596 THE CLASS STRUGGLE IN THE TORRENT OF THE REVOLUTION 599 Letters from Women The most interesting letters that receive come from women.
These letters, concerned with the impressions of the stormy present, are filled with anguish, resentment and wrath, but they are not apathetic like those of men, in every woman letter is the cry of a living soul, tortured by the countless woes of the horrible times in which we live.
They produce the impression of having been written by one woman, by the Mother of Life, by her, who has given the world all races and peoples, by her, who has borne and who will bear in her womb all genius, by her who has helped man to convert coarse animal instinct into the tender ecstasy of love.
These letters are the cry of a being which has called poetry into life, which has inspired art, and which is continually tortured by the unquenchable desire for beauty, life and joy.
these mad blood and filth stained days are the great birthdays of a new Russia, It is a painful birth, amid the crashing overthrow of old forms of life, under the rotting ruins of the dirty caverns in which the people have been struggling for breath for three hundred years, in which they became hateful, and unhappy, in the midst of this outburst of all the degradation and vileness that were stored up within us under the leaden weight of monarchism in this eruption of a whole volcano of defilement the old Russian people, the self satisfied idler and dreamer is dying. And in his place the bold, healthy workman, the creator of a new life has come.
The new Russian is not attractive, less attractive than ever before. Still fearful for the permanence of his victory, still unable to fully enjoy the fruits of his liberation, he sheathes himself with an armor of petty hatreds to assure himself, over and over again of the incredible truth, that he is really free.
How dearly he himself, and the objects of his experiments are paying for this assurance!
But life, that severe and merciless teacher, will soon bind him once more with necessity chain, will force him to work, and in united labor, he will forget all the small, slavish and shameful instincts that still hold him in their power.
New men and women will be created by new conditionsnew conditions create new men and women.
And out of the sorrow of today will come new men and women, who know not the misery of slavery, no longer disfigured by oppression, men and women whose own freedom makes them incapable of oppressing their fellow men.
Let us meet the new year with the confidence that man will learn to love work and to understand its meaning. Work that is done with love, is not slavery, but creation.
When man has once learned to love work for its own sake, the world and all its glories will be his.
The letters to which refer are full of the wails of mothers over the corruption of mankind, over the fact that it is becoming cruel, savage, vulgar and dishonorable, and that morality is being coarsened. These letters are full of curses against the Bolsheviki, the peasants and the workers, invoking all punishment, all horrors, all tortures upon them. Hang them all, shoot them all, annihilate them all, demand the women, mothers and nurses of all heroes and saints, all geniuses, all criminals, all rogues and all honorable men, the mother of a Christ as well as of a Judas, of Ivan the Terrible as well as of the shameless Machiavelli, of the gentle, affectionate Francis of Assisi, of the gloomy enemy of every joy, Savanarola, the mother of Philip II. who laughed but once in his life when he heard the news of the Bartholemew massacre, the greatest crime of Catharine de Medici, who also was a woman and a mother and in her way was concerned with the welfare of many men.
Hating death, annihilation and atrocities, the mother, the object of man greatest reverence, she who leads him to high and