‘I Shouldn’t Have Thought There Was Anyone Left in Russia to Struggle With’

In Paul Fussell’s book about British travel writing, he never says straight out that Robert Byron is his favorite travel writer, but he’s the only author Fussell quotes without commentary for more than a page, so I think it’s safe to assume. The long blockquote is here if you want a laugh; it’s a theological conversation between Byron’s traveling companion Christopher and some Iranian muleteers. I agree with Fussell, not only that Byron is the best of all British travel writers (in which opinion we are joined by Bruce Chatwin, by the way) but also that his dialogues are always the best part of his books.

This dialogue from Byron’s First Russia, Then Tibet  will be of special interest to slavophiles — because it takes place in Russia obviously, but also because slavophilia tends to coincide with an affinity for conflict and suffering. I like both of those things, but when you reach the point where your cup is in a “struggle” with the table it’s sitting on, you have taken your conflict-based worldview too far.

I should mention that Byron’s companion here is not Russian but British — a communist cab-driver who emigrated to Moscow — which might explain why he bungles the romantic concepts so badly. It also explains why he takes such a warped view of “struggle” — his position on the subject is Communist rather than Slavic.

It started with my asking the waiter for some vodka.

M.: We don’t want any of that dope here.

R.B.: Sorry, but I can’t live without alcohol.

M.: Oh, well, I suppose you’ll grow up sometime.

R.B.: I suppose so. But I’m beginning to doubt if I shall ever grow up into a communist. (Morgan looked surprised.) Anyhow, I’m not interested in politics. What I want to know is not whether the Five Year Plan is going to succeed, or how many million peasants will know the alphabet in ten years’ time, but whether anything really important, any advance in human thought or happiness, is going to come of so much misery as the Russians have gone through. I feel it will; but I can’t see how it can, when you substitute a banal ideology for the free exercise of the mind. Soviet culture, for example — what and where is it?

M.: You’re full up with the old ideas; you don’t understand. Our art must be a collective art, and we’ve got to produce an intelligentsia that will think and create collectively. It was different during the revolutionary period, when everyone was inspired . The construction period, which we’re settling down to, is harder to express in art.

R.B.: You mean there isn’t the same epic feeling of  excitement?

M.: That’s right. The struggle goes on though, just the same.

R.B. ( petulantly ): I wish to God you’d tell me what you mean by this struggle you all talk about. Struggle with what? I shouldn’t have thought there was anyone left in Russia to struggle with by now.

M.: Don’t you understand that everything’s a struggle. If I put this glass of water on this table, the glass and the table are at war — their actual contact is a struggle. It’s the same in social evolution. The workers can only build socialism by struggling, by continuing the class war right through.

R.B.: So that when you’ve done away with classes, all you do is to create new ones and make an aristocracy out of a few million factory workers, who rule the country by oppressing, i.e. struggling with, the remaining majority. How anything creative, or even interesting, can come from this obsession with class, I fail to see. It’s worse than England.

I wrote a short post about Robert Byron  last year , after I read his book about Mt. Athos .