,.
Lillian Hellman
METROPOLE HOTEL
This chapter from
An Unfinished Woman,
a book of memoirs
by Lillian Hellman, comes in the middle of an account of
her six months visit to the Soviet Union during the war.
"The Russians invited me on a cultural mission in 1944 and
Washington, acting with faceless discretion, wanted me
to
go."
There are later chapters in the book about the Soviet
Union, when she saw it again, twenty-two years later.
From a diary, Moscow,
1944:
The Kremlin is the political heart of the Soviet Union and
the geographical heart of Moscow. The city grew up around the great
thirteenth-century walls that enclose the buildings of the Kremlin
and has continued to grow away from them into what
is
called the
A
Circle and the outer B Circle. The A Circle includes the Kremlin,
the important government buildings, the
main
shopping district,
many
of the theaters and the big hotels. The National Hotel faces
St.
Basil's Cathedral and the main gate of the north Kremlin wall.
Between the cathedral and the wall is that famous cobblestone
pas–
sage
which has seen so much of Russian history: in the seventeenth
century a
czarist
massacre of friendly petitioners; in the nineteenth
century it was here that Napoleon turned loose
his
cannons on the
burning
city;
in
1917
the Bolsheviks and the White Guards fought
until the cobblestones were slippery with frozen blood, the passage
blocked by bodies.
I am told that to the pure in art, St. Basil's is one of the archi–
tectural freaks of the world: to me it has the daring self-assurance
