If a musician like Glazunof remained with the Bolsheviks, or professors like Konovalof and Pavlof, or a writer like Sologub, it was largely because they could not escape. All Russia is a prison, and they have come to no good in it.

I find it commonly asserted that we have no quarrel with Bolshevik culture. But there is no such thing, unless the writings of Trotsky, the poems of Lunacharsky, and the speeches of Zinovief are to be considered such. Where are the plays of Soviet Russia, the music of it, the novels of it, the philosophy of it, the pictures? What culture has come forth? Zero; that is all.

One of the first of the Bolshevik acts when the civil war closed was to send the philosophical professors out of the country: an expression of plain contempt for philosophy. It must be said the professors were loth to go; they had been rooted in the national life, and they felt that their true place was among their own people whatever happened to them. But Bolshevik Russia could do without the genius of Losky, the deeply religious and patriotic fervour of Bulgakof or of Berdaieff, or S. L. Frank. They must all live at Prague. Their names shine forth in letters from "Golden Prague ", that other Moscow of the Czechs. With the philosophers disappeared also

many historians and jurists. For both the history and the law of Russia had become archaic.

Most of the famous living writers of old Russia are in exile: they fled, and they will not return till the Marxian horde is dispersed. Andreief died abroad in wild despair; Kuprin came out with the army of General Judenitch, and is now in Paris; Amphiteatrof, who tried to show H. G. Wells in Moscow the utter misery of writing men in Russia, escaped from its misery in 1923. Merezhkovsky, perhaps the greatest of Russian living writers, stayed as long as he could in Petrograd and came out the sworn immutable enemy of the Bolsheviks. I suppose he is one of the greatest interpreters of the Russian national spirit that we have. He was a Liberal. His counterpart on the reactionary side, the no less talented Rozanof, died of starvation at SergeTroitsky Monastery. The folk-lorist Remizof was obliged, after some years in the Theatrical Department, to flee to Berlin, and thence he migrated to Paris. The tale-writer, Bunin, great master of the Russian language, fled also to Paris, as did Balmont, the most lyrical product of his age in Russia. Artsibashef, who once startled the world with "Sanin ", has fled to Warsaw. Severianin, the innovator in poetry, is in Esthonia.

Gumilof, brilliant young poet, was shot in Moscow for counter-revolutionary activity. Struve, the famous editor of the Russkaya Misl, is in Prague. Maxim Gorky, proletarian as he is, performed his distasteful task as Dictator of Art under the Soviets and has now gone to Capri, whence it seems improbable that he will return. Two poets, it is true, served under the Bolsheviks: Brusof as Censor, Blok, their late laureate. Both are prematurely dead. They could not live and prosper after their betrayal and mistake. Poor Blok was bitterly repentant and miserable, carried his rations to others who were starving, and his death was actually due to selfimmolation. Sologub and his wife decided upon flight, obtained their passports, and then on the eve before departure the woman in hysteria drowned herself. Mme. Sologub used to stand on street corners and cry out against the horror and shame of the new rule. She had been halfcrazed with misery. Her husband, old man as he is, felt he hardly could go on, after her death, and he has remained in Russia. Kropotkin died in penury and neglect at Dmitrof near Moscow; there is, on the other side of the scale, the terrorist Savenkof, excellent writer as he was, he betrayed the exiles last year, and then curiously

enough disappeared from public view. I have no doubt he will regret his return.

Russia is famous abroad for her music and dancing, but having constrained the greatest singer in the world to remain with them, Shaliapine, he has at last escaped and does not intend to return. The tenor, Sobinof, almost as famous as Shaliapine, is with the Bolsheviks, but is seldom heard of now. Of the great musicians of our day, Rachmaninof and Stravinsky are exiles. Scriabin died happily in 1914 before the catastrophe.

Even pro-Bolsheviks in the West laud the Imperial ballet and cheer Pavlova, but what has she to do with Soviet Russia; cheer Karsavina, Nikolaeva, Tchernicheva, Lopokova, all exiles from their country. Diaghilef does not start from Moscow or Petrograd, but wanders around and around the world with beauty. One country is shut to him: his own.

The Theatre of Art of Moscow, it is true, carries on as it may, in Soviet Russia, encouraged, but unable to create anything new. How can a theatre live without plays, and with a proletarian audience that eats sunflower seeds in the stalls? Kachalof, their greatest tragic actor, is touring the border states; Stanislavsky languishes in Moscow.

The painter Repin, eighty years old, lives in Finland, quite cut off from Russia; Roerich, at the time of writing, is in Tibet, but he has a home for all his recent pictures in America and is greatly prized there; Nesterof languishes in Moscow, not working, now, in fact, in prison. Pereplotchikof died in the famine. Benois is in Paris. Somof, with some hundreds of paintings done by starving artists in Soviet Russia, has lately been touring the Western world to find buyers.

Literature, art, music, dancing-Russia is known by these. Not her greatest product, but easiest to understand. What shall one say of the saints done to death, the meek clergy, patient and impatient monks, the bishops, the archbishops, the long list beginning with Archbishop Benjamin of Petrograd, Antony of Kief, Anastasy of Kharkof? The number of the martyrs of the Christian Church has been doubled in Russia.

In one respect, neither the old Russia nor the new one shines. Their politicians are equally vain and bad. Not all who escaped from Russia deserved to escape being shot. Let silence cover them. They loved themselves and their parties more than they loved Russia.

But we pause: of those who fought for the common cause in the War, how many have been