John Steinbeck - A Russian Journal

In a little side chapel, in a small houselike sarcophagus of marble, is the body of Jaroslav the Wise. It is the tradition that Jaroslav had an accident in battle and broke his leg. And his body lay for over a thousand years in the little houselike sarcophagus, and recently the casket was opened, and it was found that the skeleton in the casket had indeed had a broken leg, and everyone was happy, for this was really Jaroslav the Wise. The gloom of the churches threw a gloom upon us.

At luncheon Mr. Poltarazki spoke of the acts of the Germans in the war, of the thousands of people killed. War is no new thing to Kiev. Starting with the raids of the savages from Tartary, it has been a place of war for thousands of years. But no savage tribe, no invader, ever was responsible for the stupid, calculated cruelties of the Germans. They raged through the country like frantic, cruel children. And now the lines of prisoners in their German army uniforms march through the streets, to work at cleaning up the destruction they caused. And the Ukrainian people do not look at them. They turn away when the columns march through the streets. They look through these prisoners and over them and do not see them. And perhaps this is the worst punishment that could possibly be inflicted on them.

In the evening we went to the theater to see the play Storm, a nineteenth-century drama enacted in the nineteenth-century manner. The scenery was quaint and old-fashioned, and the acting was old-fashioned too. It is odd that it should be played, but it is a Ukrainian play, and they love their own. The leading lady was very beautiful. She looked a little like Katharine Cornell, and she had great authority on the stage. The story was of a young wife, under the thumb of a powerful Russian mother-in-law, who fell in love with a poet. She went into the garden to meet him while she was still married to another man. All we could see that she did in the garden was to talk a great deal, and once to let the poet kiss the tips of her fingers, but it was crime enough, so that finally she confessed her sin in a church and threw herself into the Volga and was drowned. It seemed to us almost too much punishment for having the tips of her fingers kissed. The play had its secondary plot too. The chambermaid comically paralleled her mistress's tragedy. Her lover, instead of being a poet, was a country bumpkin. It was a traditional play all right, and the audience loved it. It took half an hour to change the sets, so that it was well after midnight when the leading lady finally dropped herself into the river. It seemed odd to us that the people in the audience, who had known real tragedy, tragedy of invasion, and death, and desolation, could be so moved over the fate of the lady who got her fingers kissed in the garden.

The next morning it rained, and Capa feels that rain is a persecution of himself by the sky, for when it rains he cannot take pictures. He denounced the weather in dialect and in four or five languages.

Capa is a worrier about films. There is not enough light, or there is too much light. The developing is wrong, the printing is wrong, the cameras are broken. He worries all the time. But when it rains, that is a personal insult addressed to him by the deity. He paced the room until I wanted to kill him, and finally went to have his hair cut, a real Ukrainian pot haircut.

That evening we went to the circus. Every Russian town of any size has its permanent circus in a permanent building. But, of course, the Germans had burned the Kiev circus, so that so far it is under canvas, but still it is one of the most popular places in the city. We had good seats, and Capa had permission to photograph, so he was comparatively happy. It was not unlike our circuses, a single ring and tiers of seats.

It started with acrobats. We noticed that when the acrobats worked on high trapezes there was a hook and line in their belts, so that if they fell they would not be killed or injured, for, as our Russian host said, it would be ridiculous to hurt a man just to give the audience a thrill.

The pretty ladies and the gallant men did their spins and turns on the high wires and on the trapezes. Then there were dog acts and tumblers, and trained tigers, panthers, and leopards performed in a steel cage that was let down over the ring. The audience loved it, and all the while a circus band played away at the universal circus music which does not change.

Best of all were the clowns. When they first came in, we noticed that the audience was looking at us, and we soon found out why. Their clowns are invariably Americans now. One is a rich Chicago woman, and the Russian idea of what a rich Chicago woman looks like is wonderful. The audience was waiting to see whether we would be annoyed at this satire, but it was really very funny. And just as some of our clowns wear long black beards, and carry bombs, and are labeled Russians, so the Russian clowns labeled themselves Americans. The audience laughed with delight. The rich woman from Chicago wore red silk stockings and high-heeled shoes covered with rhinestones, a ridiculous turban-like hat, and an evening dress covered with bangles, which looked like a long, misshapen nightgown, and she teetered across the ring, her artificial stomach wobbling, while her husband postured and danced about, for he was a rich Chicago millionaire. The jokes must have been very funny, although we couldn't understand them, for the audience howled with laughter. And they seemed to be greatly relieved that we did not resent the clowns. The clowns finished off rich Chicago Americans and then went into a violent and very funny version of the death of Desdemona, where Desdemona was not strangled, but was almost beaten to death with a rubber knife.

It was a good circus. The children, sitting in the front seats, were lost in circus dreams the way children are. The company is permanent, it does not move about, and the circus goes on all year long, with the exception of a little while in the summer.

The rain had stopped, so after the circus we went to a Kiev night club, called the Riviera. It is on the cliff above the river, with an open-air dance floor surrounded by tables, and the whole overlooking the river, which flows away across the plain. The food was excellent. Good shashlik, and the inevitable caviar, and wines from Georgia. And to our great relief the orchestra played Russian, and Ukrainian, and Georgian music rather than bad American jazz. And they played very well.

At our table we were joined by Alexander Korneichuk, the ranking Ukrainian playwright, a man of great charm and humor. He and Poltarazki began to tell old Ukrainian sayings, and the Ukrainians are famous for them. Almost our favorite is "The best bird is the sausage." And then Korneichuk told a saying which I had always believed was native to California. It is the description by a heavy eater concerning the nature of the turkey, in which he says, "The turkey is a very unsatisfactory bird, it is a little too much for one, and not quite enough for two." Apparently the Ukrainians have been saying it for hundreds of years, and I thought it was invented in my home town.

They taught us a toast in Ukrainian which we like: "Let us drink to make people at home happy." And they toasted again to peace, always to peace. Both of these men had been soldiers, and both of them had been wounded, and they drank to peace.

Then Korneichuk, who had been to America once, said rather sadly that he had been to Hyde Park, and there he had seen pictures of Roosevelt and Churchill, of Roosevelt and De Gaulle, but there he had seen no picture of Roosevelt and Stalin. And he said they had been together, and they had worked together, and why in Hyde Park had they removed the photographs of them?

The music grew faster and faster, and more and more people came to dance, and colored lights were thrown on the floor, and far below the river reflected the lights of the city.