The materialistic conception of history is all very
well, but some care for the higher things of civilization is a relief.
The Bolsheviks are sometimes said to have done great things for art,
but I could not discover that they had done more than preserve
something of what existed before. When I questioned one of them on the
subject, he grew impatient, and said: "We haven't time for a new art,
any more than for a new religion." Unavoidably, although the
Government favours art as much as it can, the atmosphere is one in
which art cannot flourish, because art is anarchic and resistant to
organization. Gorky has done all that one man could to preserve the
intellectual and artistic life of Russia. I feared that he was dying,
and that, perhaps, it was dying too. But he recovered, and I hope it
will recover also.
FOOTNOTES:
[2] Electrification is desired not merely for reorganizing industry,
but in order to industrialize agriculture. In _Theses presented to the
Second Congress of the Communist International_ (an instructive little
book, which I shall quote as _Theses_), it is said in an article on
the Agrarian question that Socialism will not be secure till industry
is reorganized on a new basis with "general application of electric
energy in all branches of agriculture and rural economy," which "alone
can give to the towns the possibility of offering to backward rural
districts a technical and social aid capable of determining an
extraordinary increase of productivity of agricultural and rural
labour, and of engaging the small cultivators, in their own interest,
to pass progressively to a collectivist mechanical cultivation" (p.
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