The Wandering Dog was closed by the police, but the bohemian life continued. The War appeared to be improving and victories were reported. British armoured cars and Russian Cossacks plunged through the mud of Galicia and forced the Uhlans and the Austrian infantry to retreat. But bread became harder to obtain. The lines of miserable working people, their faces shaded by caps and shawls, as if in mourning, became familiar irritations: to the poets who spoke of the pathos of it, to the revolutionaries who foretold the risings, to the ordinary middle-class public, called in Russian slang the ‘boorzhoo’, who had become increasingly the prey of thieves robbing them of their groceries and their money. The War was draining us. They should have spent money on food and distributed it free. Then we might have averted Chaos. But the Tsar’s ministers were too obsessed with War, and the revolutionaries actually wanted people to starve so they would rise. The boorzhoo could think only of their own families; they had been called upon to give up everything to help with the War, to supply the soldiers at the Front. There is no need here to go into the whys and wherefores of the Revolution. Too many émigrés; too many historians; too many Bolshevik revisers-of-the-past have done that already. We have had a thousand versions of Ten Days That Shook The World. Perhaps we should have at least ten versions of A Thousand Books That Bored The World. I shall not add to all that. What happened, happened. We did not really believe it would happen, though so many warned of it. Poetry, when it becomes reality, rarely pleases anyone, least of all the poets.
Pronin opened a new establishment called Prival Komendiantoff (The Retreat of the Harlequinade). It is difficult to translate the exact sense of the name. Comedian’s Halt, perhaps. We all found it very appropriate and praised Pronin when he appeared, leading a mangy mongrel by a piece of ribbon (‘all that is left of the Dog’) and promising that this establishment would be even finer than the last. It was certainly more elaborate. Negro boys dressed to look as if they had come from the Court of Haroun-el-Raschid served at the tables. Murals of a blatantly radical nature covered the walls and ceilings. From the walls stared negro masks, the lighting issuing from their eye-sockets. The same negro band played the same raucous music whenever we were not having to listen to another new poet or ‘petite chanteuse’, or watching the posturings of some Pierrot mime while a horse-faced woman in a long purple dress droned on about the moon. Black female impersonators sang jazz songs. Female impersonators were the rage of Café Society. At odds with all this avant-gardism were girls in peasant costume; table-cloths made of bright peasant hand-woven fabrics; ‘folk-art’ ceramics, to remind us that this was, after all, Russia; that we were not Frenchmen or even Germans. The cellos groaned and the mime-artistes twisted their silly bodies into parodies of the human form. The jazz-band wailed. The little songstresses sang in tiny, toneless voices about the death of birds and mayflies. We talked and drank and whored. Sometimes it would be dawn before I (nowadays wearing a velvet jacket, red Ukrainian boots, riding trousers and a Cossack shirt) would stagger out into morning sunshine over the Field of Mars.
