The Russian was supposed to be incapable of action, incapable of keeping an appointment on time, incapable of doing anything but drinking a hundred cups of tea and shedding tears over the fate of man. But now comes the revolution, and in a flash we discover that all that was buncombe. The Russians begin to act precisely like other men; they cease to get drunk, they learn to keep appointments, they discover a sudden admiration for those qualities we call Yankee--hustle and efficiency, the adjusting of one’s desires to what can be immediately accomplished. The Russian peasant, supposed to be a grown-up and bearded cherub, lifting his eyes in adoration to his Little Father in the Winter Palace and his Big Father in Heaven, is discovered to have precisely the same desires as every other farmer in the world--that is to say, more land, and fewer tax-collectors. Russian literature is a great literature, because it voices the hopes and resolves of a great people groping their way to freedom and understanding. It is, whether consciously or unconsciously, a literature of revolt. It is full of ideas, because it has to take the place of the prohibited subjects, science, politics, economics, and social psychology. It is desperately serious, because it is produced by people who are suffering. Some twenty years ago I remember meeting in New York the adopted son of Maxim Gorki, who was earning his living as a printer by day and studying our civilization by night. I recall his remark: “Americans do not know what the intellectual life means.” The young man had in mind a country where you adopted ideas with the knowledge that they might cost you your liberty, and even your life. Under such circumstances you think hard before you come to a decision. A lot of Americans have had an opportunity to test their ideas that way during the past ten years, and so they are now taking the intellectual life seriously, and producing literature in many ways resembling the Russian. Says Mrs. Ogi: “Sherwood Anderson says it is because he was raised on cabbage soup.” “People will read that,” says Ogi, “and think it a flash of humor; very few will consider seriously the effect of a starvation diet upon the soul of a sensitive boy. Neither will they stop to think about three boys sleeping in one bed as a source of abnormal sexual imaginings, which constitute one of the original elements in Sherwood Anderson’s books. To me this seems a law: that wherever you have widespread and long-continued poverty, maintained by policemen’s clubs, there you will have a literature, extremely painful to its creators, but delightful to high-brow critics, who will hail it as ‘strong,’ and up to the standard of the great Russian masters.” CHAPTER LXXXII DEAD SOULS