LETTERS OF ANNA STRUNSKY

London was deeply in love with nature and hated large cities, especially New York. Ocean space, northern valleys, and the picturesque islands of the South Seas boosted his will for life. All this inspired and strengthened him both physically and spiritually. On the other hand, the gigantic city depressed him, smothered his mind and his soul, and poisoned his lungs. London was not an enemy to scientific progress and technological advancement. However, he preferred a yacht to a steamboat and a horse to a car. He ran away not only from the city itself. Mainly, he tried to escape from the American society embodied in the city. He could not bear to see the injustice, the sufferings of the poor; he felt helpless in his trying to remedy this social environment.

"No, he was not cruel," wrote Anna Strunsky in her answer to me. He was able to write about cruelty as he has done so skillfully in The Sea-Wolf. He was able to deeply understand others. In his own life, however, London was utterly disgusted with cruelty of any sort towards any living creature. In the letter to me from New York (May 28, 2024) Anna ended: "I love your singing yourself: Yours for freedom among the American and Russian peoples. Yours, dear Vil, for freedom and love between the American and Russian peoples. You are deep in my heart, a beloved friend and comrade. I embrace the three of you [a reference to my son and wife, also] and I am happy you will have a beautiful vacation. As ever yours, Anna."

Anna wrote with admiration about the flight of Yuri Gagarin. In 1963, she was going to visit the Soviet Union and finish the last chapter of her book on Russian Revolution. The chapter was supposed to be on the New Russia; a Russia that changed so drastically in the past 60 years. However, she had to postpone the trip because of her illness. In the spring of 1964 came news of her death. She was 84, but very active in her pursuit for peace and democratic rights till her last days. Anna Strunsky had been present at the Annual Congress of National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. In 1963, she participated in the march for peace. She wanted to walk with the crowd at least one block.

Not long before Anna's death, I received a parcel from the United States. It was a large, carefully packed box. I quickly opened it and found some manuscripts and a lot of old photographs.

In the pictures I saw bearded men, and young girls in dad's coats with babies on their arms; women holding their long skirts, mixing clay with their feet. Then, on other pictures, there were more men in patched sheepskin coats, poor houses roofed with hay. These were snapshots of Mother Russia. There also was a photograph of a police officer in a white uniform. He was pompously posing, with his hand on the pommel of his saddle. In the background, a poor peasant house was visible. On other pictures were a merchant in shiny boots, an eight-year-old girl with suffering in her eyes, and Pope Gapon trying to hide his face.

Here was a picture of the writer-Revolutionary, Stepnyak-Kravchinsky, among his friends. Another picture was of I.P.Kalyaev, who attempted to kill the tsarist Minister of Interior Affairs. There was also a picture taken at a meeting devoted to the theme: "Jobs for unemployed, bread for the hungry!" and many, many more pictures taken almost 60 years earlier. With the pictures, I found a manuscript, "The Odyssey of the Russian Revolution of 1905."

In front of me were pages yellowed from the passing of time, typed on a typewriter with English font. Some of them were typed in faded black ink, while some had faded blue or violet ink. Many of them had corrections done by hand. These notes had been written in the course of many years.

"From my very childhood, I have felt the charms of Russia: the call of its pain, its suffering people, and its heroism," Anna began her book. In one of her last letters to me, she wrote that she wanted to call this book Heroes and Martyrs of the Russian Revolution of 1905. She wanted to devote it to her parents. Before her trip to Russia, Anna Strunsky knew about the great country only from books and stories told to her by her parents. For her, Russia was the motherland of Tolstoy, Turgenev, Gogol, Pushkin, and Nekrasov. It was through their eyes that she first saw the prairies and woods of her native country. While reading their works, she tried to understand the soul of the Russian people. However, she wanted to see everything with her own eyes. "The sound of Russian language in Russia! Finally, I am able to hear it! I am traveling in a train that goes to St. Petersburg and catch every word with trembling. 'In the days of doubts, in the days of onerous thoughts,' said Turgenev, 'I think of Russian language and I am convinced that people who possess such language cannot but have a great fate.' I was drunk from the language, from the winter landscape. Young birch trees sparkled in the sun with their slender trunks, white as snow in which they stood."

"Early in the morning before Christmas, the train approached St.Petersburg. It was snowing. The streets were shrouded in gray pre-dawn fog. Those were the days of the Revolution when the autocratic government was trying to compromise under the pressure of people's anger. It was trying to convince people that it is ready to turn to the democratic system of government. On the streets, people were selling portraits of Karl Marx, Bakunin and Kropotkin. In the store windows, you could see photographs of Sophia Perovskaya, executed for participating in the murder of the Tsar Alexander H. Chernyshevski's book that inspired a whole generation of suffering from the tsarist people was sold everywhere. Also, the postcards with the portraits of other revolutionaries were sold, with leaflets portraying caricatures of Nicholas II, sitting on his throne covered with blood."

Anna and English Walling walked along the streets, observing the incomprehensible life of the Russian capital. Just one week after they came to the country, they witnessed an officer killing a student who refused to sing "God, Save the Tsar!" That episode marked the end of the forty days of freedom. Since then, in the course of almost two years, they witnessed persecution and terrorism.

They were traveling through the Russian land: Kostroma, Samara, Moscow. They had to change from train to steamboat, then take several cart rides along the bumpy Russian roads. Everywhere they went, they heard a cry for land and freedom. Near Tambov, they learned about a special execution group of Cossacks. Just recently, they killed one of the peasant leaders together with six of his teammates. Arrests took place everywhere.

In the village of Tsarevschina, the peasants organized a republic of their own. They elected their leader and had developed something resembling a parliament. Every evening, with the ringing of the bell, the entire village population gathered peacefully to discuss and resolve their problems. "It was a French Revolution in miniature," writes Anna. "Almost immediately, though, the government sent the Cossacks group. The village was burned to the ground."

Some woman told the American visitors that she once had hidden Sophia Perovskaya. In one of the villages, they learned that many of the local peasants were members of the Social Democratic Party. "Social Democrats are involved in the idea," noted Anna, "while Socialist-Revolutionaries are involved in their own emotions."

The Wallings were invited into a house. The samovar was on the table. The house looked rather poor, but foreigners felt at home. They wanted to talk to these people openly, for they valued their trust. Anna remembered the pale faces of little children who were closely observing the guests. Anna was shown the picture albums with the photos of Perovskaya, Kalyaev, Sazonov, and Konoplyannikova, together with the picture of some student who was killed on the Moscow barricades. These were the treasures of the hosts.

Talking about the trip to Russia, Strunsky named such cities as Kiev, Harkov, Tula, and the villages: Silnaya, Tsarevschina, Sinochka, as well as the settlement Pogromnoe. They also visited Poland, Finland (back then, a part of Russia), and met with Russian political emigrants in Geneva and Paris. There, the grandson of Karl Marx, Jan Longe, introduced them to Russians. He was also present at the Wallings' wedding in Paris.

A large part of Anna's notes were devoted to the biographies of Russian revolutionaries. Trying to explain the meaning of the concept "Nihilism," unknown to the Western mind, she referred to Turgenev's novel Fathers and Sons and What to Do? by Chernyshevsky.

Anna and her husband went to Russia, not only to see it, but also to understand it; not just to understand, but also to help by telling the truth about the Russian Revolution back home. In her notes, she mostly tried to destroy a myth common in the West about in-born laziness, spiritual poverty, and fear of education in Russian peasants. This was the way Howard Kenard, an Englishman who visited Russia in 1906-07, described Russian people in his work "Russian Peasant." English Walling also devoted several chapters of his book to attacking Kenard's point of view.

Anna Strunsky wrote about the courage and endurance of male Russian Revolutionaries with great admiration. However, her kindest words were addressed to the heroic Russian woman. "Women stood and fought on barricades together with men. Just like men, they were sent to Siberia and to execution. The strength of Russian women—a fact well-known to us through literature—has its roots in the Revolution, which is evident in the example of Vera Zasulich."

Strunsky met with Zasulich. "I asked her to take me to the beginning of her life. I insisted, for I thought I deserved it by carrying a memory of her in my heart, by living with thoughts about her. She was with me in my thoughts in my most difficult and most happy moments in life. I told children about her as about the highest example of courage and loyalty. The old woman put her trembling hand on my shoulder. 'You came to me,' she said, 'because you are young. The past and future excite you. For those of us who have already matured and reached old age, only the present is important'."

Through all of Anna's notes I could see admiration for the kind of self-denial that is characteristic of the Russian woman. In 1906, in Paris, Anna heard Vera Figner reading her poems, written in a Tsarist prison. The leader of that meeting was Anatole France. "'Everybody who listened to her, threw roses at her feet. She stood there, dressed in white. Everyone was inspired. All felt that with people like that, Revolution cannot fail. She stood in front of her listeners in the radiance of her beauty, which had traces of sufferings, being an incarnation of fame and grandeur of the movement."

From the emigrants Anna met in Europe, she especially remembered one woman, a member of an underground movement. She was arrested for propaganda, and was cruelly beaten, tortured, humiliated. She never said anything except "I do not know, I do not know anything!"

The fate of numerous sufferers of Russian revolution is still both tragic and terrifying. Anna talked about the character from Gorky's novel Mother, where the woman is an example of spiritual dignity. She admired Gorky's Nilovna for her wholeness and moral strength.