The Russians

A New Volume, By Richardson Wright

Richardson Wright

NO one is better aware than Mr. Richardson Wright that Russia has a soul, a distinct, positive soul; and that her soul expresses itself in more than her art, her music or her ballet. In Russia life itself is a supreme art. And to the interpretation of that life the author devotes his pages. It is the background against which he has set the varied Russian types and shown them to Americans in all their enigmatic spiritual chiaroscuro. "The deeper I have gone into Russian matters," he says, "the more have I been influenced by the spiritual fact rather than by the statistic." On this basis he traces the whirling currents in the Russ make-up, the contradictory habits of the classes and the hazy ideals toward which they tend. He leaves no side of the Russian character untouched; he is fortunately clever in bringing out the relations between the economic, ethnographic and political conditions of the people. These many facets include such absorbing subjects as the Russian as a business man and as a working man; the faith the moujik is taught to believe and the faith he actually does believe; the causes for revolt and the nature of revolt; the future of the Russian Empire.

In discussing Dostoevsky, Tolstoi and Gorky, Mr. Wright has made some definitions that place those three authors in a new light. Dostoevsky as a master of spiritual activity, Tolstoi, a leader of intellectual activity, and Gorky as the apostle of physical activity.

This under-current of suppressed and inhibited activity is the great idea the book leaves with the reader. It crops out in Siberia, which Mr. Wright has vividly portrayed, in the revolutions, in the arts. Beneath the surface of apparent lethargy is driving a great force—the force which will bring Russia abreast the powers of the world.

While one cannot always agree with Mr. Wright in his attempt to divine the future of the Russian Empire and to pick out the current of her economic tendencies as he shows them, there is much that convinces in his book. It is clear-headed, sane and unprejudiced; a book in which the Russian is seen, described, understood and made wholly absorbing and interesting so far as it is possible by one of a race of such opposite temperament as the Anglo Saxon.

("The Russiatis,—An Interpretation." By RichardsonWright. NcwYork: Frederick A.Stokes Co.;$ 1.50.)