ABSTRACT
It is an ironic comment upon political events that after twenty years of communist propaganda and proletarian art the name of Russia still conjures up, even in the pinkest professorial mind, Dostoievsky, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Chekhov rather than Lenin, N.E.P., Comintern or Stalin. The Russians themselves may nowadays be sighing for the World State, but the mood behind the sigh differs no whit from the mood of the three Sergeyevna sisters who nightly at the Queen's Theatre weep out their hearts for Moscow and its boulevards. A sticky veneer of political emancipation cannot obscure or alter the essential qualities of that nostalgic race whose dream is ever of past or future rather than present and whose aspiration is to be anywhere rather than where it is at the moment. To travel hopefully has no part in the Russian temperament. At the same time it is doubtful whether arrival, on the other hand, would give it any satisfaction. One trembles to think what would have happened to those sisters if their ambition to return to Moscow had been achieved. They would probably have ended as three corpses in the Moskva River.
