_Besi_, or, as it is entitled in the programme, _Nikolai Stavrogin_, is an example of the present work of the Theatre of Art. The theatre that will produce _Pickwick Papers_ as a play and can set one of its own staff to work out the libretto is not in need of dramatists at present. _Nikolai Stavrogin_ was arranged by Namirovitch Danchenko, and it is a presentment in some fifteen or twenty scenes of the vital portions of Dostoieffsky’s novel. It assumes that the public has read the book and knows it well, and so, subtly, makes the person sitting in his seat collaborate, by supplying in his mind the missing links. The performance commences at 8 P.M. and finishes about 12.30. All the while you are considering failure—death to all Americans. In the first scene, a very beautiful one, with little village church and worshippers and beggars and lackeys, the bells are set a-ringing and you open the doors of the temple of your soul and admit the whole Russian world of the suffering. The stage becomes the forecourt of your heart, and the many people in the mystery commune with your sympathies. It must be said that from an English, even from a Celtic point of view, the story is rather desperate, somewhat unredeemed; the dream-picture that you see is rather the nightmare of some one who is too conscious of being ill himself—the epileptic Dostoieffsky. Dostoieffsky’s physical ills and personal down-heartedness are interesting in his biography, but blemishes in his artistic work. All those long novels were written as almost everlasting _feuilletons_, scribbled often while the printer’s devil was waiting, or writhed into black and white in the still hours of lonely poverty and feebleness, in dreary midnight hours in Petrograd. In order to understand them truly you need Dostoieffsky himself somewhere on the stage, or in the heart. Footnote 3: Gorky went to America to raise money to help the Revolutionary Party in Russia, but was hounded out of the country as an immoral man. The newspapers started a campaign against his private life, and despite American sympathy for the cause of “liberty” he was forced to leave the country. No hotel would take him in. V THE MOVEMENTS OF THE PEOPLES MOSCOW, _March 1914_.