1936 On the Continent

other papers. He, too, knows Russian like a native language and had had long years of experience of its native conditions.
    I am thinking of the books and dispatches of Walter Duranty, ex-Harrovian and correspondent of the stately
New York Times
. His books,
Russia Reported
and
I Write As I Please
, are not to be missed.
    I am also thinking of a much humbler book which I do not now guarantee to be even in circulation, Alexander Wicksteed’s
Life Under the Soviets
. I have a particular regard for it, for it was the first book that revealed modern Russia to me. Alexander Wicksteed was the son of a well-known English father who was a contemporary and friend of Bernard Shaw, and Alexander himself had served through the War as an English naval officer. But he was a natural and instinctive bohemian. Shortly after the War he went to Russia to “have a look for himself,” and stayed there and got a job there, because, in his ownwords, “It was the only country in the world where I could make a living by doing only three days’ work a week.” He got the job of teaching English and English phonetics at the University of Moscow.
    He wrote a little book about his experiences after he had been there seven or eight years. It was called
Life Under the Soviets
—and it was remarkable in that it avoided politics, and did really tell one everything that one wanted to know about Russian life—the price of sausages and the price of tea, what the restaurants looked like, and the manners of the travellers in the Moscow trams.
Alexander Wicksteed
    It also told one fascinating stories. How a great trust had been formed in Moscow for “The Electrification of All the Russias.” And how, while the electrification of All the Russias was proceeding, the trust had not been able successfully to electrify its own front-door bell; and across the front-door of its head office was written the legend, “Please Knock Loudly! Bell Out of Order.” It also told how once his entire class at the University was late, and when he asked them why they were late the reply was they were late because they had been at the first meeting of a new “League for Punctuality Throughout Russia”! Only those who know Russia at its most characteristic will know how true and revealing this sort of story can be of the sort of life that was going on in the years immediately after the Revolution.
    His little book, in spite of its simplicity, or perhaps because of its simplicity, was a valuable and revealing one. It came at a time, some eight or nine years ago, when many English people, owing to a continuous press campaign of vilification, were seriously beginning to ask themselves, “Are the Russians human?” Wicksteed in his book supplied the answer that they were human, and often used to add in his private conversation, “all too human.” He told in his book about the daily life of streets, theatres, classes and factories. In spite of the chaos and poverty of the period, he filled me with an impatient desire to go to Russia, and if possible to meet the author.
    Two or three years later the chance came to go—and also to meet the author. I was walking up the crowdedTverskaia one day when a bearded figure passed us. He was wearing a cap with a shiny peak, as affected by many Russians, and he was wearing a battered overcoat that no English cabby, and hardly a Russian cabby even of those days, would have been seen dead in. My companion pointed him out as Alexander Wicksteed. He had become more Russian than the Russians. I had a further chance to meet him later, and to talk to him in his rooms (or room). He lived in a single room on the outskirts of Moscow, in what some people might have called squalor—he was incurably lazy, and only taught as many hours a week at the University as would give him immediate necessities, and the bottles of Caucasian wine that he loved to drink. He seemed perfectly happy. All the distinguished visitors to Moscow, such as Bernard Shaw, made a point of getting in touch with him, as his intimate knowledge not only of Moscow but of living
as
the Muscovites lived was unequalled. And his stories lifted veil after veil from Russian life.
Unfailing Courtesy
    I will quote a last story from his book. It was published at a time when there was the rumour in England that it was actually unsafe for Englishmen to walk alone in Moscow streets. It was said that the English were “unpopular”—as, from what we had been saying in our newspapers,