What the Russian Revolution turned into very soon, none will comprehend who has not seen it. This spectacle was utterably unbearable to any one who had not ceased to be a man in the image and likeness of God, and all who had a chance to flee, fled from Russia. Flight was sought by the vast majority of the most prominent Russian writers, primarily, because in Russia there awaited them either senseless death at the hands of the first chance miscreant, drunk with licentiousness and impunity, with rapine, with wine, with blood, with cocaine; or an ignominious existence as a slave in the darkness, teeming with lice, in rags, amid epidemic diseases, exposed to cold, to hunger, to the primitive torments of the stomach, and absorbed in that single, degrading concern, under the eternal threat of being thrown out of his mendicant’s den into the street, of being sent to the barracks to clean up the soldiers’ filth, of being--without any reason whatever,--arrested, beaten, abused, of seeing one’s own mother, sister or wife violated--and yet having to preserve utter silence, for in Russia they cut out tongues for the slightest word of freedom. I left Moscow in May, 1918, lived in the South of Russia (which passed back and forth from the hands of the “Whites” into those of the “Reds”) and then emigrated in February, 1919, after having drained to the dregs the cup of unspeakable suffering and vain hopes. For too long I had believed that the eyes of the Christian world would be opened, that it would be horrified at its own heartlessness, and would extend to us a helping hand in the name of God, of humanity and of its own safety. Some critics have called me cruel and gloomy. I do not think that this definition is fair and accurate. But of course, I have derived much honey and still more bitterness from my wanderings throughout the world, and my observations of human life. I had felt a vague fear for the fate of Russia, when I was depicting her. Is it my fault that reality, the reality in which Russia has been living for more than five years now, has justified my apprehensions beyond all measure; that those pictures of mine which had once upon a time appeared black, and wide of the truth, even in the eyes of Russian people, have become _prophetic_, as some call them now? “Woe unto thee, Babylon!”--those terrible words of the Apocalypse kept persistently ringing in my soul when I wrote “The Brothers” and conceived “The Gentleman from San Francisco,” only a few months before the War, when I had a presentiment of all its horror, and of the abysses which have since been laid bare in our present-day civilization. Is it my fault, that here again my presentiments have not deceived me? However, does it mean that my soul is filled only with darkness and despair? Not at all. “As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God!” IVAN BUNIN. PART ONE I