Russians Around the Place
THERE was a time, thirty years ago, when Mr. Novomeysky's name was well known to students of the Parliamentary reports, for the debates on the Dead Sea salts concession, to which he was the most indefatigable and, eventually, the suc- cessful claimant, seemed sometimes as if they would go on for ever; the Conservative Member for Chelmsford was up and down every few days to ask whether he was a Soviet agent as well as a Zionist;•and even in successfully defending, in the Lords, his ability properly to exploit the con- cession, the first. Lord Birkenhead felt obliged to say that the name of Novomeysky was not one
With which I am particularly enamoured or desire to bear.' About the only witticism that Mr. Novomeysky allows himself in this dull account of the negotiations that led, at tedious last, to his being granted the concession, is the comment, at this point, that Lord Birkenhead had chosen not to take as his title his own family name of Smith.
Mr. Jesman's lighter account of some much more picturesque characters begins with bewhiskered Russians, aboard an Austrian steamer, sailing into an African harbour near Djibouti in 1889, and being fired upon by French warships and thus prevented from competing with the Italians for influence in Abyssinia—if that, indeed, was their object. Sub-titled 'an essay in futility,' this slender book, purporting to deal with Imperial Russia's one (supposed) attempt at colonisation in Africa, hops about in time if not in space, from this ludicrous and not entirely coherent episode back to Peter the Great's Negro, Who was Pushkin's ancestor, and from a history of the Ethiopian Church to the Italian defeat at Adowa in 1896 (which prompts a perceptive aside about its profound influence on modern Italian history, though none who saw anything of the partigiani of the last war would agree that 'the last of the Risorgimento spirit expired there').
Amateurs of the oddities of history will find some engaging absurdities in these pages—such as the Russian medical mission at Addis Ababa at the turn of the century, flying the same Red Cross symbol that in those days advertised the Ethiopian brothels—and also some queer fish like the Emperor Menelik II, merchant-king, mil- lionaire and statesman. The last, and not the least rum customer in the list is a bogus Georgian per- sonage who was accorded princely honours when he turned up in Addis Ababa not long before the last war bearing the name of Amiradjibi. Curious as his behaviour was it was not more curious than that of our present author who, recording that 'after his death it was discovered that he was a humble Georgian peasant by origin, born near Gori and bearing the name of Djougashvili,' gives no indication that precisely the same was true of the late Joseph Stalin, origin, birthplace, surname
Chronic Schizophrenia (Tavistock Publications, 21s.) is a report on a research project carried out in the Glasgow Royal Mental Hospital. The authors have been convinced by their study of the prob- lem that however obscure the origins and course of the disease may be, the prospects for treatment are brightening, and could be greatly improved by paying more attention to the training and status of nurses. Psychiatrists have little time to devote to patients as individuals; but in schizophrenia it is the individual (not his symptoms) that has to be reached—by a constant sympathy and care which
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