[Vwoolf] 'The Ukraine: 1909' by VS-W

[Stephen Barkway]

'Bruised in limb after those fifty miles of crazy progress, I beheld at last what seemed to be the gates of a typical French chateau.  A more surprising edifice to find in the middle of the Russian steppe it would be hard to imagine.  Gone was the squalor of the poor villages; here was the sumptuous establishment of an eighteenth-century grand seigneur . . . For the moment I was baffled by this aping of England in the Russian steppe.  It was not the England of to-day that they had achieved, but the imitation of an England that they might have gleaned from the pages of Ouida. . . .  It was a self-contained world, on whose fringes hovered and cringed the peasants--in the foreground rioted this strange semi-English, semi-exotic extravagance--in the background brooded the vowed hatred of Russia.'

V. Sackville-West
'The Ukraine: 1909' from Life and Letters December 1928, pp. 575-579
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