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49
utter impunity that, in fact, they sometimes asked themselves if the
sense of enjoying absolute mental freedom was not due to their work–
ing in an absolute void. True, there was among
emigres
a sufficient
number of good readers to warrant the publication, in Berlin, Paris,
and other towns, of Russian books and periodicals on a comparatively
large scale; but since none of these writings could circulate within
the Soviet Union, the whole thing acquired a certain air of fragile
unreality. The number of titles was more impressive than the number
of copies any given work sold, and the names of the publishing
houses-"Orion," "Cosmos," "Logos," and so forth- had the fever–
ish, unstable and slightly illegal appearance that firms issuing astro–
logical or facts-of-life literature have. In serene retrospect, however,
and judged by artistic and scholarly standards alone, the books
produced
in vacuo
by
emigre
writers seem today, whatever their
in–
dividual faults, more permanent and more suitable for human con–
sumption than the slavish, singularly provincial and conventional
streams of political consciousness that came during the same years
from the pens of young Soviet authors whom a fatherly state pro–
vided with ink, pipes, and pullovers.
Quite a feature of
emigre
life, in keeping with its itinerant and
dramatic character, was the abnormal frequency of literary readings
in private houses or hired halls. The various types of performers
stand out very distinctly in the puppet show going on in my mind.
There was the faded actress with eyes like precious stones who, having
pressed for a moment a clenched handkerchief to a feverish mouth,
proceeded to evoke nostalgic echoes of the Moscow Art Theater by
subjecting some famous piece of verse to the action, half dissection
and half caress, of her slow limpid voice. There was the hopelessly
second-rate author whose voice trudged through a fog of rhythmic
prose, and one could watch the nervous trembling of his poor, clumsy,
but careful fingers every time he tucked the page he had finished
under those to come, so that his manuscript retained throughout the
reading its appalling and pitiful thickness. There was the young poet
in whom his envious brethren could not help seeing a disturbing
streak of genius as striking as the stripe of a skunk: erect on the
stage, pale and glazed-eyed, with nothing in his hands to ancho r
him to this world, he would throw back his head and deliver his
poem in a highly irritating, rolling chant and stop abruptly at the
