BOOKS
THIS WEEK'S BOOKS
m.xxix GORKI'S Reminiscences of My Youth (Heinemann) give us new material for wonder at the instability and extrava- gance of the Russian soul. We are so generally surprised that we do not find it especially strange to be told, casually, " I already knew the girl, having made her acquaintance by pul- ling her out of the Volga, after she had thrown herself in from the stern of a barge." Gorki himself comments on the ex- tremes of the Russian peasant's nature : " he could quite simply and unselfishly perform some noble deed and directly afterwards beat his wife till he half-killed her, or smash his neighbour's head in with a stake. He could enchant you with good-natured smiles and a hundird spontaneous expressions as bright as flowers, and suddenly, for no reason at all, stamp on your face with his dirty boot." Another book almost as illuminating is Held By the Bolsheviks, by Major L. E. Vining (St. Catherine Press). It is refreshing to see a straight- forward, untouched diary of the Bolshevik regime, with no propaganda one way or another. While there are horrors enough to freeze the blood, Major Vining has kept detached.,
and cheerful. His experiences in gaol Were surely enough to embitter anyone. I quote one of the gentler pictures :
" Another interesting person (a fellow-prisoner) is a wild-look- ing girl of seventeen, whose fuzzy dark hair stands out like a huge mop. She is in prison for life as she knows the.spot where ' many thousands of gold roubles have been hidden by her family. The Reds have shot all her family, mother, father, two brotheri and a sister . (They) hope to get the secret from her and so refrain from killing her. The girl knows that the Reds would shoot her even if she revealed the secret . . . Poor thing, she is a!ready half-insane." We are given a pitiable scene of one-time aristocrats scrambling in the gutter for cigarette ends. But Major Vining remembers the Tsarist tyranny and has seen among.the Whites atrocities as bad as the worst ; twelve thousand people, for example, who were suspected of Bolshevistic tendencies were shut up in a goods- train and moved from one end of Siberia to the other and back, until all but sixty died. There is an obvious veracity through- out the book, and it is a document of first-rate importance.
Messrs. Grant Richards publish a translation of The Con- fessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau. Very great pains have obviously been taken to make the edition both legible and beautiful ; and here, obviously, is a solution to the most bothering of problems—what can I give a grown man for a Christmas present ? A person of more recondite tastes might be pleased with the new edition of The London Spy, by Ned ' Ward (Casanova Society). Ward was a wild, coarse, humorous journalist of the times of Queen Anne, and the Spy is an amazing treasury of the manners and culture of those years. The long expected study of Wan Whitman, and selection from his work, by Mr. Gerald Bullett, arrives at a good season (Grant Richards). And those who love elegance and ease of design will be delighted that Mr. Gordon Craig has published a volume of his book-plates, Nothing, or The Book-plate (Chatto
and Windus). Some of the quietest and simplest are very charming.
The Broadway Translations include now The Twelve Books of Martial's Epigrams (Routledge). There is a quaint book of nature rhymes sent us by Messrs. Jonathan Cape ; it is The Fire Black Cousins, by Mr. J. Murray Allison. At first the bareness with which information is passed on in them startles us : t! The Puffin lays a single egg, Some twenty inches underground, Resembling a domestic hen's But faintly marked and rather round " ; and we are likely to grow annoyed now and then by Mr. Allisbn's jocularity ; as when he says of the same bird : " He dives just like a Diver, And his flight it is a speedy'un, And he bears a strong resemblance To a music hall comedian."
But we recover ourselves and admire when we get a sturdy lilt such as " The Rook " :
" The Rook is a cousin of the other black cousins-
-Crow, Raven, Jackdaw, and the Chough. .
I'm glad these sooty cousins do not run into ten dozens, For five black cousins are enough."
Finally, we are won over completely. Mr. Allison knows bird-life intimately' and he shares his knowledge with freedom and even with grace.
Tau LITERARY EDITOR.
Previous page
