Nicholas had his
opportunity--the greatest opportunity perhaps ever offered to man. He
refused it. From that moment the easiest way was closed, and only a most
perilous rocky path remained.
With every week of that winter of 1916, Petrograd stepped deeper and
deeper into the darkness. Its strangeness grew and grew upon me as the
days filed through. I wondered whether my illness and the troubles of
the preceding year made me see everything at an impossible angle--or it
was perhaps my isolated lodging, my crumbling rooms, with the grey
expanse of sea and sky in front of them that was responsible. Whatever
it was, Petrograd soon came to be to me a place with a most terrible
secret life of its own.
There is an old poem of Pushkin's that Alexandre Benois has most
marvellously illustrated, which has for its theme the rising of the
river Neva in November 1824. On that occasion the splendid animal
devoured the town, and in Pushkin's poem you feel the devastating power
of the beast, and in Benois' pictures you can see it licking its lips as
it swallowed down pillars and bridges and streets and squares with poor
little fragments of humanity clutching and crying and fruitlessly
appealing.
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