There is always something appalling when one comes face to face with such a display of law and order. It reminds me of a very eccentric Russian doctor of my acquaintance. This man had a habit of killing flies. If he saw one on a window pane or hovering about the table he would somehow manage, with great deftness, to capture it. Thereupon he would solemnly take out his pocket knife and behead the insect. Once I protested, saying that such a performance was disgusting. With great seriousness he admonished me. “So, you do not believe in killing.... Well, nevertheless, we are all forced to kill. Flies annoy you, they poison your food, endanger your life and the lives of your children. In some desperate moment you strike out in a furious and chaotic manner. What is the result? Ugh, an ugly smash. Is there anything fine about that? You condemn me, but what do I do? I simply execute flies in a sanitary way--I am a true symbol of civilization.” ANATOL VASSILIEVITCH LUNACHARSKY AND RUSSIAN CULTURE “Oh, happy earth! Out of the blood of generations Life yet will blossom, innocent and wise, And thou, my planet, shall be cleansed of lamentations, A jade-green star in the moon-silvered skies.” Thus wrote the Soviet Minister of Education, Anatol Lunacharsky, in those remote days when a revolution was only a vague goal and when he could not believe that in his own lifetime a day would come when he would be torn from his quiet study and forced to put his dreams into practice, or as near into practice as dreams ever reach. Reality is revolting and disappointing to any artist, but Lunacharsky possesses enough recuperative powers to overcome his artistic sensitiveness. If he had not had enough also of that saving grace of fanaticism which marks all leaders, he would have lacked the enthusiasm which has carried him through every battle for culture which he has had to wage since the dramatic crash of the Tsardom. Only once did he actually lose heart and Lenin overcame that attack of panic by showering responsibility upon him. Given responsibility he showed more courage than men of coarser grain. Lunacharsky’s battles in the five years he has been in office have not been concerned with bullets. “Illiteracy,” he told me once, “is the great curse of Russia; we must fight illiteracy like the plague.” And he fought it like the plague. This delicate poet, who in appearance is more like a scholarly Frenchman than a Russian, who has the manners and elegance of another age, has left off composing sonnets to fight ignorance, superstition, drunkenness, prejudice, disease, dirt.... And he has been more bitterly attacked than any other official of the new Russian Government.