We looked at the manuscripts in the library. The notes are stabbed on the paper, cutting into the staffs with a terrible haste, and whole sections are crossed out. And on some pages only eight bars remain, and the rest are viciously eliminated with a destroying pencil. And then we looked at the manuscripts of other composers, neatly inked, no note crossed out. But Tchaikovsky wrote as though every day might be his last, and every note. He was frantic to get his music down.

The old man sat with us in the garden later, and we spoke of the composers of the present day, and he said a little sadly, “Competent men, yes; good craftsmen, yes; honest and intelligent men, yes; but not genuises, not genuises.” He looked down the long garden where Tchaikovsky had walked every day, winter or summer, after he had finished his daily work.

The Germans had come to this pleasant house, and they had made a motor pool of it, and tanks were in the garden. But the nephew had moved the precious manuscripts in the library, and the pictures, even the piano, safely away before the Germans came. And now it is all back—a strange, haunted place. From the window of the caretaker’s cottage came the notes of someone practicing on a piano, the exercises of a child, hesitant and stumbling, and the strange and passionate loneliness of the frantic little man who lived exclusively for music filled the garden.

Our time was growing very short. Our lives had become jerky. We rushed from one thing to another, trying to see everything in our last few days. We visited the University of Moscow, and the undergraduates did not look unlike ours. They congregated in the halls, and laughed, and rushed from class to class. They paired off, boy and girl, just as ours do. The university was bombed during the war, and the students rebuilt it while the war went on, so that it was never closed.

The ballet had opened, and we went nearly every night—the loveliest ballet we have ever seen. It started at seven-thirty and did not finish until after eleven. The casts were huge. A commercial theater could not support such ballet. Such performance, and training, and sets, and music, must be subsidized or they cannot exist. There is no way to make the sale of tickets pay for this kind of production.

We also went to the Moscow Art Theater, and saw Simonov’s play The Russian Question. And perhaps we made a mistake in seeing this play, or perhaps this production was not of the best. We found it, for our taste, overacted, overemphasized, unreal, and stylized—in a word, hammy. The character of the American publisher would have reduced an American audience to helpless laughter, and the Russian idea of American newspapermen was only slightly less fantastic than Ben Hecht’s. But this play has been unbelievably successful. And its picture of American journalism is taken as absolute truth by nearly all of its audiences. We wish we could have seen other plays, and other casts, to see whether overemphasis is general, but there was no time. We can only say that by New York standards The Russian Question is not good.