Journey Into the Mind's Eye by Lesley Blanch

Author:Lesley Blanch
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2018-05-03T12:27:20+00:00

CHAPTER XV

Upon my return, a yet greater fervour for all things Russian caused even my most sympathetic friends some uneasiness.

The political scene had long crystallized, with Russia emerging triumphantly as the U.S.S.R., but I still held to my subjective conception of the country, seeing it neither as Holy or Unholy Russia, but only as it had seemed to the Traveller when he recalled it for my delight. How much of that was truly his remembrance and how much of it his especial vision – a Russia which was remote from him too, but created rather than re-created, for the romantic illusions we both cherished – I never discovered.

Meanwhile, both Russians and English attributed to me some mischievous designs I did not have. While the few Soviet citizens I encountered found my interest in them curious for one so obviously engaged in a bourgeois way of life, White Russians, particularly those of the Nansen passport generation, regarded this interest as a dangerous aberration, for they had thought my first visit to the U.S.S.R. would disillusion me. I now found myself excluded from several agreeable dinner-tables because both host and hostess were unsympathetic to my views, so loudly expressed, and, oh! fatal error, in front of the servants. ‘I do wish she wouldn’t . . . it only puts ideas into their heads,’ was the complaint of those who, knowing servants to have become a vanishing species, to be preserved, like wild life, or placated, like household gods, had not yet realized that in the heads of those same domestic workers, as they now preferred to be called, ‘ideas’ had been replaced by ultimatums.

But I had, I felt, crossed the Irtysh, as the Russian saying goes (the Irtysh was a river which all political exiles to Siberia must cross on their way East: once across there was no turning back). In proffering even the most superficial acceptance of the new Russia I must also accept being eyed askance, cut even, as if I had unfurled the Red Flag outside the Junior Carlton Club.

When, a few years later, I planned another visit to the U.S.S.R. I was rebuffed in my attempts to obtain a visa for the Caucasus; something which discouraged me sadly, for I felt my enthusiasm and purpose merited Soviet sympathy. I had fixed my sights high, planning a book on the Caucasian wars, but it was to be another twenty years before I was able to write it. Meanwhile, my rebuff had quite illogically enraged an old friend, born in Russia but who, brought up in England, expressed himself in the vernacular.

‘Refused you a visa to the Caucasus? Well of all the bloody cheek! Who the hell do they think they are?’ he said, scowling in the direction of the Soviet Embassy. ‘But serve you right for wanting to go to such an outlandish place,’ he added, revealing by this remark, how deeply he had assimilated the English spirit.

•

In the London of the ‘thirties there was a very marked prejudice

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