I have just written to Tatarinov, asking him to place an announcement on the 6th or the 7th, in Rul’, that I (name given) am looking for a room with board in a Russian family. Otherwise it would work out too expensive. Unfortunately I left your package on the train. I am ‘in total despair’! In fact, two days ago I took it to the address – which you wrote in a barely audible whisper … You know what I’d like to do now? To watch you slightly curtsy when stepping up from the street to the sidewalk (‘Stop it! …’). I love you so much today that I seem to be writing nonsense.
And here’s what I have noticed so far in Prague: a huge number of cart-horses, and in the shops, signs like when a Frenchman, wanting to show off, puts Russian words in his novel – and shows off illiterately. There’s also a wide river here – under the ice. Here and there areas have been cleared for skating. On each of these ice squares a single boy skates, falling down every minute. Idle passers-by look down at him from the huge ancient bridge, along which horses drag their carts, one after the other. A fat man in a uniform stands at one end of the bridge, and every passer-by must pay him a copper coin for the right to cross to the other side. The custom is old, feudal. The trams are small, russet-flanked, and inside the latest magazines hanging on hooks – for general consumption. Great city?
Yesterday, one professor told me that when his daughter was just a few months old, she often pretended to faint. Later, when she’d grown up a little, he’d scare her like this: he’d sit down, reading; she’d play on the floor. Suddenly he would lower his book, make terrible eyes, wipe his forehead and say slowly: ‘You know, Mashen’ka, I seem to be turning into an eagle …’ She – in tears: ‘Why do things always happen to you when there’s no one in the apartment? …’
Tomorrow at seven I will try to ‘call’ you. It will probably be painful, but I want to hear if only a little edge of your voice. And how will it be in Berlin, my love? Will you come to America with me? Oh, if you only knew how disgusted I am with this poor fit of a life, the fuss about money, the repulsive translations I have to sweat over – and the pennies, the pennies … But I’m bourgeois in everyday things. Kramář’s automobiles, his marble bath, his servants drive me mad … Buffon put on lace cuffs when he sat down to work. I need comforts, you understand, not for the sake of comforts, but so I need not think about them – and can just write, write – and unfurl myself, and explode … But after all, who knows, maybe because I am writing ‘Mr Morn’ sitting in a fur coat, on a prison bed, by the light of a candle-end (this is getting almost poetic), it will turn out still better. I can’t wait to read you the fifth scene.
Do you know that you are my happiness? You are made entirely of tiny arrow-like movements – I love every one of them. Have you ever thought how strangely, how easily our lives have come together? Probably God, bored in Heaven, had his hand in Patience come out, which doesn’t happen often. I love this marvellous quickness in you, as if in your soul there’s a place prepared in advance for my every thought. When Monte Cristo came to the palace he had bought, he noticed, among other things, a small casket on his desk. He said to his majordomo, who’d arrived earlier to arrange everything: ‘There should be gloves in here.’ The man beamed, opened this unremarkable casket and, indeed, there were gloves. I’ve got a bit lost in the image – but somehow this all relates to you and me. You know, I have never trusted anyone as I trust you. In everything enchanted there’s an element of trust.
I am afraid that this has turned out to be a rather stumbling letter. And not completely literate. I have been speaking in iambic pentameter so much lately it’s hard to write prose. Listen: can you call my former apartment some time at midnight or even later? I have also asked the Tatarinovs and the Struves to do this. I want to make the tenants happy.
I kiss you, my happiness – and you cannot stop me …
V.
1924
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[ALS, 2 PP.]
[8 January 1924]
TO: 41, Landhausstr., Berlin W.
[Prague]
8–I–24
Hullo! (slightly short of breath). Gre-etings (quietly and softly, – it’s such a cushion-word).
No, I didn’t manage to call you, my love … But then I received today – finally – your wonderful (stellar!) letter. You know, we are terribly alike … For example, in letters: we both like 1) to slip in foreign words unnoticed, 2) to quote from favourite books, 3) to translate impressions from one sense (for example, vision) to another (for example, taste), 4) to apologize at the end for imaginary nonsense; and much more. You wrote so well about yourself, my lovely: I saw you. And I wanted to tousle you even more. As for the mask, indeed, don’t you dare wear it. You’re my mask … Would you like to know the view I have out of my window, since you love snow? So here you are: the broad whiteness of the Moldau, and along that whiteness, little black silhouettes of people cross from one shore to the other, like musical notes. For example, the figure of some boy is dragging behind him a D-sharp: a sledge. Across the river there are snowy roofs in a distant, lightweight sky, and to the right, that feudal bridge I’ve already written you about.
Morn is growing like fire on a windy night! I have only two scenes to write; and, I already have the very end of the last – eighth – scene. I am writing to Lukash that it’s all a brilliant trifle – but I don’t believe that … However …
Lord, how I wish to see you … My dear eyes … I don’t know what I’ll do with you when we meet. Can’t write more today – have to go to a party. They are taking me out into society! Of all my acquaintances, there’s only the eternally youthful Sergey Makovsky here. I love you. Without end.
V.
I’m just come back from the party at Kramář’s. I have to quote the dialogue which ‘took place’ (a Gallicism) there.
A lady (elderly)
And how do you like Prague? (Several lines follow about the beauty of Prague. I’ll skip them. Then:)
You’re at the local gymnasium?
I
???
The Lady
Ah, sorry – you have such a young face … Then you will be going to lectures. What field?
I (with a melancholy smile)
I finished university two years ago. Two majors, Natural History and Literature.
The Lady (confounded)
Er … so you work?
I
For the Muse.
The Lady (livening up a bit)
Ah, you are a poet. And have you been writing long? Tell me, have you read Aldanov – amusing, isn’t he? Overall, books are a great help in our difficult times. You pick up, say, Voloshin or Sirin – and at once your heart lifts. But nowadays, you know, books are so expensive …
I
Yes, extremely expensive. (And disappear modestly, incognito.)
Isn’t it an amusing little conversation? I have quoted it to you word for word.
My happiness, you know, tomorrow will be exactly one year since I broke up with my fiancée. Do I regret it? No. It had to happen this way, so I could meet you. After Mr Morn I will write the second – final – act of ‘The Wanderers’. I suddenly feel like it. And now I am putting the candle out and going to bed. No, I will read for a bit longer. I love you, my lovely. Do write to me more often otherwise I won’t cope. And meet me at the station on the seventeenth.
V.
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[ALS, 2 PP.]
[10 January 1924]
TO: 41, Landhausstr., Berlin W.
10–I–24
Smichov, Třida Svornosty, 37
Prague
My love, today I was sure my sister would fly in to me with a shout: ‘A letter from Madame Bertran!,’ – but no. I became so sad … ‘And what are letters? White patches on partings’ tattered black’ (paraphrasing Mr Lermontov’s famous line).
Yesterday evening was straight out of a Flemish painting, motionless in a languorous mist. Over the snows, in the mist, the sunset shone through tenderly, d
imly, like the undeveloped colours of decalcomania (you know what I mean?). After crossing the river on ice, I climbed a hill – white, with black bushes of naked elder. On one side the hill is suddenly cut off by a fortress wall; on its top stands a dark two-towered cathedral, girded here and there with scarlet fretwork – like a Slavic sheen falling on Gothic geometry. There, too, behind a cast-iron railing, is a Catholic cemetery: straight little graves, golden crucifixes. Above the cathedral door, a vaulted bas-relief, ending on both sides of the door with two heads – the moulded, protuberant faces of two … jesters. One of them has large, sly features, the other’s face is twisted in a crooked grin of contempt. Both are in those paddle-shaped leather hats or hoods (recalling simultaneously bat wings and a rooster’s comb) that medieval jesters used to wear. I found a few such faces on other doors too, and each has a different expression: one, for example, has a beautiful, austere profile from under the folds of his rough head-gear: an angel jester. I like to think that the carver, insulted by the ungenerous reward, by the stinginess of the sullen monks he was ordered to depict on the walls, turned their faces, without altering the likenesses, into those of jesters. Or perhaps this is a nice symbol for me, that only through laughter can mortals enter Heaven … You agree?
I walked around the cathedral along a slippery path between snow-drifts. The snow was light, dry: grab a handful, throw it up, and it disperses in the air like dust, as if flying back up. The sky darkened. In it appeared a thin golden moon: half of a broken halo. I walked along the edge of the fortress wall. Old Prague lay below in the thickening mist. The snowy roofs clustered together, cumbrous and dim. The houses seemed to have been piled anyhow, in a moment of terrible and fantastic carelessness. In this frozen storm of outlines, in this snowy semi-darkness, the streetlamps and windows were burning with a warm and sweet lustre, like well-licked punch lollipops. In just one place you could also see a little scarlet light, a drop of pomegranate juice. And in the fog of crooked walls and smoky corners I divined an ancient ghetto, mystical ruins, the alley of Alchemists … On the way back I composed a short monologue, which Dandilio will say in the penultimate scene:
… … … Matter must decay
for matter to be resurrected – and from that,
if we guess the ancient symbol right,
it comes out thus – follow me, Tremens:
space is God, and matter is Christ, and time
is the Holy Ghost. Hence my conclusion:
the world is divine, and therefore all is happiness,
and so we must all sing
as we work (for our existence
means to work for the master
in three forms: space, matter,
and time), but the work ends,
and we depart to the eternal feast,
having given our memory to time, our image
to space, and our love to matter …
To which Tremens answers: ‘Opposites meet, I agree with you, – but the point is, I rebel against a sovereign-existence: I don’t want to work for it, but rather, to go and party right away.’
My literary labours notwithstanding, I love you very much, my happiness – and I am very angry that you’re not writing to me. All these days I’ve been in a tense and exalted mood, because I have been composing, ‘literally’, non-stop.
They told me that there was a note in Rul’ by Mme Landau about our Ahasuerus reading. Have you read it?
So long, my lovely. You’ve not ‘fallen out of love’ with me, have you?
V.
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[ALS, 2 PP.]
[12 January 1924]
TO: 41, Landhausstr., Berlin W.
[Prague]
12–I–24
12 midnight
‘You are voiceless, like all that’s beautiful …’ I’m already used to the thought that I won’t get a single letter more from you, my bad love, you. I am sending you my countenance, which I happened to find among Mother’s things (she has another like it). I had it taken two years ago, in Cambridge of sweet memories, on the eve of an exam – so that in case I ‘failed’, I could find a sign of doom, a fatal little feature in my image. But, as you can see, I’m proud and care-free.
Yesterday our furniture u. s. w. finally arrived. It seems to have gone a roundabout route (Hamburg – America – Singapore – Constantinople) – which explains the delay. Now our apartment has cheered up a bit, i.e. first there was only one chair in each (tiny!) room, now there’s a whole regiment of them, so it recalls the look of a room where children are having a magic lantern show. (Damp linen and very long explanations with each picture: I hated it as a child.) Do you know that on the cover of the first issue of ‘Grani’ our surnames are side by side? A symbol?
Kadashev-Amfiteatrov has just been visiting me and talking about famous typos. One provincial newspaper printed ‘veterinary’ instead of ‘Virgin Mary’. The authorities would certainly not have noticed, but the newspaper apologized next day for its mistake – and was immediately shut down. And Nemirovich-Danchenko had a fight with ‘Spolokhi’ because in one of his stories, in the most dramatic episode, instead of ‘Beppo, saddle the horse!’ was cosily and modestly printed: ‘Beppo, paddle the horse!’ Such things happen …
The lamps have arrived too, so that now the paper and my writing hand are bathed in a cone of light.
Today we had an unlucky accident: I went to visit a sick professor with Mother and Kirill. Kirill was dragging his sledge behind. When I caught sight of a high steep snow slope, I decided to show how to really slide down. I lay face down on the sledge, sat him on my back, and pushed myself off. (Meanwhile, a crowd of gawkers had gathered.) Halfway down something cracked – and I was already flying down without the sledge and without Kirill, in a whirlwind of snow. It turned out that one of the runners had given out, snapped (I’ve put on a lot of weight since being here). Weeping and reproaches went on for several hours. And here’s what Morn says, farewelling Midia:
… You will leave; we’ll forget one another;
but now and then the name of a street,
or a street organ weeping in the twilight,
will remind us in a more vivid and more
truthful way than thought could resurrect
or words convey, of that main thing which
was between us, the main thing which
we do not know …
And in that hour when the soul
will sense the charm of past trifles –
the soul will understand that in eternity all is eternal:
the genius’s thought and the neighbour’s joke,
the bewitched suffering of Tristan
and the most fleeting love.
… not unlike yours (are you angry?). My darling, today I love you so sweetly, so joyfully – you don’t know how …
I dreamt of you last night – as if I was playing the piano and you were turning the pages for me …
V.
____________________
[ALS, 1 p.]
[postmarked 14 January 1924]
TO: 41, Landhausstr., Berlin W.
[Prague]
Date – not interesting.
Address: the same, ‘svoronosty’.
Don’t you find our correspondence somewhat … one-sided? I’m so cross with you that I’ve begun this letter without a salutation. At first I decided to send you just a blank sheet of paper with a little question mark in the middle, but then I didn’t feel like wasting the stamp. Honestly, why aren’t you writing to me? This is my fifth letter, but I’ve had only one from you. Or perhaps you’re ill? Or are there ‘sharp corners’ again? Or, finally, you’re acting like this on purpose, so I’ll forget you? I am a surprisingly bad writer today.
I have to postpone my return to Berlin indefinitely, in view of the infinite slowness with which I’m working. Sometimes, after a whole day of creative pangs I manage to write only two or three lines. I’ve cut out from scene two Kliyan’s story and everything connect
ed with it. Now I’m floundering in the muddy water of scene six. I get so tired that my head feels like a bowling alley – and I can’t fall asleep earlier than five or six in the morning. In the early scenes there are a thousand reworkings, deletions and additions. And ultimately I’ll be rewarded with the routine sarcasm: ‘… not without poetic talent, but we must admit …’ and so on. And on top of that you – staying silent …
No – not on your life! I’ll show myself so that the gods will flinch, covering themselves with their elbows … Either my head will burst open or the world will – one or the other. Yesterday I ate goose. The weather is frosty: straight pink smoke puffs and the air tastes of sugar-glazed cranberries.
The seventeenth is approaching, but on which street in Berlin I’ll land that day, where I’ll live – I know not. Tatarinov doesn’t write, my boss doesn’t write, Drozdov doesn’t write, you don’t write … I’m the only one writing – and not well at that.
Let me repeat that this is very poor on your part. But if you do not love me, tell me frankly. Sincerity above all! All the same: you are my happiness.
V.
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[ALS, 2 PP.]
[16 January 1924]
TO: 41, Landhausstr., Berlin W.
[Prague]
16–I–24
Thank you, my love, for your two amazing letters. Here’s a silly aphorism I’ve thought up: the mind writes with a pen, the heart, with a pencil.
My happiness, I won’t be able to come on the 17th, either. Besides the tragedy, there’s another, secondary reason – which, unfortunately, is more important than the first one. The fact is, to be blunt, I’m waiting for money from Berlin (for those translations). They promised to send it to me on the 7th – ten days have gone by and I’m still waiting. As soon as I get it, I’ll leave that day – and this could even be tomorrow. I had a little with me, but yesterday I had to squander it all on household needs; meanwhile it’s dangerous to just chance it, coming to Berlin with five marks. As for the tragedy, it will reach a point any day now where I can finish it where I like. I’m so vexed by all this I can hardly write to you.
Letters to Véra Page 6