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Pantherskin.

    Mogador
    3. Proletcult
    On the walls some crude squares of painting in black and white, a man with a pick, a man with a shovel, a man with a gun. The shadows are so exaggerated they look like gingerbread men. Certainly the man who painted them had not done many figures before in his life. The theater is a long tin shed that used to be a cabaret show of some sort, the audience mostly workmen and soldiers in white tunics open at the neck, and women in white muslin dresses. Many of the men and all the children are barefoot and few of the women wear stockings. When the curtain goes up romping and chattering stop immediately; everyone is afraid of missing a word of what is said on the stage. It’s a foolish enough play, an Early-Victorian sob-story, about a blind girl and a good brother and a wicked brother, and a bad marquis and a frequently fainting marquise, but the young people who play it—none of them ever acted before the Red Army entered Batum three months ago—put such conviction into it that one can’t quite hold aloof from the very audible emotion of the audience during the ticklish moments of the dagger-fight between the frail good brother and the wicked and hearty elder brother who has carried off the little blind girl against her will. And when at last all wrongs are righted, and the final curtain falls on felicity, one can’t help but feel that the lives of these people who crowd out through the dilapidated ex-beergarden in front of the theater have somehow been compensated for the bareness of the hungry livingrooms and barracks they go home to. In the stamping and the abandon with which the two heroes fought was perhaps an atom of some untrammelled expression, of some gaudy bloodcurdling ritual which might perhaps replace in people’s hopes and lives the ruined dynasty of Things.
    4. Bees
    The secretary of the commission for schools recently set up in Batum was a blackhaired man, hawknosed, hollow-eyed, with a three-day growth of beard. Undernourishment and overwork had made his eyes a little bloodshot and given them a curious intense stare. He had a sheaf of papers in front of him among which he scribbled an occasional hasty word, as if pressed for time. He spoke French with difficulty, digging it up word by word from some long-forgotten layer of his mind. He talked about the new school-system the Bolsheviki were introducing in the new republic of Adjaria, of which Batum was the capital, explained how already children’s summer colonies had been started in several villages, how every effort was being made to get equipment ready to open the primary and secondary schools at the end of September.
    â€”All education is to be by work, nothing without actual touch; he spread his hands, that were angular tortured painful hands, wide, and closed them with a gesture of laying hold onto some slippery reality. The words he used, too, were concrete, dug out of the soil—From the very first, work.… In summer in the fields, the children must cultivate gardens, raise rabbits, bees, chickens, learn how to take care of cattle. They must go into the forests and learn about trees. Everything they must learn by touch. Then in the winter they must study their native languages and Esperanto.… Here there will be schools for Armenians, Greeks, Muslims, Georgians, Russians … and the rudiments of sociology, arithmetic, woodworking, cooking. For in our republic every man must be able to attend to his wants himself. That will be the primary education. You see, nothing by theory, everything by practice. Then the secondary education will be more specialized, preparation for trades and occupations. Then those who finish the high schools can go to the universities to do independent work in the directions they have chosen. You see, merit will be according to work, not by theories or examinations. And all through there will be instruction in music and gymnastics and the theater; the