A Writer's Notebook by W. Somerset Maugham
The grave of Dostoievsky. It is surrounded by a neat iron railing and the plot of ground is neatly laid with sand. In one corner stands a huge round case with a glass front, containing an enormous wreath of artificial flowers, prim white roses and lilies of the valley larger than life; it is tied with a great bow and there is a long silk streamer on which is an inscription in gold letters. I wish the grave were as neglected, covered with fallen leaves, as are those which surround it. Its tidiness is distressingly vulgar. The bust is placed against a granite stele, a shapeless thing carved with meaningless emblems, and it gives you an uncomfortable feeling that it is on the point of toppling over.
It is a face devastated by passion. The dome of the head is stupendous and evokes irresistibly the thought of a world great enough to contain the terrible throng of his creatures. The ears are large, protruding, with the heavy lobes of the sensualist; the mouth is sensual too, with a cruel pout, but a pout like that of a sorrowful child; the cheeks are hollow, the temples deeply sunken; beard and moustache are long, bedraggled and unkempt; the long hair is lank; there is a great mole on the forehead and another on the cheek. There is agony in that face, something terrible that makes you want to turn away and that yet holds you fascinated. His aspect is more terrifying than all his works. He has the look of a man who has been in hell and seen there, not a hopeless suffering, but meanness and frippery.
Nevsky. Prospekt. Bond Street has the narrow tortuousness of the medieval city, and it reminds one always of the town to which great ladies came for the season; it was in Bond Street that the last Duchess of Cleveland boxed her footman’s ears. The rue de la Paix has the flamboyance of the Second Empire; it is wide, handsome, coldly stately and gay withal, as though the shadows of Cora Pearl and Hortense Schneider still smiled brightly at the gathered gems. Fifth Avenue is gay too, but with a different gaiety, of high spirits, and it is splendid with the rich, unimaginative splendour of youth in its buoyancy. Though each has its character and could belong only to the city in which it is, these great streets have in common a civilised opulence; they represent fitly a society which is established and confident. But none of them has more character than the Nevsky. It is dingy and sordid and dilapidated. It is very wide and very straight. The houses on either side are low, drab, with tarnished paint, and their architecture is commonplace. There is something haphazard about the street, even though we know that it was built according to plan, and it has an unfinished air; it reminds you of some street in a town of the Western States of America which has been built in the hurry of a boom, and, prosperity having departed from it, has run to seed. The shop windows are crowded with vulgar wares. They look like bankrupt stock from the suburbs of Vienna or Berlin. The dense crowd flows ceaselessly to and fro. Perhaps it is the crowd that gives the Nevsky its character. It does not, as in those other streets, consist chiefly of one class of the population, but of all; and the loiterer may there observe a great variety of his fellow creatures, soldiers, sailors and students, workmen and bourgeoisie, peasants; they talk incessantly; in eager throngs they surround the men who sell the latest edition of a paper. It looks a good-natured crowd, easy-going and patient; I shouldn’t imagine that they had the quick temper of the crowd in Paris which may so easily grow ugly and violent, and I can’t believe that they would ever behave like the crowd of the French Revolution. They give the impression of peaceable folk who want to be amused and excited, but who look upon the events of life chiefly as pleasant topics of conversation. Outside butchers’ and grocers’ these days are the long food lines, women with kerchiefs over their heads, boys and girls, grey-bearded men and pale youths, waiting hour after hour, waiting patiently.
I think that the most astonishing thing in these crowds is the diversity of appearance; these people have not the uniformity of look which you find commonly in the crowds of other countries; it is as though the passions of the soul were written more plainly on their faces, and the faces were not a mask but an index, and walking along the Nevsky you saw the whole gallery of the characters of the great Russian novels so that you could put a name to one after the other. You see the thick-lipped, broad-faced merchant with his exuberant beard, sensual, loud-voiced and coarse; the pale-faced dreamer, with his pinched cheeks and sallow skin; you see the stolid woman of the people with a face so expressionless that it is like an instrument of music for wilful hands to play on, and you divine the cruelty of her sex’s tenderness. Lust walks abroad like the personified abstraction of an old morality, and virtue and anger and meekness and gluttony. The Russians say constantly that the world can as little understand them as they understand themselves. There is a little vanity in the mysteriousness upon which they dwell. I have no idea of explaining what so many have claimed to be inexplicable, but I ask myself whether the mystery does not lie in simplicity rather than in complexity. They are strangely primitive in the completeness with which they surrender themselves to emotion. With English people, for instance, there is a solid background of character which emotion modifies, but which in turn reacts on emotion; with the Russians it looks as though each emotion took complete possession of the individual and swayed him wholly. They are like Aeolian harps upon which a hundred winds play a hundred melodies, and so it seems as though the instrument were of unimaginable complexity.
I often see brooding over the crowd on the Nevsky an extraordinary, a horrifying figure. It seems hardly human. It is a little misshapen dwarf, perched strangely on a tiny seat at the top of a stout pole high enough to bring him above the heads of the passers-by; and the pole is upheld by a sturdy peasant who collects the alms of the charitable. The dwarf sits on his perch like a monstrous bird and the effect is increased by something birdlike in his head, but the strange thing is that the head is finely shaped, the head of a young man, with a great hooked nose and a bold mouth. The eyes are large, rather close together, and they stare with an unwinking fixity. The temples are hollow, the cheeks wan and sunk. The strange beauty of the features is more than commonly striking because in Russia as a rule features are indistinct and flat. It is the head of a Roman of the Empire in a sculpture gallery. There is something sinister in the immobility of the creature, watching the crowd with the intentness of a bird of prey and yet seeing nothing, and that fierce bold mouth is curved into the shadow of a sardonic smile. There is something terrifying in the aloofness of the creature, contemptuous and yet indifferent, malicious and yet tolerant. It is like the spirit of irony watching the human race. The people pass to and fro and they put into the peasant’s box kopecks and stamps and notes.
The Lavra of Alexander Nevsky. As you reach the end of the Nevsky Prospekt it grows shabbier and more dingy. The houses have the bedraggled look of those on the outskirts of a town, they suggest a sordid mystery, until the street ends abruptly in an oddly unfinished way and you come to the gateway of the monastery. You enter. There is a cemetery on each side of you and then you cross a narrow canal and come to the most unexpected scene in the world. It is a great quadrangle. Grass grows fresh and green as though you were in the country. On one side is a chapel and the cathedral and then, all around, the low white buildings of the monastery. There is something exquisitely strange in their architecture; the decoration is very simple and yet gives a sensation of being ornate; they remind you of a Dutch lady of the seventeenth century, soberly but affluently dressed in black. There is something prim about them, but not at all demure. In the birch trees rooks were cawing, and my recollection was carried back to the precincts of Canterbury; for there the rooks cawed too; it is a sound that never fails to excite my melancholy. I think of my boyhood, unhappy through the shyness which made me lonely among a crowd of boys, and yet rich with vague dreams of the future. The same grey clouds hung overhead. I felt homesick. I stood on the steps of the Greek church, looking at the long line of the monastery buildings, the leafless birches, but I saw the long nave of Canterbury cathedral with its flying buttresses and the central tower more imposing and lovely to my moved eyes than any tower in
With the revolution came a movement to abolish tips. Waiters in restaurants, servants in hotels, claimed instead a percentage of the bills. They looked upon tips as an insult to their manhood. People out of habit continued to offer them, but they were invariably refused. I had an experience which I found peculiar. I had given the boots in my hotel unusual trouble over something or other and so offered him five roubles. He refused it, and though I pressed it on him he would have none of it. Now, with a waiter in a restaurant who might be seen by his fellows, this would not have been astonishing, but here we were by ourselves in my room and no one could have known that the boots—member of a race born with an itching palm—had accepted a gratuity. There was no denying it, there was a change of heart; in some dim way these people, crushed by centuries of brutal oppression, had found a new sense of human dignity. It is foolish to abuse them because they have subjected themselves to the influence of demagogues; they see in these gestures of theirs the promise of a new life. I asked the waiter who generally served me whether the change was to his advantage or not. “No,” said he, “we all made more money when we took tips.” “Would you like to go back to the old days then?” “No,” he smiled. “It’s better as it is.” The spirit is worthy of praise. Unfortunately the common experience is that all these people have grown very uncivil. Service is rendered badly and ungraciously. It is a hard conclusion that man is naturally a boorish fellow who resents service to his like and will be amiable only if he is going to be paid for it.
Savinkov. Before the revolution he was the leader of the terrorists. He planned and executed the assassinations of Plehve and of the Grand Duke Sergius. Hunted by the police, he lived for two years under a British passport. He was at last run to earth at an hotel. He was taken into the dining-room while a compte rendu was being made. He was told he could have anything he wanted. He asked for soda water and cigarettes. Soda water was brought and the officer in charge of the soldiers who had effected the arrest took a cigarette out of his case and flung it to him. Savinkov lost his temper. He took the cigarette and threw it in the officer’s face. He laughed a little as he told me his words: “You forget, sir, that I am no less a gentleman than you.” It bore out my theory that men in moments of great emotion express themselves in terms of melodrama. That is why the best writers are often so untrue to life.
I asked him what he felt when he was arrested, whether he was not horribly frightened. “No,” he said, “after all, I knew it was inevitable sooner or later, and when it came, strangely enough I felt relieved. You must remember that I had been leading a terribly strenuous life and I was tired out. I think my first thought was: now I shall be able to rest.”
He was sentenced to death, and while waiting for his execution was imprisoned at Sebastopol. I had heard a story that by his eloquence he had persuaded his jailers to join the revolutionary ranks and allow him to escape; and I asked him if it was true. He laughed. The real story was less romantic. The lieutenant in charge of the guard at the prison was already a revolutionary and was induced by others to effect Savinkov’s escape. It was done in the simplest way. The lieutenant went boldly to the cell, ordered Savinkov to be taken out, and telling the prisoner to follow, marched out. The various sentries seeing an officer pass made no comment and presently they found themselves in the street. They went down to the harbour and got into an open boat which had been prepared for them and set sail over the Black Sea. They encountered fearful storms, but in four days reached the coast of Rumania. From there Savinkov reached France and lived in Paris and on the Riviera till the revolution allowed him to return to Russia.
I said that it must have required enormous courage to plan and commit his assassinations. He shrugged his shoulders. “Not at all, believe me,” he answered. “It is a business like another, one gets accustomed to it.”
Petrograd. Towards evening it can be very beautiful. The canals have a character all their own, and though you may be reminded of Venice or of Amsterdam, it is only to mark the difference. The colours are pale and soft. They have the quality of a pastel, but there is a tenderness in them that painting can seldom reach; you find the dreamy blues, the dying rose, of a sketch by Quentin de Latour, greens and yellows like those in the heart of a rose. They give the same emotion as that which the sensitive soul obtains from the melancholy gaiety of the French music of the eighteenth century. It is a quiet scene, simple and naïve, and it makes a pleasantly incongruous setting for those Russians of unbridled imaginations and wild passions.
My first teacher of Russian was a little man from Odessa covered with hair. He was almost a dwarf. I was then living at Capri and he used to come to my villa among the olive trees in the afternoon and give me a lesson every day. He was not a good teacher; he was shy and abstracted. He was dressed in rusty black and wore a large hat of fantastic shape. He sweated freely. One day he did not come, nor the next day, nor the day after; and on the fourth I set out in search of him. Knowing that he was very poor I had been rash enough to pay for his lessons in advance. I found my way to a narrow white alley in the town and was directed to a room at the top of the house. It was a tiny garret under the roof, baking hot, with nothing in it but a truckle bed, a chair and a table. I found my Russian sitting on the chair, stark naked, very drunk, with a huge flagon of wine on the table in front of him. When I went in he said to me: “I have written a poem.” And without further ado, unconscious of his hairy nudity, with dramatic gestures, he recited it. It was very long and I didn’t understand a word.
Every nation forms for itself a type to which it accords its admiration, and though individuals are rarely found who correspond with it a consideration of it may be instructive and amusing. This type changes with the circumstances of the time. It is an ideal to which writers of fiction seek to give body and substance. The characteristics which they ascribe to this figment of their fancy are those which the nation at a given moment vaguely aspires to, and presently simple men, fascinated by these creatures of fiction, take them as their model and actually transform themselves, so that you may recognise in real life a type which you have seen described in novels. It is a curious thing that writers can create characters which men afterwards make their own. It is said that Balzac’s people were truer to the generation after his own than to the generation he described, and no one can have wandered about the earth without encountering persons who had modelled themselves on the characters of Rudyard Kipling. It may be remarked that they show a deplorable taste. The type which seems most to captivate the fancy of the English today is that of the strong silent man. It is difficult to know when first he forced his way into English fiction; it may be that Jane Eyre’s Rochester is the first example of him; he has since then been a constant favourite with women writers. He appeals to them, and to women generally, for a double reason; they feel in him the power to protect them for which they yearn, and his strength, submissive to their influence, flatters their innate desire for domination. Since he is more common in fiction and on the stage than in life and it is difficult to describe a man without making him express himself at length, silence, though part of his definition, is not the characteristic which is most noticeable; in fact he tends to be verbose. But in principle he is taciturn; a man of few words and of a smaller vocabulary; he is very practical, as is shown by the fact that he uses a great many technical terms when speaking to people who cannot be expected to understand them; he is embarrassed in general company and his manners leave much to be desired; but, strangely enough, though awkward in his dealings with his fellow countrymen, he has a singular gift with natives. At a loss in a drawing-room, he is a match for the subtle Oriental. He uses him kindly but firmly, as a good father does his children; he is upright, just and truthful. He is not much of a reader, but such literature as he studies is sound, the Bible, Shakespeare, Marcus Aurelius and the Waverley novels. He is not a conversationalist, but when he speaks it is to go straight to the point; his intelligence is good, but a little narrow. He knows that two and two