a man like Andr Gide should enjoy playing with them.
Jef Last had to pretend that this little relaxation served as a rest
for my grey cells.  For a true Komsomol is always bent on service and
judges everything from the point of view of its utility.  Oh! without
pedantry, and this discussion itself was interlarded with laughter and
carried on in a spirit of fun.  But as there was a considerable lack of
fresh air in their car, we invited a dozen or so of them to come
through into ours, and the evening was spent in singing and even
dancing their country songs and dances; there was enough room in our
car to allow of this.  This evening remains one of the most delightful
memories of our journey, both for my companions and myself.  And we
doubt whether in any other country such sudden and natural cordiality
could be met with, whether the youth of any other country is so
charming.[3]

I have said that I was less interested in the scenery.  And yet I
should like to say something of the wonderful Caucasian forests--the
one that lies on the outskirts of Kakhetia, the one in the
neighbourhood of Batum, and especially the one above Borzhom in
Bakuriani; it seems impossible to conceive--certainly I had never seen
any more beautiful.  No underwoods hide the great columns of the
timber; forests, interspersed with mysterious glades, where evening
falls before the day's end and where one can imagine Hop o' My Thumb
losing himself!  We passed through this marvellous forest on our way to
a mountain lake which, we were told as an honour, no foreigners had
ever visited before us.  There was no need of that to make me admire
it.  On its treeless shores is a strange little village (Tabatzkuri)
which lies buried under snow for nine months of the year, and which I
should have liked to describe....  Oh! to have been there as a simple
tourist!  Or as a naturalist, overjoyed at recognizing on those high
plateaux the "Caucasian scabious" of my garden! ... But it is not for
this that I travelled to the U.S.S.R.  The important thing for me here
is man--men--what can be done with them, and what _has_ been done.  The
forest that attracts me, the frightful tangle in which I am lost, is
the forest of social questions.  In the U.S.S.R. they solicit you,
press on you, oppress you on every side.



[1] "And you think that a good thing?" cried my friend X, when I told
him this.  "Mockery, irony, criticism are all of a piece.  The child
who is incapable of making fun will turn into the credulous and
submissive youth whom later on you, my dear mocker, will criticize for
his '_conformism_.'  Give me French banter--even if I'm the one to
suffer from it."

[2] Communist youth.

[3] Another thing I especially liked in the U.S.S.R. is the
extraordinary prolongation of youth, which, particularly in France (but
I think in all Latin countries), we are very little accustomed to.
Youth is rich in promise.  A boy among us soon ceases to promise in
order to perform.  Already at fourteen years old, everything in him
becomes stereotyped.  Wonder at life is no longer to be seen on his
face, nor the slightest ingenuousness.  The child becomes a young man
without transition.  Playtime is over.  _Les jeux sont faits_.




_2_

I saw very little of the new quarters of Leningrad.  In Leningrad it is
St. Petersburg that I admire.  I know no more beautiful city; no more
harmonious blending of stone, metal,[1] and water.  It might be a dream
of Pushkin's or of Baudelaire's.  Sometimes too it reminds one of
Chirico's pictures.  The buildings are perfectly proportioned like the
themes of a Mozart symphony.  "_L tout n'est qu'ordre et beaut_."
The mind moves in it easily and happily.

I have no inclination for the moment to speak of that prodigious
picture-gallery, the Hermitage; nothing I could say about it would
satisfy me.  And yet I should like in passing to give a word of praise
to the activity and intelligence which, whenever possible, have grouped
round each picture everything by the same master that may help us to
understand it--sketches, drawings, and studies which explain the work's
slow formation.

On returning to it from Leningrad, Moscow strikes one as being all the
more ill favoured.  It actually has an oppressive and depressing effect
on one's spirits.  The buildings, with a few rare exceptions, are ugly
(not only the very modern ones) and take no account the one of the
other.  I quite realize that Moscow is changing from month to month and
is a town in process of formation; everything goes to prove it and
everywhere one is conscious of this state of transition.  But I am
afraid it has started badly.  On all sides buildings are being cut
through, pulled down, undermined, suppressed, rebuilt, and all
apparently at haphazard.  But Moscow, in spite of its ugliness, remains
an eminently engaging city; it is supremely alive.  Let us stop looking
at the houses.  What interests me here is the crowd.

During the summer months almost everyone is dressed in white.  Everyone
is like everyone else.  In no other place is the result of social
levelling so obvious as in the streets of Moscow--a classless society
of which every member seems to have the same needs as every other.  I
exaggerate a little, but not much.  There is an extraordinary
uniformity in people's dress; no doubt it would be equally apparent in
their minds, if one could see them.  This too is what enables everyone
to be and to look cheerful.  (People have for so long been without
almost everything that very little contents them.  When one's neighbour
is no better off than oneself, one puts up with what one has got.)  It
is only after a searching study that differences become visible.  At
first sight the individual is sunk in the mass and so little
particularized that one feels as though in speaking of people here one
ought to use a collective singular and say not: "Here are men," but:
"Here is some man."  (As one says: "Here is some fruit," and not: "Here
are fruits.")

Into this crowd I plunge; I take a bath of humanity.


What are those people doing in front of that shop?  They are lined up
in a queue--a queue that stretches as far as the next street.  There
are two to three hundred of them waiting very calmly and patiently.  It
is still very early.  The shop has not yet opened.  Three quarters of
an hour later I pass by again; the same crowd is still there.  I
inquire with astonishment what is the use of their coming so long
beforehand?  What do they gain by it?

"What do they gain by it?  Why, only the firstcomers are served."

Then I learn that the newspapers have announced a large arrival of--I
forget what (I think that day it was pillows).  There are perhaps four
or five hundred articles for which there will be eight or ten or
fifteen hundred would-be buyers.  Long before evening not one of the
articles will be left over.  The needs are so great and the public so
numerous that the demand for a long time to come will be greater than
the supply--much greater.  Impossible to satisfy it.

A few hours later I went into this shop.  It is enormous.  Inside the
crush is unbelievable.  The servers, however, do not lose their heads,
for no one about them shows the least sign of impatience; everybody
awaits his or her turn, seated or standing, sometimes carrying a child.
There is no device for taking them in order and yet there is no
confusion.  The whole morning and, if necessary, the whole day will be
spent there, in an atmosphere which to a person coming in from the
outside seems asphyxiating; then one gets accustomed to it, as one gets
accustomed to everything.  I was going to say one becomes resigned.
But the Russians are much more than resigned; they seem to enjoy
waiting--and to keep you waiting with enjoyment.

Making my way through the crowd or carried along with it, I visited the
shop from top to bottom and from end to end.  The goods are hardly less
than repulsive.  You might almost think that the stuffs, objects, etc.,
were deliberately made as unattractive as possible in order to put
people off, so that they shall only buy out of extreme necessity and
never because they are tempted.  I should have liked to bring back a
few souvenirs for some of my friends; everything is frightful.  And yet
for some months past great efforts have been made--efforts directed
towards an improvement of quality; and by looking carefully and
devoting the necessary time to it one can manage to discover here and
there some recent articles which are quite pleasing and of some promise
for the future.  But before considering the quality, the quantity must
first of all be sufficient, and for a long time it was not sufficient;
it now just manages to be so, but only just.  For that matter, the
peoples of the U.S.S.R. seem to be delighted with any novelties that
are offered them, even those which to our Western eyes are frightful.
Intensified production will soon, I hope, permit of selection and
choice; articles of better quality will continue to increase in number,
and those that are inferior be progressively eliminated.

The effort towards an improvement of quality is particularly directed
to food.  Much still remains to be done in this field.  But when we
deplored the bad quality of some of the provisions, Jef Last, who was
on his fourth visit to the U.S.S.R., and whose last stay there took
place two years ago, marvelled, on the contrary, at the immense
progress that had recently been made.  The vegetables and fruit in
particular are, with a few rare exceptions, if not actually bad, at any
rate mediocre.  Here, as everywhere else, what is delicious is swamped
by what is common; that is, by what is most abundant.  A prodigious
quantity of melons--but they are tasteless.  The impertinent Persian
proverb, which I am obliged to quote in English, for I have never heard
it in any other tongue: "Women for duty, boys for pleasure, melons for
delight," would be misapplied here.  The wine is often good (I remember
in particular some delicious vintages of Tzinandali, in Kakhetia); the
beer is passable.  Some of the smoked fish is excellent, but will not
bear travelling.


As long as necessities were lacking, it would have been unreasonable to
take thought for superfluities.  If more has not been done, or done
sooner, in the U.S.S.R. to minister to the pleasures of appetite, it is
because so many appetites were still starving.

Taste, moreover, can only become refined if comparisons are possible;
and no choice was possible.  No "X's beer is best."  Here you are
obliged to choose what is offered you.  Take it or leave it.  From the
moment that the State is at once the maker, buyer, and seller of
everything, improvement of quality can only come with improvement of
culture.

Then, in spite of my anti-capitalism, I think of all those in our own
country, from the great manufacturer to the small trader, who are
continually racking their brains to invent some way of flattering the
public taste.  With what astuteness, with what subtlety, each of them
applies himself to discovering some refinement that will supplant a
rival.  The State heeds none of this, for the State has no rival.
Quality?  Why trouble about it, we were asked, since there is no
competition?  In this way the bad quality of everything in the
U.S.S.R., together with the want of public taste, is given a too facile
explanation.  Even if the public had good taste, they could not satisfy
it.  No; progress in this respect depends not so much on competition as
on a more exacting demand, which culture will increasingly develop in
the future.  In France it would all go quicker, for in France the
exacting demand already exists.

But there is another thing.  Each of the Soviet states had once its
popular art.  What has become of them?  For a long time a powerful
equalitarian tendency deliberately ignored them.  But these regional
arts are coming back again into favour, and at the present moment they
are being protected and revived, and their unique value seems beginning
to be understood.  Should it not be the work of an intelligent
directing body to bring back into use once more the old patterns of
printed stuffs, for instance, and impose them, offer them, at any rate,
to the public?  Nothing could be more stupidly bourgeois, more lower
middle class, than the present-day productions.  The displays in the
shop windows of Moscow are horrifying.  Whereas in old times the
printed cloths, stencilled for the most part, were often very
beautiful.  And it was popular art, but the work of craftsmen.

To return to the people of Moscow.  What strikes one first is their
extraordinary indolence.  Laziness is, I suppose, too strong a word....
But Stakhanovism is a marvellous invention for brisking up idleness (in
old days there was the knout).  Stakhanovism would be useless in a
country where the workers all work.  But out there, as soon as they are
left alone, they become slack.  And it's a marvel how, in spite of
this, everything somehow gets done.  At the expense of what efforts
from above it would be impossible to say.  In order to realize the
immensity of these efforts, one would first of all have to estimate the
natural unproductivity of the Russian people.

In one of the factories we visited, which was in marvellous working
order (not that I know anything about it; I admired the machines in
blind confidence; but I went into whole-hearted ecstasies over the
dining-hall, the workmen's club, their lodgings, and all the things
that have been done for their comfort, their instruction, and their
pleasure), I was introduced to a Stakhanovite whose huge portrait I had
seen posted on a wall.  He had succeeded, I was told, in doing the work
of eight days in five hours (or else the work of five days in eight
hours; I forget which).  I ventured to ask whether this didn't mean
that to begin with he had spent eight days in doing the work of five
hours?  But my question was not very well received and they thought
best to leave it unanswered.

I have heard tell that a party of French miners who were travelling in
the U.S.S.R. went to look over one of the mines.  In a spirit of good
fellowship they asked to relieve a shift of Soviet miners and then and
there, without putting themselves out in the least, and without even
being aware of it, turned out to be Stakhanovites.

One wonders what a Soviet rgime might not succeed in doing if it had
workmen like ours, with their French temperament, their zeal, their
conscientiousness, and their education.

It is only fair to add to this drab background that, as well as the
Stakhanovites, there is a whole generation of keen and ardent youth--a
joyous ferment--a yeast well able to raise and lighten the dough.


This inertia of the masses seems to me to have been, and still to be,
one of the most important, one of the gravest elements of the problem
Stalin had to solve.  This accounts for the shock workers (Udarniks);
this accounts for Stakhanovism.  And the return to unequal salaries is
explained by this.


We visited a model kolkhoz in the neighbourhood of Sukhum.  It dates
from six years back.  After having struggled obscurely for some time,
it is now one of the most prosperous in the country.  It is known as
"the millionaire," and is bursting with life and happiness.  This
kolkhoz stretches over a very large tract of country.  The climate
ensures a luxuriant vegetation.  The dwelling-houses, built of wood and
standing on stilts to keep them from the soil, are picturesque and
charming; each one is surrounded by a fairly large garden full of
fruit-trees, vegetables, and flowers.  This kolkhoz succeeded last year
in realizing extraordinarily big profits, which made it possible to set
aside a considerable reserve fund and enabled the rate of the daily
wage to be raised to sixteen and a half roubles.  How is this sum
fixed?  By exactly the same calculations that would settle the amount
of the dividends to be distributed among the stockholders if the
kolkhoz were a capitalist agricultural concern.  So much has been
definitely gained; the exploitation of the greater number for the
benefit of the few no longer exists in the Soviet Union.  This is an
immense advance.  There are no stockholders; the workmen themselves
share the profits without any contribution to the State.[2]  This would
be perfect, if there were no other kolkhozes which were poor and unable
to make two ends meet.  For if I understood rightly, each kolkhoz is
autonomous and there is no question of mutual assistance.  I am
mistaken perhaps.  I hope I am mistaken.[3]

I visited several dwellings in this highly prosperous kolkhoz.[4]  I
wish I could convey the queer and depressing impression produced by
each one of these "homes"--the impression of complete
depersonalization.  In each, the same ugly furniture, the same portrait
of Stalin, and absolutely nothing else, not the smallest object, not
the smallest personal souvenir.  Every dwelling is interchangeable with
every other; so much so that the kolkhozians (who seem to be as
interchangeable themselves) might all take up their abode in each
other's houses without even noticing it.[5]  In this way, no doubt,
happiness is more easily achieved.  And then it must be added that the
kolkhozian takes all his pleasures in common.  His room is merely a
place to sleep in; the whole interest of his life has passed into his
club, his park of culture, his various meeting-places.  What more can
be desired?  The happiness of all can only be obtained by
disindividualizing each.  The happiness of all can only be obtained at
the expense of each.  In order to be happy, conform.



[1] Copper domes and golden spires.

[2] This at least is what I was repeatedly told.  But I consider all
"information" that has not been verified as subject to suspicion, like
that given one in the colonies.  I find it difficult to believe that
this kolkhoz was so privileged as to escape the 7 per cent tax on gross
production that is borne by the other kolkhozes; not to mention the 35
to 39 roubles capitation fee.  [3] I have relegated to the appendix a
few rather more detailed items of information.  I collected a great
many others.  But figures are not my strong point and specifically
economic questions escape my competence.  Moreover, though these items
are very precisely such as they were given me, I cannot guarantee their
accuracy.  Familiarity with the colonies has taught me to distrust all
"information."  In the next place, these questions have already been
sufficiently dealt with by specialists; there is no need for me to hark
back to them.

[4] In many others there are no such things as individual dwellings;
people sleep in dormitories--"barrack-rooms."

[5] This impersonality of each and all makes me think that the people
who sleep in dormitories suffer less from the promiscuity and the
absence of privacy than if they were capable of individuality.  But can
this depersonalization, towards which everything in the U.S.S.R. seems
to tend, be considered as progress?  For my part, I cannot believe it.




_3_

In the U.S.S.R. everybody knows beforehand, once and for all, that on
any and every subject there can be only one opinion.  And in fact
everybody's mind has been so moulded and this conformism become to such
a degree easy, natural, and imperceptible, that I do not think any
hypocrisy enters into it.  Are these really the people who made the
revolution?  No; they are the people who profit by it.  Every morning
the _Pravda_ teaches them just what they should know and think and
believe.  And he who strays from the path had better look out!  So that
every time you talk to one Russian you feel as if you were talking to
them all.  Not exactly that everyone obeys a word of command; but
everything is so arranged that nobody can differ from anybody else.
Remember that this moulding of the spirit begins in earliest
infancy....  This explains their extraordinary attitude of acceptance
which sometimes amazes you if you are a foreigner, and a certain
capacity for happiness which amazes you even more.

You are sorry for those people who stand in a queue for hours; but they
think waiting perfectly natural.  Their bread and vegetables and fruit
seem to you bad; but there is nothing else.  You find the stuffs and
the articles which you are shown frightful; but there is no choice.  If
every point of comparison is removed, save with a past that no one
regrets, you are delighted with what is offered you.  What is important
here is to persuade people that they are as well off as they can be
until a better time comes; to persuade them that elsewhere people are
_worse_ off.  The only way of achieving this is carefully to prevent
any communication with the outside world (the world beyond the
frontier, I mean).  Thanks to this the Russian workman who has a
standard of living equal or even noticeably inferior to that of a
French workman thinks himself well off, is better off, much better off,
than a workman in France.  Their happiness is made up of hope,
confidence, and ignorance.


It is extremely difficult for me to introduce any order into these
reflections, owing to the interweaving and overlapping of the problems.
I am not a technician and what interests me in economic questions is
their psychological repercussion.  I perfectly understand the
psychological reasons which render it necessary to operate in close
isolation, to prevent any leakage at the frontiers; in present-day
conditions and so long as things have not improved, it is essential to
the inhabitants of the U.S.S.R. that this happiness should be protected
from outside influences.

We admire in the U.S.S.R. the extraordinary _lan_ towards education
and towards culture; but the only objects of this education are those
which induce the mind to find satisfaction in its present circumstances
and exclaim: "_Oh!  U.S.S.R....  Ave!  Spes unica!_"  And culture is
entirely directed along a single track.  There is nothing disinterested
in it; it merely accumulates, and (in spite of Marxism) almost entirely
lacks the critical faculty.  Of course I know that what is called
"self-criticism" is highly thought of.  When at a distance, I admired
this and I still think it might have produced the most wonderful
results, if only it had been seriously and sincerely applied.  But I
was soon obliged to realize that apart from denunciations and
complaints ("The canteen soup is badly cooked" or "The club
reading-room badly swept"), criticism merely consists in asking oneself
if this, that, or the other is "in the right line."  The line itself is
never discussed.  What is discussed is whether such and such a work, or
gesture, or theory conforms to this sacrosanct line.  And woe to him
who seeks to cross it!  As much criticism as you like--up to a point.
Beyond that point criticism is not allowed.  There are examples of this
kind of thing in history.

And nothing is a greater danger to culture than such a frame of mind.
I will go more fully into this later on.

The Soviet citizen is in an extraordinary state of ignorance concerning
foreign countries.[1]  More than this--he has been persuaded that
everything abroad and in every department is far less prosperous than
in the U.S.S.R.  This illusion is cleverly fostered, for it is
important that everyone, even those who are ill satisfied, should be
thankful for the rgime which preserves them from worse ills.

Hence a kind of _superiority complex_, of which I will give a few
examples:

Every student is obliged to learn a foreign language.  French has been
completely abandoned.  It is English and especially German that they
are supposed to know.  I expressed my surprise that they should speak
them so badly; in our countries a fifth-form schoolboy knows more.

One of the students we questioned gave us the following explanation (in
Russian and Jef Last translated it for us):

"A few years ago Germany and the United States still had something to
teach us on a few points.  But now we have nothing more to learn from
foreigners.  So why should we speak their language?"[2]

As a matter of fact, though they do take some interest in what is
happening in foreign parts, they are far more concerned about what the
foreigner thinks of them.  What really interests them is to know
whether we admire them enough.  What they are afraid of is that we
should be ill informed as to their merits.  What they want from us is
not information but praise.

Some charming little girls who gathered round me in a children's
playground (which I must say was entirely praiseworthy, like everything
else that is done here for the young) harried me with questions.  What
they wanted to know was not whether we have children's playgrounds in
France, but whether we know in France that they have such fine
children's playgrounds in the U.S.S.R.

The questions you are asked are often so staggering that I hesitate to
report them.  It will be thought that I have invented them.  They smile
sceptically when I say that Paris too has got a subway.  Have we even
got street-cars?  Buses? ... One of them asks (and these were not
children, but educated workmen) whether we had schools too in France.
Another, slightly better informed, shrugged his shoulders; "Oh yes, the
French have got schools; but the children are beaten in them."  He has
this information on the best authority.  Of course all workers in our
country are wretched; that goes without saying, for we have not yet
"made the revolution."  For them, outside the U.S.S.R. the reign of
night begins.  Apart from a few shameless capitalists, everybody else
is groping in the dark.

Some educated and most "refined" young girls (at Artek camp, where only
exceptional characters are admitted) were highly surprised when I
mentioned Russian films and told them that _Chapaiev_ and _We are from
Kronstadt_ had had a great success in Paris.  Had they not been assured
that all Russian films were banned in France?  And, as those who told
them so are their masters, I could see perfectly well that it was my
word they doubted.  The French are so fond of pulling one's leg!

In a circle of naval officers on board a battleship which had just been
presented to our admiration ("This one is entirely made in the
U.S.S.R."), when I went so far as to say that I was afraid that people
in the Soviet Union were less well informed about what is being done in
France than the people in France about what is being done in the Soviet
Union, a distinctly disapproving murmur arose: "The _Pravda_ gives us
sufficient information about everything."  And suddenly somebody in a
lyrical outburst, stepping out from the group exclaimed: "In order to
describe all the new and splendid and great things that are being done
in the Soviet Union, there would not be paper enough in the whole
world."

In that same model camp of Artek, a paradise for model children and
infant prodigies, all hung round with medals and diplomas--and that is
just what makes me vastly prefer some other camps for pioneers, which
are more modest and less aristocratic--a child of thirteen, who I
understood came from Germany, but who had already been moulded by the
Union, guided me through the park, showing off its beauties.  He began
to recite:

"Just look!  There was nothing here till quite recently ... and then
suddenly--this staircase appeared.  And it's like that everywhere in
the Soviet Union.  Yesterday nothing; tomorrow everything.  Look at
those workmen over there, how hard they're working!  And everywhere in
the Soviet Union there are schools and camps like these.  Of course
they're not quite so wonderful as this one, because this camp of Artek
has not got its equal in the world.  Stalin takes a special interest in
it.  All the children who come here are remarkable.

"Later on you'll hear a child of thirteen who is going to be the best
violinist in the world.  His talent has already been so highly thought
of that they have made him a present of a historic violin, a violin
that was made by a very famous violin-maker who lived a long while
ago.[3]

"And here--look at this wall!  Could you possibly tell that it had been
built in ten days?"

The child's enthusiasm seemed so sincere that I took good care not to
point out that this retaining wall which had been too hastily
constructed was already fissured.  He only consented to see, was only
able to see, what satisfied his pride, and he added in a transport:

"Even the children are astonished!"[4]

These children's sayings (sayings which had been prompted, and perhaps
taught) appeared to me so revealing that I wrote them down that very
evening and relate them here verbatim.

And yet I do not want it to be thought that I have no other memories of
Artek.  It is quite true that this children's camp is wonderful.  It is
built on overhanging terraces that go right down to the sea, and this
splendid site is used to the best advantage with great ingenuity.
Everything that one can imagine for the well-being of children, for
their hygiene, for their physical training, for their amusement, for
their pleasure, has been assembled and arranged along the terraces and
slopes.  All the children were glowing with health and happiness.  They
seemed very much disappointed when we told them that we couldn't stay
till the evening; they had prepared the traditional camp-fire, and
decorated the trees in the lower garden with streamers in our honour.
I asked that all the rejoicings, the songs and dances which were to
have taken place in the evening, should be held instead before five
o'clock.  We had a long way to go and I insisted on getting back to
Sebastopol before night.  It was just as well that I did so, for it was
that very evening that Eugne Dabit, who had accompanied me on my
visit, fell ill.  However, nothing as yet foreshadowed this and he was
able to enjoy to the full the performance that the children gave us,
and particularly a dance by the exquisite little Tajikistan girl
called, I think, Tamar--the very same little girl that is portrayed
being embraced by Stalin in those enormous posters that cover the walls
of Moscow.  Nothing can express the charm of the dance or the grace of
the child.  "One of the most exquisite memories of the Soviet Union,"
as Dabit said to me; and I thought so too.  It was his last day of
happiness.


The hotel at Sochi is very pleasant; its gardens are extremely fine and
its beach highly agreeable; but the bathers there at once want to make
us admit that we have nothing comparable to it in France.  A sense of
decency restrains us from saying that there are better places in
France--much better places.

No, what we admire at Sochi is the fact that this semi-luxury, this
comfort, should be placed at the disposal of the people--if, that is,
those who come to stay here are not once more a privileged set.  In
general, the favoured ones are the most deserving, but they are
favoured on condition they conform--"keep to the line"; and these are
the only people who enjoy advantages.

What we admire at Sochi is the great quantity of sanatoriums and
rest-houses, all wonderfully well equipped, that surround the town.
And how excellent that they should all be built for the workers!  But
it is painful to see next door to all this that the workmen who are
employed in the construction of the new theatre should be so badly paid
and herded in such sordid barracks.

What we admire at Sochi is Ostrovski.  (See appendix.)


If I speak in praise of the hotel at Sochi, what words shall I find for
the one at Sinop, near Sukhum, which was vastly superior and could bear
comparison with the best, the finest, the most comfortable hotels in
foreign seaside resorts.  Its magnificent garden dates from the _ancien
rgime_, but the hotel building itself is of recent construction, and
has been very ingeniously fitted up.  Both the outside and the inside
are delightful to look at and every room has a private bathroom and
private terrace.  The furnishing is in perfect taste, the cooking
excellent, among the best we had tasted in the U.S.S.R.  Sinop hotel
seems to be one of the places in the world where man is nearest to
being happy.

A sovkhoz[5] has been set up in the neighbourhood in order to cater for
the hotel.  There I admired the model stables, the model cattle-sheds,
the model pigsties, and especially a gigantic hen-house--the last word
in hen-houses.  Every hen has a numbered ring on its leg, the number of
eggs it lays is carefully noted, each one has its own little box where
it is shut up in order to lay its eggs and only let out when it has
laid them.  (What I can't understand is why, with all this care, the
eggs we get at the hotel are no better.)  I may add that you are only
allowed to enter the premises after you have stepped on a carpet
impregnated with a sterilizing substance to disinfect your shoes.  The
cattle of course walk round it--never mind!

If you cross the stream which bounds the sovkhoz, you come upon a row
of hovels.  There four people share a room measuring eight feet by six,
which they rent for two roubles per head per month.  The luxury of a
meal at the sovkhoz restaurant, which costs two roubles, is beyond the
means of those whose monthly salary is only seventy-five roubles.  They
have to content themselves with bread supplemented by dried fish.


I do not protest against the inequality of salaries; I grant that it
was necessary.  But there are means of remedying differences of
condition; now I fear that these differences, instead of getting less,
are actually on the increase.  I fear that a new sort of workers'
bourgeoisie may soon come into being.  Satisfied (and for that very
reason conservative, of course!), it will come to resemble all too
closely our own petty bourgeoisie.

I see everywhere the preliminary symptoms of this.[6] And as we cannot
doubt, alas, that bourgeois instincts, degraded, greedy, self-centred,
slumber in many people's hearts notwithstanding any revolution (for
many can hardly be reformed entirely from the outside), it disquiets me
very much to observe, in the U.S.S.R. today, that these bourgeois
instincts are indirectly flattered and encouraged by recent decisions
that have been alarmingly approved of over here.  With the restoration
of the family (in its function of "social cell"), of inheritance, and
of legacies, the love of lucre, of private ownership, is beginning to
dominate the need for comradeship, for free sharing, and for life in
common.  Not for everybody, of course; but for many.  And we see the
reappearance, not of classes no doubt, but of social strata, of a kind
of aristocracy; I am not referring here to the aristocracy of merit and
of personal worth, but only to the aristocracy of respectability, of
conformism, which in the next generation will become that of money.

Are my fears exaggerated?  I hope so.  As far as that goes, the Soviet
Union has already shown us that it was capable of abrupt reversals.
But I do fear that in order to cut short these bourgeois tendencies
that are now being approved and fostered by the rulers, a revulsion
will soon appear necessary which will run the risk of becoming as
brutal as that which put an end to the N.E.P.

How can one not be shocked by the contempt, or at any rate the
indifference, which those who are and feel themselves "on the right
side" show to "inferiors," to servants,[7] to unskilled workmen, to
"dailies," male and female workers by the day, and I was about to say
to "the poor."  There are no more classes in the U.S.S.R.--granted.
But there are poor.  There are too many of them--far too many.  I had
hoped not to see any--or, to speak more accurately, it was in order
_not_ to see any that I had come to the U.S.S.R.

Add to this that philanthropy, or even plain charity, is no longer the
correct thing.[8]  The State takes charge of all that.  It takes charge
of everything and there is no longer any need--granted--for private
help.  This leads to a kind of harshness in mutual relations, in spite
of all comradeship.  Of course I am not referring to relations between
equals; but as regards those "inferiors" to whom I have alluded, the
"superiority complex" is allowed full play.

This petty bourgeois spirit, which I greatly fear is in process of
developing, is in my eyes profoundly and fundamentally
counter-revolutionary.

But what is known as "counter-revolutionary" in the U.S.S.R. of today
is not that at all.  In fact it is practically the opposite.

The spirit which is today held to be counter-revolutionary is that same
revolutionary spirit, that ferment which first broke through the
half-rotten dam of the old Tzarist world.  One would like to be able to
think that an overflowing love of mankind, or at least an imperious
need for justice, filled every heart.  But when the revolution was once
accomplished, triumphant, stabilized, there was no more question of
such things, and the feelings which had animated the first
revolutionaries began to get in the way like cumbersome objects that
have ceased to be useful.  I compare these feelings to the props which
help to build an arch but which are removed when the keystone is in
place.  Now that the revolution has triumphed, now that it is
stabilized and moderated, now that it is beginning to come to terms,
and, some will say, to grow prudent, those that the revolutionary
ferment still animates and who consider all these successive
concessions to be compromises become troublesome, are reprobated and
suppressed.  Then would it not be better, instead of playing on words,
simply to acknowledge that the revolutionary spirit (or even simply the
critical spirit) is no longer the correct thing, that it is not wanted
any more?  What is wanted now is compliance, conformism.  What is
desired and demanded is approval of all that is done in the U.S.S.R.;
and an attempt is being made to obtain an approval that is not mere
resignation, but a sincere, an enthusiastic approval.  What is most
astounding is that this attempt is successful.  On the other hand the
smallest protest, the least criticism, is liable to the severest
penalties, and in fact is immediately stifled.  And I doubt whether in
any other country in the world, even Hitler's Germany, thought be less
free, more bowed down, more fearful (terrorized), more vassalized.



[1] Or at least he is only informed as to things which will encourage
him in his own frame of mind.

[2] Confronted by our undisguised amazement, the student, it is true,
added: "I understand--we all understand today--that such an argument is
absurd.  A foreign language, when it no longer serves for learning, may
still serve for teaching."

[3] Shortly afterwards I heard this little prodigy play some Paganini
and then a pot-pourri of Gounod on his Stradivarius, and I must admit
that he was amazing.

[4] Eugne Dabit, when in the course of conversation I mentioned this
superiority complex, to which his own extreme modesty made him
particularly sensitive, handed me the second volume of _Dead Souls_
which he was re-reading.  At the beginning there is a letter from Gogol
in which Dabit pointed out the following passage: "There are many among
us, and particularly among our young people, who exalt the Russian
virtues far too highly; instead of developing these virtues in
themselves, all they think of is showing them off and saying to Europe:
'Look, foreigners, how much better we are than you!'  This swaggering
is terribly pernicious.  While it irritates other people, it also
damages the person who indulges in it.  Boasting degrades the finest
action in the world.  As for me, I prefer a momentary dejection to
self-complacency."

This Russian "swaggering" that Gogol deplores is fostered and
emboldened by the present system of education.

[5] State farm.

[6] The recent law against abortion has horrified all whose salaries
are insufficient to enable them to found a family and to bring up
children.  It has also horrified others, but for different reasons.
Had it not been promised that a sort of referendum, a popular
consultation, should be held on the subject of this law, to decide
whether or not it should be enacted and applied?  A huge majority
declared itself (more or less openly, it is true) against this law.
But public opinion was not taken into consideration, and to the almost
general stupefaction, the law was passed in spite of all.  The
newspapers, of course, had chiefly published approvals.  In the private
conversations I was able to have with a good many workmen on this
subject, I heard nothing but timid recriminations and resigned
complaints.

Can this law be to a certain degree justified?  At any rate, it was
occasioned by some deplorable abuses.  But from a Marxist point of
view, what can one think of that other, older law against homosexuals?
This law, which assimilates them to counter-revolutionaries (for
non-conformism is hunted down even in sexual matters), condemns them to
a sentence of five years' deportation, which can be renewed if they are
not reformed by exile.

[7] As a counterpart to this, how servile, how obsequious the servants
are!  Not the hotel servants, who are usually full of self-respect,
although extremely cordial, but those who come into contact with the
leaders and the "responsible administrators."

[8] But I hasten to add the following: in the public gardens of
Sebastopol I saw a crippled child, who could only walk with crutches,
pass in front of the benches where people were taking the air.  I
observed him for a long time while he went round with a hat.  Out of
twenty people to whom he applied, eighteen gave him something, but they
would no doubt not have allowed themselves to be touched had he not
been a cripple.




_4_

In a certain oil-refining factory, in the neighbourhood of Sukhum,
where everything seemed quite admirable--the canteen, the workers'
dwellings, their club (as for the factory itself, I know nothing about
such things, and admire on trust)--we went up to the "Mural Gazette"
which according to custom was posted up in one of the club-rooms.  We
did not have time to read all the articles, but under the heading "Red
Help," where as a rule foreign news is to be found, we were surprised
not to see any allusion to Spain, news from which had been giving us
cause for anxiety for some days past.  We did not hide our surprise or
our disappointment.  Slight embarrassment ensued.  We were thanked for
our remarks; they would, we were told, certainly be taken into
consideration.

The same evening there was a banquet.  According to custom, the toasts
were numerous.  And when we had drunk the healths of the guests and
then of each one in particular, Jef Last rose and, in Russian, proposed
to empty a glass to the triumph of the Spanish red front.  This was
warmly applauded, although with a certain amount of embarrassment, it
seemed to us; and at once, as though in answer--a toast to Stalin.  In
my turn I lifted my glass to the political prisoners of Germany, of
Jugoslavia, of Hungary....  This time the applause was whole-hearted;
we clinked our glasses, we drank.  Then again, immediately
afterwards--a toast to Stalin.  But then, on the subject of the victims
of fascism, in Germany and elsewhere, everybody knew what attitude to
take up.  With regard to the disturbances and the struggle in Spain,
opinion, public and private, was awaiting the leadership of the
_Pravda_, which had not yet declared itself.  Nobody dared risk himself
before knowing what to think.  It was only a few days later, when we
had just arrived in Sebastopol, that a great wave of sympathy, starting
from the Red Square, broke over all the newspapers, and that everywhere
voluntary subscriptions to help the Government side began to be
organized.


In the office of this factory a large symbolic picture had struck us;
it depicted, in the middle, Stalin speaking; and carefully arranged, on
his right and on his left, the members of the Government applauding.


Stalin's effigy is met with everywhere; his name is on every tongue;
his praises are invariably sung in every speech.  In Georgia
particularly, I did not enter a single inhabited room, even the
humblest and the most sordid, without remarking a portrait of Stalin
hanging on the wall, in the same place no doubt where the ikon used to
be.  Is it adoration, love, or fear?  I do not know; always and
everywhere he is present.


On the road from Tiflis to Batum, we passed through Gori, the small
town where Stalin was born.  I thought that it would no doubt be
courteous to send him a message, in response to the welcome given us by
the Soviet Union, where we had everywhere been acclaimed, feasted, and
made much of.  I should never, I thought, find a better opportunity.  I
stopped the car in front of the post-office and handed in the text of
the telegram.  This is almost exactly what I had written: "Passing
through Gori, in the course of our wonderful journey, I feel the need
to send you my most cordial..."  But here the translator paused: "I
cannot let you speak like this.  'You' is not enough when that 'you' is
Stalin.  It would be positively shocking; something must be added."
And, as I displayed some amazement, they began to consult among
themselves.  They proposed: "You, leader of the workers," or "You,
master of the peoples," or ... I can't remember what.[1]  I said that
it was absurd, protested that Stalin was above such base flattery.  I
struggled in vain.  There was nothing to be done.  My telegram would
only be accepted if I consented to the addition.  And as it concerned a
translation that I could not control, I gave up the struggle and
submitted, but declined all responsibility, reflecting with sadness
that all this sort of thing helps to widen between Stalin and the
people an appalling, an unbridgeable gulf.  And as I had already
noticed that other translations of various speeches[2] that I had had
occasion to make in the U.S.S.R. had been similarly touched up and
"improved," I at once declared that I would not recognize as mine any
text by me that might be published in Russian during my stay, and that
I should say so.  I have now said it.

Oh! to be sure, I refuse to see in these small distortions, which are
usually unconscious, any bad intentions--rather the wish to help
somebody who is ill informed as to the customs of the country and who
cannot desire anything better than to submit and to conform to them in
his expressions and his thoughts.


Stalin, in the establishment of the first and second five-year plans,
has shown such wisdom, such an intelligent flexibility in the
successive modifications that he has seen fit to bring to them, that
one begins to wonder whether it was possible to be more consistent;
whether this gradual divergence from the first lines, this departure
from Leninism, was not necessary; whether more obstinacy would not have
demanded from the people a truly superhuman effort.  But in either
case, the pill is bitter.  If not Stalin, then it is man, humanity
itself, that has disappointed us.  What had been attempted, what had
been desired, what was thought to be on the point of achievement, after
so many struggles, so much blood spilt, so many tears, was that then
"above human strength"?  Must one wait still longer, relinquish one's
hopes, or project them into the future?  That is what one asks oneself
in the Soviet Union with painful anxiety.  And even the suggestion of
such a question is too much.

After so many months, so many years, of effort, one had the right to
ask oneself: will they now at last be able to lift up their heads?
They are more than ever bowed down.

It is undeniable that there has been a divergence from the first ideal.
But must we then suspect that what we first wished for was not
immediately attainable?  Has there been a fiasco?  Or an opportune and
legitimate adaptation to unforeseen difficulties?

Does this passage from "mysticism" to "politics" necessarily involve a
_degradation_?  For we are no longer on the theoretical plane; we are
in the domain of practical politics; the _menschliches,
allzumenschliches_ must be reckoned with--and so must the enemy.

Many of Stalin's decisions--in recent times almost all of them--have
been taken entirely with a view to Germany and are dictated by fear of
her.  The progressive restoration of the family, of private property,
of inheritance can thus be reasonably explained; the citizen of the
Soviet Union must be encouraged to feel that he has some personal
possessions to defend.  But it is in this way that, progressively, the
first impulse is deadened, is lost, and it becomes impossible to keep
the eyes fixed on the path that leads forward.  And I shall be told
that all this is necessary, urgent, for a flank attack might ruin the
whole enterprise.  But the enterprise itself is in the end compromised
by these successive concessions.

There is another fear--the fear of "Trotskyism" and of what is now
called over there the _counter-revolutionary spirit_.  For there are
some people who refuse to believe that this compounding was necessary;
all these concessions appear to them as so many defeats.  Explanations,
excuses, can, perhaps, be found for the deviation from those first
directives; the deviation alone is the important thing in their eyes.
But what is demanded today is a spirit of submission, is conformism.
All those who do not declare themselves to be satisfied are to be
considered "Trotskyists."  So that one begins to wonder, if Lenin
himself were to return to earth today...?


To say that Stalin is always in the right is tantamount to saying that
Stalin always gets the best of it.


We were promised a _proletarian dictatorship_.  We are far from the
mark.  A dictatorship, yes, obviously; but the dictatorship of a man,
not of the united workers, not of the Soviets.  It is important not to
deceive oneself, and it must be frankly acknowledged--this is not what
was desired.  One step more, and we should even say--this is exactly
what was not desired.


To suppress the opposition in a State, or even merely to prevent it
from declaring itself, from showing itself in the light of day, is a
very serious thing; an invitation to terrorism.  If all the citizens of
a State had the same views, it would without any doubt be more
convenient for the rulers.  But in the presence of such an
impoverishment who could still dare speak of "culture"?  Without a
counterpoise how can thought not incline all to one side?  It is a
proof of great wisdom, I think, to listen to one's opponents, even to
cherish them if need be, while preventing them from doing harm; combat,
but not suppress them.  To suppress the opposition...?  It is
fortunate, no doubt, that Stalin should succeed so ill in his
endeavours to do so.

"Humanity is not uniform, we must make up our minds to that; and any
attempt to simplify, to unify, to reduce it from the outside will
always be odious, ruinous, and disastrously grotesque.  For what is so
annoying for Athalie is that it is always Eliacin, what is so annoying
for Herod is that it is always the Holy Family that escapes," as I
wrote in 1910.[3]



[1] It sounds as though I was making it up, doesn't it?  Alas, I am
not!  And people had better not try to say that we had to do with some
stupid and clumsily zealous subordinates.  No, we had with us, taking
part in the discussion, several personages who were quite sufficiently
highly placed and, at any rate, quite familiar with "what is done."

[2] X explained to me that, according to correct usage, the word
"destiny" should be followed by a laudatory epithet when it is the
destiny of the U.S.S.R. that is being referred to.  I finally proposed
"glorious," which X told me would satisfy everybody.  On the other hand
he asked me to be good enough to suppress the word "great" that I had
put in front of "monarch."  A monarch cannot be great.  (See Appendix
III).

[3] _Nouveaux Prtextes_, p. 189.




_5_

Before going to the Soviet Union, I wrote the following passage:

"I believe that a writer's value is intimately linked to the force of
the revolutionary spirit that animates him--or to be more exact (for I
am not so mad as to believe that only left-wing writers have artistic
value), to the force of his spirit of opposition.  This spirit exists
as much in Bossuet and Chateaubriand, or at the present time in
Claudel, as in Molire, Voltaire, Victor Hugo, and so many others.  In
our form of society, a great writer, a great artist, is essentially
non-conformist.  He makes head against the current.  This was true of
Dante, of Cervantes, of Ibsen, of Gogol.  It is not true apparently of
Shakspere and his contemporaries, of whom John Addington Symonds says
so well: 'What made the playwrights of that epoch so great ... was that
they [the authors] lived and wrote in fullest sympathy with the whole
people.'[1]  It was no doubt not true of Sophocles and certainly not of
Homer, who was the voice, we feel, of Greece itself.  It would perhaps
cease to be true the day that ... But this is the very reason that we
turn our eyes with such anxious interrogation to the Soviet Union.
Will the triumph of the revolution allow its artists to be borne by the
current?  For the question arises: what will happen if the
transformation of the social State deprives the artist of all motive
for opposition?  What will the artist do if there is no reason for him
to go _against_ the current, if all he need do is to let himself be
carried by it?  No doubt as long as the struggle lasts and victory is
not perfectly assured, he can depict the struggle, and by himself
fighting, contribute to the triumph.  But afterwards...?"

This is what I asked myself before visiting the U.S.S.R.


"You see," explained X, "it wasn't at all what the public asked for;
not at all the kind of thing we want nowadays.  Before this he had
written a very remarkable ballet which had been greatly admired."
(_He_ was Shostakovich, whom I had heard praised in terms usually
reserved for geniuses.)  "But what is the public to do with an opera
that leaves them with no tunes to hum when they come out?"  (Heavens!
Is this the stage they're at? I thought to myself.  And yet X is
himself an artist and highly cultivated, and I had never before heard
him say anything that was not intelligent.)

"What we want nowadays are works everyone can understand, and
understand immediately.  If Shostakovich doesn't feel that himself, he
will soon be made to by losing all his listeners."

I protested that often the finest works, and even those that eventually
become the most popular, were at first appreciated by only a very small
number of people.  "Why, Beethoven himself," I said, and handed him a
volume I happened to have on me at that very moment.  "Here!  Read what
he says."

"_In Berlin gab ich auch_" (Beethoven is speaking), "_vor mehreren
Jahren ein Konzert, ich griff mich an und glaubte, was Recht's zu
leisten und hoffte auf tchtigen Beifall; aber siehe da, ah ich meine
hchste Begeisterung ausgesprochen hatte, kein geringstes Zeichen des
Beifalls ertnte._"[2]

X granted that in the U.S.S.R. a Beethoven would have found it very
difficult to recover from such a failure.  "You see," he went on, "an
artist in our country must first of all keep in line.  Otherwise even
the finest gifts will be considered _formalism_.  Yes, that's our word
for designating whatever we don't wish to see or hear.  We want to
create a new art worthy of the great people we are.  Art today should
be popular or nothing."

"You will drive all your artists to conformism," I answered.  "And the
best, those who refuse to degrade their art, or will not allow it to be
subservient, will be reduced to silence.  The culture you claim to
serve, to illustrate, to defend, will put you to shame."

Then he declared I was arguing like a bourgeois.  That, for his part,
he was convinced that Marxism, which had already produced such great
things in other domains, would also produce works of art.  He added
that what prevented such works from arising was the importance that was
still attached to a by-gone past.

His voice became louder and louder, and he seemed to be giving a
lecture or reciting a lesson.  This conversation took place in the hall
of the hotel at Sochi.  I left him without saying anything more.  But a
few moments later he came to my room and, in a low voice this time, "Of
course," he said, "you are perfectly right ... but there were people
listening to us just now ... and I have an exhibition opening very
soon."

X is a painter.


When we first arrived in the U.S.S.R., public opinion had barely
recovered from the great quarrel of Formalism.  I tried to understand
what this word meant and this is what I made out:

The accusation of formalism was levelled at any artist who was capable
of attaching less importance to _content_ than to _form_.  Let me add
at once that no _content_ is considered worthy of interest (or, to be
more accurate, is tolerated) unless it is inclined in a certain
direction.  The work of art is considered formalist if it is not
inclined at all and therefore has no direction (I use the word in both
meanings).  I confess I cannot write these words of _form_ and
_content_ without a smile.  But it would be more proper to weep that
this absurd distinction should be a determining consideration in
criticism.  That it may have been useful politically is possible; but
then stop talking of culture.  Culture is in danger when criticism is
not free.

In the U.S.S.R., however fine a work may be, if it is not in line it
scandalizes.  Beauty is considered a bourgeois value.  However great a
genius an artist may be, if he does not work in line, attention will
turn away--will _be_ turned away--from him.  What is demanded of the
artist, of the writer, is that he shall conform; and all the rest will
be added to him.


At Tiflis I saw an exhibition of modern art which it would perhaps be
charitable not to speak of.  But after all, these artists had attained
their object, which is to edify, to convince, to convert (episodes of
Stalin's life being used as the themes of these illustrations).  Oh!
it's very certain that none of these people were "formalists."
Unfortunately they were not painters either.  They made me think of
Apollo, who, when he was set to serve Admetus, had to extinguish all
his rays and from that moment did nothing of any value, or at any rate
nothing of any good to us.  But as the U.S.S.R. was no better at the
plastic arts before the revolution than after it, let us keep to
literature.

"In the days of my youth," said X, "we were recommended certain books
and advised against others; and naturally it was to the latter that we
were drawn.  The great difference today is that the young people read
only what they are recommended to read and have no desire to read
anything else."

Thus Dostoievski, for instance, finds today very few readers, without
our being able to say exactly whether young people are turning away (or
being turned away) from him--to such an extent are their minds moulded.

If the mind is obliged to obey a word of command, it can at any rate
feel that it is not free.  But if it has been so manipulated beforehand
that it obeys without even waiting for the word of command, it loses
even the consciousness of its enslavement.  I believe many young Soviet
citizens would be greatly astonished if they were told that they had no
liberty of thought, and would vehemently deny it.

And as it always happens that we recognize the value of certain
advantages only after we have lost them, there is nothing like a stay
in the U.S.S.R. (or of course in Germany) to help us appreciate the
inappreciable liberty of thought we still enjoy in France--and
sometimes abuse.

At Leningrad I was asked to prepare a little speech to be addressed to
a meeting of writers and students, I had only been a week in the
country and was trying to tune in to the correct key.  I therefore
submitted my text to X and Y.  I was at once given to understand that
my text was far from being in the right key or the right tone, and that
what I was intending to say would be most unsuitable.  Oh! it didn't
take me long to realize this by myself.  As for the speech, it was
never delivered.  Here it is:

"I have often been asked my opinion of present-day Soviet literature.
I should like to explain why I have always refused to give it.  I shall
be able at the same time to repeat with greater precision one of the
passages of the speech I made in the Red Square on the solemn occasion
of Gorki's funeral.  I was speaking of the 'new problems' which had
been raised by the very triumph of the Soviet Republics, problems, I
said, which it would not be the least of the U.S.S.R.'s glories to have
introduced into history and to have presented to our meditations.  As
the future of culture seems to me to be closely bound up with their
solution, it will perhaps not be amiss if I return to the subject with
greater particularity.

      *      *      *      *      *

"The great majority, even when composed of the best individuals, never
bestows its approbation on what is new, potential, unconcerted, and
disconcerting in a work; but only on what it can _recognize_--that is to
say, the commonplace.  Just as once there were bourgeois commonplaces,
so now there are revolutionary commonplaces; it is important to know
it.  It is important to realize that the essential value of a work of
art, the quality that will ensure its survival, never lies in a
conformist adherence to a doctrine, be that doctrine the soundest and
the surest possible; but rather in formulating questions that forestall
the future's, and answers to questions that have not yet been
formulated.  I am very much afraid that many works, imbued with the
purest spirit of Marxism, and on that account so successful today, will
soon emit to the noses of tomorrow the insufferable odour of the
clinic; and I believe that the works that will live most victoriously
will be those that have freed themselves successfully from such
preoccupations.

"When the revolution is triumphant, installed, and established, art
runs a terrible danger, a danger almost as great as under the worst
fascist oppression--the danger of orthodoxy.  Art that submits to
orthodoxy, to even the soundest doctrines, is lost--wrecked upon the
shoals of conformism.  What the triumphant revolution can and should
offer the artist is above all else liberty.  Without liberty art loses
its meaning and its value.

"Walt Whitman, on the death of President Lincoln, wrote one of his most
beautiful poems.  But if this poem had been imposed, if Whitman had
been forced to write it by order and in conformity with an accepted
canon, his threnody would have lost all its virtue and its beauty; or
rather, Whitman could not have written it.

"And as, quite naturally, the assent of the greatest number, with its
accompanying applause, success, and favours, goes to the qualities the
public is best able to recognize--that is say, to conformism--I wonder
with some anxiety whether perhaps in this great Soviet Union there may
not be vegetating obscurely, unknown to the crowd, some Baudelaire,
some Keats, or some Rimbaud, who by very reason of his worth cannot
make himself heard.[3]  And yet he, of all others, is the one who is of
importance, for those who are at first disdained, like Rimbaud, Keats,
Baudelaire, and even Stendhal, are those who tomorrow will be the
greatest."



[1] General Introduction to the Mermaid Series.

[2] "Several years ago I too gave a concert in Berlin.  I exerted
myself to the utmost and thought I had really accomplished something
excellent; I hoped therefore for vigorous applause; but just imagine,
after I had given utterance to my highest inspiration, not the smallest
sign of approbation was heard."  (Goethe's _Briefe mit
lebensgeschichtlichen Verbindungen_.  Vol. II, p. 287.)

[3] But, they will say, what concern have we today with a possible
Keats, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, or even Stendhal?  The only value they have
in our eyes now is the degree in which they reflect the moribund and
corrupt society of which they were the melancholy products.  If the new
society of today is unable to produce them, so much the worse for them,
but so much the better for us, who have nothing more to learn from them
or their like.  The writer who can be of service to us today is the man
who is perfectly at his ease in this new form of society and whose
spirit is intensified by what would have hampered the others.  In other
words, the man who approves, enjoys, and applauds.

Exactly.  And I think that the writings of those applauders are of very
slight value or service, and that if the people wish to develop their
culture, they had far better not listen to them.  Nothing is so useful
for developing culture as to be forced to think.

As for what might be called "mirror" literature--that is to say, books
that confine themselves to being a mere reflection (of a society,
event, or period)--I have already said what I think of them.

Self-contemplation (and admiration) may be the first interest of a
society that is still very young; but it would be extremely regrettable
if this first interest were also the sole and the last.




_6_

Sebastopol, last stage of our journey.  No doubt there are more
interesting and more beautiful towns in the U.S.S.R., but nowhere else
had I felt how deeply I was captivated, how lasting would be my
affection.  At Sebastopol, as at Sukhum or Sochi, though here it is
less hedged round, less select, I came across Russian life and society
in its entirety, with its lacks, its defects, its sufferings, alas!
side by side with those triumphs, those achievements, that give mankind
the possibility or the promise of greater happiness.  And as from day
to day the light varies, so sometimes it softened the shades, or
sometimes, on the contrary, deepened them.  But all the darkest as well
as the brightest of what I saw here drew me, attached me--sometimes
sorrowfully--to this land, to these united peoples, to this unfamiliar
climate which bestows its blessings on the future and in which who
knows what unhoped-for flowers may blossom....  All this I had to leave.

And already my heart began to ache with another, a fresh anguish.  When
I got back to Paris, what should I say?  How should I answer the
questions I foresaw?  Wholesale judgments would certainly be expected
of me.  How explain that turn by turn in the U.S.S.R. I had felt so hot
and so cold?  In declaring my love afresh, must I hide my reserves and
give a lying approval to everything?  No; I feel too deeply that in
acting so I should injure both the U.S.S.R. itself and the cause it
stands for.  But the gravest error would be to link too closely the one
to the other and make the cause responsible for what we deplore in the
U.S.S.R.


The help that the Soviet Union is giving to Spain shows us what fine
capabilities of recovery it still possesses.

The Soviet Union has not yet finished instructing and astonishing us.




APPENDICES


_1_


SPEECH

  _Delivered in the Red Square in Moscow on the
  Occasion of Maxim Gorki's Funeral_

(20 June 1936)

Maxim Gorki's death darkens not only the Soviet State but the whole
world.  That great voice of the Russian people that spoke through Gorki
has found an echo in the most distant lands.  So that I am not here to
express a merely personal grief, but that of French letters, of
European culture, of the culture of the whole world.

Culture has long remained the apanage of a privileged class.  To be
cultivated one had to have leisure; a whole class of people toiled in
order to enable a very few to enjoy life and to get educated; and the
garden of culture, of belles-lettres, and of arts was a private domain,
where the only people to be admitted were not the most intelligent or
the most apt, but those who since their childhood had been sheltered
from want.  No doubt it was clear that intelligence did not necessarily
accompany wealth; in French literature Molire, Diderot, Rousseau, for
instance, came from the people; but their readers were still the
leisured classes.

When, in the great October Revolution, the deep masses of the Russian
peoples rose up, it was said in the West, it was repeated, and it was
even believed that this great tidal wave was going to submerge culture.
For as soon as it ceased to be a privilege, was not culture in danger?

It was in reply to this query that some writers of all countries have
come together with the clear feeling of an urgent duty to perform: yes,
there is a menace to culture; but the danger does not come from the
revolutionary and liberating forces; on the contrary, it comes from the
parties who try to subjugate these forces, to break them, to hide
thought itself under a bushel.  The menace to culture comes from
fascism, from narrow and artificial nationalisms which have nothing in
common with true patriotism, with the deep love of one's country.  The
menace to culture comes from war, to which all these nationalisms and
their hatreds fatally and necessarily lead.

I was to have presided at the international conference for the defence
of culture which is being held at this moment in London.  Bad news
about Maxim Gorki's health made me leave suddenly for Moscow.  In this
Red Square which has already seen so many tragic and glorious events,
in front of Lenin's mausoleum on which so many eyes are fastened, I
wish to declare before all, in the name of the writers assembled in
London, and in my own, that it is to the great international
revolutionary forces that must fall the task, the duty, of defending,
of protecting, and of illustrating culture.  The fate of culture is
bound up in our minds with the destiny of the Soviet Union.  We will
defend it.

Just as, over and above the particular interests of each people, a
great common need binds together the proletarian classes of all lands,
so, over and above each national literature, there flourishes a culture
composed of all that is really vital and human in each particular
literature--"national in form, socialist in content," as Stalin has
said.

I have often written that it is by the exercise of his most distinctive
gifts that a writer best attains universal significance, because it is
through being most individual that he shows himself by that very means
the most human.  No Russian writer has been more Russian than Maxim
Gorki.  No Russian writer has been listened to with more universal
attention.

I was present yesterday at the march past of the people before Gorki's
catafalque.  I could not weary of contemplating the numbers of women,
of children, of workers of all kinds for whom Maxim Gorki had been a
spokesman and a friend.  I reflected with sorrow that these people, in
any other country than the U.S.S.R., belonged to those to whom entry of
the hall would have been forbidden; to those who, precisely, when they
come to the gardens of culture are confronted with a terrible "No
admittance.  Private property."  And tears came to my eyes at the
thought that what seemed to them already so natural seemed to me, the
Westerner, still so extraordinary.

And it seemed to me that there existed here, in the Soviet Union, a
most surprising novelty--up till now, in all the countries of the
world, a great writer has always been, more or less, a revolutionary, a
fighter.  In a way that was more or less conscious and more or less
veiled, he thought, he wrote, in opposition to something.  He refused
to approve.  He brought into the minds and into the hearts of people
the germs of insubordination, of revolt.  Respectable people, public
powers, the authorities, tradition, had they been far-seeing enough,
would not have hesitated to recognize in him the enemy.

Today, in the U.S.S.R., for the first time, the question is put in a
very different manner; while remaining a revolutionary, the writer is
no longer a rebel.[1]  On the contrary, he responds to the wishes of
the greatest number, of the whole people, and what is most remarkable,
to those of the rulers.  So that there appears to be a sort of fading
away of the problem, or rather a transposition so new that at first it
disconcerts thought.  And it will not be one of the least glories of
the U.S.S.R. and of those prodigious days which still continue to shake
our old world, to have called up into fresh heavens new stars and
unimagined problems.

Maxim Gorki will have had the singular and glorious destiny of
attaching this new world to the past and of binding it to the future.
He experienced the oppression of old times, the tragic struggle of
yesterday; he powerfully helped on the calm and radiant triumph of
today.  He lent his voice to those who had not yet been able to make
themselves heard; to those who will in future, thanks to him, be
listened to.  From now on, Maxim Gorki belongs to history.  He takes
his place among the greatest.



[1] This was where I fooled myself; I was obliged, alas, soon to admit
it.




_2_


SPEECH

_To the Students of Moscow_

(27 June 1936)

Comrades--representatives of Soviet youth, I want you to understand why
I feel so moved at finding myself today among you.  In order to do
that, I shall have to talk to you a little about myself.  The sympathy
you have shown me encourages me to do so.  I feel I deserve this
sympathy a little; I believe I am not being too presumptuous in
thinking and saying so.  My merit is that I have been able to wait for
you.  I waited a long time, but I was full of confidence; I knew that
some day you would come.  And now you are there and your welcome fully
makes up for the long silence, the solitude, the lack of comprehension
in which I lived at first.  Yes, truly, I consider your sympathy to be
the true recompense.

When, in Paris, the review _Commune_ was founded under the direction
and thanks to the bold initiative of Comrade Louis Aragon, it occurred
to him to put the following question to each of the writers of France:
Whom do you write for?  I did not answer this inquiry, and I told
Aragon why I did not answer it.  It was because I could not say,
without some appearance of vanity, what was nevertheless the truth--I
have always written for those who will come after me.

I cared very little about applause; I could only have got it from that
bourgeois class from which I myself came, and to which, it is true, I
still belonged, but which I heartily despised, precisely because I knew
it so well, and against which all that was best in me rebelled.  As my
health was bad and I could hardly hope to live long, I accepted having
to quit this earth without having known success.  I agreed to consider
myself as a posthumous author, like one of those whose pure fame I
envied, those who died practically unknown, who only wrote for
posterity, like Stendhal, Baudelaire, Keats, or Rimbaud.  I kept saying
to myself: "Those to whom my books are addressed are not yet born."
And I had the painful but exhilarating impression of speaking in the
desert.  Speaking in the desert is very satisfactory; there is no risk
of an echo distorting the sound of your voice; there is no need to be
concerned about the impression your words may make; and there is
nothing to influence them but a need for sincerity.  And it is to be
observed that when the public taste is warped, when convention has
overcome truth, that very sincerity is styled affectation.  Yes, I was
supposed to be an affected author.  I was made aware of it by not being
read.

The example of the great writers that I have just mentioned and whom I
especially admired reassured me.  I consented to have no success during
my lifetime, being fully convinced that the future would bring me my
revenge.  I have kept, as others might keep a prize-list, the
sales-list of my _Nourritures Terrestres_.  In the course of twenty
years (1897-1917) there were exactly five hundred purchasers.  The book
had passed unnoticed by the public and the critics.  No article had
been written about it, or, to be more accurate, there had been nothing
but two articles by friends.  What I have just said about the
_Nourritures Terrestres_ is only interesting in view of the
extraordinary success that the book had later on, and of the influence
it exercises on the young generation of today.

And this story does not only apply to my _Nourritures Terrestres_.  In
general the original lack of success of each of my books was in direct
ratio to its value and its novelty.

I do not want to draw from this a conclusion which might seem
paradoxical--that only mediocre books can hope for an immediate
triumph.  No; that is certainly not my view.  I simply want to say that
the deep significance of a book, of a work of art, is not always
recognized at once.  And therefore a work of art is not merely
addressed to the present.  The only really valuable works are those
messages which are often not understood till later, and a work which
exclusively and too perfectly responds to an immediate need runs the
risk of soon appearing totally insignificant.

Young people of new Russia, you understand now why I sent you my
_Nouvelles Nourritures_ with such cheerful confidence; it was because
you carry within you the future.  The future will not come from the
outside; the future is within you.  And not only the future of the
U.S.S.R., for on the future of the U.S.S.R. depend the destinies of the
rest of the world.  It is you who will make the future.

Take good care.  Be vigilant.  On you are weighing tremendous
responsibilities.  Do not rest on the triumph that your elder comrades
have generously paid for with their endeavours and their blood.  They
have cleared away from the sky an accumulation of clouds that still
darken many countries in this world.  Do not remain inactive.  Do not
forget that, from the depths of the West, our eyes are fixed on you
with love, with expectation, and with an immense hope.




_3_


SPEECH

_To the Men of Letters of Leningrad_

(2 July 1936)

      *      *      *      *      *

I was immediately fascinated by the charm, the beauty, the historic
eloquence of Leningrad.  Moscow indeed touched my mind and my heart by
its extreme interest.  There the (glorious)[1] destiny of the Soviet
Union is being framed with power.  But whereas at Moscow no memories
could arise but those of the Napoleonic conquest, that vain effort that
was instantly followed by disaster, in Leningrad many buildings
recalled to me all that was most fruitful and most cordial in the
intellectual relations between Russia and France.  In those by-gone
relations, in that spiritual emulation that animated all that was most
generous, most universal, newest, and boldest in the culture of the
time, I like to see a kind of foreshadowing, a preparation, and an
unconscious promise; yes, a promise of what revolutionary
internationalism is about to realize today.

We should not fail to notice, however, that in the past these relations
were always personal; they took place between a great man and a
(great)[2] monarch, or between great men among themselves.  Today the
relations which are being established and for which we are working go
far deeper; they imply the consent of the peoples themselves and they
embrace and merge together without distinction the intellectuals and
workers of all kinds, a thing that had never been seen till now.  So
that it is not only in my own name that I am speaking, but when I
reiterate my love for the U.S.S.R., I am also expressing the feelings
of vast toiling masses in France.

If my presence among you, and that of my companions, can open fresh
possibilities of intellectual traffic, I shall rejoice with all my
heart.  I have always protested against the racial barrier that,
according to some nationalists, is unsurmountable and which, if we are
to believe them, would be an eternal obstacle to the mutual
understanding of different peoples and would render their spirit
incommunicable as well as impenetrable to the spirit of others.  I am
glad to be able to say here that, from the days of my youth, I have
always experienced a particularly fraternal feeling towards what were
then supposed to be the incomprehensible mysteries of the Slav soul.
So much so that I was able to feel myself in close communion with your
great authors, whom I had learnt to know and to love from the moment I
left school.  Gogol, Turgeniev, Dostoievski, Pushkin, Tolstoi, then
later Sologub, Shchedrin, Chekhov, Gorki, to name only the dead--with
what excitement I read them, and, indeed, with what gratitude!  I found
in them, together with a highly individual art, the most surprising
revelations on man in general, and on myself in particular.  These
great writers prospect regions of the soul that other literatures, it
seems to me, have left unexplored; they instantly grasp, with delicacy,
with strength, and with that kind of indiscretion that love permits,
what lies deepest in man, what is at the same time the most individual
and the most genuinely human.  I have persistently done my best to
spread the knowledge and the love of Russian literature in France--both
of the literature of the past and that of the Soviet Union of today.
We are often ill informed, and between two peoples grave errors and
most regrettable omissions may arise; but our curiosity is ardent, as
is that of the comrades who came to join Pierre Herbart and myself--Jef
Last, Schiffrin, Dabit, and Guilloux, two of whom belong to the party.
These, no less than myself, hope that our journey in the Soviet Union
may enlighten us and enable us to enlighten on our return the French
public, which is extraordinarily eager as to everything the Soviet
Union is contributing in the way of novelties to our old world.  The
sympathy which you have been kind enough to show me encourages me, and
I take pleasure in expressing in the name of many of those who have
remained in France our cordial thanks.



[1] I was given to understand that it would be suitable to add here
"glorious."

[2] I was asked to suppress "great" as being unsuitable for "monarch."




_4_


THE STRUGGLE AGAINST RELIGION

I did not visit the anti-religious museums at Moscow; but I saw the one
in the Leningrad cathedral of St. Isaac, whose golden dome shines so
exquisitely over the city.  From the outside the cathedral is very
beautiful, but the inside is frightful.  The big religious paintings
which have been kept there might very well launch blasphemy on a
successful career; they are really hideous.  The museum itself is much
less impertinent than I had feared.  It was designed with the idea of
confronting the religious myth with science.  Obliging cicerones come
to the rescue of lazy visitors who are not likely to be sufficiently
convinced by optical instruments and astronomical, biological,
anatomical, and statistical tables.  Decencies are preserved and there
is nothing very outrageous.  It savours of Reclus and Flammarion rather
than of Leo Taxil.  The popes, it is true, are pretty roughly handled.
But a few days before, I had happened to meet a pope--a real one.  It
was in the outskirts of Leningrad, on the road that leads to Peterhof.
The mere sight of him was more eloquent than all the anti-religious
museums in the U.S.S.R.  I will not attempt to describe him.
Monstrous, abject, and ridiculous, he seemed to have been invented by
Bolshevism to serve as a scarecrow, for the express purpose of putting
to flight for ever and ever the pious feelings of the countryside.

On the other hand, I cannot forget the beautiful figure of the monk in
charge of the fine church we visited shortly before arriving at X.
What dignity of manner!  What nobility of feature!  Not a word, not a
sign passed from him to us; not a glance was exchanged.  As I gazed at
him without his being aware of it, there came into my mind the
"_tradebat autem_" of the Gospels, in which Bossuet found the
inspiration for one of his finest flights of oratory.

The archological museum of Chersonese, in the suburbs of Sebastopol,
is also housed in a church.[1]  The mural paintings here have been
respected, no doubt on account of their provocative ugliness.
Explanatory labels are affixed to them.  Under a picture of Christ are
the words: "Legendary character who never existed."

I doubt whether the U.S.S.R. has conducted this anti-religious war very
skilfully.  It would have been allowable for the Marxists to have
confined themselves to history, denied Christ's divinity, and, if they
pleased, his existence, to have rejected the Church's dogmas,
discredited the Revelation, and considered from a purely human and
critical point of view a teaching which, after all, brought new hope to
the world and the most marvellous revolutionary ferment possible at the
time.  It would have been allowable for them to show the manner in
which the Church itself turned traitor and how the Gospels' doctrine of
emancipation gave countenance (with the Church's connivance, alas) to
the worst abuses of power.  All this would have been better than the
conspiracy of silence and negation.  Nothing can prevent this thing
from having been, and the ignorance in which the peoples of the
U.S.S.R. are kept in regard to it leaves them without the defence of
critical judgment and unvaccinated against the constant menace of an
epidemic of mysticism.

There is more, and so far I have only presented my objections in their
narrowest form and from a practical point of view.  The ignoring, the
repudiation, of the Gospels and all they have given rise to cannot fail
to impoverish humanity and culture in the most lamentable way.  I
should be sorry for people to be suspicious of me in this respect and
to scent here some whiff of my early education and convictions.  I
should speak in the same way about the Greek myths, which have also, I
think, a profound and permanent teaching value.  It seems to me absurd
to _believe_ them, but equally absurd to refuse to recognize the
element of truth that informs them, and to think they can be treated
with sufficient respect by a smile and a shrug of the shoulders.  As
for the arrest of development that religion may inflict upon the mind,
as for the stamp that may be set upon it by faith, I know them well
enough and think it right to free the new man from all such things.  I
agree too that superstition kept alive (with the pope's help) an
abominable state of moral filth in the country districts--and in other
places too (I have seen the Tzarina's apartments)--and I understand
that there was urgent need for clearing the whole thing up once and for
all, but ... The Germans have an excellent image for which I have tried
in vain to discover an equivalent, and which expresses what I find it
difficult to say otherwise: _The baby has been emptied away with the
bath-water_.  The result, no doubt, of a want of discrimination as well
as of too great hastiness.  That the water was dirty and smelly is very
likely; I have no difficulty in believing it--so dirty, in fact, that
without paying any attention to the child, the whole lot was thrown
away regardless.

And now if I am told that the church-bells are being recast out of a
spirit of conciliation and tolerance, I greatly fear that it may be
merely a beginning, that the bath will soon be filled again with dirty
water--while the baby will be missing.



[1] In another church near Sochi we were present at a dancing-class.
In the place of the high altar there were couples revolving to the
sound of a foxtrot or a tango.




_5_


OSTROVSKI

I cannot speak of Ostrovski without profound respect.  If we were not
in the U.S.S.R. I should say he was a saint.  Religion never fashioned
a more beautiful figure.  That it is not only religion that can fashion
such figures he is the proof.  An ardent conviction is all-sufficing,
without any hope of future recompense, without _any_ recompense but the
satisfaction of an austere duty duly performed.

Ostrovski, as the result of an accident, lost his sight and was left
completely paralysed....  It seems as though, deprived of almost every
contact with the outside world, and with no soil in which to spread its
roots, Ostrovski's soul has only been able to grow upwards.

We gathered together near his bed, to which he has been long confined.
I sat at its head and put out my hand, which he grasped, or, I should
say rather, clutched, as if it were a means of clinging to life, and
during the whole hour our visit lasted, his thin fingers never ceased
caressing mine, entwining them and transmitting to me the effluvia of
his quivering sensibility.

Ostrovski cannot see, but he speaks, he hears.  His mind is all the
more active and tense that nothing comes to distract it, save perhaps
physical pain.  But he makes no complaint and his fine, emaciated face
still manages to smile, in spite of his long-drawn agony.

The room he was lying in is bright.  The song of birds, the scent of
flowers in the garden outside came in through the open windows.  How
calm it all was!  His mother and sister, his friends and visitors were
seated discreetly not far from the bed; some took notes of our
conversation.  I told Ostrovski that the spectacle of his steadfastness
had brought me a reserve of extraordinary encouragement to draw upon;
but praise seemed to embarrass him; what we must admire in the U.S.S.R.
is the accomplishment of a stupendous task.  He is interested only in
that, not in himself.  Three times over, afraid of tiring him, for such
unrelaxing ardour, I imagined, must be exhausting, I bade him good-bye;
but he begged me to stay; he needed, one felt, to speak.  He would go
on speaking after we had left; and speaking for him is dictating.  It
is thus that he has written to dictation the book in which he relates
the story of his life.  He was now, I was told, dictating another.
From morning to evening, and late on into the night, he works,
ceaselessly dictating.

At last I rose to go.  He asked me to kiss him.  As I put my lips to
his brow, I could hardly restrain my tears; I felt too that it was he
who was leaving us and that I was saying good-bye to a dying man....
But for months and months, I was told, he has seemed on the brink of
death and his fervour alone keeps the sinking flame alive in that frail
body.




_6_


A KOLKHOZ

So then the daily wage is 16.50 roubles.  Not a very large sum.  But
the brigade foreman of the kolkhoz, with whom I conversed at length
while my companions were bathing (for this kolkhoz is by the seaside),
explained to me that what is called "a day's work" is a conventional
measure and that good workmen can do a double and sometimes even a
triple "day's work" in one day.[1]  He showed me the individual
pay-books and the account-sheets, which all pass through his hands.
Not only the quantity of work done was taken into consideration, but
the quality as well.  The gang foremen supply him with information on
the matter, and it is according to this information that he makes out
the pay-sheets.  This requires a pretty complicated system of accounts,
and he did not conceal the fact that he was rather overworked, but very
satisfied nevertheless, for he was already able to credit himself
personally with the equivalent of three hundred days' work since the
beginning of the year (it being then August 3rd).  This brigade foreman
had charge of fifty-six men; between them and him are the gang foremen.
A hierarchy, in fact; but the basic salary for the "day's work" is the
same for all.  Moreover, each man enjoys the personal use of the
produce of his garden which he cultivates after having finished his
work at the kolkhoz.

For such work there are no regulation hours; when there is no
particular hurry, each man works when he feels like it.

This led me to ask him whether some people do not contribute less than
the standard "day's work."  He replied that this does not happen.
Evidently the "day's work" is not an average one, but is a minimum
easily enough obtained.  Moreover, the incorrigible slackers would
rapidly be eliminated from this kolkhoz, the advantages of which are so
great that people are always trying to enter it.  But without success;
the number of its members is limited.

The members of this privileged kolkhoz then earn about six hundred
roubles a month.  Skilled workers sometimes receive much more.  For the
unskilled, who form the great majority, the daily wage is from five to
six roubles.[2] The ordinary labourer earns even less.

They might, it would seem, be paid a higher wage.  But as long as there
is no increase in the number of goods in circulation, a rise in wages
would only result in a rise in prices.  This, at any rate, is the
objection that is made.

As it stands, the differences in wages are an inducement to skilled
labour.  Labourers are only too plentiful; what are lacking are
specialists, technicians.  No effort is spared to get hold of them; and
perhaps there is nothing in the U.S.S.R. that I admire more than that
the means of instruction should already almost everywhere be placed
within the reach of the humblest workers, thus enabling them (it only
depends on them) to rise above their precarious condition.



[1] The reckoning allows for a division of the "day's work" into
decimal fractions.

[2] Perhaps I had better remark that, theoretically, the rouble is
worth three French francs; that is to say, that the foreigner arriving
in the U.S.S.R. pays three francs for each rouble note.  But the
purchasing power of the rouble is hardly greater than that of the
franc; moreover, many of the most essential commodities are still at a
very high price (eggs, milk, meat, and especially butter, etc.).  As
for clothes...!




_7_


BOLSHEVO

I visited Bolshevo.  It was at first a mere village which suddenly
sprang into being by order, about six years ago, I think, at Gorki's
initiative.  Today it is a fairly large town.

It has this peculiarity.  All its inhabitants are former
criminals--thieves and even murderers.  The master idea that presided
at the formation and constitution of the town was this--that criminals
are victims who have been led astray, and that a rational re-education
may turn them into excellent Soviet subjects.  Bolshevo has proved
this.  The town is prosperous.  Factories were started in it which soon
became model factories.

All the inhabitants of Bolshevo are reformed characters and have now
become, under no leadership but their own, zealous, orderly, peaceful
workers, particularly strict as to their morals and anxious to improve
their minds, for which purpose all possible means are put at their
disposal.  And it was not only their factories they invited me to
admire, but their meeting-places, their club, their library, all their
arrangements, which leave, indeed, nothing to be desired.  No trace can
be seen on the faces of these ex-criminals, in their appearance or
their language, of their past life.  Nothing could be more edifying,
more reassuring and encouraging than this visit.  It leads one to think
that all crimes are imputable not to the man himself who commits them,
but to the society which drives him to commit them.  One of these men,
then another were invited to speak, to confess their former crimes, to
relate how they had been converted, how they had come to recognize the
excellence of the new rgime and the personal satisfaction they
experienced in submitting to it.  It all reminded me oddly of the
series of edifying confessions that I had heard at Thun two years ago
during a great meeting of adepts of the Oxford Group.  "I was a sinner;
I was unhappy; I did evil; but now I understand; I am saved; I am
happy."  The whole thing is rather in the rough, rather nave, and only
whets the psychologist's appetite without satisfying it.  Bolshevo,
none the less, is one of the most remarkable successes on which the new
Soviet State can plume itself.  I am not sure whether in other
countries man would prove so malleable.




_8_


THE BESPRIZORNIS

I had hoped there would be no more _besprizornis_[1] for me to see.
But there are plenty of them at Sebastopol, and I was told that there
are even more at Odessa.  They are not quite the same type of child as
in earlier times.  Nowadays these children may have parents still
living; they have left their native village, sometimes through love of
adventure, more frequently because they could not conceive that
anywhere else it was possible to be as wretched and as starved as they
were at home.  Some of them are under ten.  They are easily
recognizable because they wear a great many more clothes (I do not say
better clothes) than the other children.  This is explained by the fact
that they carry all their belongings about with them.  The other
children very often wear nothing but bathing-trunks.  (This was in
summer and the heat was tropical.)  They run about the streets naked
down to the waist and with bare feet.  And this should not always be
taken as a sign of poverty.  They have just bathed or are going to
bathe.  They have a home where they can leave their other clothes, that
they may need for rainy days or for the winter.  As for the
besprizornis, they have no domicile.  They usually wear a ragged
sweater as well as bathing-trunks.

What the besprizornis live on I do not know.  But what I do know is
that if they have enough money to buy a piece of bread, they devour it
ravenously.  Most of them are cheerful in spite of all; but some of
them seem on the point of fainting.  We talked to several of them and
won their confidence.  They finally told us the place where they often
sleep when the weather is not fine enough to spend the night out of
doors; it is near a public square where a statue of Lenin stands, under
the fine portico which overlooks the embarcation quay.  On the left
when you go down to the sea, there is a sort of recess in the portico,
shut off by a little wooden door that you do not push open but pull
towards you.  I did so one morning, when there were not too many people
about--for I was afraid of giving away their hiding-place and getting
them turned out of it--and found myself facing a small space about the
size of an alcove, with no other opening, where, curled up like a
kitten on a sack, a wretched little starveling was sleeping.  I closed
the door on his slumbers.

One morning the besprizornis had disappeared (as a rule, they used to
prowl about the large public gardens); then one of them, whom we
finally discovered, told me that there had been a police raid and that
all the others were under lock and key.  Two of my companions had been,
in fact, present at the police raid.  A policeman whom they questioned
told them that the children would be placed in a State institution.
The next day they had all reappeared.  What had happened?  "They
wouldn't have us," said the children.  But it seems more likely that it
was they themselves who refused to submit to what little discipline was
demanded of them.  Had they run away again?  It would have been easy
for the police to recapture them.  One would have thought that they
would have been glad to be rescued from such depths of poverty.  Or did
they prefer to what was offered them their poverty together with their
freedom?

I saw a very small one--certainly not more than eight--being carried
off by two plain-clothes policemen.  Two were needed, for the child was
struggling like a wildcat--sobbing, howling, stamping, trying to
bite....  Nearly an hour later, happening to pass near the same place,
I saw the same child again.  He had now calmed down and was sitting on
the pavement.  There was only one of the two policemen standing beside
him.  The child was no longer trying to run away.  He was smiling at
the policeman.  A large truck drew up, and the policeman helped the
child to get in.  Where was he taking him?  I do not know.  And I only
relate this little incident because few things in the Soviet Union
moved me as much as the attitude of this man towards the child; the
persuasive gentleness of his voice (ah, if I could only have understood
what he was saying!), the kindness of his smile, and his caressing
tenderness as he lifted him in his arms....  I thought of Dostoievski's
_Moujik Mare_[2]--and that it was worth while coming to the U.S.S.R.
in order to see such a thing.



[1] Abandoned children.

[2] _A Writer's Notebook._



      *      *      *      *      *      *      *      *



Also by Andr Gide

THE COUNTERFEITERS

THE IMMORALIST

TRAVELS IN THE CONGO


_These are Borzoi Books published by_

ALFRED A. KNOPF






[End of Return from the U.S.S.R., by Andr Gide]
