The Rupa Book of Travellers' Tales by Ruskin Bond

Author:Ruskin Bond [Bond, Ruskin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9788129106063
Goodreads: 3007812
Publisher: Rupa Publications India
Published: 2000-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

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* From The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp, by W.H. Davies (1908).

An Exotic Figure in Moscow

By Alexander Woollcott

am just back from Leningrad and the manager of the hotel has gone off again with my passport. He will brood over it for a week, entering all its fascinating vital statistics in a series of ledgers and in the process discovering—I should think without great surprise—that, although I have been away from Moscow three whole days, nothing has happened in the interval to alter the previously noted fact that I was born in Phalanx, N. J., of all places, on January 19, 1887. It is depressing to contemplate the amount of clerical labour and white paper which, during the past ten years, has been wasted in solemnly recording for the police archives of various countries a date of such scant historical significance.

There is one aspect of travel in the Soviet Union about which no one thought to warn me. Of course, I had heard it would be bitter cold and it is true that already Moscow is festively mantled in snow. There is skating on the ponds which fringe the city and the small, pre-revolutionary sleighs (into which I can get only with the aid of several panting tovarishchi and a shoe-horn) are out today, busily threading, with gleeful urchin impudence, the baffled traffic of trucks and trams. When the curtain rises even at the pampered Art Theater, an Arctic blast sweeps out over the proletarian audience from the drafty reaches of the stage. But we don't call this cold in Quebec. At least, it seems no more than chilly to one who has ever waited for the last trolley on a street-corner in Utica, N.Y. I suppose it will get quite nippy in January, but as the citizenry has already resorted to fur coats, extra sweaters, tippets, mittens, and ear-muffs, I do not see what there is left for them to add in the event of a really brisk day.

Then on the eve of sailing I had asked an infatuated Communist if, in other respects besides temperature, I would find travelling in Russia uncomfortable. "Certainly not," he replied scornfully, "unless you are one of those who attach more importance to bugs than to spiritual values." Unfortunately, it is the bugs that attach importance to me, but it is only fair to say that, after three weeks in this large and angry country, I have yet to encounter my first Russian insect.

But no one had warned me how disconcerting would be the daily experiences of a fat man in the Soviet Union. In this connection it is necessary for me to intrude upon you the fact that your correspondent verges on the portly. Therefore, all readers who have been envisaging him as a young gazelle are in error. For candor in this matter, there is dignified literary precedent. When Mr Shaw, lying sick in his prime, announced that his coffin might at least be followed through the streets of London by all the

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