Out of the woods

These two memoirs by ladies born into the Russian elite in the 1880s have both had to wait many decades before publication in English. The Green Snake, however, has gone through eight editions in its original German, whereas The Russian Countess has never been published before. No one was in the least interested in a Russia that no longer existed.

Margarita Woloschin was a painter and her husband was a well-known poet. She knew most of the key figures in the Russian Symbolist movement, and she became a disciple of Rudolf Steiner, the founder of anthroposophy. From 1924 to her death in 1973 she lived in Stuttgart and devoted herself to her art and her work as a teacher of Steiner’s doctrines. It is probably her connection with Steiner, someone better known in Germany than in England, that has kept the German version of The Green Snake in print.

Unfortunately, this memoir has the oddly abstract quality of Rudolf Steiner’s own writings. Woloschin meets interesting figures but is unable to bring them to life on the page. Nor can she explain what is important about anthroposophy. As if to compensate, she rhapsodises a great deal about ‘the Russian folk-soul’.

Nevertheless, Russia immediately before and after the Revolution was so extraordinary a place that few memoirs of the period are entirely without interest. An account of an anti-religious rally in 1918 is particularly striking. The chairman innocently grants a village priest’s request to say ‘only three words’:

The priest climbed up to the podium … and called out in a loud voice, ‘Christ is arisen!’ And as if with one voice came the response, ‘Truly, He is arisen!’ The old man was immediately arrested.

Both the priest’s words and the response are fixed idioms; even if their revolutionary enthusiasm was genuine, the crowd was unable to resist the pull of the hallowed words.