"MY RUSSIAN YEAR."
[TO THR EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR."]
SIR,—I have to thank you for the compliment you have paid me by noticing a book of mine, "My Russian Year," in your issue of March 29th. The reviewer, who is apparently not a member of your staff, is kind enough to say that I have "produced a charming and a just book," but he goes on to give an account of it which leaves the impression that I hold a brief for the Russian bureaucracy and have deliberately suppressed facts to its discredit. "Mr. Reynolds skips the whole question of prison horrors," he writes, and forces me to ask myself whether he himself has skipped the pages of my book devoted to M. Lomtatidze's account of the horrors of the prison at Sevastopol (pp. 173-176), to an account of Mme. Breshkovsky's sufferings in prison (pp. 150-151), and to the tortures employed in prisons at Riga and elsewhere (pp. 191-192). Surely my surmise must be correct, as he states without reservation, "Those who look for horrors will find none in his pages. Russia has converted him." And, perhaps just to show how thorough my conversion has been, he introduces a paragraph on the condition of Russian prisons with the remark : "Mr. Reynolds finds Russia a land of liberty undreamed of in .(sic) the shackled West." Ile refrains, and thereby does me an injustice, from mention- ing that the quotation is a phrase in a string of paradoxes. "And Russia is also the land of melancholy, the land of dancing and laughter, the land of tyranny, and the land of liberty undreamt of by the shackled West" (P. 17) is what I wrote, and I have attempted to justify my opinion in the pages that follow. The reviewer is at the pains to state that [have "nothing to say on the themes most damaging to the Russian Government." among which he mentions the Persian policy and the packing of the fourth Duma. It is surely unreasonable to expect a discussion of Persian affairs in a book professedly dealing with every-day life in Russia, and it is more than a little trying to be told that I should have given an account of an election campaign which took place more than a month after my book was in the printers' hands. I feel it due to myself to state these facts ; but I can have no grudge against a reviewer who allows himself to misquote the gospel of St. John in order to heighten the effect of his account of an imaginary interview between my friend, Mr. A. G. Gardiner, and myself.—I am, Sir, Ix.,
ROMAN' REYNOLDS.
Cury Cross Lanes S.O., Cornwall.
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