Defenders of Democracy Part 25

The Roumanian is proud of his Latin descent; and he shows his ancestry not only in his literature, his art, and his every day life, but also, perhaps chiefly, in his government which is practically a safe and sane oligarchy, modeled on that of ancient Florence, and, be it said, fully as successful as that of the Florentine Republic.

Latin, too, is his diplomacy. It is clean--AND clever. It is the big stick held in a velvet glove. It is supremely able. He seeks a great advantage with a modest air, in contrast to the Greek who seeks a modest advantage with a grandiloquent air.

He seeks no "reclame," but goes ahead serenely, unfalteringly, sure in his knowledge that he is the torch-bearer of ancient Rome in the savage Balkans.

[signed] Achmed Abdullah

The Soul of Russia

There is a strange saying in Russia that no matter what happens to a man, good results to him thereby. No matter what hair-breadth escapes he has, what calamities he faces, what hards.h.i.+ps he undergoes, he emerges more powerful, more experienced from the ordeal. Danger and privation are more beneficial in the long run than peace and joy. A nation of some fifty different races gradually melting into one, a country covering a territory of one-sixth of the surface of the earth and a population of 185,000,000, the Russians have remained to the outside world the apaches of Europe, wild tribes of the steppes. In the imagination of an average American or Englishman, Russia was something Asiatic, something connected with the barbaric East, a country beyond the horizon. It was considered as lacking in culture and civilization, and as a menace to the West. "Nichevo, sudiba!"--(It doesn't matter, everything is fate) replies a Russian, crossing himself. The whole psychology of the Slavic race is crystallized in these two impressionistic words.

What John Ruskin said in his famous historic essay applies to Russia: "I found that all the great nations learned their truth of word and strength of thought in war." Every great Russian reform has taken place suddenly as a consequence of some nation-wide calamity.

The Tartar invasion united Russia into one powerful nation; the Crimean War abolished the feudal system; the Russo-Turkish War gave the judicial reforms and abolished capital punishment; the Russo-j.a.panese War gave the preliminary form of Const.i.tutional government in the Duma; the present war is opening the soul of Russia to the world by giving an absolute democratic form of government to the united Slavic race. The present war will reveal that Russia the known has been the very opposite extreme of Russia the unknown.

The outside world is wondering how the Russian character will fit in with the aspirations of democracy. They cannot reconcile the Russia of pogroms and Serbia with the Russia of wonderful munic.i.p.al theaters, great artists, writers, musicians and lovers of humanity.

The world has known the tyrants like Plehve, Trepoff, Orloff and Stolypin, or others like Rasputin, Protopopoff and forgets that Russia has also produced geniuses like Dostoyewsky, Turgenieff, Tchaikowsky, Tolstoy, Moussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakoff, Mendeleyeff and Metchnikoff. The world has looked at Russia as a land of uncultivated steppes, of frozen ground, hungry bears and desperate Cossacks, and forgets that in actuality this is the Russia of the past very extreme surface and next to it is a Russia of great civilization and the highest art, unknown yet to the West generally.

One of the strangest peculiarities of Russian life is that you will find the greatest contrasts everywhere. Here you will see the most luxurious castles, cathedrals, convents, villas and estates; there you will find the most desolate huts of the moujiks and lonely hermit caves in the wilds of Siberia. Here you will meet the most selfish chinovnik, the most fanatic desperado or reckless bureaucrat; there you face the n.o.blest men and women, supermen, physically and mentally. You will find that all Russian life is full of such mental and physical contrasts.

This is the dualism that confronts like a sphinx the foreigners.

In the same way you will find that the Russian homes are full of contrasting colors, bright red and yellow, white and blue. The Russian music is the most dramatic phonetic art ever created; it reaches the deepest sorrow and the gayest hilarity and joy. Dreamy, romantic, imaginary, simple, hospitable and childlike as an average moujik, is the soul of the people. Nowhere is there a hint of those qualities which are thrown up as dark shadows on the canvas of his horizon. While with one hand Russia has been conquering the world, with the other she has been creating the most magnificent masterpieces of humanity. In the same generation she produces a Plehve and a Tolstoy, both in a way, true to national type.

In the popular American imagination, which invariably seizes upon a single point, three things stand out as representative of Russia: the moujiks, the Cossacks and the Siberian penal system. The vast unknown s.p.a.ces between these three have been filled in with the dark colors of poverty and oppression, so that a Russian is looked upon as an outcast of evolution, an exile of the ages.

the Russia of the dark powers is past; thus soon will pa.s.s the Russian chinovnik, the Russian spy and the Russian gloom, who have been a shadow of the Slavic race. From now all the world will listen to the majestic masterpieces of the Russian composers, see the infinite beauty of the Russian life and feel the greatness of the Russian soul. Not only has Russia her peculiar racial civilization, her unique art and literature, and national traditions, but she has riches of which the outside world knows little, riches that are still buried. The Russian stage, art galleries, archives, monastery treasuries and romantic traits of life remain still a sealed book to the outsiders. Take for instance, Russian music, the operas of Rimsky-Korsakoff, the plays of Ostrowsky and the symphonies of Reinhold Gliere or Spendiarov and you will have eloquent chapters of a modern living Bible. No music of another country is such a true mirror of a nation's racial character, life, pa.s.sion, blood, struggle, despair and agony, as the Russian. One can almost see in its turbulent-lugubrious or buoyant-hilarious chords the rich colors of the Byzantine style, the half Oriental atmosphere that surrounds everything with a romantic halo.

The fundamental purpose of the pathfinders of Russian art, music, literature and poetry was to create beauties that emanated, not from a certain cla.s.s or school, but directly from the souls of the people. Their ideal was to create life from life. Though profound melancholy seems to be the dominant note in Russian music and art, yet along with the dramatic gloom go also reckless hilarity and boisterous humor, which often whirl one off one's feet. This is explained by the fact that the average Russian is extremely emotional and consequently dramatic in his artistic expressions. Late Leo Tolstoy said to me on one occasion: "In our folksong and folk art is evidently yearning without end, without hope, also power invisible, the fateful stamp of destiny, and the fate in preordination, one of the fundamental principles of our race, which explains much that in Russian life seems incomprehensible for the foreigners."

Thus the Russian art and soul in their very foundations are already democratic, simple, direct and true to the ethnographic traits of the race. In the same way you will find the Russian home life, the peasant communities, the zemstvoe inst.i.tutions, offsprings of an extremely democratic tendency, perhaps far more than any such inst.i.tution of the West. Instead of the rich or n.o.blemen absorbing the land of the peasants, we find in Russia the peasant commune succeeding tot he property of the baron. An average Russian peasant is by far more democratic and educated, irrespective of his illiteracy than an average farmer of the New World. He has the culture of the ages in his traditions, religion and national folk-arts. Russia has more than a thousand munic.i.p.al theaters, more than a hundred grand operas, more than a hundred colleges and universities or musical conservatories. Russia has a well-organized system of cooperative banks and stores and a marvelous artelsystem of the working professional cla.s.ses which in its democratic principles surpa.s.ses by far the labor union systems of the West. Herr von Bruggen, the eminent German historian writes of the Russian tendency as follows: "Wherever the Russian finds a native population in a low state of civilization, he knows how to settle down with it without driving it out or crus.h.i.+ng it; he is hailed by the natives as the bringer of order, as a civilizing power."

I have always preached and continue to do so in the future, that Russia and the United States should join hands, know and love each other, the sooner the better. Russia needs the active spirit, the practical grasp of the things, which the people of the United States possess. Nothing will help and inspire an average Russian more than the sincere democratic hand of an American. A dose of American optimism and active spirit is the best toxin for free Russia. On the other hand, the American needs just as much Russian emotionalism, aesthetic culture and mystic romanticism, as he can give of his racial qualities.

The old system having gone, Russia is free to open her national, spiritual and physical treasures. For some time to come neither Germany nor other European countries, will be able to go to Russia, for even if the war does not last long, its havoc will take years to repair. Endless readjustments will have to take place in each country affected by the war. Russia, being more an agricultural, intellectual-aristocratical country, will fell least of all the after effects of the past horrors, therefore has the greatest potentialities. There is not only a great work, adventure and romance that waits an American pioneer in Russia, but a great mission which will ultimately benefit both nations. It should be understood that the Russian democracy will not be based upon the economic-industrial, but aesthetic-intellectual principles of life.

It is not the money, the financial power that will play the dominant role in free Russia, but the ideal, the dramatic, the romantic or mystic tendency. Money will never have that meaning in Russia which it has in the West. It will be the individual, the emotional, the great symbol of the mystic beyond, that will speak from future democratic Russia only in a different and more dynamic form, as it has been speaking in the past.

As Lincoln is the living voice of the American people, thus Tolstoy is and remains the glorified Russian peasant uttering his heart to the world. The voice of this man alone is sufficient to tell the outside world that the Russian democracy is a creation not of form and economics but of spirit and aesthetics.

[signed]Ivan Narodny

Author of "Echoes of Myself," "The Dance," "The Art of Music," X Volume, etc.

The American Bride

Petka had been for years a village tailor but he had never been able to save enough money to open a grocery-store. He hated his profession and hated to think that he could never get anything higher in the social rank of the place than what he was. While the name of a tailor sounded to him so cheap, that of a merchant flattered his ambition immensely. But there was no chance to earn the five hundred rubles, which, he thought, was necessary to change the profession.

"If I marry a poor peasant girl like Tina or Vera, I'll never get anywhere," soliloquized Petka and made plans for his future.

Petka knew a girl with two hundred ruble-dowry, but she was awfully homely and deaf; and he knew a widow with three hundred rubles, but she was twenty years older than himself. It was a critical situation.

One day Petka heard that the daughter of an old peddler had a dowry of five hundred rubles, exactly the amount he needed. After careful planning of the undertaking he hired a horse and drove to the lonely cottage of the rag peddler to whom he explained as clearly as he could, the purpose of his visit.

"My Liz ain't at home," the old man replied. "She is in that distant country called America. Good Lord, Liza is a lady of some distinction. If you should see her on the street you would never take her for my daughter. She wears patent-leather shoes, kid-gloves, corsets and such finery. Why, I suppose she has a proposal for every finger, if not more. She is some girl, I tell you."

Petka listened with throbbing heart to the thrilling story of the old man, scratched his head and said:

"I suppose that she is employed in some high cla.s.s establishment or something like that?"

"Of course, she is," grunted the peddler proudly. "She might be employed or she might not. She has written to me that she is a lady all right."

"What is her special occupation?"

"She is employed as the waitress in a lunch-room on the so called Second Avenue corner at New York. And her salary reaches often thirty dollars a month, which represents a value in our money of something over sixty rubles. Now that is not a joke. She has all the food and lodging free. Why, it's a real gold-mine."

"Has she saved already much?"

"She has five hundred dollars in the savings bank, and she has all the hats and shoes, and gloves and such stuff that would make our women faint. So you see she is the real thing."

The happy father pulled the daughter's letter from the bottom of his bed and reached it over to the visitor. Petka read and reread the letter with breathless curiosity. In the letter which was also a small snap-shot picture of the girl. Petka looked at the picture and did not know what to say. To judge from her photograph, she was a frail spinster, with high cheekbones, a long neck and a nose like a frozen potato. But the tr.i.m.m.i.n.g of her hair, her city hat with flowers, and her whole American bearing made her interesting enough to the ambitious tailor. For a long time he was gazing at the picture and thinking.

"Do you think that Liza would marry a man like me? I am a well known tailor. But I have now a chance to become a merchant in our village. I need some money to make up the difference, and why not try the luck? Liza might be a well known waitress in New York, but to be a merchant's wife is a different thing. Don't you think she might consider my proposal seriously?"

The old peddler puffed at his pipe, walked to the window and back as if measuring the matter most seriously.

"It all depends--you know Liza is a queer girl--it all depends on how you strike her with a strong letter. You could not go to New York and make the proposal personally. It has to be done by mail.

It all depends how well the letter is written, how everything is explained and how the idea of being a merchant's wife strikes her.

She is a queer girl, like all the American women are."

"Can your Liza read and write letters?"

"Of course, she can. Liza is a lady of some standing. She can write and read like our priest. She is a highly educated girl."

"So you think a strong letter will fix her up?"

"Exactly. And tell her everything you plan to do."