I have no money. I need 42 marks per diem, excluding travel and the vast tips a visitor is obliged to leave. I am experiencing incredible things. Almost more than I can put down, in terms of fullness and intensity. My illness is almost gone. I eat black bread and onions and for 3 or 4 days of the week, live like a peasant. The remaining days, admittedly, I spend in the best hotels I can find. I spent a week tramping on foot through Chuvash villages. I have been to Minsk and Byelorussia. I am now on my way to Baku, Tbilisi, Odessa, the whole Ukraine. A few newspapers greeted my arrivaclass="underline" “Revolutionary writer comes to Russia.” Reviews of my books continue to appear. I have avoided doing anything officially sanctioned, even though most doors were open to me.
I live in the continual fear that it’s all too much for the company. It’s been paying me money since JULY and has received no copy. Perhaps you could set their minds at ease — and mine too!
Poland was in such an abject political and human state, that I’ve put off writing about it until I’m on my way back. I’m sorry to say that blasé German correspondents are not always wrong. For now, silence is the best policy for me.
There’s no doubt that a new world is being born in Russia. For all my skepticism, I am happy to be able to witness it. It’s not possible to live without having been here, it’s as if you had stayed at home during the war.
Write and tell me what your dear wife is doing, and my friend Jan. I carry his picture in my wallet — any other photograph would be sentimental. Is he well?
In old friendship I shake your hand, and remain as ever
Your Joseph Roth
Picard didn’t reply. I feel offended.
I haven’t seen a copy of the newspaper for months. My permanent address is:
Moscow, Hotel Bolshaya Moskovskaya till October,
Thereafter c/o German Embassy for Joseph Roth, Frankfurter Zeitung
Moscow Leontyevsky pereulok 10
38. To Bernard von Brentano
Odessa, 26 September 1926
Dear friend,
you must be puzzled and irked and probably less puzzled than irked. Calm! Forgiveness! Today is the first day I have given myself off. Not that I have deserved it. I really ought to walk around and gather material and order it in my head, just exactly as I have on all my other days. I have never worked as hard as I have in Russia; and you know I have never been one for idleness. I shall be staying in Odessa for another two weeks; then through the rest of the Ukraine. At the end of October I’ll be in Moscow again. You could write me Hotel Bolshaya Moskovskaya ca. 14 October, or here, Odessa, Hotel London, but only by airmail. An airmail letter takes 5 days — unless the censor happens to take an interest in it.
I feel as though I’ve been gone from Europe for six months. I’ve experienced so much here, and all of it strange to me. Never has it been brought home to me so strongly that I’m a European, a man of the Mediterranean if you will, a Roman and a Catholic, a Humanist and a Renaissance man. Everything I told you about myself in Paris was wrong, and a lot of what you told me was right. It’s a boon that I’ve come to Russia. I should never have gotten to know myself otherwise. Finally I have the subject for the book that only I can write, and will maybe write while in Russia. It will be the novel I’ve waited for for so long,1 and with me a couple of other people in the West as well. You would be amazed if I were to tell you the story. But you will get to read it in a year’s time.
I hope my articles have got through and been printed. Write and tell me, if you will. The most important of them are still to come.
You know I’m a celebrity here. I enclose a clipping of an interview with me — it’s as if I were an American shoe-polish king, or something. I am mobbed by journalists wherever I go. They don’t always get things right, but I’d be the last person to object to a false echo, so long as it’s just an echo. (Jesuit.)
Everything Toller2 and Kisch have said about Russia is wrong. And all the attacks are not just unfair, but misplaced. It’s like viewing a human residence through the eyes of a fly. I’m not talking about a positive or negative view of the Soviet states — I want to show you that both the positives and the negatives are completely wrong, because they are political. The issue here is not politics, the issue is culture, religion, metaphysics, spirituality. You will understand what I mean if you recall our conversations about Russia, and my exposition, and if you see the situation diagrammatically.
In other words, I am looking in a completely different direction. Russia is somewhere else. I was like a mariner from antiquity or the Middle Ages, setting off for the Spice Islands, in the persuasion that the earth was flat. If you know it’s round, you know how mistaken the voyage was.
It’s incredibly difficult to write newspaper pieces about Russia, unless you stick to processing other people’s research, like Kisch. I won’t do that at any price. You were right about that too, when you said the time for that sort of journalism was over. I’m glad you were right on those important things, and I was wrong. That shows me I judged you correctly, which pleases me more than merely being right about something.
I’d like to know what you’re working on, how you’re living. The Frankfurter Zeitung is nowhere to be found here, of course, unlike the Vossische, or the Berliner Tageblatt. Which means it has an incredibly exalted, if somewhat legendary, reputation.
Give my regards to Dr. Guttmann, I think about him sometimes and how useful his bitter clarity would be in reportages from Moscow. Scheffer from the Berliner Tageblatt enjoys an unfair prominence, as the one-eyed among the blind.
Regards to your wife, regards to Dr. Guttmann, and don’t forget
Your old
Joseph Roth
1. The novel I’ve waited for for so long: perhaps the first glimmerings of Job?
2. Toller: Ernst Toller (1893–1939), prominent left-wing playwright, poet, essayist. Leader of the Bavarian revolution in 1918, for which he was imprisoned for five years. It was news of the despondent Toller’s suicide in New York that prompted Roth’s final collapse in May 1939.
39. To Benno Reifenberg
Odessa, 1 October 1926
Dear Mr. Reifenberg,
it’s hard to describe my pleasure on receiving your letter. A day ago I got an old letter (August) from Mr. Geck, asking — oh so discreetly — whether I was ill, why they had heard nothing from me. I gathered from that that 2 pieces I dispatched from Poland, and 1 letter and one book review have failed to arrive. It turns out that the Poles have an occasional, but then all the more inflexible, censorship. I wrote back right away, you’ll see the letter, just asking for confirmation of arrival. I’d had a nightmare, namely that my articles on Russia were all appearing in the Bäderblatt.1 It was a hideously real nightmare, my articles were on page 2, column 4, over a large ad for Bad Nauheim, and I was cross that the photograph of the Kremlin had been stuck on page 4. You said just one word: “misplaced!”—dolorously, as if on stage. Only one creature is endowed with dreams like that, namely a reporter on the Frankfurter Zeitung. I’m sure I’m more afraid of your restraint than you are of a scoop. What a happy awakening when your copies arrived, with that dignified, if rather flattering byline. Thank you! But isn’t it too chancy to settle on a particular day? What if I have no ideas, can’t write anything for 3 weeks? Have you got all 7 articles? The tenth is already done, I keep putting off making a fair copy, it’s torture for me, I have to keep thinking about the blond sub with the academic qualification — geology, wasn’t it? I dread misprints, two jumped up at me just now like fleas from the type.