Unchanging RuSsia
Journey for our Time: The Journals of the Marquis de Custine. (Arthur Barker. 16s.) IT is doubtful whether that frigid and enquiring French nobleman, the Marquis de Custine, would have altogether approved the form of the "re-discovery" (of his famous journals) by former members of the United States Embassy in Moscow, under the title of Journey for our Time. A re-translation of the third French edition of 1 8 64 has been made by Mrs. Phyllis Penn Kohler, and, although reference is made to "omitted sections" of some substance, it would have been appropriate for the translator, or for General Walter Bedell-Smith, who has written the introduction, to have pointed out that the re- translation covers less than one-third of the Marquis's original work. In this respect it must be considered as something of a "digest" of the excellent English translation of 1843, which Mrs. Kohler has perhaps overlooked. Had the. nineteenth century known a "cold war" along the bureaucratic lines of the twentieth, there is no doubt that the Marquis would have been one of its most passionate crusaders, but he would scarcely have agreed to the drastic surgical treatment to which his journals have now 'been subjected, and still less to the insertion of chapter headings in the form of arresting and often unrelated extracts, of which "Asia stomped the Earth and out of it came the Kremlin!" is a fair example. The passage in the original which preceded Custine's vivid piece of imagery is a tribute to the Russians of 1812, and the phrase is misleading when reproduced so prominently without its context.
But however imperfect the presentation, the reappearance of the Marquis's journals is an event in itself. This redoubtable French- man spent three months in Russia in the summer of 1839. He went there in search of arguments against the type of representative government which France was experiencing under the bourgeois monarchy of Louis Philippe. He returned from Russia "a partisan of constitutions." His journey can be compared in many respects with that which a Frenchman might have taken under the watchful care of "Intourist" a hundred years later—three weeks in Leningrad (St. Petersburg was then the capital) and ten days in Moscow, followed by another ten in Gorky (Nizhni Novgorod), with short stays at Klin, Kostroma, Vladimir and Yaroslavl, and a visit to the Troitsko- Sergievskaya Lavra thrown in. Travelling in his own carriage, the Marquis spent considerable periods on the road, and had in that respect a great advantage over his modern counterpart. He .spoke no word of Russian, and did not experience either the rigours of a Russian winter or the effect on Russian country roads of autumn and spring. On the other hand, he was a fair target for every surreptitious expression of the developing revolt against the reactionary prussianism of the Government of Nicholas I, and a heaven-sent sounding-board for the distantolamentations of the Decembrist exiles in Siberia. Apparently devoid of a sense of humour, and seemingly incapable of establishing sympathetic human relationships with the Slays among whom he travelled, he none the less chronicled his observations and impressions with meticulous accuracy, and the result gives a remark- ably honest picture of the Imperial Russia of 1839, despite its subjective limitations. The reader will be struck by the unchanging nature of Russian institutions and will be impressed to find that many opinions of the Soviet Union, widely held today, re-echo the strongly-held views of the Marquis. These views were deeply affected by his introduction to Russian history according to Karamzin, the ultra- chauvinist historian and familiar of Arakcheyev; and the Marquis came just too soon to experience the balancing effect of the great flowering of Russian humanistic literature inaugurated by Pushkin. The Marquis de Custine holds a place all his own among authorities on Russia, and it is distressing to see his journals described by General Bedell-Smith as "the first 'fellow-traveller's' confession of disillusionment with a god that always failed." Nor is it possible to agree with the General's view that "Here is political observation so penetrating and timeless that it could be called the best work so far produced about the Soviet Union." Let us always remember that, in his earlier travels, the Marquis (for somewhat different reasons) found Scotland almost as insupportable as Imperial Russia.
This book is most readable, in spite of its manifest shortcomings. It will satisfy those in search of talking-points to support pre- conceived views, but its greatest value will be in directing the attention of more serious readers to the complete three-volume English translation of-1843, entitled The Empire of tire Czar.
RICHARD CHANCELLOR.
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