One night, very late, our boat stopped in a desolate spot where there
were no houses, but only a great sandbank, and beyond it a row of
poplars with the rising moon behind them. In silence I went ashore, and
found on the sand a strange assemblage of human beings, half-nomads,
wandering from some remote region of famine, each family huddled
together surrounded by all its belongings, some sleeping, others
silently making small fires of twigs. The flickering flames lighted up
gnarled, bearded faces of wild men, strong, patient, primitive women,
and children as sedate and slow as their parents. Human beings they
undoubtedly were, and yet it would have been far easier for me to grow
intimate with a dog or a cat or a horse than with one of them. I knew
that they would wait there day after day, perhaps for weeks, until a
boat came in which they could go to some distant place in which they had
heard--falsely perhaps--that the earth was more generous than in the
country they had left. Some would die by the way, all would suffer
hunger and thirst and the scorching mid-day sun, but their sufferings
would be dumb. To me they seemed to typify the very soul of Russia,
unexpressive, inactive from despair, unheeded by the little set of
Westernizers who make up all the parties of progress or reaction. Russia
is so vast that the articulate few are lost in it as man and his planet
are lost in interstellar space.
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