Jasper County Democrat, Volume 21, Number 8, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 27 April 1918 — LIFE PRIMITIVE AND RUGGED [ARTICLE]

LIFE PRIMITIVE AND RUGGED

Scenes on Bosom pf Russia’s Mighty River Cannot Be Duplicated Anywhere on Earth. The days on (the Volga are as alike as the white towns strung on the Volga chain, and all laden with a sense of life, sluggish and primal and potential. The scent of pines, of new-mown hay, of drying nets, and the fragrance of lilies; brawny red-shirted sailort shouting and splashing each other with water as they scrub the decks; the whistling of grain steamers; the sound of hammers from barges building along the shore; anchor chains rattling as we drop into the wharf where fishermen are unloading their shining catch. It is a robust river life, not familiar, but transposed into strange keys and staged largely. The rafts seemed the most essentially Russian part of the Volga. We had seen them before. Gargantuan yellow logs, as delicious looking as taffy, dragged from a forest in Tver and bound together with saplings, each raft bearing a tiny hut for the families who make the journey with the rafts to the sea. Now we met them on the river, peopled with rollicking figures; who balanced themselves with long poles and laughed and shouted unintelligible cries to us as the surge of thp,steamer threatened their foothold. The trackers, borilaki, we never say; debased men of herculean strength, muscles knotting in their hairy throats, thews straining like horses against the dead, weight, of the barges as Rlepin had painted them. They have passed with the sails. But the other figures—on the rafts, in the fishing boats —are their brothers. And never have I felt life emerging so freshly from the black mold.—Olive Gilbreath in the Yale Review.