I AM A CHILD of my century and as old as the century. I was born in 1900, on I January, in South Russia: the ancient true Russia from which the whole of our great Slavic culture sprang. Of course it is no longer called Russia, just as the calendar itself has been altered to comply with Anglo-Saxon notions. By modern reckoning I was therefore born in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic on 14 January. We live in a world where many kinds of regression dignify themselves with the mantle of progress.
I am not, as is frequently suggested by the illiterates amongst whom I am forced to live, Jewish. The great Cossack hawk’s beak is frequently mistaken in the West for the carrion bill of the vulture.
I am not a fool. I know my own Slavic blood. It roars in my veins; it pounds as the elemental rivers of my fatherland pound, forever longing to be reconciled with our holy and mysterious soil. My blood belongs to Russia as much as the Don, the Volga, and the Dnieper belong. My blood still hears the call of our vast, timeless steppe under whose solitudinous skies aristocrat and peasant, merchant and worker, were dwarfed and understood how little material prosperity mattered; that they were united by God and were part of His inevitable pattern. Alien Western ideas came to threaten this understanding. It was in the factory towns, where chimneys crowded to shut out our incomparable Russian light, where people were denied the shelter and confirmation of God’s wide roof, God’s cool and merciful eye, where the synagogues sprouted, that Russians began to elevate themselves and challenge God’s will, as even the Tsar would not dare; as even Rasputin, playing Baptist to Lenin’s Antichrist and spreading rot from within, would not dare. Influenced by Jewish socialists in Kharkov, Nikolaieff, Odessa and Kiev, these stokers and these riveters first denied the Lord Himself. Then they denied their blood. And then they denied their souls: their Russian souls. And if I cannot deny my soul after fifty years of exile, how then can I be Jewish? Some Peter? Some Judas? I think not.
