conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me a description for a story titled Among the Russians about English, Jan, Morris with the genre: Travel, Asia.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: "There is no travel writer working today in English who possesses such a remarkable combination of the observant and the lyric gifts--the most poetic of us all."-- Jan Morris
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the first five paragraphs for this story.. Start with the sentence 'Among the Russians
  Yet when I turned to the back of the journal, the names and biographies of its contributors were boldly inscribed there, including Volodya's'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Among the Russians
  Yet when I turned to the back of the journal, the names and biographies of its contributors were boldly inscribed there, including Volodya's. I was amazed.
  I gazed round the circle of callow men and soft-eyed girls, and thought of the KGB officer. They looked fearfully isolated. They lived in a garden of ideas, passions, possibilities still unfrustrated. They talked with all the brightness of their long, unknown futures. It was heady and irresponsible stuff, and reminded me of nights too long past when groups of students (I was one) in London perfected the world with the shake of an intellectual kaleidoscope. One man here was reading out some politically risqué poetry, another planning a dissident sculpture exhibition. The room vibrated with a half-adolescent excitement at the forbidden and the initiate. I felt afraid for them. Theirs was an energy which had tried for a better life in 1825, 1905, 1917; they were today's revolutionaries. But instead of dogma and ruthlessness, they wielded poetry. Sometimes, listening to them, I felt as if the policies of the Kremlin were no more than the wish-fulfilments of patriarchal old men trying to keep the world as they had known it. But it was impossible, I thought, that the KGB were ignorant of Volodya's journal and of its privately trumpeted contributors. And Volodya must know that they knew. Like the tsarist police before them, they preferred not to drive the whole apparatus of dissent underground, but to watch and control it. While the writers' refusal to conceal their names was a statement of guiltlessness. I assumed, also, that we were bugged.
  True words or images in the Soviet Union are precious and powerful precisely because they are forbidden. 'A word of truth dropped into Russia,' wrote de Custine as long ago as 1839, 'is like a spark landing in a keg of gunpowder.' In such an atmosphere art becomes both more valuable and more dangerous. Small wonder, then, that canvases of Malevich and others have been lying unexhibited in the basements of museums for more than half a century. And when I visited Leningrad's Russian Museum, I was amazed to see in preparation an inaugural exhibition for Larionov, whose works have been familiar to the West since 1906.
  In just such a way the dissidents themselves disturb the Kremlin not because of their numbers, which are tiny, but because they embody a truth. This truth accuses and makes guilty the whole system. It expresses what everybody in fact knows: that Communism is smaller than life. It dissolves the myth of the Soviet paradise. And for this it cannot be forgiven.
  I remembered with irony the unheard clamour of writers and painters in the West, whose honesties were two a penny; meanwhile the Kremlin was turning art and thought here into the most precious commodity of all, had recognized its catalytic power and paid it the compliment of persecution.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me two more paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The woman was at my elbow. She was heavy and dark, grossly motherly. She shepherded me into her hut away from the cold, and brewed me tea. The hut was furnished only with a bed and a stove. Her children had gone away to the cities, she said, that's where everybody went now. And the tombs? Her mouth flashed with gold teeth. 'Yes, my family's all over there.' She shook her head. 'But you see how it is, everything falling. Somebody should renovate it. It's a historical place, you see, centuries old. It's not death that's a shame. We all die. It's the indignity of it....'
  I could think of nothing comforting to say. The place fell into my journey like a monstrous caesura, violated, meaningless.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the last five paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Yet I read the diary like a valediction. I was sure it would be impounded. Even as I did so, I was reliving places and people half forgotten, until these descriptions seemed to be all I had to take away with me. I passionately wanted to keep them. Without them, I felt, I might not believe that I had entered the Soviet Union at all. And there are times even now when this land reverts to the enigma which hung on my classroom wall when I was a boy—Mercator's projection, its proportions distorted—until it seems to be less a physical country than an area of mingled tenderness and unease in my mind, which I call Russia.
  At last the shoulders of the immigration officer (if that is what he was) heaved with a kind of dejected relief. 'It's getting late.'
  It would be a gross and pedantic superstition to venerate any form of society in itself, apart from the safety, breadth, or sweetness which it lent to individual happiness.
  THIS JOURNEY by car through European Russia took place in the summer and fall of 1980 towards the end of the grayest era in Soviet history: the long, stagnant reign of President Brezhnev. At that time almost nobody—in either the Soviet Union or the West—predicted what was soon to happen. Now this journey, unusual in its day, seems to belong to remote history.
  Yet the fascination of a people's character survives political change. In this sense the Russia I encountered then is recognizable today. Brezhnev's USSR, and Stalin's before it, looms like a haunting hinterland behind the lives of ordinary Russians, who remain the offspring of the complex world into which I blundered twenty years ago.