The Wandering Dog was closed by the police, but the bohemian life continued. The War appeared to be improving and victories were reported. British armoured cars and Russian Cossacks plunged through the mud of Galicia and forced the Uhlans and the Austrian infantry to retreat. But bread became harder to obtain. The lines of miserable working people, their faces shaded by caps and shawls, as if in mourning, became familiar irritations: to the poets who spoke of the pathos of it, to the revolutionaries who foretold the risings, to the ordinary middle-class public, called in Russian slang the ‘boorzhoo’, who had become increasingly the prey of thieves robbing them of their groceries and their money. The War was draining us. They should have spent money on food and distributed it free. Then we might have averted Chaos. But the Tsar’s ministers were too obsessed with War, and the revolutionaries actually wanted people to starve so they would rise. The boorzhoo could think only of their own families; they had been called upon to give up everything to help with the War, to supply the soldiers at the Front. There is no need here to go into the whys and wherefores of the Revolution. Too many émigrés; too many historians; too many Bolshevik revisers-of-the-past have done that already. We have had a thousand versions of Ten Days That Shook The World. Perhaps we should have at least ten versions of A Thousand Books That Bored The World. I shall not add to all that. What happened, happened. We did not really believe it would happen, though so many warned of it. Poetry, when it becomes reality, rarely pleases anyone, least of all the poets.
Pronin opened a new establishment called Prival Komendiantoff (The Retreat of the Harlequinade). It is difficult to translate the exact sense of the name. Comedian’s Halt, perhaps. We all found it very appropriate and praised Pronin when he appeared, leading a mangy mongrel by a piece of ribbon (‘all that is left of the Dog’) and promising that this establishment would be even finer than the last. It was certainly more elaborate. Negro boys dressed to look as if they had come from the Court of Haroun-el-Raschid served at the tables. Murals of a blatantly radical nature covered the walls and ceilings. From the walls stared negro masks, the lighting issuing from their eye-sockets. The same negro band played the same raucous music whenever we were not having to listen to another new poet or ‘petite chanteuse’, or watching the posturings of some Pierrot mime while a horse-faced woman in a long purple dress droned on about the moon. Black female impersonators sang jazz songs. Female impersonators were the rage of Café Society. At odds with all this avant-gardism were girls in peasant costume; table-cloths made of bright peasant hand-woven fabrics; ‘folk-art’ ceramics, to remind us that this was, after all, Russia; that we were not Frenchmen or even Germans. The cellos groaned and the mime-artistes twisted their silly bodies into parodies of the human form. The jazz-band wailed. The little songstresses sang in tiny, toneless voices about the death of birds and mayflies. We talked and drank and whored. Sometimes it would be dawn before I (nowadays wearing a velvet jacket, red Ukrainian boots, riding trousers and a Cossack shirt) would stagger out into morning sunshine over the Field of Mars.
Here, colourful soldiers still paraded above the heads of our ‘menagerie’ which, as usual, was in a series of cellars. Hussars and streltsi trotted and marched in polished leather, in carefully brushed serge, in brass and gold braid, and we would wander past, some of us hardly able to stand, staring in astonishment at these vestiges of the old world. We would be moved along by policemen who seemed, more frequently, to share our attitudes. Futurists would pause in their constant bickerings with Acmeists (there were as many opposing artistic camps as there were political). Social Revolutionaries would stop in mid-sentence in an argument with Tolstoyans and watch open-mouthed as a band struck up or a column of blue-coated, red-hatted soldiers wheeled and turned to the sound of patriotic marches. I was infected by the general cynicism. I think there was hardly anyone in Petrograd by that time who was not. I think if we had stumbled out of The Harlequinade one morning and seen German troops parading, we should scarcely have noticed. If we had noticed we should not have cared. The artists would have announced the coming of the Germans as the first sign of a ‘new age’ in Art. The revolutionaries would have said this was a sure sign the people would rise up at any moment. The cynics would have said that German efficiency was better than Russian incompetence. And that would have been the end of it. We half-believed that this strange dream would continue until we all died the early, romantic deaths we expected to die in a sufficiently distant future. Nobody took anything very seriously, I think, except Kolya, who, with Tolstoi, had faith in the natural divinity of the human spirit. My faith was in the triumph of Man’s ingenuity over all the vicissitudes of nature, including human nature. Both of us, I am sure, were as guilty as everyone of adding to the rhetoric of despair. It was easy to be smart and drink champagne and toast the triumph of the working-class. One forgot the slow transformation taking place everywhere. St Petersburg, an unnatural city, easily blockaded, cut off from her supplies by virtue of her physical geography, pretended to herself she was not under siege and that Victory was a month or two away. By the autumn, when it seemed we were completely beaten, as we had been beaten by the Japanese at Port Arthur, the fashionable carriages were fewer than ever in the Nevski. Merchants and landowners saw Moscow as a safer wintering place than Peter. And Kolya, with some amusement, quoted Kipling, of whom he was also very fond;
The captains and the kings depart!
Rome, he said, was being evacuated, for the Hun again threatened. ‘Byzantium! Byzantium!’ he sang, as he escorted me home in his carriage one late-August morning. ‘They are all fleeing East. Wait until the Tsar goes to Moscow, Dimka. Then you will know it is the end of us.’
‘The Tsar will never give up the capital.’
‘The Tsar scarcely occupies it now. How often have you seen the Royal Standard flying over the Winter Palace?’
‘Tsarskoe Selo is not too far from the centre,’ I reminded him.
‘There’s no proof he’s there. The rumours are that he, his family, Rasputin, are already packing their bags and plan to stay with the Kaiser. They’re related, after all.’
Our carriage stopped at an intersection as a marching column of cadets went past. The drums rolled, the trumpets blared, the fifes piped and the cadets moved as one creature. Kolya smiled sadly. He was as usual dressed all in black. The only white was the white of his hair beneath his hat. The paleness of his face was relieved by his slightly pinkish eyes. He put his chin upon his fist and shrugged. ‘Did you know I was once a cadet, Dimka?’
‘I suppose you must have been.’ It was natural for a member of the aristocracy to attend a military school.
‘I ran away. When I was fifteen. I ran away to Paris because I wished to meet poets. I met a good many charlatans and was seduced by a few of them, men and women. But I don’t think I met a single poet until I returned to Peter! Now all the Russian poets, all the artists, all the impresarios, are going to Paris! Is that an irony? Should we follow them, Dimka?’
‘The Germans will be beaten soon,’ I said. ‘The newspapers are confident. They haven’t been so confident for ages.’
‘A sure sign of impending defeat!’ He laughed.
‘Our allies won’t let it happen. England, France, Italy - even Japan - will come to help.’
‘They are no better off than we are. The Germans have all but taken Paris.’
‘Then we had better stay here,’ I said.