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Springer Geography

Jan Selmer Methi · Andrei Sergeev

Małgorzata Bieńkowska
Basia Nikiforova Editors

Borderology:
Cross-disciplinary
Insights from the
Border Zone
Along the Green Belt
Springer Geography
The Springer Geography series seeks to publish a broad portfolio of scientific
books, aiming at researchers, students, and everyone interested in geographical
research. The series includes peer-reviewed monographs, edited volumes, text-
books, and conference proceedings. It covers the entire research area of geography
including, but not limited to, Economic Geography, Physical Geography,
Quantitative Geography, and Regional/Urban Planning.

More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/10180

Jan Selmer Methi Andrei Sergeev
•

Małgorzata Bieńkowska Basia Nikiforova

•

Editors

Borderology:
Cross-disciplinary Insights
from the Border Zone
Along the Green Belt

123
Editors
Jan Selmer Methi Małgorzata Bieńkowska
Faculty of Education and Arts University of Białystok
Nord University Białystok, Poland
Bodø, Nordland Fylke, Norway
Basia Nikiforova
Andrei Sergeev Lithuanian Culture Research Institute
Murmansk Arctic State University Vilnius, Lithuania
Murmansk, The Murmansk Area, Russia

ISSN 2194-315X ISSN 2194-3168 (electronic)

Springer Geography
ISBN 978-3-319-99391-1 ISBN 978-3-319-99392-8 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99392-8

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018952610

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part
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The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this
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The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
Preface

This book is a collection of articles related to the ongoing project called

Borderology. The project started in 2009 initiated by The Norwegian Barents
Secretariat and was dedicated to build up education and research in order to develop
new knowledge based on people-to-people-diplomacy and lived experience in the
border zone between Norway and Russia. Nord university and Murmansk Arctic
State University (MASU) became partners in this project and decided to develop a
joint master program and arrange Bakhtin-Kant seminars annually on both sides
of the border. The master program, Joint Master in Borderology, enrolled its first
class in 2013. The seminars have resulted in six reports and one anthology,
Philosophy in the border zone (2015). This book also represents the expanding of
borderology thinking following the line of the Green Belt showing the collaborative
project of an international group of authors which comprises, primarily, researchers
from Nord University (Bodø, Norway) and Murmansk Arctic State University
(Murmansk, Russia), as well as representatives of Saint Petersburg State University
(St. Petersburg, Russia), the Lithuanian Culture Research Institute (Vilnius,
Lithuania), Klaipėda University (Klaipėda, Lithuania), and the University of
Białystok (Białystok, Poland). This is mirrored in the editorial board:
Andrei Sergeev is Doctor of Philosophy, Professor, full member of Russian
Academy of Natural Sciences, rector of Murmansk Arctic State University. In 1984,
he graduated from “History” training program of Petrozavodsk State University
named after O. V. Kuusinen. In 1991–1993, he was enrolled in Ph.D. philosophy
program of Leningrad State University. In 1997, he graduated from Higher
Doctorate training in philosophy of Saint-Petersburg State University, and suc-
cessfully passed a postdoctoral thesis defense on topic “Attitude to culture in the
Russian metaphysical philosophy of XIX–XX century”. In 1998, he was issued an
academic degree Doctor of Philosophy. In 2001, he was issued a title of Professor.
Spheres of academic interests: metaphysics, philosophy of culture, social
philosophy.

v
vi Preface

Jan Selmer Methi is Associate professor in philosophy at Center for Practical

knowledge, Nord university in Bodø, Norway. He completed his Ph.D. in philos-
ophy at Århus University in Denmark in 2007. The topic of his Ph.D. was teacher’s
professional identity and self-awareness. His research interests include philosophy
of science, sociocultural and activity theory, borderology and practical knowledge.
Basia Nikforova is Senior Research Fellow, Department of Contemporary
Philosophy in Lithuanian Culture Research Institute. She completed her Ph.D. in
philosophy in Moscow State University in 1977. Her interests of research include
sociology of religion, cultural, and border studies, new materialism.
Małgorzata Bieńkowska is professor in sociology at Institute of Sociology and
Cognitive Science, University of Bialystok, Poland and visiting professor
University of Economy, Bydgoszcz, Poland. She is head of the Department of
Sociology of Multiculturalism in Bialystok. She completed her Ph.D. in sociology
at University of Nicolaus Copernicus in Torun, Poland. Her interests of research
include theory of sociology, multiculturalism, anthropology of borderland, and
gender studies.

Bodø, Norway Jan Selmer Methi

Murmansk, Russia Andrei Sergeev
Białystok, Poland Małgorzata Bieńkowska
Vilnius, Lithuania Basia Nikiforova
Contents

Part I Border Practices in the Green belt

On Uses of ‘Wild Nature’: Empowered Versus Disempowered Agency
in Kola Reindeer Herding Territories (Murmansk Region,
NW Russia) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
Yulian Konstantinov
Borderlands of Lithuania and Kaliningrad Region of Russia:
Preconditions for Comparative Geographic Approach and Spatial
Interaction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
Eduardas Spiriajevas
Movement to Defend the Białowieża—The Problem of the Białowieża
Forest Protection as an Example of a Values Conflict . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
Małgorzata Bieńkowska, Łukasz Faszcza and Łukasz Wołyniec
Potential, Problems, and Challenges of Joint International Master
Programmes: Case-Study of the Joint Norwegian-Russian Master
Degree Programme in Borderology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
Inna Ryzhkova and Jan Selmer Methi

Part II Challenges of Mental Borders: Challenge for Europe

The Power of Doubt . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
Boris Sokolov
Nature and Man: Crime and Punishment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69
Nadezhda Golik
Nature as Stoic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81
Viggo Rossvaer

vii
viii Contents

What Role Plays Intuition in Mathematics and Science? On the

Borders Between Several Conceptions of What It Means to Intuit . . . . . 93
Johan Arnt Myrstad
Deconstruction of European Environmental Identity in the Mass
Immigration Context Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121
Basia Nikiforova

Part III Knowledge on the Frontiers; Conceptualization

of Practice (Activity)
Man and Nature: Approaches to the Delimitation of Concepts . . . . . . . 135
Viktor R. Tsylev
Borderology and Practical Knowledge—Humanities Response
to Epigenetics? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149
Jan Selmer Methi
Human Existence Between the Forest (Nature) and Home
(Technology) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163
Vasilii M. Voronov
Beyond the Green Shift—Ecological Economics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 173
Ove Jakobsen and Vivi M. L. Storsletten
Myth on the Border Between Man and Nature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 185
Irina Gorina

Part IV Borders in Collision: Search of New Paradigms

Cultural Images of Nature as Paradigms of Human Practices . . . . . . . . 197
Aleksandr Sautkin
Imagination as a Breaker of the Border . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 207
Andrey Vinogradov

Part V New Unity in Science and Humanities: Renewal of Ethics

Translation in a Hermeneutical Context: Transforming Culture
and Human Nature Through Ethics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 217
Andrei Kopylov
The Need for Being Disinterested as a Key Characteristic
of Human Nature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 231
Andrei Sergeev
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 247
Contributors

Małgorzata Bieńkowska Institute of Sociology and Cognitive Science, University

of Białystok, Białystok, Poland
Łukasz Faszcza Institute of Sociology and Cognitive Science, University of
Białystok, Białystok, Poland
Nadezhda Golik St. Petersburg State University, Saint Petersburg, Russia
Irina Gorina St. Petersburg State University, Saint Petersburg, Russia
Ove Jakobsen Nord University, Bodø, Norway
Yulian Konstantinov Bulgarian Society for Regional Cultural Studies, Sofia,
Bulgaria
Andrei Kopylov Murmansk Arctic State University, Murmansk, Russia
Jan Selmer Methi Nord University, Bodø, Norway
Johan Arnt Myrstad Nord University, Bodø, Norway
Basia Nikiforova Lithuanian Culture Research Institute, Vilnius, Lithuania
Viggo Rossvaer Nord University, Bodø, Norway
Inna Ryzhkova Murmansk Arctic State University, Murmansk, Russia
Aleksandr Sautkin Murmansk Arctic State University, Murmansk, Russia
Andrei Sergeev Murmansk Arctic State University, Murmansk, Russia
Boris Sokolov St. Petersburg State University, Sankt-Peterburg, Russia
Eduardas Spiriajevas Klaipeda University, Klaipeda, Lithuania
Vivi M. L. Storsletten Nord University, Bodø, Norway
Viktor R. Tsylev Murmansk Arctic State University, Murmansk, Russia

ix
x Contributors

Andrey Vinogradov Murmansk Arctic State University, Murmansk, Russia

Vasilii M. Voronov Murmansk Arctic State University, Murmansk, Russia
Łukasz Wołyniec Institute of Sociology and Cognitive Science, University of
Białystok, Białystok, Poland
Editors’ Introduction

The central problem discussed by the authors belonging to different disciplinary

matrices is the subject of the Border. For a long time, since 2007, this international
team of researchers has focused its attention on different aspects of the under-
standing of the border and on the impact of this understanding on different aspects
of life. The border is understood as a phenomenon which not only separates but also
connects different components of the natural, human, and cultural spheres of life. At
the same time, the establishment of a boundary in an act of distinguishing one from
the other defines the essence and objectness of that with which the human being
begins to live, with which he is occupied, and which causes him anxiety. The
mobility of borders creates a complex ensemble of various relations, whose essence
and peculiarities the authors of this volume seek to understand.
The multinational team started its practical work by developing a joint
Norwegian-Russian Master Degree programme with a philosophical focus called
“Borderology: Practical knowledge experience” which is now being implemented
by the academic staff of the Norwegian Nord University and the Russian Murmansk
Arctic State University. A new dimension was added to this collaboration by our
joint research on the border phenomenon which resulted in a series of conferences
and seminars periodically held both in Murmansk and Nikel (Russia), and in
Kirkenes and Svanhovd (Norway). A good example of this sustained academic
cooperation is afforded by the international Kant and Bakhtin seminar which is
annually hosted by Murmansk Arctic State University.1 One way or another, these
past few years have seen dozens of researchers from around the world become
involved in the study of borderology, including members of the academic com-
munities of Russia, Norway, Finland, France, Lithuania, Poland, Bulgaria, Portugal,
Croatia, Hungary, and Brazil. A significant milestone in this operation was the
collective monograph Philosophy in the Border Zone (Through the Eyes of Russian
and Norwegian Participants).2

1
The sixth seminar was held in March 2018.
2
Philosophy in the Border Zone (through the Eyes of Russian and Norwegian Participants). Edited
by Viggo Rossvaer and Andrei Sergeev. Oslo, Orkana Akademisk, 2015.

xi
xii Editors’ Introduction

This book is a result of a successful research seminar at Svanhovd research

center in the border zone between Norway and Russia. The title of the seminar was
Man and Nature; philosophy and ecology in the border zone and along the Green
Belt. The Green Belt is a 12,500 km (over 7700 miles) long border zone along the
one-time Iron Curtain, from the Barents Sea in North of Europe to the Black Sea in
the South. This border zone is forming a corridor of habitats for an exceptional
diversity of species.
With the emergence of Borderology, it became apparent that it would have to
explore and clarify a large number of previously neglected questions. These were
not exclusively of a theoretical interest that might have arisen from the somewhat
contradictory nature of borders, fixed and mobile at the same time. Borders and
border regions are particularly revealing places for social research, especially in the
present era of growing globalization, and the growth of supra-state regions such as
the European Union (EU). There was also an important practical aspect to these
questions, since in our age of globalization individuals, ethnic groups, nations, and
cultures interact with each other—and with themselves—in exceptionally complex
ways, generating problems that have to be solved “here and now”, “hic et nunc”.
Our aim is to develop a new approach to studying changes in the periphery of
Europe through exploring the process in which borders themselves become visible,
strengthening, meaningful, or disappearing. At the same time, we are simultane-
ously focusing on what those borders separate and what they bring together, along
with the impact of remaking borders, which means studying the understandings of
possible futures as well as the past.
Thus, the texts that we offer the reader can be seen as an attempt at reflecting on,
and coming to terms with, the diverse interpretations of the border, our “point of
departure” being the present time, something that enables the various conceptual
and methodological tools suggested by the contributors to be applied to the very
situation of our life in the border zone which both divides and connects Norway and
Russia, giving a unique character to all the regional processes. This volume should
therefore be read as a reference book for different approaches to the term bor-
derology and border zone.
It is possible to identify several perspectives and thematic fields relevant to these
subjects: five parts of the book reflect both the distinctiveness and the intrinsic
interrelatedness of the individual authors’ texts. First, the problem of the Border is
considered through a discussion of the various relations between Man and Nature,
proceeding from the established practices of Man’s dealing with the world and with
himself. Second, an important aspect in the understanding of this problem is
revealed by the practice and theory of changing mental borders. An environmental
identity can be similar to another collective identity (national or ethnic) and give us
a sense of connection, possibility to be part of a larger whole, and with a recog-
nition of similarity between ourselves and others. Third, another significant aspect
of the understanding of the Border is manifested in the emergence and expansion of
new knowledge about borders as frontiers, something that is connected with a
conceptualization of new bases of Man’s practical experience in his interaction with
the Border. Fourthly, awareness of the mobility, fluidity, and change in the
Editors’ Introduction xiii

understanding of the phenomenon of the Border is connected with the process

of the emergence of new theoretical and conceptual constructions leading to the
formation of new paradigms of understanding. Fifth, a new interaction between the
Sciences and the Humanities in their attempts to gain more knowledge about the
Border is connected with a turn towards Ethics which opens an entirely new per-
spective on the traditional ideas of the Border and the existing theoretical
constructions.
In his article “On Uses of ‘Wild Nature’: Empowered Versus Disempowered
Agency in Kola Reindeer Herding Territories (Murmansk Region, NW Russia)”,
Yulian Konstantinov focuses his attention on the concept of “wild nature” which
was created by a number of specific human attitudes developed in the context of
Post-Soviet reindeer-breeding practices in the North of Russia.
Ove Jakobsen and Vivi Storsletten argue in their article “Beyond the Green Shift—
Ecological Economics” that green economy, on the one hand, represents changes in
the protective belt in order to defend the mainstream economy’s hard core. On the
other hand, ecological economics question the hard core of main stream economy.
Eduardas Spiriajevas in his article “Borderlands of Lithuania and Kaliningrad
Region of Russia: Preconditions for Comparative Geographic Approach and Spatial
Interaction” discusses the border zones between the territories of Lithuania and the
Kaliningrad region of the Russian Federation which were traditionally perceived as
peripheral zones of existence. However, in the context of cross-border cooperation
such territories can come to be perceived as centers where new cultural and eco-
nomic opportunities are generated, as well as new human identities. In our
present-day reality, the natural is defined by human attitudes—this is the view taken
by Małgorzata Bieńkowska, Łukasz Faszcza, Łukasz Wołyniec in their paper
“Movement to Defend the Białowieża—The Problem of the Białowieża Forest
Protection as an Example of a Values Conflict”: one’s perception of the Nature
of the Białowieża Forest as either an environmental treasure to be preserved, or a
natural resource to be exploited depends largely on one’s own value orientations
and is in many respects defined by them. Any serious attempt at comprehending the
borders between Man and Nature can only be made within a special disciplinary
space which is only just beginning to be granted “citizenship rights” in academic
discourse: Jan Selmer Methi in his article “Borderology and Practical Knowledge—
Humanities Response to Epigenetics?” uses the new research field epigenetics to
show what borderology does on a macro scale using tools within humanities finds
its parallel in natural sciences within microbiology.
Another perspective on the problem of understanding the Border is to be found in
reflecting on the cultural borders of the modern European: on Boris Sokolov’s view
expressed in his article “The Power of Doubt”, the status of any border, including
that of a state frontier, is defined in the present-day European culture of the era of
globalization by turning to the fundamental existentiale of “doubt”, a view that
allows the author to reveal new aspects in the phenomena of migration and terror.
Basia Nikiforova in her article “Deconstruction of European Environmental
Identity in the Mass Immigration Context Summary”, offers to look on the
European environmental identity development through rationality, growing
xiv Editors’ Introduction

solidarity and responsibility. An environmental rationality is not just a philosoph-

ical and theoretical enterprise, but is rooted in social practices, recovered sense
of the being and formulates new arguments for mobilizing collective actions. At the
same time, nowadays ethic of otherness is not a dialectic of opposites that results in
the exclusion and elimination of the opposite (radical) other. In her article “Nature
and Man: Crime and Punishment”, Nadezhda Golik analyzes the ideological con-
ception of the Enlightenment which overcame the teleological model of the
understanding of Nature, making it possible for the latter to be more and more
consistently perceived by Man as a means of man’s existence. But in the end Nature
will hit back against man’s subjection. The “three senses of the word “nature”,
nature as wild nature, nature as dynamic activity, and nature as Stoic” highlighted in
Viggo Rossvaer’s article “Nature as Stoic”, suggest another perspective on the
problem of understanding the Border between Man and Nature where, in the
analytic of their relationships, the context of nature remains an essential component
of human consciousness.
Johan Arnt Myrstad explores, in his article “What Role Plays Intuition in
Mathematics and Science? On the Borders Between Several Conceptions of What It
Means to Intuit” the nuances in the use of the term “intuition” in Kant and Poincaré,
thereby discovering deep paralogisms in the discussion about geometry and hence
resolving some of the problems pestering modern epistemology, by focusing on the
border zones of conceptions covered by the same or similar terms.
The modern European propensity for contrasting Man and Nature, sometimes
placing them in direct opposition to each other, is an attitude that requires funda-
mental reconsideration, as Viktor R. Tsylev suggests in his article “Man and Nature:
Approaches to the Delimitation of Concepts”.
Jan Selmer Methi and Inna Ryzhkova in their article “Potential, Problems, and
Challenges of Joint International Master Programmes: Case-Study of the Joint
Norwegian-Russian Master Degree Programme in Borderology” reflect on the
experience of academic mobility in the context of the current internationalization of
education, drawing, in particular, on the experience of the long-term implementa-
tion of the joint Master Degree programme “Borderology (Practical knowledge
experience)” by Nord University and Murmansk Arctic state university, and
revealing new aspects in the understanding of the Border.
In his article “Human Existence Between the Forest (Nature) and Home
(Technology)”, Vasilii M. Voronov presents a project of an existential and
anthropological analytic of the liminal position of the human being who has found
himself caught between the regions of nature and technology. As symbolic keys for
these spheres of human life, the images of the house (technology) and the woods
(nature) are introduced.
Aleksandr Sautkin in his article “Cultural Images of Nature as Paradigms of
Human Practices” discusses the imagination, including its archetypal attitudes, as a
fundamental intermediary between abstract thinking and human nature; in this
connection, the modern practices of human domination over nature and the prac-
tices of its environmental protection are considered as products of a certain attitude
of the human imagination. Andrey Vinogradov in his article “Imagination as a
Editors’ Introduction xv

Breaker of the Border” emphasizes that borders are established in the parameters of
our mind and are established by our mind; therefore, the imagination can be
regarded as both the universal “violator” of borders and as their creator. It was as
early as the time of mythological consciousness that the natural began to be
involved in both the dialectic of the functioning of everyday practices, and in the
procedures of their cognition. In Irina Gorina’s article “Myth on the Border
Between Man and Nature” the process of the symbolization of the natural world in
mythological consciousness is considered in which myth becomes a means of
domesticating and humanizing the world, whereas the imbalances in the interaction
between Man and Nature coincide with eschatological motifs.
The functioning of established borders gives rise to a major problem, that of
communication. In Andrei Kopylov’s article “Translation in a Hermeneutical
Context: Transforming Culture and Human Nature Through Ethics” communica-
tion is considered in the context of one’s attitude towards the Other where the
ethical aspect of understanding becomes one of the attributes of hermeneutical
procedures. A multidimensional reflection on the internal borders of the human
being is presented in Andrei Sergeev’s article “The Need for Being Disinterested as
a Key Characteristic of Human Nature”: the author considers the need for per-
forming disinterested actions, something that has an intrinsic ethical component, as
one of the main ways of making a transition from what is contingent and particular
to what is integral and one’s own.

Jan Selmer Methi

Andrei Sergeev
Małgorzata Bieńkowska
Basia Nikiforova
 Part I
Border Practices in the Green belt
On Uses of ‘Wild Nature’: Empowered
Versus Disempowered Agency in Kola
Reindeer Herding Territories
(Murmansk Region, NW Russia)

Yulian Konstantinov

Abstract The groundwork of this paper comes from 3 months of research in the
reindeer-husbandry part of the Kola Peninsula (March–May 2016). I examined the
variety of uses of the ‘wild nature’ concept among three groups of tundra-focussed
actors (‘oligarchs’, ‘old bosses’ and ‘city anglers’). They fall on both sides of a
‘dominating/dominated’ class division in the context of post-Soviet reality. The
findings suggest a reassessment of the position, inherent in critiques of ‘nature-
culture’ dichotomies, according to which they are conceptually born exclusively for
the purposes of domination. Uses of tundra space, firmly separated from an urban
antipode, reveal motivations of dominance by empowered actors. At the same time,
uses through which disempowered actors attain access to appealing alternative
cosmologies can also be seen. Such diverse uses of tundra space I examine through
their realizations in terms of tundra access and mobility. I show that a
dichotomizing town-tundra (‘culture-nature’) division is perceived as necessary for
all of them, but for different reasons. This calls for reassessing existing critiques of
culture-nature bounderism. Its conceptual roots as well as instrumental motivations
are in need of examination beyond current privileging of empowered actors as
exclusive agents. The role of disempowered actors for sustaining culture-nature
dichotomies, their diverse conceptualizations and forms of agency need also to be
considered.

Keywords Bounderism
Culture-nature dichotomies
Reindeer husbandry

Kola Peninsula

Note: Unpublished or rare texts are marked PA (personal archive) and can be accessed by
writing to the author at <konstantinovyulian01@gmail.com>

Y. Konstantinov (&)
Bulgarian Society for Regional Cultural Studies, Sofia, Bulgaria
e-mail: konstantinovyulian01@gmail.com

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 3

J. S. Methi et al. (eds.), Borderology: Cross-disciplinary Insights
from the Border Zone, Springer Geography,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99392-8_1
4 Y. Konstantinov

Theoretical Issues

In this paper,1 attention is drawn to a particular problem with what can be called a
‘domination bias’ in critiques of boundary constructivism: namely, their privileging
of empowered subjecthood. Below I clarify this point and state my reasons.
As it is well known, a principal tenet in critiques of boundary constructivism is
that a theoretical tradition, anchored in the binaries of the Enlightenment and its
main divide between nature and culture, is anachronistic as it imposes the seeing of
variety through a single analytical lens: that of a Western (European) colonizing
culture. (Cf. Bessire and Bond 2014: 1) Hence an appeal, inherent in the ‘onto-
logical turn’ (i.e. Descola 2013), for addressing alterity on its own terms, thus
heralding, in the words of Marshall Sahlins, ‘a new anthropological dawn’ (2013:
xii). I would add here in parenthesis that such an appeal was made at the very dawn
of American Cultural Anthropology itself. Namely, when it was realized by Franz
Boas that American Indian languages and the world views of their speakers cannot
be understood and should not be described in terms of the analytical categories
(syntactical and morphological) inherited from Latin grammar. Neither their views
of the world should be understood in the categories of the researchers’ contem-
porary Euro-American culture. The appeal that we should look ‘firmly within the
bounded terrain of the Other’ (Bessire and Bond 2014: 1) thus bears the mark of
familiarity, which, nonetheless, does not detract from its power of persuasion.
What I find problematic, however, is a particular outcome, most categorically
stated in political ecological writing of the past decades. In the writing of Donna
Haraway, for instance this type of critique further extends to Western dualisms, in
general, and against their main thrust of ensuring, in her words of ‘One’s domi-
nation of the Others: women, lower class people, non-whites, and all those whose
task is to mirror the unitary self’ (Harraway 1991: 177). The collective subjecthood
of this ‘One’ bears, correspondingly, the features of ‘male’, ‘higher class people’,
‘whites’ and all those empowered beings that comprise the self that is mirrored.
This collective subjecthood is, in other words, that of the power-holders, the
empowered and the dominating. A hard and fast culture-nature boundary is seen,
consequently, to place the dominant on the culture side of the binary, while the
‘weak’ (sensu Scott 1985) are on the nature one. Or, as it was classically phrased by
Sherry Ortner in reference to gender, ‘Female is to male, as nature is to culture’
(Ortner 1974).
Within what I have called above the ‘domination bias’ in critiques of boundary
constructivism, a counter, deconstructive thrust follows the basic tenets of the
ontological turn. Namely, by claiming that in the real world the binary of culture as
different from nature does not exist, it is proposed that what does exist—on the

1
Field-research was supported by ‘Humans and the tundra nature of the Kola North: interactive
social practices’, Research Project No. 17-13-51601, supported by the Government of Murmansk
Region and the Russian State Science Fund (RGNF) in 2017, following the results of the Regional
Competition ‘The Russian North: History, Modernity, Prospects’.
On Uses of ‘Wild Nature’: Empowered … 5

strength of ethnographies in non-Western settings—is a single all-encompassing

culture, revealed in an infinite multitude of forms. This insight, traceable in its
literary projections at least back to Marcel Proust’s writings of the first decades of
the twentieth century. 2, found a reincarnation in the perspectivism of Viveiros de
Castro (2000) and his followers.
From this point on, the very existence of hard and fast dividing lines and
binarism itself became, as it were, politically incorrect. In postmodernist episte-
mologies, a virtual abhorrence of hard and fast dividing lines came to be noticed,
with a corresponding preference for the amorphous, fluid, fuzzy-edged and
ambiguous. An intellectual culture and aesthetic of fluidity or liquidity (Bauman
2000) came to replace one of firmness.
In this paper, I do not address the issue of whether the relationship between
‘culture’ and ‘nature’ can be defined as a binary or not. In other words, whether it is
right or wrong to see them as entities, separated by a hard and fast boundary, or,
alternatively, to see them as a unity (‘culture’) with an infinite number of
embodiments, each with its own instantiation (‘perspective’) of a common universe.
I would note here, that in the second case, one subject of a particular perspective is
not sharply different from another—like human from animal, for instance but is
more or less like them since they belong to a common, as it were, ‘deep structure’
(sensu early Chomsky (1957)).3 This ‘more or less’ makes dividing lines between
them finely graduated or ‘fuzzy’4, and they themselves tend to become rhy-
zomatically connected, rather than standing as members of binaries.
The task which I set before myself is much more modest. I am questioning the
premise that motivations and even applications of ‘firm boundering’ have, exclu-
sively, domination as a target, and those in power—as subjects. My argument is that
while we can find abundant proof of social constructivism with this particular aim
in mind, we can, at the same time, find also numerous instances in which disem-
powered agents make use of and actively resist the erosion of boundaries.
A dissolution of boundaries may be experienced as the advance of chaos and, closer
to my field-case ‘lawlessness’ (Rus.: bespredel). Importantly, it may be resisted on
the grounds that it is an obstacle to a search for alternative realities by disem-
powered actors—sought in attempts to escape from or resist domination. In this
way, the defence of a ‘culture/nature’, ‘domus/agrios’ firm boundary may unex-
pectedly appear as an important item in the ‘weapons of the weak’ arsenal (for the
felicitous phrasing James Scott 1985). If so, the connection between boundary
constructivism—in my case ‘culture/nature’—and its political implications (as an

2
Literary premonitions of perspectivism can be seen in the works of French writer Marcel Proust.
In the 1920s, he wrote: ‘The only true voyage of discovery, (…), would be not to visit strange
lands but to possess other eyes, to behold the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred
others, to behold the hundred universes that each of them beholds, that each of them is (…)’.
(Proust 2006: Vol. II, 657).
3
For a critique of this view Bessire and Bond (2014).
4
For the origins of the concept, see Zadeh (1965) on ‘fuzzy sets’, Lakoff (1973) on ‘fuzzy
concepts’.
6 Y. Konstantinov

exclusive ‘weapon of the strong’) becomes problematic in its subjecthood

part. A demand or at least an active search for territoriality (sensu Sack 1986)
effected through firm boundering, may in other words, come as much from ‘below’
as from ‘above’.
In this article, I draw on empirical evidence from the reindeer-herding part of the
Kola Peninsula to defend such a ‘bounderism from below’ argument. The evidence
comes from longitudinal ethnographic work with reindeer herders from Lovozero
District since the spring of 1995, with a latest focussed research—leading up to this
paper—conducted in February–June 2016.

The Setting

This is the grazing range of Reindeer Herding Cooperative ‘Tundra’ of Lovozero,

specifically: that of its Reindeer Herding Team No X.5 The territory stretches from
the Keivi Ridge in the SW (winter pastures) to the Barents Sea Coast to the NE
(summer pastures). It is controlled by the Lovozero Village Administration and
rented out (for a symbolic annual fee) to the Cooperative. Apart from this inheritor
of the former Soviet Farm (sovkhoz) bearing the same name, at present numerous
other leaseholders make use of the territory. They are mainly owners of salmon
fishing and/or hunting camps.6
The focal point in my setting is one such camp. It was created on the site of a
closed down Hydro-Meteorological Station, situated in the central part of the
grazing range. Very soon after the closing down of the Station in 2010, it was
leased for a period of 25 years to a businessperson from a regional town.
The Station, now private hunting and fishing lodge, is situated on the top of a hill
overlooking a big lake, with the buildings of Reindeer Herding Camp X, at its foot.
Camp X or Base X for short, to approximate local usage, is the second focal point,
the third being my own permanent camp, some two kilometres to the south of
Base X. Let me add here that since June 2016, the camp became officially a
Research Station of Murmansk Arctic University.

The Actors

I have divided them into three groups: ‘oligarchs’, ‘old bosses’ and ‘city anglers’,
with the current generation of reindeer herders as background actors.

5
Whenever possible I have changed designations, place name, and personal names in an effort to
preserve a degree of anonymity of my informants.
6
On such camps Konstantinov (2016), Ogarkova (2007), Osherenko (1998).
On Uses of ‘Wild Nature’: Empowered … 7

The ‘oligarchs’, representing new power over the territory, had as a central
figure Andrey,7 the businessman renting the former Meteorological Station. This for
a symbolic sum, as the rumour went among the herders. The takeover, as tundra
rumour also had it, had been achieved thanks to Andrey’s connections with
influential persons in the regional administration, as well as with the help of a
high-orbit ‘real oligarch’ from Moscow. The new owner and his rich and influential
friends, who came to the Station for fishing and hunting trips were generally dubbed
‘the oligarchs’ by the reindeer herders. I follow this usage here.
The ‘old bosses’ were the former heads of the Station and Reindeer Herding
Team X, respectively. They were both old-age pensioners8 by the time of the study
and had come to fish for a month as guests of the current reindeer-herding team.
Naturally, both of them—Dad Vasya and Uncle Kolya as the younger reindeer
herders would respectfully address them—deeply resented their fall in status. Still,
some sort of peaceful coexistence was maintained between the ‘bottom’ (the
reindeer-herding camp) and the ‘top’ (the ‘oligarchs’ lodge) of the hill.
The third group was of two young anglers from Murmansk: Ivan (Vanya), an
engineer, working in the Fishing Port of Murmansk, and his friend and colleague
from the Port—Gennadiy (Gena). Vanya and Gena were both in their mid-30s,
passionate anglers, spending practically all their weekends and other stretches of
spare time on angling outings near Murmansk. This was their first time so deep into
the tundra. ‘It is only recently I could finally buy the (Yamaha) ‘Viking’ (snow-
mobile) so we could get here‘, Vanya explained when the topic was broached, ‘and
Gena still cannot afford to get one. We are not like those up there (na verhu)
(pointing with his hand in the general direction of the Station) with all the
machinery and petrol up to here (a gesture across his throat)’.

Control Over Resources: The Vassiliy-Ty Incident

This event, which happened soon after the arrival of Vanya and Gena, illustrated
who had control over the territory in the new times. Although the city anglers were
not affected by it themselves, it was their descriptions and discussions of it that
forcibly related an important message. Namely, that they resisted intrusion into the
tundra by people like the ‘oligarchs’ or other potential leaseholders. This resistance
was for the sake of preserving the tundra in its ‘wild’ state and thus allowing its use
as a way to access reality sharply different from their daily urban one. I describe the
case in some detail.
Vassiliy-Ty is a lake in the NE part of the grazing range of ‘Tundra’, in the
spring–autumn pastures of the reindeer herding team in my story. During the
heyday of Soviet reindeer husbandry and until late after its demise, reindeer herders

All personal names are fictitious: see Footnote 5.

7

8
Note that the current pensioning-off age in reindeer husbandry is 50 years.
8 Y. Konstantinov

considered it their own prized fishing location. Many parts of the herding calendar
were organized in view of fishing there.
Following these established ways, the two former bosses, Dad Vasya and Uncle
Kolya, drove by snowmobile to the lake, but just as they were about to set their nets
under the ice, two private guards—chopovtsy9—suddenly swooped on them on
some rather fancy-looking snowmobiles. Didn’t they know the lake was off-limits
without a ‘special arrangement’?
Kolya and Vasya did not know the guards themselves, but the manager of the
salmon fishing company, which had exclusive rights of this part of the territory, was
known to Kolya from former Soviet days. This was used as an instrument to bear on
the situation. Consulting between themselves a little, the guards announced the
following decision: for old times’ sake, let Kolya and Vasya set their nets and fish
the lake, but on the eastern side only and for not more than three days. If they
caught them on the lake after that, the conversation would be ‘difficult’, as they put
it.
It so happened, that during the three days allowed, two track vehicles (vezde-
khodi) of the Cooperative had arrived at the Base, there was much celebrating (i.e.
drinking) at the huts, as brigade traditions required it, and in result, Kolya and
Vasya were fit enough to see to their nets only on the fourth day. But when they got
there, the nets had been already gathered in and taken away. The guards had been
true to their word: three days, but no more.
While the former bosses were having their troubles at Vassiliy-Ty, the ‘oli-
garchs’ had gone out on an outing for salmon at the much prized and well guarded
Vostochnaya Litsa Lake. A few days after that, they stopped by my camp, where
the city anglers happened also to be. ‘How was it at the Litsa?’, they asked, ‘were
there any guards prowling?’. ‘Oh, yes, they came, sure enough’, Andrey answered.
‘And what?’ ‘We reached an agreement’ was the answer.
The expression ‘to reach an agreement’ (‘my dogovorilis’) is worthy of attention
here. In all probability, what it meant was that it was made known to the lake guards
in question, who the oligarchs were and, in particular, with what people they were
connected at the higher rungs of the regional administration. It also contains the hint
of a bribe given, as when, for instance a controlling organ—like road police—
would find fault with a driver. We all three discussed it afterwards together with the
former bosses when they came to see us. They were of the opinion that it was
enough to mention the oligarch from Moscow to make the guards change their tone.

9
From ChOP, acronym for Chastnoe Okhranitel’noe Predpriyatie (Private Protection Enterprise).
On Uses of ‘Wild Nature’: Empowered … 9

Mobility: The Helicopter

The second profile event was the coming of a helicopter: a big Mi-8 machine of a
private company. The aircraft landed at the helicopter pad of the Station, which was
part of its older infrastructure. Since the Station used to have the status of ‘difficult
to reach’ (trudnodostupnaya), while it existed, it was often that helicopters landed
on that pad: either to bring people or goods to the Station, or in connection with the
needs of the reindeer herding camp below. The herders remembered nostalgically
that helicopters in those days, when the price of petrol was of little concern, would
fly back and forth even on ‘small errands’ (po melocham). Examples would be
quoted of helicopters bringing in parts of personal belongings left behind in the
village. ‘The coal for heating the Station would come in by helicopter’, Dad Vasya
remembered during this particular conversation. ‘Small things also: the pilots were
glad for an excuse to do some trout-fishing or get fish or (reindeer) meat from us’.
For the young anglers from town, all of this was new. They had grown up during
the time when petrol had already become a serious concern, as it was for them right
at that moment: they had estimated that on the petrol they had, they could hardly
make it back to the village. The contrast with the previous liberal times was
painfully accentuated. ‘So these lords (bare) up there, they can summon helicopters
just like that? To bring them spares?’ It had become known, by that time, that the
helicopter had been summoned to bring a new gearbox for the oligarchs’ ATV.
Uncle Kolya had learned it from Ivan Ivanich: one of Andrey’s servants. ‘Yes, like
that’ Uncle Kolya flicked his thumb against his forefinger. ‘They drive all over the
tundra also: they have the petrol and also the connections’.

Metaphors

Petrol and connections summed up metonymically the new order in the tundra.
They stood for wealth and power. The group of the ‘lords’ above represented the
new order in their tightly knit group of business people (‘oligarchs’) and admin-
istrators (state employees, chinovniki). For various different reasons, all of those
‘below’, i.e. at the Base by the bank of the Lake and at my camp, had found
themselves to be outsiders in a newly structured tundra universe, or even tres-
passers, as the Vassiliy-Ty incident illustrated. For the former tundra bosses and the
reindeer herders in general this was a very sore point. During the previous order,
they had been publicly celebrated as ‘custodians of the tundra’ (khozyaeva tundry).
It was, as it were, their native element and a territory under their control. For the
young anglers, those were days dimly remembered, but they also felt themselves
deprived of being barred from engaging in pursuits of an encounter with ‘wild
nature’. As I illustrate shortly, the newly powerful expressed and acted out their
motivations in a similar way. The motif of ‘othering nature’ could be seen, there-
fore, to override the new class divisions.
10 Y. Konstantinov

The coming and going of the helicopter did not merit much discussion at the
Base. It was remembered that Volodya, the big shot from Moscow and Andrey’s
friend and patron, had once arrived in his own helicopter, as it befitted an oligarch
of his rank. The immediately pragmatic side of the matter was, however, what
oriented conversations: the fact the Mi-8 had brought in a considerable amount of
petrol. Among the constantly petrol hungry herding community, this was a matter
of utmost attention: it meant the ability to move both for contacting herd fragments,
strewn over the tundra, and fishing in trout and salmon spots, closer to the Barents
Coast. Using Uncle Kolya’s connections with the oligarchs’ servants, particularly
with Ivan Ivanich, a plea was made for getting three hundred litres on credit. This
was granted by the oligarchs at 50 roubles the litre.10 Speedy preparations for the
trip began. To my questions about how they would tackle the various private guards
who may intercept them, they proffered a valid reason. This was the herding ter-
ritory of the Brigade and they had all the right to do their herding business there.
The helicopter affair and its ramifications impressed the young urban anglers.
How the tundra was parcelled out to various private interests they knew in prin-
ciple, but here they were looking at it directly, day by day. The summing up of this
new experience was done by Vanya. While we were discussing the possibility for
them to ask the oligarchs for 50 litres of petrol to get back to Lovozero, he said:
‘You see, we can’t be like them, it is too late in the day now, and we wouldn’t have
done it anyway. For us fishing means something else, another reality’.
This was a crucial statement in my view. What Vanya was saying was that they
would not have not chosen the ways of vertical mobility of the ‘oligarchs’, i.e. of
rising from petty trading to vegetable wholesaling (as was Andrey’s case), or
becoming pig-feed kings (as that of the Moscow oligarch). Or more precisely, as
they had heard it from the herders: of using connections from former Komsomol
days to buy at Soviet prices on credit, and sell at the new liberated prices after the
reforms of early 1992. These ways to make the millions were memories of the past
now, but for them they were ‘not interesting’, as they put it, meaning they were
morally untouchable for them. ‘For us the tundra is a chance to get out of such
things, it is a parallel reality. We can still find spots in it where these types have not
reached, but the spots are getting fewer every day’.
It is to be noted at this point that in all such conversations and with all groups
concerned—the urban anglers, the herders, the former bosses, and finally: the oli-
garchs—‘tundra’ stood for ‘nature’, or rather: for ‘wild nature’. In the conversations
with all four groups, the use of the term implied distancing oneself from a refer-
entially critical locus, and in this initially geographical way, establishing an
opposition. The themes differed and, consequently, the terms that captured the
opposite end of the dichotomies. For the herders, it would be ‘the settlement’
(poselyok), from which they commuted to the ‘tundra’ for performing various
official and private tasks, intricately mixed with one another. This theme paralleled

10
The average price of petrol (A 95) was RBL 33/l. at this time, so the oligarchs did not raise the
price excessively.
On Uses of ‘Wild Nature’: Empowered … 11

the one of the OAPs, with the additional nuances of their case. Namely, that the
settlement was not so attractive anymore for them—as it was for the much younger,
working herders––while the Base by the Lake and the surrounding tundra territory
was the place where they had spent their lives. They wished if not to return to live
permanently there, at least to have the opportunity to be there at exciting fishing or
berry-picking times.
In the case of the oligarchs, the opposite pole was described in terms of the
enormous stress that a crushing load of work big business imposed. The
self-representation was of hard-working people. They had to overcome the negative
effects of the present period of economic crisis, when people had less money to
spend. Another major obstacle, according to them, was the mentality of employees.
‘These are the same old soviet beings (sovki) of before.11 ‘Andrey would complain.
‘I am sick and tired of repeating that I am not a Soviet factory from which you can
pilfer as much as you like and pretend to work. It is a private business, in which I
have invested my life. The tundra is the only place where I can get away for a while
from tension and stress. Some people go abroad, to Egypt, Spain, such places.
I prefer to come here with my friends. Here we charge our batteries! (zdes’
zaryazhaemsya)’.
The world of the city and business activities was thus described as stressful and
one from which escape routes were being sought, ones leading, in the particular
case, to the tundra and its opportunities for engaging with ‘real things’(nastoy-
ashchye veshchi), ones that befitted real men. ‘I often take my son on such trips’,
Andrey went on ‘let him learn to be a man’.
In this particular narrative, the tundra was represented as a ‘get away’ place, an
alternative reality with its particular attractions. City-life or ‘civilization’ was
portrayed as a place or reality inhabited by necessity, as it were, the attractive place
was here, in the tundra. In a constellation of possible ‘worlds’, or frames of ref-
erence, the centre of gravity in terms of attractions lay here. The latter came out as
ones offered by the kudos of blood-sports: of shooting a spectacular animal like a
bear or moose, or of catching some trophy-calibre salmon, trout or pike.
The poetic trope of representing the ‘wild’ as the place of manly virtues, with the
city as the place of vice, takes us back to the very beginning of what Andrey
referred to as ‘civilization’: to the Gilgamesh epic, or much later to Tacitus’
Germania, through the ‘noble savage’ sentimentalism of the 18th c., the romanti-
cism of the early nineteenth and the Indianomania of the late. And so on, in various
representations, reaching as alive as ever to the present day. Among the multitude
of ideological strands that the contemporary situation I describe leads up to—like
its strongly gendered, ‘manly’ emphasis—I single out here the similarity, and yet
critical difference as it concerned the ‘escape ideology’ of the young anglers, as
well as, in variations of a ‘disempowered’ narrative, of the other actors: the herders,
and the ‘old bosses’.

11
Sovki (sg. sovok) is a Russian pejorative colloquialism for ‘Soviet beings’, i.e. people with
die-hard Soviet mentality, unable to imagine life in other than Soviet terms.
12 Y. Konstantinov

In the young anglers’ narrative, the escape route to the tundra was motivated by
very different reasons compared to those of the oligarchs, retaining the similarity of
the ‘city’ as a place of necessity from which one needs to get away at the least
opportunity. The former Soviet reality was positively represented in the youngsters’
narrative: as a fairer and more virtuous reality, strongly contrasting it with the
present one of lawlessness and greed, in which ‘those like our friends at the top’, (a
gesture towards the Station), ‘do as they please’. The incident with them being able
to ‘reach an agreement’ with the private guards at the Vostochnaya Litsa Lake
would be quoted (in contrast with the confiscation of the pensioners’ nets), as also
the unlimited quantity of petrol at their disposal, their glittering transport machin-
ery, their servants, their summoning of a big transport helicopter at the flick of the
fingers. ‘We are trying to get away from all that’, Vasya summed it up ‘but, as you
see, we are here living next door to them and have to be nice, so they sell us some
petrol’.
A parallel reality thus seemed possible only in case one managed to get to some
‘really wild’ place, beyond the reach of current power-holders. This topic: of where
‘really wild places’ were would be discussed with the herders and the pensioners,
often only to establish the fact that a salmon-fishing lodge for rich foreign and home
clients had already been built there and the surrounding territory was already
off-limits.12 Still, places would be named, in between the stretches of tundra already
appropriated.13 Fabulous places, where birds would alight on your head and ani-
mals look at you in wonder, as they had never seen a human being before.
Whether such places still exist on the Peninsula, or can be reached by some next
to magical means is a matter of speculation, or, more precisely: of dreams. The
important issue is their need to be as a realm of escape. The two city anglers,
together with all others at the Base (including myself), wished to believe that
‘wilderness’ existed and we can reach it. Plans were made and treks discussed. The
vezdekhods had to start back before the tundra became impassable with the spring
thaws. The young anglers’ 2 weeks of leave was reaching its end. The tundra
expedition finished on a hopeful note: the search for the ‘really wild’ stretches
would continue.

Conclusions

I have tried to show in this paper how in a post-Soviet northern context, ‘bound-
ering’—that is, the drawing of a dividing line between ‘wild nature’ (tundra in my
case)—and the spaces that stand in opposition to it, follow desires of those currently
in power, as well as from those of the currently disempowered. Those ‘at the top’
(in my case: at the former Station) reiterate the script of an age-long political

12
On high price-range salmon-fishing camps see Note 6.
On similar ‘intersticiality’ in a Siberian context Anderson (2006).
13
On Uses of ‘Wild Nature’: Empowered … 13

ecology. In it, the exclusive access to ‘wilderness’—be it where in Medieval times

the ‘King’s deer’ roamed (cf. Eliason 2012), or when it encompassed the Victorian
countryside as a whole, before the Game Act of 1831 (Fisher 2000; Archer 1999),
served as an exclusive playground, in which blood-sports provided a diversion from
duties or boredom, and an opportunity for the honing of ‘manly’ skills. It simul-
taneously effected and legitimized a superior social position. In my field-case, such
Medieval and Early Victorian tropes—not to mention those of the rich Russian/
Soviet heritage—were reproduced as exclusive access to salmon fishing and tundra
big game hunting.
‘Wild nature’ can be, at the same time, the place of escape from such an order,
where power arrangements are renegotiated on the risky terms of the trespasser.
This line connects the investigation with poaching practices, particularly such that
have political motives: either for the preservation of age-long cultural values and
rights, or as rebellious acts against the dominant classes and their legislature.14 This
strand needs examination as regards its post-Soviet representations, which has so
far been lacking.
Another important issue, which to my knowledge has not been addressed so far
as regards ‘boundering from below’, is its pronounced gender aspects, namely that
it is a territory, in the Russian case at least, overwhelmingly populated by men.
When we get to the related issue of ‘political’ poaching, the absence of women
becomes even more striking. While in fishing and hunting women, in many cases
around the globe may have a strong presence (i.e. Sami women in fishing, Evenki
women in hunting, etc.), poaching is a domain, where women seem to be next thing
to absent, or, at least, we do not hear of the opposite. This gender specifics may be
related, or indeed may stem from the fact of ‘female flight’ from places, perceived
as remote and ‘wild’. It may also be, on a more general level, that escape and
seeking of alternative frames of reference (‘worlds’) is a gender-specific issue.
Investigations here are at their beginning and it has borne the intellectual stamp
of women’s studies. This aspect of historical development of the investigation of
‘boundering’ has possibly led in its turn to discussing nature/culture boundaries as
an exclusively empowered men’s construction for purposes of domination. I have
tried to show here, that in view of the existence of cases such that I have presented
above, constructing this boundary may be seen also as the ‘work’ of the dominated,
which problematizes, or at least serves to expand existing views.

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For general typologies, see von Essen et al. (2014); Eliason (2008, 2012).
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Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
 “A photograph?” Pauline said. “No; I don’t think I’ve seen a
photograph.”
“Ah, you wouldn’t have a photograph of me that’s not a good
many years’ old. It was a good deal before your time.”
With her head full of the possibilities of her husband’s past, for
she couldn’t tell that there mightn’t have been another, Pauline said,
with her brave distinctness:
“Are you, perhaps, the person who rang up 4,259 Mayfair? If
you are ...”
The stranger’s rather regal eyes opened slightly. She was
leaning one arm on the chimney-piece and looking over her
shoulder, but at that she turned and held out both her hands.
“Oh, my dear,” she said, “it’s perfectly true what he said. You’re
the bravest woman in the world, and I’m Katya Lascarides.”
With the light full upon her face, Pauline Leicester hardly stirred.
“You’ve heard all about me,” she said, with a touch of sadness in
her voice, “from Robert Grimshaw?”
“No, from Ellida,” Katya answered, “and I’ve seen your
photograph. She carries it about with her.”
Pauline Leicester said, “Ah!” very slowly. And then, “Yes; Ellida’s
very fond of me. She’s very good to me.”
“My dear,” Katya said, “Ellida’s everything in the matter. At any
rate, if I’m going to do you any good, it’s she that’s got me here. I
shouldn’t have done it for Robert Grimshaw.”
Pauline turned slightly pale.
“You haven’t quarrelled with Robert?” she said. “I should be so
sorry.”
“My dear,” Katya answered, “never mention his name to me
again. It’s only for you I’m here, because what Ellida told me has
made me like you;” and then she asked to see the patient.
 Dudley Leicester, got into evening dress as he was by Saunders
and Mr. Held every evening, sat, blond and healthy to all seeming,
sunk in the eternal arm-chair, his fingers beating an eternal tattoo,
his eyes fixed upon vacancy. His appearance was so exactly natural
that it was impossible to believe he was in any “condition” at all. It
was so impossible to believe it that when, with a precision that
seemed to add many years to her age, Katya Lascarides
approached, and, bending over him, touched with the tips of her
fingers little and definite points on his temples and brows, touching
them and retouching them as if she were fingering a rounded wind-
instrument, and that, when she asked: “Doesn’t that make your head
feel better?” it seemed merely normal that his right hand should
come up from the ceaseless drumming on the arm of the chair to
touch her wrist, and that plaintively his voice should say: “Much
better; oh, much better!”
And Pauline and Mr. Held said simultaneously: “He isn’t ...”
“Oh, he isn’t cured,” Katya said. “This is only a part of the
process. It’s to get him to like me, to make him have confidence in
me, so that I can get to know something about him. Now, go away. I
can’t give you any verdict till I’ve studied him.”
 PART V

IN the intervals of running from hotel to hotel—for Robert Grimshaw

had taken it for granted that Ellida was right, and that Katya had
gone either to the old hotel where she had stayed with Mrs. Van
Husum, and where they knew she had left the heavier part of her
belongings—Robert Grimshaw looked in to tell Pauline that he hadn’t
yet been able to fix things up with Katya Lascarides, but that he was
certainly going to do so, and would fetch her along that afternoon. In
himself he felt some doubt of how he was going to find Katya. At the
Norfolk Street hotel he had heard that she had called in for two or
three minutes the night before in order to change her clothes—he
remembered that she was wearing her light grey dress and a linen
sun-hat—and that then she had gone out, saying that she was going
to a patient’s, and might or might not come back.
“This afternoon,” he repeated, “I’ll bring her along.”
Pauline looked at his face attentively.
“Don’t you know where she is?” she said incredulously, and then
she added, as if with a sudden desolation: “Have you quarrelled as
much as all that?”
“How did you know I don’t know where she is?” Grimshaw
answered swiftly. “She hasn’t been attacking you?”
Her little hands fell slowly open at her sides; then she rested
one of them upon the white cloth that was just being laid for lunch.
The horn of an automobile sounded rather gently outside, and
the wheels of a butcher’s cart rattled past.
 “Oh, Robert,” she said suddenly, “it wasn’t about me you
quarrelled? Don’t you understand she’s here in the house now? That
was Sir William Wells who just left.”
“She hasn’t been attacking you?” Grimshaw persisted.
“Oh, she wouldn’t, you know,” Pauline answered. “She isn’t that
sort. It’s you she would attack if she attacked anybody.”
“Oh, well, yes,” Robert Grimshaw answered. “It was about you
we quarrelled—about you and Dudley, about the household: it
occupies too much of my attention. She wants me altogether.”
“Then what’s she here for?” Pauline said.
“I don’t know,” Grimshaw said. “Perhaps because she’s sorry for
you.”
“Sorry for me!” Pauline said, “because I care.... But then she ...
Oh, where do we stand?”
“What has she done?” Robert Grimshaw said. “What does she
say?”
“About you?” Pauline said.
“No, no—about the case?”
“Oh,” Pauline said, “she says that if we can only find out who it
was rang up that number it would be quite likely that we could cure
him.”
Grimshaw suddenly sat down.
“That means ...” he said, and then he stopped.
Pauline said: “What? I couldn’t bear to cause her any
unhappiness.”
“Oh,” Robert Grimshaw answered, “is that the way to talk in our
day and—and—and our class? We don’t take things like that.”
“Oh, my dear,” she said painfully, “how are we taking this?” Then
she added: “And in any case Katya isn’t of our day or our class.”
She came near, and stood over him, looking down.
 “Robert,” she said gravely, “who is of our day and our class? Are
you? Or am I? Why are your hands shaking like that, or why did I just
now call you ‘my dear’? We’ve got to face the fact that I called you
‘my dear.’ Then, don’t you see, you can’t be of our day and our class.
And as for me, wasn’t it really because Dudley wasn’t faithful to me
that I’ve let myself slide near you? I haven’t made a scandal or any
outcry about Dudley Leicester. That’s our day and that’s our class.
But look at all the difference it’s made in our personal relations! Look
at the misery of it all! That’s it. We can make a day and a class and
rules for them, but we can’t keep any of the rules except just the
gross ones like not making scandals.”
“Then, what Katya’s here for,” Robert Grimshaw said, “is to cure
Dudley. She’s a most wonderful sense, and she knows that the only
way to have me altogether is to cure him.”
“Oh, don’t put it as low down as that,” Pauline said. “Just a little
time ago you said that it was because she was sorry for me.”
“Yes, yes,” Grimshaw answered eagerly; “that’s it; that’s the
motive. But it doesn’t hinder the result from being that, when
Dudley’s cured, we all fly as far apart as the poles.”
“Ah,” she said slowly, and she looked at him with the straight,
remorseless glance and spoke with the little, cold expressionless
voice that made him think of her for the rest of his life as if she were
the unpitying angel that barred for our first parents the return into
Eden, “you see that at least! That is where we all are—flying as far
apart as the poles.”
Grimshaw suddenly extended both his hands in a gesture of
mute agony, but she drew back both her own.
“That again,” she said, “is our day and our class. And that’s the
best that’s to be said for us. We haven’t learned wisdom: we’ve only
learned how to behave. We cannot avoid tragedies.”
She paused and repeated with a deeper note of passion than he
had ever heard her allow herself:
“Tragedies! Yes, in our day and in our class we don’t allow
ourselves easy things like daggers and poison-bowls. It’s all more
difficult. It’s all more difficult because it goes on and goes on. We
think we’ve made it easier because we’ve slackened old ties. You’re
in and out of the house all day long, and I can go around with you
everywhere. But just because we’ve slackened the old ties, just
because marriage is a weaker thing than it used to be—in our day
and in our class”—she repeated the words with deep bitterness and
looked unflinchingly into his eyes—“we’ve strengthened so
immensely the other kind of ties. If you’d been married to Miss
Lascarides you’d probably not have been faithful to her. As it is, just
because your honour’s involved you find yourself tied to her as no
monk ever was by his vow.”
She looked down at her feet and then again at his eyes, and in
her glance there was a cold stream of accusation that appeared
incredible, coming from a creature so small, so fragile, and so
reserved. Grimshaw stood with his head hanging forward upon his
chest: the scene seemed to move with an intolerable slowness, and
to him her attitude of detachment was unspeakably sad. It was as if
she spoke from a great distance—as if she were a ghost fading
away into dimness. He could not again raise his hands towards her:
he could utter no endearments: her gesture of abnegation had been
too absolute and too determined. With her eyes full upon him she
said:
“You do not love Katya Lascarides: you are as cold to her as a
stone. You love me, and you have ruined all our lives. But it doesn’t
end, it goes on. We fly as far asunder as the poles, and it goes on for
good.”
She stopped as suddenly as she had begun to speak, and what
she had said was so true, and the sudden revelation of what burned
beneath the surface of a creature so small and apparently so cold—
the touch of fierce hunger in her voice, of pained resentment in her
eyes—these things so overwhelmed Robert Grimshaw that for a long
time, still he remained silent. Then suddenly he said:
“Yes; by God, it’s true what you say! I told Ellida long ago that
my business in life was to wait for Katya and to see that you had a
good time.” He paused, and then added quickly: “I’ve lived to see
you in hell, and I’ve waited for Katya till”—he moved one of his
hands in a gesture of despair—“till all the fire’s burned out,” he
added suddenly.
“So that now,” she retorted with a little bitter humour, “what
you’ve got to do is to give Katya a good time and go on waiting for
me.”
“Till when?” he said with a sudden hot eagerness.
“Oh,” she said, “till all the ships that ever sailed come home; till
all the wild-oats that were ever sown are reaped; till the sun sets in
the east and the ice on the poles is all melted away. If you were the
only man in all the world, my dear, I would never look at you again.”
Grimshaw looked at the ground and muttered aimlessly:
“What’s to be done? What’s to be done?”
He went on repeating this like a man stupified beyond the power
of speech and thought, until at last it was as if a minute change of
light passed across the figure of Pauline Leicester—as if the
softness faded out of her face, her colour and her voice, as if, having
for that short interval revealed the depths of her being, she had
closed in again, finally and irrevocably. So that it was with a sort of
ironic and business-like crispness that she said:
“All that’s to be done is the one thing that you’ve got to do.”
“And that?” Robert Grimshaw asked.
“That is to find the man who rang up that number. You’ve got to
do that because you know all about these things.”
“I?” Robert Grimshaw said desolately. “Oh yes, I know all about
these things.”
“You know,” Pauline continued, “she’s very forcible, your Katya.
You should have seen how she spoke to Sir William Wells, until at
last he positively roared with fury, and yet she hadn’t said a single
word except, in the most respectful manner in the world, ‘Wouldn’t it
have been best the very first to discover who the man on the
telephone was?”
 “How did she know about the man on the telephone?” Grimshaw
said. “You didn’t. Sir William told me not to tell you.”
“Oh, Sir William!” she said, with the first contempt that he had
ever heard in her voice. “He didn’t want anybody to know anything.
And when Katya told him that over there they always attempt to cure
a shock of that sort by a shock almost exactly similar, he simply
roared out: ‘Theories! theories! theories!’ That was his motor that
went just now.”
They were both silent for a long time, and then suddenly Robert
Grimshaw said:
“It was I that rang up 4,259 Mayfair.”
Pauline only answered: “Ah!”

And looking straight at the carpet in front of him, Robert

Grimshaw remembered the March night that had ever since weighed
so heavily on them all. He had dined alone at his club. He had sat
talking to three elderly men, and, following his custom, at a quarter
past eleven he had set out to walk up Piccadilly and round the acute
angle of Regent Street. Usually he walked down Oxford Street, down
Park Lane; and so, having taken his breath of air and
circumnavigated, as it were, the little island of wealth that those four
streets encompass, he would lay himself tranquilly in his white bed,
and with Peter on a chair beside his feet, he would fall asleep. But
on that night, whilst he walked slowly, his stick behind his back, he
had been almost thrown down by Etta Stackpole, who appeared to
fall right under his feet, and she was followed by the tall form of
Dudley Leicester, whose face Grimshaw recognized as he looked up
to pay the cabman. Having, as one does on the occasion of such
encounters, with a military precision and an extreme swiftness
turned on his heels—having turned indeed so swiftly that his stick,
which was behind his back, swung out centrifugally and lightly struck
Etta Stackpole’s skirt, he proceeded to walk home in a direction the
reverse of his ordinary one. And at first he thought absolutely nothing
at all. The night was cold and brilliant, and he peeped, as was his
wont, curiously and swiftly into the faces of the passers-by. Just
about abreast of Burlington House he ejaculated: “That sly cat!” as if
he were lost in surprised admiration for Dudley Leicester’s
enterprise. But opposite the Ritz he began to shiver. “I must have
taken a chill,” he said, but actually there had come into his mind the
thought—the thought that Etta Stackpole afterwards so furiously
upbraided him for—that Dudley Leicester must have been carrying
on a long intrigue with Etta Stackpole. “And I’ve married Pauline to
that scoundrel!” he muttered, for it seemed to him that Dudley
Leicester must have been a scoundrel, if he could so play fast and
loose, if he could do it so skilfully as to take in himself, whilst
appearing so open about it.
And then Grimshaw shrugged his shoulders: “Well, it’s no
business of mine,” he said.
He quickened his pace, and walked home to bed; but he was
utterly unable to sleep.
Lying in his white bed, the sheets up to his chin, his face dark in
the blaze of light, from above his head—the only dark object, indeed,
in a room that was all monastically white—his tongue was so dry that
he was unable to moisten his lips with it. He lay perfectly still, gazing
at Peter’s silver collar that, taken off for the night, hung from the
hook on the back of the white door. His lips muttered fragments of
words with which his mind had nothing to do. They bubbled up from
within him as if from the depths of his soul, and at that moment
Robert Grimshaw knew himself. He was revealed to himself for the
first time by words over which he had no control. In this agony and
this prickly sweat the traditions—traditions that are so infectious—of
his English public-school training, of his all-smooth and suppressed
contacts in English social life, all the easy amenities and all the facile
sense of honour that is adapted only to the life of no strain, of no
passions; all these habits Were gone at this touch of torture. And it
was of this intolerably long anguish that he had been thinking when
he had said to Etta Stackpole that in actual truth he was only a
Dago. For Robert Grimshaw, if he was a man of many knowledges,
was a man of no experiences at all, since his connection with Katya
Lascarides, her refusal of him, her shudderings at him, had been so
out of the ordinary nature of things that he couldn’t make any
generalizations from them at all. When he had practically forced
Dudley Leicester upon Pauline, he really had believed that you can
marry a woman you love to your best friend without enduring all the
tortures of jealousy. This sort of marriage of convenience that it was,
was, he knew, the sort of thing that in their sort of life was frequent
and successful enough, and having been trained in the English code
of manners never to express any emotion at all, he had forgotten
that he possessed emotions. Now he was up against it.
He was frightfully up against it. Till now, at least, he had been
able to imagine that Dudley Leicester had at least a devouring
passion for, a quenchless thirst to protect, his wife. It had been a
passion so great and commencing so early that Grimshaw could
claim really only half the credit of having made the match. Indeed,
his efforts had been limited to such influence as he had been able to
bring to bear upon Pauline’s mother, to rather long conversations in
which he had pointed out how precarious, Mrs. Lucas being dead,
would be Pauline’s lot in life. And he had told her at last that he
himself was irretrievably pledged, both by honour and by passion, to
Katya Lascarides. It was on the subsequent day that Pauline had
accepted her dogged adorer.
His passion for Katya Lascarides! He hadn’t till that moment had
any doubt about it. But by then he knew it was gone; it was dead,
and in place of a passion he felt only remorse. And his longing to be
perpetually with Pauline Leicester—as he had told Ellida Langham—
to watch her going through all her life with her perpetual tender
smile, dancing, as it were, a gentle and infantile measure; this, too,
he couldn’t doubt. Acute waves of emotion went through him at the
thought of her—waves of emotion so acute that they communicated
themselves to his physical being, so that it was as if the thought of
Katya Lascarides stabbed his heart, whilst the thought of Pauline
Leicester made his hands toss beneath the sheets. For, looking at
the matter formally, and, as he thought, dispassionately, it had
seemed to him that his plain duty was to wait for Katya Lascarides,
and to give Pauline as good a time as he could. That Pauline would
have this with Dudley Leicester he hadn’t had till the moment of the
meeting in Regent Street the ghost of a doubt, but now ...
 He said: “Good God!” for he was thinking that only the Deity—if
even He—could achieve the impossible, could undo what was done,
could let him watch over Pauline, which was the extent of the
possession of her that he thought he desired, and wait for Katya,
which also was, perhaps, all that he had ever desired to do. The
intolerable hours ticked on. The light shone down on him beside the
bed. At the foot Peter slept, coiled up and motionless. At the head
the telephone instrument, like a gleaming metal flower, with its nickel
corolla and black bell, shone with reflected light. He was accustomed
on mornings when he felt he needed a rest to talk to his friends from
time to time, and suddenly his whole body stirred in bed. The whites
of his eyes gleamed below the dark irises, his white teeth showed,
and as he clasped the instrument to him he appeared, as it were, a
Shylock who clutched to his breast his knife and demanded of the
universe his right to the peace of mind that knowledge at least was
to give him.
He must know; if he was to defend Pauline, to watch over her, to
brood over her, to protect her, he must know what was going on.
This passionate desire swept over him like a flood. There remained
nothing else in the world. He rang up the hotel which, tall, white, and
cold, rises close by where he had seen Etta Stackpole spring from
the cab. He rang up several houses known to him, and, finally, with a
sort of panic in his eyes he asked for Lady Hudson’s number. The
little dog, aroused by his motions and his voice, leapt on to the bed,
and pattering up, gazed wistfully at his face. He reached out his
tongue to afford what consolation he could to the master, whom he
knew to be perturbed, grieved, and in need of consolation, and just
before the tinny sound of a voice reached Grimshaw’s ears
Grimshaw said, his lips close to the mouthpiece, “Get down.” And
when, after he had uttered the words, “Isn’t that Dudley Leicester
speaking?” there was the click of the instrument being rung off,
Robert Grimshaw said to himself grimly, “At any rate, they’ll know
who it was that rung them up.”
But Dudley Leicester hadn’t known; he was too stupid, and the
tinny sound of the instrument had destroyed the resemblance of any
human voice.
 Thus, sitting before Pauline Leicester in her drawing-room, did
Robert Grimshaw review his impressions. And, looking back on the
whole affair, it seemed to present himself to him in those terms of
strong light, of the unreal sound of voices on the telephone, and of
pain, of unceasing pain that had never “let up” at any rate from the
moment when, having come up from the country with Katya’s kisses
still upon his lips, he had found Pauline in his dining-room, and had
heard that Dudley Leicester didn’t know.
He remained seated, staring, brooding at the carpet just before
Pauline’s feet, and suddenly she said: “Oh, Robert, what did you do
it for?”
He rose up suddenly and stood over her, and when he held both
her small hands between his own, “You’d better,” he said—“it’ll be
better for both you and me—put upon it the construction that shows
the deepest concern for you.”
And suddenly from behind their backs came the voice of Katya
Lascarides.
“Well,” she said, “Robert knows everything. Who is the man that
rang up 4,259 Mayfair?”
Robert Grimshaw hung his head for a moment, and then:
“I did,” he said.
Katya only answered, “Ah!” Then, very slowly, she came over
and put one hand on Pauline’s shoulder. “Oh, you poor dear,” she
exclaimed, and then to Robert: “Then you’d better come and tell him
so. I’ll stake my new hat to my professional reputation that it’ll put
him on to his legs at once.”
And with an air of taking him finally under her wing, she
conducted him down the passage to Dudley Leicester’s room.

In the dining-room Pauline stood for a long time looking down at

her fingers that rested upon the tablecloth. The air was full of little
noises—the clitter of milk-cans, the monotonous sound of water
pulsing continuously from the mains, the voices of two nurses as
they wheeled their charges home from the Park. The door-bell rang,
but no one disturbed her. With the light falling on her hair, absolutely
motionless, she looked down at her fingers on the white cloth and
smiled faintly.

II

IN the long, dark room where Dudley Leicester still sprawled in his
deep chair, Katya stopped Robert Grimshaw near the door.
“I’ll ask him to ask you his question,” she said, “and you’ll
answer it in as loud a voice as you can. That’ll cure him. You’ll see. I
don’t suppose you expected to see me here.”
“I didn’t expect it,” he answered, “but I know why you have
come.”
“Well,” she said, “if he isn’t cured, you’ll be hanging round him
for ever.”
“Yes, I suppose I shall be hanging round him for ever,” he
answered.
“And more than that, you’ll be worrying yourself to death over it.
I can’t bear you to worry, Toto,” she said. She paused for a long
minute and then she scrutinized him closely.
“So it was you who rang him up on the telephone?” she said. “I
thought it was, from the beginning.”
“Oh, don’t let’s talk about that any more,” Grimshaw said; “I’m
very tired; I’m very lonely. I’ve discovered that there are things one
can’t do—that I’m not the man I thought I was. It’s you who are
strong and get what you want, and I’m only a meddler who muddles
and spoils. That’s the moral of the whole thing. Take me on your own
terms and make what you can of me. I am too lonely to go on alone
any more. I’ve come to give myself up. I went down to Brighton to
give myself up to you on condition that you cured Dudley Leicester.
Now I just do it without any conditions whatever.”
 She looked at him a little ironically, a little tenderly.
“Oh, well, my dear,” she said, “we’ll talk about that when he’s
cured. Now come.”
She made him stand just before Leicester’s sprawled-out feet,
and going round behind the chair, resting her hands already on
Leicester’s hair in preparation for bending down to make, near his
ear, the suggestion that he should put his question, she looked up at
Robert Grimshaw.
“You consent,” she said, with hardly a touch of triumph in her
voice, “that I should live with you as my mother lived with my father?”
And at Robert Grimshaw’s minute gesture of assent: “Oh, well, my
dear,” she continued quite gently, “it’s obvious to me that you’re more
than touched by this little Pauline of ours. I don’t say that I resent it. I
don’t suggest that it makes you care for me any less than you should
or did, but I’m sure, perfectly sure, of the fact such as it is, and I’m
sure, still more sure, that she cares extremely for you. So that ...”
She had been looking down at Dudley Leicester’s forehead, but she
looked up again into Robert Grimshaw’s eyes. “I think, my dear,” she
said slowly, “as a precaution, I think you cannot have me on those
terms; I think you had better”—she paused for the fraction of a
minute—“marry me,” and her fingers began to work slowly upon
Dudley Leicester’s brows. There was the least flush upon her
cheeks, the least smile round the corners of her lips, she heaved the
ghost of a sigh.
“So that you get me both ways,” Robert Grimshaw said; and his
hands fell desolately open at his side.
“Every way and altogether,” she answered.
 EPISTOLARY EPILOGUE

“IT was a summer evening four years later when, upon the sands of
one of our most fashionable watering-places, a happy family group,
consisting of a buxom mother and several charming children, might
have been observed to disport itself. Who can this charming matron
be, and who these lovely children, designated respectively Robert,
Dudley, Katya, and Ellida?
“And who is this tall and robust gentleman who, wearing across
the chest of his white cricketing flannel the broad blue ribbon of His
Majesty’s Minister for Foreign Affairs, bearing in one hand
negligently the Times of the day before yesterday and in the other a
pastoral rake, approaches from the hayfields, and, with an indulgent
smile, surveys the happy group? Taking from his mouth his pipe—for
in the dolce far niente of his summer vacation, when not called upon
by his duties near the Sovereign at Windsor, he permits himself the
relaxation of the soothing weed—he remarks:
“‘The Opposition fellows have lost the by-election at Camber.’
“Oblivious of his pipe, the charming matron casts herself upon
his neck, whilst the children dance round him with cries of
congratulation, and the trim nurses stand holding buckets and
spades with expressions of respectful happiness upon their
countenances. Who can this be?
“And who, again, are these two approaching along the sands
with happy and contented faces—the gentleman erect, olive-
skinned, and, since his wife has persuaded him to go clean-shaven,
appearing ten years younger than when we last saw him; the lady
dark and tall, with the first signs of matronly plumpness just
appearing upon her svelte form? They approach and hold out their
hands to the happy Cabinet Minister with attitudes respectively of
manly and ladylike congratulation, whilst little Robert and little Katya,
uttering joyful cries of ‘Godmama’ and ‘Godpapa!’ dive into their
pockets for chocolates and the other presents that they are
accustomed to find there.
“Who can these be? Our friend the reader will have already
guessed. And so, with a moisture at the contemplation of so much
happiness bedewing our eyes, we lay down the pen, pack up the
marionettes into their box, ring down the curtain, and return to our
happy homes, where the wives of our bosoms await us. That we
may meet again, dear reader, is the humble and pious wish of your
attached friend, the writer of these pages.”

Thus, my dear ——, you would have me end this book, after I
have taken an infinite trouble to end it otherwise. No doubt, also, you
would have me record how Etta Hudson, as would be inevitably the
case with such a character, eventually became converted to Roman
Catholicism, and ended her days under the direction of a fanatical
confessor in the practice of acts of the most severe piety and
mortification, Jervis, the butler of Mr. Dudley Leicester, you would
like to be told, remained a humble and attached dependent in the
service of his master; whilst Saunders, Mr. Grimshaw’s man, thinking
himself unable to cope with the duties of the large establishment in
Berkeley Square which Mr. Grimshaw and Katya set up upon their
marriage, now keeps a rose-clad hostelry on the road to Brighton.
But we have forgotten Mr. Held! Under the gentle teaching of Pauline
Leicester he became an aspirant for Orders in the Church of
England, and is now, owing to the powerful influence of Mr. Dudley
Leicester, chaplain to the British Embassy at St. Petersburg.
But since, my dear ——, all these things appear to me to be
sufficiently indicated in the book as I have written it, I must confess
that these additions, inspired as they are by you—but how much
better they would have been had you actually written them! these
additions appear to me to be ugly, superfluous, and disagreeable.
The foxes have holes, the birds of the air have nests, and you,
together with the great majority of British readers, insist upon having
a happy ending, or, if not a happy ending, at least some sort of an
ending. This is a desire, like the desire for gin-and-water or any other
comforting stimulant, against which I have nothing to say. You go to
books to be taken out of yourself, I to be shown where I stand. For
me, as for you, a book must have a beginning and an end. But
whereas for you the end is something arbitrarily final, such as the
ring of wedding-bells, a funeral service, or the taking of a public-
house, for me—since to me a novel is the history of an “affair”—
finality is only found at what seems to me to be the end of that
“affair.” There is in life nothing final. So that even “affairs” never really
have an end as far as the lives of the actors are concerned. Thus,
although Dudley Leicester was, as I have tried to indicate, cured
almost immediately by the methods of Katya Lascarides, it would be
absurd to imagine that the effects of his short breakdown would not
influence the whole of his after-life. These effects may have been to
make him more conscientious, more tender, more dogged, less self-
centred; may have been to accentuate him in a great number of
directions. For no force is ever lost, and the ripple raised by a stone,
striking upon the bank of a pool, goes on communicating its force for
ever and ever throughout space and throughout eternity. But for our
vision its particular “affair” ends when, striking the bank, it
disappears. So for me the “affair” of Dudley Leicester’s madness
ended at the moment when Katya Lascarides laid her hands upon
his temple. In the next moment he would be sane, the ripple of
madness would have disappeared from the pond of his life. To have
gone on farther would have been, not to have ended this book, but to
have begun another, which—the fates being good—I hope to write. I
shall profit, without doubt, by your companionship, instruction, and
great experience. You have called me again and again an
Impressionist, and this I have been called so often that I suppose it
must be the fact. Not that I know what an Impressionist is.
Personally, I use as few words as I may to get any given effect, to
render any given conversation. You, I presume, do the same. You
don’t, I mean, purposely put in more words than you need—more
words, that is to say, than seem to you to satisfy your desire for
expression. You would probably render a conversation thus:
“Extending her hand, which was enveloped in creamy tulle, Mrs.
Sincue exclaimed, ‘Have another cup of tea, dear?’ ‘Thanks—two
lumps,’ her visitor rejoined. ‘So I hear Colonel Hapgood has eloped
with his wife’s French maid!’”
I should probably set it down:
“After a little desultory conversation, Mrs. Sincue’s visitor,
dropping his dark eyes to the ground, uttered in a voice that betrayed
neither exultation nor grief, ‘Poor old Hapgood’s cut it with Nanette.
Don’t you remember Nanette, who wore an apron with lace all round
it and those pocket things, and curled hair?’”
This latter rendering, I suppose, is more vague in places, and in
other places more accentuated, but I don’t see how it is more
impressionist. It is perfectly true you complain of me that I have not
made it plain with whom Mr. Robert Grimshaw was really in love, or
that when he resigned himself to the clutches of Katya Lascarides,
whom personally I extremely dislike, an amiable but meddlesome
and inwardly conceited fool was, pathetically or even tragically,
reaping the harvest of his folly. I omitted to add these comments,
because I think that for a writer to intrude himself between his
characters and his reader is to destroy to that extent all the illusion of
his work. But when I found that yourself and all the moderately quick-
minded, moderately sane persons who had read the book in its
original form failed entirely to appreciate what to me has appeared
as plain as a pikestaff—namely, that Mr. Grimshaw was extremely in
love with Pauline Leicester, and that, in the first place, by marrying
her to Dudley Leicester, and, in the second place, by succumbing to
a disagreeable personality, he was committing the final folly of this
particular affair—when I realized that these things were not plain, I
hastened to add those passages of explicit conversation, those
droppings of the eyelids and tragic motions of the hands, that you
have since been good enough to say have made the book.
Heaven knows, one tries enormously hard to be simple, to be
even transparently simple, but one falls so lamentably between two
stools. Thus, another reader, whom I had believed to be a person of
some intellect, has insisted to me that in calling this story “A Call” I
must have had in my mind something mysterious, something
mystical; but what I meant was that Mr. Robert Grimshaw, putting the
ear-piece to his ear and the mouthpiece to his mouth, exclaimed,
after the decent interval that so late at night the gentleman in charge
of the exchange needs for awaking from slumber and grunting
something intelligible—Mr. Grimshaw exclaimed, “Give me 4259
Mayfair.” This might mean that Lady Hudson was a subscriber to the
Post Office telephone system, but it does not mean in the least that
Mr. Grimshaw felt religious stirrings within him or “A Call” to do
something heroic and chivalrous, such as aiding women to obtain
the vote.
So that between those two classes of readers—the one who
insist upon reading into two words the whole psychology of moral
revivalism, and the others who, without gaining even a glimpse of
meaning, will read or skip through fifty or sixty thousand words, each
one of which is carefully selected to help on a singularly plain tale—
between these two classes of readers your poor Impressionist falls
lamentably enough to the ground. He sought to point no moral. His
soul would have recoiled within him at the thought of adorning by
one single superfluous word his plain tale. His sole ambition was to
render a little episode—a small “affair” affecting a little circle of
people—exactly as it would have happened. He desired neither to
comment nor to explain. Yet here, commenting and explaining, he
takes his humble leave, having packed the marionettes into the
case, having pulled the curtain down, and wiping from his troubled
eyes the sensitive drops of emotion. This may appear to be an end,
but it isn’t. He is, still, your Impressionist, thinking what the devil—
what the very devil—he shall do to make his next story plain to the
most mediocre intelligence!

THE END
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