Let me start by searching for information about this book.Let me find more details on the contents and the 1914 edition.I have enough to write a well-grounded article.
The Kind Eye (Russian: Глаз добрый, Glaz dobryĭ) is a collection of essays, sketches, stories, ballads, poems and fairy tales by the Russian painter, writer and public figure Nicholas Roerich (Nikolai Konstantinovich Rerikh, 1874–1947). It first appeared in Moscow in 1914 as the opening volume of a planned multi-volume collected works, and was reissued in the Soviet Union in 1991. The title is taken from one of the book’s best-known short essays, which sets out an ethical and aesthetic outlook that came to characterize Roerich’s thought as a whole.
Author and context
Nicholas Roerich was born on October 9, 1874, in Saint Petersburg, and died on December 13, 1947, in Naggar, India. He is described as a Russian painter, writer, archaeologist, theosophist, philosopher and public figure. Artistically, he became known as a painter of Russia’s ancient past, a subject compatible with his lifelong interest in archaeology. He also worked as a stage designer for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, with his best-known designs being for Borodin’s Prince Igor and for Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring (1913).
The Kind Eye belongs to the early, pre-revolutionary phase of Roerich’s career, when he was associated with the World of Art circle, and when his literary work ran parallel to his paintings on themes of ancient Rus’ and Slavic antiquity. It predates the Himalayan period and the later esoteric writings associated with Roerich and his wife Helena. The book should not be confused with later commercial Russian compilations that bear a similar title, such as the “Agni Yoga. Glaz dobryĭ. Legends, Parables, Fairy Tales” volume (AST), which combines Agni Yoga material by Helena Roerich with selections of Nicholas Roerich’s writings. That later edition includes Nicholas Roerich’s articles under the general title “Glaz dobryĭ,” along with his legends, parables and fairy tales.
The 1914 edition and its fate
The cover of the original edition reads: Roerich, Collected Works, Book One, published by I. D. Sytin, Moscow, 1914. The collected works were planned in several volumes, but the outbreak of the world war prevented their completion. The first volume then in effect went underground, becoming the possession of rare bibliophiles. Later publishers describe the 1914 edition as extremely rare, and as volume one of a collected works that was never realized because of the First World War.
The introductory commentary to the modern reissue stresses the book’s fate as dramatic and, in its way, typical: it shared the lot of many outstanding pre-revolutionary publications, being excluded from the circle of Russian reading for a long time. After the Stalin era, Roerich and his writings began a cautious return to his homeland, and individual works from the unrealized collected edition appeared in periodicals and in various Roerich volumes. The commentary notes that only with the later reissue did the book appear in full, as the author conceived and published it.
Contents and genres
The volume brings together articles, ballads, poems, novellas, biographical and travel sketches, reminiscences of artists, essays and fairy tales. The commentary observes that the first volume, more than any other Roerich publication, is distinguished by an exceptional variety of genres.
The contents list of the 1991 edition and the online Roerich library shows a sequence of pieces, among them:
- Essays and sketches such as “O starine moleniya” (On the antiquity of prayers), “Na kurgane” (On the Burial Mound), “Ikonnyĭ terem” (The Icon Chamber), “Iz Varyag v Greki” / “Po puti iz Varyag v Greki” (On the Way from the Varangians to the Greeks), “Po starine,” “K prirode,” “Spas Neredit͡sky” and “Strannyĭ muzeĭ” (A Strange Museum); the 1991 edition’s contents also list the essay “Glaz dobryĭ” itself.
- Fairy tales and legends including “Zaklyatiya” (Incantations), “Goroda pustynnye” (Desert Cities) and “Granit͡sa t͡sarstva” (The Border of the Kingdom).
- Reminiscences of artists: biographical sketches such as “Dedushka” (Grandfather), and recollections of painters close to Roerich in spirit and creative aims, among them Vrubel, Kuindzhi and Serov.
- Poetry: the cycle of poems “Zaklyatie” was later included in Roerich’s only poetry collection published in his lifetime, Flowers of Morya (Tsvety Morii), which it opens.
- Historical novellas: such as “Ikonnyĭ terem” and “Starinnyĭ sovet,” which show solid professional knowledge of historical material.
A commentator on the reissue remarks that, in turning to the traditional form of the fairy tale, Roerich avoids the temptation of stylization that lies in wait for beginning authors and follows an untrodden, non-traditional path. In these tales the drive of the narrative comes less from plot, which is simple and unadorned, than from inner experience and a thought that possesses the characters. The commentary also emphasizes that the wealth of oral folk legend, reinterpreted and transformed by the artist’s imagination, becomes an integral part of his spiritual world.
The title essay
The title of the book is taken from the essay “Glaz dobryĭ,” chosen deliberately because it formulates the artist’s moral and aesthetic credo. The essay is dated 1913. It opens with the observation that a kind eye is rare, while an evil eye can be found in every house.
Roerich’s argument is built around a remark attributed to the theatre director Konstantin Stanislavski, who is said to require his students to find in each thing not the worst but the best. This maxim became a kind of motto for Roerich. The essay contends that people readily devote energy and eloquence to condemning what they dislike, and tends to be sparing with words of approval. As an illustration, Roerich describes an experiment on a lover of painting who was followed with a watch, which showed that he spent roughly twice as long before pictures he condemned as before those he approved. The conclusion drawn is a call to cultivate joy, to learn to see what is cheerful and beautiful, and to refrain from dwelling on what is unworthy; in this way, the essay holds, a “kind eye” will open.
The theme of attentive, generous perception recurs throughout Roerich’s later thought, in which beauty, culture and the affirmation of the positive are central values.
Later editions
In 1991 the Moscow publishing house Khudozhestvennaya literatura (Fiction Publishers) reprinted the work. It appeared as an author’s collection in the series “Zabytaya kniga” (The Forgotten Book), ISBN 5-280-01599-7, with 224 pages in paperback. That series ran from 1989 to 1993 and was devoted to little-known and rare works, chiefly by Russian authors, that had for various reasons gone unpublished for a long time. The print run of the 1991 edition was 100,000 copies.
The book’s texts have since circulated widely in electronic form on Russian-language Roerich library sites, and individual pieces, notably the title essay, are frequently reprinted in anthologies of Roerich’s philosophical essays. The title has also been borrowed for later composite editions that combine Nicholas Roerich’s literary writings with the Agni Yoga teachings.
Significance
The Kind Eye is a key expression of Roerich’s early literary program: a union of historical imagination, folk legend, art criticism and moral reflection. It documents the author in the years just before the First World War, drawing on archaeology, medieval Russian art and oral tradition, and it contains an early statement of ideas about beauty, memory of the past and the ethics of perception that he developed over the following decades.
