Pasternak, "Heinrich von Kleist" (part 2)

The conclusion to an essay by this Russian poet on this German man of letters.  You can read the original in this omnibus.

The consequences of Goethe's mysterious and secret dislike for Kleist extended throughout the latter's life.  Attempts to clarify the matter only exacerbated the enmity.  Kleist did not know that it was to the tactlessness of intriguers that he owed his notoriety to Goethe, who was like a sacred object to him, who could have brought him happiness, and to whom he must have seemed like a foolish copy of Werther.  In 1809 Goethe wrote a man of letters the following about Kleist: "I am right to reproach Kleist because I loved and ennobled him.  But either his development has been delayed by time, as one may notice in many nowadays, or for some other reason he has not justified his potential.  Hypochondria is killing him as both a person and a poet.  You know full well how much effort I exerted so that his Broken Jug would be performed in our theaters.  And if nevertheless he did not succeed, we may attribute this to the fact that a talented and witty scheme may be lacking in naturally developing action.  But to impute his failure to me and even, as has been proposed, to consider issuing me a challenge – this is, as Schiller says, evidence of the severe distortion of nature, excusable only by an extreme irritability of the nerves or by an illness."

Kleist's life assumed a certain quality during the time of his return from Switzerland: he was recognized and acknowledged.  Beside his innate timidity, his proud and secretive nature, arose the lack of freedom of a person noticed by his century.  This gave his unhappiness legitimacy.

He tried to establish himself somewhere, first in Königsberg then later in Dresden.  Constantly distinguishing himself in his methods, he wrote some remarkable and striking works, like his brilliant stories, The Earthquake in Chile, The Marquise of O., the aforementioned Michael Kohlhaas, and others.  As if possessed by some kind of demon he fled from the favors of any fate, woman, work, or safe haven, and the wartime chaos aided him in his mobility.  These aimless meanderings were sometimes complicated by the interference of the police.

Such was the case, for example, during his second trip to Paris when, in a frenzy, he burned his Guiscard and quarreled violently with von Phull, the future general and his friend, whom he obliged to race among the morgues of Paris the whole next day in search of his body.  Such was the case on the French coast as the army was preparing itself for disembarkation to England.  Kleist believed that it was the fate of the troops to be buried at the bottom of the ocean.  They found Kleist in Saint-Omer where he had gone to enlist as a volunteer.  Here he was arrested on suspicions of espionage; only thanks to the efforts of the Prussian emissary Lucchesini did he avoid getting shot.  Instead, he was sent back to his homeland.  In 1807, on exactly the same suspicions, he was deported from French-occupied Berlin to the French Fort de Joux, the place of the recent captivity and death of the black consul Toussaint Louverture.  This circumstance informed Kleist's fearful tale, The Engagement in Santo Domingo.          

The years which we have covered in this brief overview were a turning point for Kleist's moral structure.  He had once been ruled by fibs and fictions; his delusions had triumphed over facts.  But now this would all change.  In 1806 Prussia lost the battle of Jena-Auerstedt.  Every facet of life fell into disarray; devastation set in.  Kleist stopped receiving the financial support earmarked for him by Louise of Mecklenburg-Strelitz.   Before him hovered the spectre of indigence.

The assumption that politics would always trump life seemed merely like the unspoken exaggeration of publicists; yet in the years of a century's upheavals it is true.  When, in 1808, Spain rose up against the French dominion, this affected countless other corners of the world.

Kleist was then in Dresden.  He nurtured personal enmity towards Napoleon of the kind he had only experienced towards Goethe.  The events in Spain animated and inspired him.  With his usual prolificness Kleist wrote, in a little more than a year, three five-act dramas: Penthesilea, based on themes from Greek mythology; The Trial by Fire, a dramatic fairy tale about German knights in the Middle Ages; and The Battle of Teutoburg Forest, a patriotic drama glorifying medieval German warfare.  But what was Kleist supposed to feel when in the spring of 1809 one of the German states, Austria, following Spain's example, emerged from its thrall to its conqueror?  Kleist rejoiced and, abandoning his affairs and job, sought to enlist in active duty in the Austrian army.  In a camp near Aspern some acquaintances of his, as well as unpleasantries experienced twice before, awaited him.  He seemed suspicious.  With some difficulty he wriggled his way out of this confrontation and left to Prague.  It was here that he learned of the catastrophe at the Battle of Wagram – a blow from which he would never recover.

In order for the last chapter of his life to stand out more prominently, no further information on Kleist will be provided at this time.  Some are convinced that during these months he was preparing an assassination attempt on Napoleon; rumors spread about his demise; and this is precisely when he arrived in Berlin.

He came in coldest winter.  He was no longer the odd crank of before, who even in good times saw everything in the blackest of hues, but a level-headed warrior against the true iniquities of fate.  In cold and desolation, regardless of what means it required, he would develop a reality that now seems incredible.   He wrote The Prince of Homburg, his very best work, an historical drama realistic in its performance, concise, witty, flowing and well-paced, a mix of the fire of lyric poetry and a clear sequence of events.  He took the reins of an evening paper for which he would compose an endless amount of small articles and stories over a period of several months.  Only a negligible part of these writings has been identified amidst the pile of anonymous material in which it appeared.  He finished a novel in two books that vanished without a trace in a Berlin print shop, and prepared for publication the second volume of his peerless stories.

All this time his destiny did not abate.  Louise of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, his protectoress, died.  The ministry that had been so lenient to him and his newspaper was replaced.  The new cabinet began imposing limitations on the paper, devaluing the business enterprise itself, which finally collapsed.  Kleist ended up in debt.  The Prince of Homburg did not get published.  The stories already in print no longer interested anyone.  Then in February of that terrible winter of 1811 for which no end seemed in sight, Kleist remembered his first distraction, his first conscious steps towards a calling, his childish game of playing soldier, penned a farewell to his illustrious name, and reenlisted in the army.  His request would soon be met, but it proved impossible to get him into uniform.  He beseeched the king anew to loan him money for equipment and awaited a reply.  Summer passed by and no answer had been received.  Autumn came with strong evidence of the return of that winter without end.

Kleist had a female acquaintance, the terminally ill musician Henriette Vogel.  One time when they were playing together as lovers might, she said that if she could find a partner she would like to part with this life.  "Why then did we even start all this?" said Kleist, and offered himself up as a companion on this treacherous road.

On November 20, 1811 they went out to the Wannsee near Berlin, a site for long strolls outside the city.  They took two hotel rooms by the lake and spent the evening and a part of the next day there.  All the morning through they strolled; after lunch they asked that a table be taken out to the dam on the same side of the creek.  From there two shots were heard at dusk.  One Kleist discharged into his girlfriend, the other he used to end his own life.

Had our interest in Kleist arisen recently it would have been an inexplicable anachronism.  Kleist began to be studied before the war.  In 1914 together with Sologub and Wolkenstein, I translated The Broken Jug.  The remaining translations of The Prince of Homburg, The Family Schroffenstein, and Robert Guiscard were completed between 1918 and 1919.

Getting to know Kleist's work was abetted by the publications in Vsemirnaya Literatura and Academia.  The first is prefaced by a marvelous article by Sorgenfrei; the second supplemented by interesting commentary by Berkovsky.  The translations of Kleist's stories by Rachinsky and Petnikov remain above any possible praise.

Pasternak, "Heinrich von Kleist" (part 1)

The first part to an essay by this Russian poet on this German man of letters.  You can read the original in this omnibus.

In my collection of translations the publishing house Sovetskii pisatel' decided to include a drama by Kleist; another publishing house put out his comedies.  And so here it behooves me to say a few words about him.

Heinrich von Kleist is one of the most interesting German writers of the past century.  The realm of his fame is not nearly as wide or as unquestionable as the world of Schiller, Goethe, or Heine, and for that reason he should not be compared to them.  Yet everything he has ever written brims with force and exceptionality, placing him in the first rank right after the abovementioned triptych. 

Kleist is distinguished by a level of materiality unusual in German literature, as well as by a restrained wealth of passionate, bright, and original language.  He bequeathed us eight dramas and just as many stories.  These are the sole existing expressions for his particular flights of human passion.  For example, one's instinct for justice in its blind embodiment. In Kleist we see when, under the influence of perceived offense and with a thirst for vengeance rising in one's throat, what would otherwise be a beneficial gift is transformed into a source of numerous evil deeds and crimes committed without accountability.  When we read about arson and murder in Kleist, crimes committed at the height of emotion and enragement, we cannot rid ourselves of the impression that Pushkin might have known Kleist when he wrote Dubrovsky.

In vain is Kleist clustered with the Romantics.  Despite their contemporaneity and his friendship with some of the more notable in the movement, between them lies a gaping abyss.  In contrast to the penchant for amateurishness of which all Romantics were proud, and the formless fragmentariness for which they strove, Kleist battled his whole life with being undereducated and irrelevant, qualities he had long since suspected in himself.  And although not everything created by him can be rightly deemed perfection, everything was infused with the sullen seriousness of a genius who knew in life neither peace nor satisfaction.

He was born on October 18, 1777 in Frankfurt-an-der-Oder.  Being a member of the old clan of Kleists meant that from the cradle he was destined for a military career.  At the age of fifteen he became a member of the rank and file guard; at eighteen he participated in the Rhine campaign against revolutionary France.  When he returned home his parents had already passed away.  He then served for two years in the Potsdam garrison.

A new period of his life began.  Napoleon, an omnipresent, magical, and, before long, hated name, became his inspiration and then his victim.  Amidst the daily changes to which the borders, mores, duties, and notions of these states were subjected, a new societal division assumed the form of a middle estate or stratum for whose sake a declaration of rights would feature articles about personal freedom, and which the Petersburg nihilists of the 1860s would call the intelligentsia.  Schiller spoke about the realm of aesthetic ideas; the nineteenth century was in the palm of his hand complete with its own future lexicon; the expression "the development of one's own I," which indicated an education in the humanities, came rather easily to Fichte; in this way Kleist was encircled in pedagogical fever.  As a result he enrolled as a student at the University of Frankfurt.

This decision lowered him in the eyes of his kin and forced him into lifelong justifications before the highest judgments of the old house of Kleist by the quay, a location of a future post office.  Kleist imagined that once he had taken the world by surprise and done something no one had ever done before, he would again rise in their estimation.  This pathologically intensified his self-esteem and imbued his works with both hyperbole and violence.  

A certain receptibility bordering on mediumism speckled his life with signs of everything in his environs.  In his works one detects traces of Schlegel's unfinished Shakespeare, the meanderings of time and its sensations.  He mined Schiller's The History of the Revolt of the Netherlands for a Germanized version in The Broken Jug, and the South American travels of Alexander von Humboldt for an exotic tale that would not involve cutting off an ear and calling it a national custom.  In those days Kant was not only the main event of the intellectual world, he was also the pride of Eastern Prussia.  An exposure to contemporary trends and ideas settled Kleist's choice on mathematics and moral philosophy. 

In order to cease the ordeal and approach a certain degree of solemnity vis-à-vis his relatives, Kleist decided from his initial foray as a student that he should prepare himself for a career as a professor; he even ordered a professorial chair from a joiner and proceeded to regurgitate what he had learned in a series of lectures to a modest number of ladies, wives from a circle of officers whom he knew.  The main visitors among them were Wilhelmine von Zenge and his half-sister Ulrika.  She was the envy of her gender and, in the manner of the cavalry-maiden, Nadezhda Durova, would walk around in breeches with a long hunting crop.  She understood her brother and would later become privy to his secrets, his companion when he traveled, and, to a certain degree, his sponsor whenever he became impecunious.

Kleist soon cooled to the theories of speculative reason and dropped out of university, at which point his relatives set him up with a job in one of the ministries.  He left for Berlin.  Soon people began getting alarming messages from him: something had happened to him which had driven him to deepest, then persistent melancholy.  This matter was never explained or named and has lent itself to widespread speculation among biographers.  In Kleist's Michael Kohlhaas, in a way a German Pugachev, one has to read pages and pages about child heroes so as to understand how influential Kleist's heredity was.  Yet another facet that would cost him dearly.  Kleist was temperamental, mistrustful and impatient.  Unexpectedness offended him and made him, having revolted against everything on earth, into an enemy of society.

In reply to his letters full of despair, grandiosity, and strange preteritions, Ulrika came to see him in Würzburg, where he had gone into hiding.  In order to calm him down, it was decided that he would be sent on a long trip abroad.  Ulrika accompanied him.

In 1803, after a long stay in Paris, Kleist ended up in Switzerland near Lake Thun.  Beyond his window loomed the Schreckhorn and the Finsteraarhorn.  Smoke rose towards the sky from the villages ensconced in the valley.  He was surrounded by winter Alpine beauty, pure lines, pure mores, and people who believed in him and who were devoted to literature.  Not long thereafter the gift of creativity awoke in him.  Until this point he had never even contemplated poetry.    

Here he gave his will over to his inspiration.  It poured out into three very different works: the first is The Schroffenstein Family, his rather feeble debut, a helpless and protracted tragedy replete with silliness; the second is Kleist's short comedy, The Broken Jug; and the third, the crown jewel of his efforts, Robert Guiscard, a fragment of a tragedy which occupied Kleist his whole life and which was destroyed in several published versions.

One of the Swiss acquaintances with whom he stayed, the Bernese publisher Gessner, put out The Schroffenstein Family without including Kleist's name.  In Der Freimutige, August von Kotzebue's publication which relentlessly sought out opportunities to spite Goethe, there appeared a eulogistic critique of the tragedy under the headline, "The Birth of a New Poet."

Pascal, "Marques de la véritable Religion"

An essay ("The mark of true religion") by this French man of letters.  You can read the original here.

True religion should have as a mark the obligation of loving God.  This is quite right.  And nevertheless no other religion makes this an order apart from our own.  True religion should also recognize the concupiscence of man and the powerlessness with which he strives on his own to acquire virtue; it should provide man with remedies, of which prayer is the most important.  Our religion has done all that; and no other has ever asked God to love and follow it

A religion makes itself true by having come to know our true nature because one cannot separate the knowledge of the true nature of man from the knowledge of his true good, his true virtue, or of true religion.  True religion should have come to know the greatness and baseness of man and the reasons for both one and the other.  What other religion apart from the Christian faith has known these things?  Other religions, like those of the pagans, are more popular because they consist exclusively of an outward appearance; but they are not made for able and talented people.  A purely intellectual religion would be in line with such able and talented people, yet it would not serve the populace.  Only the Christian faith is made for everyone, a mix of the external and internal.  It elevates the populace internally and lowers the able and the magnificent externally; it is not perfect without both of these elements.  Because the populace needs to understand the spirit of the law, and the able and talented need to submit their minds to the law by practicing that which may be deemed the external element.   

We are hateful; reason convinces us so, for no other religion apart from Christianity proposes that we hate ourselves.  No other religion can then be received by those who know that they are worthy of nothing but hate.  No other religion apart from the Christian faith knows that man is the most excellent of creatures and at the same time the most miserable.  Those who know full well the reality of their excellence consider those base sentiments that man naturally has of himself to be cowardice and ingratitude.  And those others who know full well how effective this baseness is have dismissed with laughable arrogance the sentiments of greatness which are equally natural to man.  No religion apart from ours teaches that man is born into sin.  No sect of philosophers says it.  None, therefore, has said the truth.

Since God is hidden every religion which does not aver that God is hidden is not true.  And every religion which does not engage reason is not instructive.  Our religion does all that.  This religion that consists of the belief that man has fallen from a state of glory and communication with God into a state of sadness, of penitence, and a distancing from God, yet in the end will be redeemed by a Messiah who was bound to come, has always been on earth.  All things have happened and this has subsisted because this is all things.  For God wished for a sacred people to arise whom He would separate from all other nations, from whose enemies He would deliver to safety and put in a place of rest, and to whom He would make this promise and come into the world for this purpose.  And through His prophets He predicted the time and manner of His coming.    

And nevertheless, so as to confirm the hope of His chosen people through all of time, He has always allowed them to see images and figures and never left them without assurances of His power and His wish for their salvation.  For in the creation of man, Adam was both witness to this and the depositary of the promise of the Savior who was to be born from woman.  And although mankind was still so recently removed from this creation so as not to be able to forget it or mankind's fall, or the promise that God had made to man of a Redeemer, nevertheless even in this first epoch of the world mankind allowed themselves to be carried away by all sorts of disorders and abuses.  They were some saints, however, such as Enoch, Lamech and others who waited with patience for the Christ promised since the beginning of the world.  Then God sent Noah who bore witness to the utmost degree to the malice of man.  And He saved him by drowning the entire world in a miracle which He deemed sufficient and by the power which He possessed to save the world, and the desire which He possessed to do so, and to have born from woman Him whom He had promised.   

This miracle was sufficient to confirm the hope of mankind.  And this memory being fresh enough among them, God made His promises to Abraham who was surrounded by idolaters, and taught him the mystery of the Messiah which He was to send.  At the time of Isaac and Jacob the abomination was spread across the world.  But the Saints lived in faith.  And Jacob, as he lay dying, blessing his children, cried out in a spasm of joy that made him interrupt his discourse: I have awaited, O Lord, Thy promised Savior (Genesis 49:18). 

The Egyptians were infected by idolatry and magic; the very people of God were being carried away by their examples.  But nevertheless Moses and others saw what they did not see, and adored Him, gazing at the eternal goods which He was preparing for them.  The Greeks and Romans subsequently let false gods reign; poets concocted various theologies; and philosophers were split into a million different sects.  Nonetheless, at the heart of Judea there always remained some chosen men who predicted the coming of the Messiah known only to them.  The end of this period came at last; and since that time, although we have seen the rise of countless schisms and heresies, the overthrow of countless governments, and countless changes in all things, this Church who adores Him who has always been adored has subsisted without interruption.  And what is admirable and incomparable and completely divine is that this religion which has always endured has also always been in combat.  A thousand times was it on the brink of universal destruction; and every time it reached that state, God raised it again through extraordinary displays of His power.  This is what is surprising, and may it remain without bending or yielding beneath the willfulness of tyrants.   

Governments would perish if we did not often bend our laws when needed.  But religion has never suffered this nor of it has ever made any use.  Here too do we need accommodations, or what we call miracles.  It is not strange that in bending these laws we preserve them, yet this is not the same as maintaining them.  For sooner or later they will perish entirely; no law has lasted fifteen hundred years.  But religion has always been maintained and is inflexible.  This is divine.

In this way the Messiah has always been believed.  The tradition of Adam was still new in Noah and in Moses.  The prophets have since predicted Him, always while also predicting other things whose occurrence from time to time before man's eyes has marked the truthfulness of their mission, and, consequently, the truthfulness of their promises regarding the Messiah.  They told us that the law they obeyed was simply to wait for the law of the Messiah; that until then it would be perpetual but that the other law would last for all of eternity; that therefore their law or that of the Messiah from whom the law was promised would always be on earth.  And indeed it has always endured.  And Jesus Christ came in accordance with all the predicted circumstances.  He completed miracles and His apostles converted the pagans, and with these prophecies accomplished, the Messiah has been proven for ever and always.

The only religion contrary to nature in the state in which it is, which combats all our pleasures and which seems initially contrary to common sense is the only one which has always been there.  The entire conduct of things should have as an aim the establishment and the greatness of religion: men should have within themselves sentiments in conformity with that which religion teaches us.  And, in the end, religion should be so much the aim and the center towards which all things tend that he who shall learn his principles from it, can also derive reason and all of the nature of man in particular, as well as all of the conduct of the world in general.

It is on this basis that the impious intercede to blaspheme the Christian faith, because they do not know it well at all.  They believe that it simply consists of the adoration of a God considered great, powerful and eternal; what is properly termed deism is as distant from Christianity as atheism, which is its exact opposite.  And from there they conclude that this religion is not true because if it were, then God would have to manifest Himself to man through proofs so tangible that it would be impossible for anyone to mistake Him.  But those who come to whatever conclusions they wish against deism will not have come to any conclusions against the Christian faith, which recognizes that, owing to sin, God does not show Himself to man with all the evidence at His disposal, and which consists more specifically in the mystery of the Redeemer who, unifying in Himself the two natures, divine and human, has removed man from the corruption of sin so as to reconcile him with God in His divine person.

Thus the Christian faith teaches men both truths, and that there is one God for whom they are capable and there is one corruption in nature that renders them unworthy.  It is as important to men to know both of these points; and it is equally dangerous to men to know God without knowing their own misery, and to know their own misery without knowing the Redeemer who can heal them from it.  Knowledge of only one of these truths results either in the pride of philosophers who know God but not their own misery, or the despair of atheists who know their own misery but nothing of the Redeemer.

And so, as it is equally necessary for man to know both of these points, it is also from the grace of God that we have come to know them.  The Christian faith does so; this is precisely of what it consists.  May we look at the order of the world on this matter and may we see whether all things do not tend towards the establishment of the two main points of this religion.

If a man is not filled with pride, with ambition, with concupiscence, with weakness, with misery and with injustice, this man is then quite blind.  And if, in recognizing that he is so batten, he does not desire to be delivered into salvation from these things, what can we say of a man so lacking in reason?  How could he possibly not hold in esteem a religion that knows the flaws of man so well, and how could he not long for truth from a religion that promises him such desirable remedies?

Pasternak, "Nikoloz Baratashvili"

An essay on this Georgian poet by this Russian man of letters and translator from the Georgian.  You can read the original as part of this collection.

Among Baratashvili's poems is "Georgia's Fate."  Its hero, the last Georgian Tsar Heraclius II, is on the cusp of letting his war-plagued homeland fall under Russia's protection.  He excuses such a desire with the understanding that he can spare his country further incursions by its Eastern neighbors.  Once free from violence it could, he imagines, finally enjoy the fruits of peacetime diligence and enlightenment.

This was the Georgia into which Nikoloz Baratashvili, the greatest Georgian poet of the new era, was born.  The Georgian nobility married into the Russian nobility and, in so doing, entered the arena of Russian governmental concerns and the highest intellectual interests of both Petersburg and Europe.  The previously existent Western influence was now strengthened.

The circle of several princely families in which Nikoloz Baratashvili grew up was the same progressive circle where, thanks in all likelihood to Griboedov, both Pushkin and Lermontov ended up in the Georgian Caucasus. 

In addition to this motley eastern foreign land, which Tbilisi certainly offered its visitors, they also encountered a powerful, kindred leaven which evoked life in their souls, propelling to the surface the most natural, the most slumbering, and the most repressed elements from within them.  Everything in this circle was much like it was in Petersburg: wine, cards, razor-sharp wit, French conversation, skirt-chasing, and that audacious pride ever ready to parry the slightest slip into arrogance.  The circle was just as well-acquainted with debts and creditors, hatching plots, and landing in military jails as it was with endless blather, plaintive tears, and the composition, at the age of eighteen, of burning, impetuous verse of unrepeatable spiritualization – and, after all this, with dying young.

The father of Nikoloz Baratashvili was an impoverished marshal of the Georgian nobility who had squandered his fortune on receptions and banquets.  The life of his son Nikoloz was marked by few happenings and spent in penury and obscurity, the price for his father's luxuries.

Baratashvili was born on November 22, 1816 in Tbilisi.  He studied at a parish school and finished gymnasium.  His dreams of a military career were dashed just like the leg he had broken as a boy, leaving him lame his entire life.  His other wish – to complete his education at a Russian university – similarly did not come true.  His father's troubles and the need to support his family forced him to look for work as a government official.  After having served in minor positions with various administrative duties he was appointed as the assistant to a district commander in Ganja in 1845.  On the trip there he fell ill from a particularly pernicious form of malaria that was rampant in the area and died on October 9 of the same year. 

This series of bureaucratic positions diametrically opposes our notions of Baratashvili; in fact, it seems more like his reflection in a crooked mirror.  His true traits were sharp and significant.  These traits persisted in the minds of his contemporaries and were preserved with devotion.

As a child Baratashvili was a mischievous and venturesome lad; in school he was a good chum.  As an adult he would infuriate Tbilisi society with his pranks and the venom behind his mockery.  His habit of telling the truth to people's faces made him seem deranged.

It was the sister of Nino Griboedova, Princess Ekaterina Chavchavadze, whom he really loved.  But she married another man.  He would spend his whole life beset by this festering wound, a wound he salted with the tenderness and zeal of his lyric poetry and the scores he had to settle with the upper echelon of the Georgian aristocracy.  For him the sovereign Mingrelian Princess Dadiani was the beloved, the brightest star that could ever grace his firmament.

Baratashvili was surrounded by literati: Grigol Orbeliani was his uncle; Alexander Chavchavadze a friend of his father's. 

Yet his own writings were accorded so little significance that he could scarcely hope to see them in print in the near future.  His further projects were foiled by his premature demise.  Perhaps the way in which his poetry lies before us does not represent its definitive edition; perhaps the author would have preferred to subject his works to further selection and polishing.  The trace of genius that remained in these poems, however, is so great as to imbue them with perfection arguably more final, more significant than if the author had actually had more time to tend to their appearance.

Baratashvili's lyric poetry is distinguished by its notes of pessimism, motifs of solitude, and the general mood of Weltschmerz.

Happy days and their belief in man and the receptivity of posterity allow artists to express only the main idea in their works, almost not touching upon secondary matters, all in the hope that the reader's imagination alone will fill in the missing details.  Hence we can explain the imprecision in language and fecundity found in the classics, so natural in the ease of their very general and abstract problems.

Artist renegades of a gloomy stripe love talking to the very end.  They are meticulously clear from a lack of faith in the powers of others.  Lermontov's intelligibility is insistent and arrogant.  His details conquer us with almost supernatural force.  Between his hyphens we discover what we should have been left to figure out by ourselves.  This is the magical reading of our thoughts from a distance.  The secret to such an effect was possessed by Baratashvili.

His dreaminess commingled with fragments of life and everyday activity.  In his oeuvre one finds an individual imprint unique to him alone, in which nevertheless the particularities of his age are registered.  His descriptions in "Dusk on Mtatsminda" and "Nights on the Kabakhi" would not have exerted such a magical effect upon us if, along with being descriptions of the state of the soul, they had not been even more astonishing descriptions of nature.  The bursts in the visual element in his peerless, mad, and inspired "Merani" cannot be compared with anything else.  This is the symbol of the faith of a great personality in the throes of struggle, convinced of his immortality and that aim and meaning mark the movement of human history.  

Baratashvili's best verse has already been mentioned above: namely, the poems dedicated to Ekaterina Chavchavadze as well as all those from the final two years of his life, including the stunning "Blue flower."

In 1893 his ashes were transferred from Ganja to Tbilisi.  On October 21, 1945, following the lead of Georgia, his homeland, the entire country solemnly celebrated the centennial of his death.

Die Moskauer Schuhputzer

A short essay ("The Moscow shoeshiners") by this German author, on what would have been this composer's eighty-fifth birthday in 1965.  You can read the original in this collection.

Moscow shoeshiners, both female and male, take their time and have the time to take.  Their booths, as tall as a man, lockable, with the surface area of a narrow bed, are small temples of dignity which, if one were to call it human dignity, would be the very prerequisite of dignity.  In these holy halls one has already gone further.  Those who engage there in a seemingly demeaning activity all resemble one another, as if they were mothers and sons, siblings.  Their eyes, the narrow faces with long noses, these profiles I all know from fresco and vase reproductions.  I thought Syrian, perhaps Assyrian – gleaned, I suppose, from school books with short narratives about the history of Asia Minor; later I heard that one did not know for sure.  Probably from what is now Lebanon, Maronites, forced migrants from one of the largest forced migrations after the First World War.  Shoeshining seems to be their privilege, their fief, an unwritten law, just as the sale of roasted chestnuts in Rome seems to have been the privilege of the Apulians.

In these booths the passer-by can do more than simply have his shoes shined.  A stain remover is available to clean dirty clothes; a sewing kit to re-attach ripped-off buttons is there for the borrowing; scissors exist in order to cut off fringes and tamper with briefcases and shopping bags.  Shoeshining, the main activity, proceeds without haste, without the implication of subjection or lowliness, without any attempts on the part of the shiner to ingratiate himself.  Rushing customers who evince impatience and wish that the ritual be abridged are asked by a dark-eyed look and a gentle shake of the head to indulge in the ritual's full, uncut length.  Woe is woe, dignity dignity, shoes are shoes, and here one can learn what the word "application" means, which might come closest to correctly translating "sacrament."  (Marriage would then be the application of love.)

Carefully, in an appropriate manner, are bootlaces tucked in and socks protected by paper cuffs.  Left shoe on the footrest: with brushes of varied toughness dirt and dust are removed, fluid shoe polish is applied from a bottle.  Right shoe on the footrest: the same application.  Left shoe: brief polishing with a special rag for the liquid shoe polish, the same fate then befalls the right foot.  Left shoe on the footrest: solid shoe polish applied from a can, the same occurs with the right foot.  Left and right foot: blacked shiny with a soft brush.   A shake of the head, a gentle request from a pair of dark eyes: one more time must both shoes be placed, one behind the other, upon the footrest.  Then, from a special bottle, a special blacking is applied which again – left foot, right foot – is rubbed on until it shines.

The ritual application is over.  The time that one believes one has lost comes back doubled from that pair of dark eyes.  Gained, not lost.

More I do not know about Moscow shoeshiners.  They are forced migrants who have found a homeland here.  They return lost time to us with one hundred percent interest.  Their profiles seem familiar to me, from vase and fresco reproductions about which I once read in school books.  I would like to know more about Moscow shoeshiners – everything, in fact – and will try to do so.  I envy them.