A Remarkable Book by a Russian Refugee "Beasts, Mes anp Gons." By Ferdinand Ossendowski. Published by P. Dutton & Ca., New Fork. $3.00, 325 pp.
By this ungainly title a human document is covered as romantic as anything in fiction. The exodus of the upper classes from Russia under the spur of a drastic revolution across the wildernesses that were the only path of safety must have been marked by many first class adventures which will never be adequately told. But the Polish Professor who has written this book is a trained observer, had indeed been appointed by the fallen Government to survey the very regions in which he was driven to wander, and in these pages we can look, as through a window, on a world. of facts of which his story no doubt is typical.
Part one has all the glamour of "Robinson Crusoe'? without the in-prospective passages. The sheer excitement dies down in the remainder of the book, but the narrative becomes a series of extraordinarily vivid pictures, not of the far West with which the 'Movies' have made us depressingly familiar, but with the far east of Central Asia, the mysterious regions of Mongolia and Tibet. Driven clean off the main tracks as the author was, he has been able to give details of geography and natural tis-tory which are very welcome... Besides this information,' the customs of the Mongolian tribes, the mummeries and mysteries of their religion, are related by one who had unusual chances of seeing the inside of things. He introduces us to fortune tellers, prisoners, and the incarnate Buddha himself.
But income ways the most enthralling interest in the book is the insight it gives with the psychology of Revolution. The writer was in intimate contact with the Baron Ungern the "bloody general," son of crusades, but convert to Buddhis, fanatic and fatalist. For him and the company of refugee officers who either cooperated with him or conspired against him, the foundations of life were so s¢riously shaken that they thought and acted eccentrically, and into the vacancies of their mind created by civil war and exile, influences from the primitive world of Mother Asia seemed to rush and take possession.
The author gives little room to comment in comparison with his experiences and observation, but in one sentence (p.296) he sums up his hidden reflexions: "Awakened Asia is full of enigmas, but it 1s also full of answers to the questions eet by the destiny of humankind. This
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.