You and I (part 2)

The second part of Sinyavsky's story. You can read the original here.

3

You never led a dissolute life.  In love you preferred listening to your conscience, not making empty promises and unsubstantiated vows; instead, you humbly paid your taxi fare, be it 25, or 30, or even 50 rubles in cash and harmlessly received in return your due compensation.  On the other hand, neither scandal nor court fees hounded you, and, although Polyansky kept saying that his wife cost him less than a prostitute, around 15 rubles a session, you concluded that, in such matters, it was better to overpay than wallow in regret for the rest of your life.

When monetary issues did arise, you were always able to survive easily for a month, even perhaps a year, without those sketching assistants and Ministry typists.  Were you to invite one of them to the movies, you wouldn't even bother to score a single grope above the knee.  With an honest women one never knows beforehand whether she will give in or not – and this insecurity always alarmed and weakened your spirit.  It was better just to say "No!" right off the bat and let both of you go your own way.

So when you leaned over towards Lida and immediately began wooing her, it was provoked by extreme necessity.  You parried Graube's first attack with dignity; nevertheless, you still felt the odds were in his favor.  For the attack would start again at a moment's notice and you had to forestall it no matter what happened.

This is how things were: an elderly man would come to visit, a serious man, even perhaps an academic. He would drain a few glasses, and, wouldn't you know it, he was already pocketing his host's good silver or reciting verse of rather lewd content, and sitting under the table with no desire of ever resurfacing.  We usually look down upon actions of this nature.  Yes, they'd banter and laugh: "What's your problem, Vasya, you scumbag," they'd say.  "Dragging the honor of the academy in the mud and trying to overshadow its great accomplishments?"  And yet, as they said this, they were still slapping each other on the shoulder and being merry and supportive.  Because it was immediately obvious that this fellow was not educated in the proper schools, and was, in the moral sense, as pure as Jesus Christ.  This was not the type of guy who would give away military secrets nor betray the homeland at a critical moment.  No, this fellow was above all suspicion and content with such status.

A similar lot provoked your envy.  You wooed her with the help of Lida the librarian, the only woman capable of salvaging your reputation.  Having discovered Lida next to you, only a meter away, you were inspired to scream:

"Lida, I love you!"

The private eyes looked at one another somewhat lost; but Lida, not believing her own ears, sat there motionless.  Her clavicle was twisted on her décolleté and sunken chest.  A sharply raised elbow now resembled a duck wing gnawed down to the bone.

"Lida, I love you!" you repeated more loudly, and grabbed her with your withered fingers above the knee.

"Not in front of everyone!"  Lida whispered and appreciatively stroked your hand, which was fondling her leg.  This was how your love began – in a game with death, in the eyes of your pursuers all knocked senseless by your unexpected temperament.  

You didn't hesitate to organize a riot.  You grabbed the best pieces of food from under the guests' noses, announcing "This is for you!" and demonstratively treating Lida to what you had snatched.  Then you piled up a food barricade around her and cycled through a gamut of tender diminutives:

"Lidochka!  Lidunchik!  Ledenchik!  Lidiastaya Lididil'ka-limousine!"

Screwing your eyes tight you saw that all this had made an impression.

"And we didn't know that you were such a rake," said the detective with the boxer-like appearance who had been transformed into Vera Ivanovna, forcing a laugh.  "We always thought you were more of the quiet type, modest, keeping your thoughts to yourself."

He was very embarrassed about his calculations and suspicions, but still maintained the outward appearance of the mistress of the house, the wife of Heinrich Ivanovich Graube at their anniversary.

"Now, now, Vera Ivanovna, you must be joking!" you then said to him with a bit of gusto.  "What do I have to hide?  And from whom?  No, I have nothing to hide and readily admit to you that I am a true Lothario, especially when I load up on drink."

In attestation of these words, you, wobbling like a wino, came right up to him and, fighting off your natural timidity, ever so carefully touched one brown- and orange-spotted hand that was pressed against his chest in bulging camouflage.  And so you knew: it was nothing more than a resin pillow, inflated with empty breath.  

"Now you are a joker!" the detective cheeped in fear, jumping back in his seat – most likely because he didn't want to reveal every last lever of his costume's mechanism.  And you, teetering, made your way back to Lida and bit her lightly on the elbow just so she wouldn't be jealous.

"Not in front of everyone," she whispered in shame.  "We'd better step out for a minute if you keep insisting."

Heinrich Ivanovich turned green with longing from this interrupted provocation.  Now he would definitely pay his wedding party expenses himself.

"Oh, I am a wounded man!"  he exclaimed, turning to Lobzikov and Polyansky with hypocritical indignation in his voice.

They laughed soundlessly, rocking back and forth like metronomes.

"What an impassioned lad!  No, think about it now: what an impassioned lad!" the liberated boxer by the name of Vera Ivanovna prattled on.

And here another brilliant idea occurred to you: instigate a scandal and flee from everyone with Lida in the guise of unbridled emotion.  That's how it was.  Passion raged, the howls of ancestors were heard, and women were fought over along with some German fraud and Stefan Zweig.

This is the modus operandi of drunk people who seek ambition, you said waving your hands all over the room.

"Lidia, I am abducting you.  Let's get the hell out of here.  These people can carry on their conversations without me.  It'll be much easier for them to find fault with these governmental ducks when I'm not around.  What am I?  I am nothing, just completely loyal.  And you, Heinrich Ivanovich, I see right through you."

And you looked him directly in the eye with your own penetrating gaze as if it were he who was visiting you.

"Yes, yes, yes!  I see right through you!"

Lida obediently gathered her belongings, bag, and lipstick.  You helped her on with her coat made of goat hair, two thirds of it mangy.  You both left, slamming the door before Graube's empty-eyed physiognomy.  Graube, who was standing with his mouth agape, apparently lacking the authority to have you detained by force.

Thick snow was falling now.  It swallowed you and Lida in its noiseless crowds.  It seemed like there were thousands if not millions of paratroopers in snow-white parachutes flying down from the sky, invading the silent city in a full-out air raid.  Before they landed, some spun around nearby, choosing a softer spot to plop down.

The snowfall prevented you from discerning the enemy's manoeuvres.  The enemy who was so cunning as to follow you masked in that curtain of snow.  And you, in a black coat, were a good guide.  You only had one cover, and that was Lida.

Heinrich Ivanovich had undoubtedly set some grizzled experts on your tail so as to check on what you and she would do once you were by yourselves.  Heinrich Ivanovich's hunches were accurate enough so that he didn't take your shotgun romance for a given.  For that reason, as you walked on the streets with Lida, you continued to be repulsed by yourself and kept tripping like a drunkard, and even uttered assorted sentences and proposals, including a proposal for marriage, to Lida and anyone else who would listen.       

Lida clung trustingly to your side and talked to herself, looking at her feet and chirping in delight.

"Why couldn't I have met you a long time ago?  When I was seventeen, for example.  When I was just a girl but completely mature?"

But the two of you had neither a past nor a future together.  You took her the way she was, intoxicated and in love, with her ragged fur over her chest, which served nevertheless as rather comfortable protection for your face grown so thin from all your worries.  And as you spoke to her about love, you thought lustfully about that sweet moment when you would walk Lida home and then go back to your place, to your isolated apartment, and lie down with a light heart in your clean and unoccupied bed.

From time to time you would stop and spin Lida around in a sharp axis, a rapid movement, kissing her on the mouth and her blissfully covered cheeks.  And kissing her you would keep peering above her head, which was thrown back in attentiveness, at the murky distance behind you, where darkness and snow, snow and darkness melted in turn.

And they were watching you.  And although you couldn't quite make out the look in these eyes fixed on you from every corner, you wanted to proclaim proudly to the whole world:

"Go ahead and look, I'm not afraid!  You'll see that I have a lot to do; I love Lida and I'm not to blame for any of this." 

4

Four days he spent in my field of vision.  To him I must have seemed like a python whose cold-blooded stare deprived the rabbit of all sensation.  His notions of me were pure rubbish.  And even if he had taken these silly fantasies as the basis of fact, I didn't know which of us was holding the other by the leash: was I holding him or was he yanking on me?  We had both fallen captive, and the glazed looks that we exchanged couldn't be ripped asunder.  And although he didn't see me, beneath those whitish lashes throbbed such a nexus of fear and hatred towards me that I wanted to scream: "Stop or I'll swallow you!  All I need to do is slam my eyelids and you would tumble like a fly!"  This torture was really starting to wear me out.

"Fool!  Understand one thing: you live and breathe as long as I look at you.  After all, you are only you because I address you.  Only once you'd seen God did you become a human being.  Oh, you!"

He did not want to listen to my friendly attempts at persuasion.  And he had his reasons for everything.  For four straight days he got no sleep so as not to let himself be taken by surprise.  But at night he would lie on the couch in a state of military preparedness, with his jacket and pants on, now already quite creased, with his boots tightly laced up, and stare into the darkness.

And before his tense gaze there arose circles and spots of various colors.  To him they seemed to be eyes, without a nose or ears, just eyes.  They growled, stared, and prattled on, these brown, gray, light blue eyes; they flew around the room, batted their eyelids and settled on his chest when they got tired.  When he got up they would fly off above his head, occasionally blinking their spread wings.

He felt particular discomfort in the bathroom.  Compelled by his privates which he disliked and was embarrassed to display in public, he would hide behind a newspaper, grimace, whistle arias or, wanting to provoke me even more, fall into deep meditation, and all of this just had one goal: to draw my attention to his face and keep me there for a while.  As if all these stupidities interested me!

Owing to his nervous thoughts, all of which I see, his urine did not flow nor did the muscles of his rectum contract.  I felt bad for him as I saw the tortures he endured and tortured myself along with him out of indiscretion.

Ah, if only those blessed with a higher level of awareness of their guilt and obvious insignificance were to suffer on occasion from persecution mania!  No, it was more like he was being stopped by another ailment, what medicine terms mania grandiosa.  The universe had only one concern: to vex him.  And scampering out to the city in the early morning for bread and sausage, he unabashedly assumed everything he happened to see had something to do with him.

Moscow was teeming with impostors.  They pretended that they weren't looking his way (and, as it were, they were looking at him askance).  They convened in random meetings and lollygagged around the streets with absent expressions on their faces, but were somehow all dressed the same, both in shape and sporting dark cloth boots.  Others, in white mask-robes, had frozen expressions.  Not a single one of them bought anything.

But most repellant of all were the houses, those eye-like creatures with their innumerable windows...

"What a lovely coincidence!  Hello, hello!  You're here in Moscow?  You still haven't left?  And how's the ulcer?"

You turned around.  It was, of course, Heinrich Ivanovich who had touched you on the shoulder next to the gourmet store.  On the second day following the so-called "wedding anniversary," you had taken leave at the Ministry under the guise of having something wrong with your stomach.  Your colleagues were told that you had been sent to Yalta on a cure, but of course you spent your leave locked up in your apartment.  What joy then must this omnipresent Graube have experienced when he caught you red-handed somewhere between an ulcer and Yalta, just when you were popping out for some provisions!

While you searched for reasons for having delayed your departure, Heinrich Ivanovich unceremoniously seized you around the waist and dragged you off the sidewalk.  Five steps later and you were outside, and all signs pointed to a trap, falling somehow in balls of yellowed snow.  These had to have been approved by Graube.

"I get it!  I get it!  Cherchez la femme.  No questions there.  We've all had our share of adventure."

He was bouncing on every side of you, as if sniffing you before biting, and threatening you with his index finger.  All the while his round palm never relinquished his thick ministerial briefcase.     

You and I (part 1)

The first part of one of the most original Russian short stories of the twentieth century, the work of this writer.  You can read the original here.

And Jacob was left alone; and there wrestled a man with him until the breaking of the day.

                                                                                                                       Genesis 32:24

From the very beginning this story had a strange shade.  Under the pretext of celebrating his silver anniversary, Heinrich Ivanovich Graube invited four coworkers, including you, to his apartment, whereby he insisted so vehemently that you attend that your presence almost seemed to be the focal point of the gathering.

"I will be mortally offended if you don't come," he said with emphasis.  And then his eyes fell upon you, eyes like convex lenses.  In them lurked an icy, hypnotic glint.

Understanding that you shouldn't reveal your suspicions beforehand as he would guess them and take measures against you that you couldn't have imagined – wily, cunning measures – you politely agreed.  You even congratulated Graube on his fictitious anniversary.  Why he summoned you at all was still unclear, but your heart was seized by dark premonition.   

And, indeed, hardly had you entered his apartment when all the guests sprang out of their chairs – chairs they had almost melted into waiting for your appearance.  Two of your coworkers, Lobzikov and Polyansky, winked at each other gleefully.

"Here he is!"

"Time to get started!"

These words alone betrayed treacherous designs whose traces the host, Heinrich Ivanovich, had to cover up by motioning everyone to the dinner table.  But you made no indication that you knew the meaning of the menacing phrase, "time to get started!"  It was as if this phrase, blurted out by Graube's underlings, contained nothing suspicious, nothing more than an innocent anniversary plan to eat and drink for hours.

"Let us raise our glasses!" you exclaimed loudly and with all possible mirth.  "May this celebration be just the precursor to your golden anniversary!  Hurrah!"

All glasses were raised and clinked and you, taking stock of your surroundings, dashed your vodka under the table at that propitious moment when all eyes were closed and all throats were chugging away in honor of Heinrich Ivanovich Graube and his imaginary spouse.

Yes, the wife and hostess in this group was none other than an impostor; in fact, it was probably a man in drag.  He was painstakingly scrubbed, powdered, and made up to look like a lady who had been married for twenty-five years.  And this was precisely what explained the squeamish face made by Heinrich Ivanovich when, in a public display of familial affection, he kissed her – that is to say, him – on his protruding, muscular lips.  Oh, these people would take no prisoners to entangle you in their web and do you in!  

The bottles alone must have run about 280 rubles, not to mention the roasted duck, mushrooms, and sturgeon.  They probably also purchased a nut cake for dessert, various types of cookies, fruit candy – all for an evil end – for no less than twenty-two roubles.  And what about the butter, sugar, and bread?

In total they paid no less than eight hundred for everything.  Or ten thousand, if one includes the men in women's roles (Lobzikov and Polyansky's wives were probably also impostors), the toiletries needed, as well as the perfume – although they likely had their own underwear on – and perhaps even their colored, store-rack lace purchased for full semblance just in case they had to flirt.

And bank accounts were drained of the entire massive sum of almost fifteen thousand rubles only because of you.   Counting up these expenses in your head made you somewhat proud, but at the same time you remembered that if this was indeed the estimate and such finances were being exhausted, your situation was truly dire.

The guests were eating with great ambition, clanking their knives and forks together in some cryptic code akin to Morse's alphabet.  "Time to get started!  Time to get started!"  tapped out Polyansky impatiently – Polyansky who had not been fond of you for some time now because management, acting on higher orders, had given you a raise and not him, which was, as it were, perfectly justified.  

But Lobzikov, whose friendship with Polyansky was summed up by the aphorism, "two shoes make a pair and one hand washes the other," seized a huge piece of duck with both hands and bit into the side, hinting that this display of ferocity was analogous to what would happen to you.  Learning this bit of intelligence, the guests smacked their salty lips and cheerfully knocked their knives onto their plates, chanting: "It'll happen to you!  It'll happen to you!"  Yet Heinrich Ivanovich Graube, seated at the head of the conspirators, shook his head lightly and pensively put his shot glass – in which gleamed some untouched liquid – to his mouth.  Now you knew that it was supposed to take you another half-hour before you were drunk and unable to notice anything more.

Then Vera Ivanovna Graube – or I should say, a man dressed up as Vera Ivanovna – turned to you and very distinctly uttered the following words:

"Why is our humble friend not eating or drinking anything?"

This sentence was pronounced with the softest of girlish voices, as if he were in fact some kind of woman.  His virtuoso squeakiness must have cost him a lot of work and contradicted his makeup as a heavyweight boxer. 

"Ah!"  he said with feeling, almost ripping his vocal cords.  "You know, I got this duck at the Vagansky market.   Think you'll find decent food in a store nowadays?"

Upon hearing this rather provocative question, the guests stopped chewing and stared at you in eager anticipation of your response.  One word of sympathy and it would all be over.  Graube's ears – the technical term is helices – were hanging over the table, jutting out like headphones on both sides of his head, and his look was sniper-like and microscopic as he went over the features of your face.  Over and above all that, you suddenly had the feeling that someone invisible and omniscient was looking on at this moment (through the window, perhaps, or from the wall, or maybe even through the wall).  This someone was looking at you and everyone else sitting upright in front of their plates, just as if they had all gathered for a group picture.

Realizing that you had to say something or have your silence be interpreted as consent, as unlawful cooperation with the fun on hand, you looked, unblinking, at Graube's sculptured profile and screamed as clearly and distinctly as you could:

"No!" you said.  "Useless, it's all useless!  It is in vain that Vera Ivanovna undervalues the products of our urban and rural trade.  Duck, chicken and even goose – and even the most exotic and rarest of fowl, turkey – all is sold in appropriate quantity in all of our shops, where you can find as much as you want!"

A sigh of disappointment and somehow, at the same time, of relief spread through the room.  Graube blushed and said in full exertion of his neural apparatus:

"Fate – is a turkey; life – is a kopeck."

He was about to add something, something certainly just as nonsensical and ambiguous when Lobzikov began hissing through his chipped tooth.  This was their sign of retreat.  The guests averted their eyes – some towards their plates, others at the tablecloth – but that all-seeing and all-knowing eye which had been watching them ironically squinted at its ill-starred agents and, as if it weren't there at all, dissolved into a yellow spot the color of the yellow wallpaper.

2 

The snow fell; it fell on my eyelashes, on my hat, making it even fluffier, and on the roofs.  One was obliged to squint one's lids, and between them appeared toy-like snow houses.  Through them the street lamps were radiant, creating the pleasant effect so incident to the northern lights.  The light sated the sky then tumbled down and melted ever so slightly.  Suddenly my field of vision gave way to blind slush, and yellow tears mixed with genuine snow flowed from my eyes – on my nose, on the lights, on the roofs covered by that same snow and so akin to thatched huts.

Every time I suddenly remembered and wiped away the next tear with a mitten, nature assured me again that more snow would fall and would fall for much longer, perhaps for all of eternity.  It was that blessed hour of the day when no one quite knew what time it was because the sky, falling in bits of snow onto the ground, might very well pass for day due to its brightness and for night for the opposite reason.  Most likely it was an early winter morning stretching into evening.   I wanted to lie down, burrow my head in the snowdrift and fall asleep.  And I wanted the snow to keep falling to block the flow of time.    

I was enraptured by the weather.  If I had been a twelve-year-old boy like Zhenya rushing down Kirov street with Gagi skates under my arm, at home I would have expected a Christmas tree swathed in golden thread and a picture book version of  Verne's In Search of the Castaways.  A certain brunette provoked a foretaste of this secret in Nikolai Vasileevich, running in a drunken stupor through the frost, fully convinced that she would welcome him with open arms in a warm and cozy room.  She would take him in as she had twice before to their mutual satisfaction, and why would – he now thought – why would he slip up the third time around?  Now the cognac was already working its magic, and the brunette had much of this same mysteriousness.

So gradually, through the snowdrifts and the walls, including the spine of Nikolai Vasileevich made translucent by a flash of electric light and bent in incline towards the brunette, a panorama unfolded before me.

It was snowing.  A fat woman was brushing her teeth.  Another fat woman was cleaning a fish.  A third was cooking some meat.  Two engineers seated together at a piano were playing Chopin with all four hands.  In maternity wards, four hundred women were simultaneously giving birth. 

An old woman was dying.

A ten-kopeck coin fell under the bed.  Father, laughing, said: "Oh, Kolya, Kolya."  Nikolai Vasileevich raced through the freezing weather.  A brunette was rinsing herself off in a bathtub before a date.  An auburn-haired woman was putting on pants.  Three miles away her lover, also somehow Nikolai Vasileevich, crawled with his suitcase in his hand through an apartment spattered in blood.  

An old woman was dying – but not that one, another.

Oh my heavens, what were they doing, what were they up to!  Cooking oatmeal.  Firing a rifle, but missing.  Unscrewing a nut and crying.  Zhenya warmed his cheeks with his Gagi skates under his arm.  Windows were smashed to smithereens.  An auburn-haired woman was putting on pants.  A porter spat with loathing and said: "Here they are!  They've arrived!"

In a bathtub, prior to a date, he raced with his suitcase.  He unscrewed his cheeks from the rifle, and gave birth to the old woman, laughing:  "Here they are!  They've arrived!"  The brunette was dying.  Nikolai Vasileevich was dying.  Zhenya was dying and was born.  The auburn-haired woman was playing Chopin.  But another auburn-haired woman – about seventeen or so – was nevertheless putting on pants.

Sense and logic were embedded in the synchronicity of all these actions, each of which made no sense on its own.  They did not know who else was participating.  What is more, they didn't know what purpose the details in the picture could possibly have, the picture I created while looking at them.  They had no idea that every step they took was fixed and subject, at any given moment, to meticulous examination.

Admittedly, someone experienced a gnaw of conscience.  But sensing continually that I was watching them, staring at them, not averting my piercing and vigilant gaze for a second – this they could not imagine.  Perhaps they acted rather naturally in their mistaken ways, but they were myopic to a substantial degree.

Suddenly my eye slammed against an obstacle and stumbled backwards as if pushed.  It was a person whom one couldn't help but notice.  On the empty, snow-covered street he was drawing attention to himself by constantly looking every which way.  Even entering the apartment, surrounded by wine and hors-d'oeuvres, showing his gratitude to his hospitable host, he was still behaving like a criminal about to be caught and convicted.

No one threatened him, and I deemed it sound and sensible that he began to feel a premonition of my presence.  He probably caught sight of my piercing gaze and writhed beneath it, unaware that it contained a snag.  Yes, there was a snag to allotting power to people to whom that power did not belong.  He must have thought that someone was following him for personal reasons, and this person was I, while he must have thought it was they, and all of this amused me to no end.  I concentrated on him; I captured his brilliant plan in the colored blur of my pupil.  He was like a bacillum beneath a microscope, and I was examining him in every last cruel detail.  

He had red hair; his face was very white, gentle, impenetrable by the sun's rays; its only features were faded freckles which, however, also covered his hands, merging into phalanges and a dark thick rash.  He was dressed rather fashionably, in a freshly pressed suit, in a new necktie and clean socks, which given his age and bachelorhood indicated a certain hidden pride if not a fondness for women.

This last supposition, however, soon ceased to be of any import.  He did not react to any of the women sitting around the table, taking them to be men.  The exception was the librarian Lida, who was sitting on his right.  He knew her from the Ministry, where he would often sit in the library reading the journal Kunststoffe as well as detective novels in translation, and might have hoped that she was in fact none other than the librarian Lida and not an imaginary agent.

Lida was also a girl prone to daydreams, and couldn't resist anyone's advances due to her youth and kindness.  Two years ago she and Heinrich Ivanovich had had a brief affair and now, out of compassion, he had invited her to this family celebration.  She drank a lot in silence and with no interest in what was going on.

This did not escape the attention of my ward.  Having poured out a second glass of wine under the table, he turned to Lida and said for everyone to hear:

"Lida, I love you!"

Signs and Symbols

Those who love and appreciate art – true art, not the popularized kitsch that pollutes all too many of our modern museums – are blessed in more ways than one.  Art is the pleasure of human ingenuity, thought, feeling and remembrance, but it is also a way of life that encompasses and weds every fabric of our being.  From art  we can derive all the postulates of the Ancient Greeks, all the science of Leibniz and Da Vinci, all the politics and history of every politician and historian that has ever lived.  My hyperbolic waves might cause you to snicker, and snicker you may (I am a staunch believer in freewill).  Yet for many of us art and reality are coterminous.  My world may not be perfect, or even particularly beautiful at times, but sooner or later, out of the corner of my watering eye, I will catch a glimpse of something that will return me to the fold, to the other lambs I call human beings and their love for what is greater than they are.  Literary criticism, that unwieldy shapeshifter, has long been aware of the vicissitudes of its subject matter and has mutated appropriately.  Often it adheres to the spirit of the age or whatever else seems trendy; sometimes, however, it ventures out on a bare, untenanted limb and makes a bold declaration only then to find it in a text written two hundred years earlier.  One of literary criticism's more recent chestnuts, concocted in the mad throes of the modernist interbellum, is a holistic approach to the ineluctable modality of the visible.  Everything is reflected in everything else, a prison of a thousand mirrors with only one original – a solipsistic view as old as literature itself.  What is literature if not the mimicry of the omnipotent?  What is art if not a new universe reinvented at the whims of a minor god?  What if that same god senses that his world is rebelling against him, a conspiracy of trees and grass and air?  One answer can be found in this magical short story.

We are taken, rudely, into the life of three miserable people.  An elderly couple, Russian in culture and language but now residents of a foreign land after a great war destroyed everything they loved, is about to visit their only son.  He is twenty and not well, although his gigantic intellect has not been damaged as much as warped.  The white-garbed priests of the new religion have subjected him to countless doses of unpronounceable medications, ink blots, and other brilliantly subversive tactics with no results except a filing cabinet stuffed with lengthy reports about things that will make you and me wonder what on earth is being taught at modern universities.  Our patient remains sick, if sick is the right word:

In these very rare cases the patient imagines that everything happening around him is a veiled reference to his personality and existence.  He excludes real people from the conspiracy – because he considers himself to be so much more intelligent than other men.  Phenomenal nature shadows him wherever he goes.  Clouds in the staring sky transmit to one another, by means of slow signs, incredibly detailed information regarding him.  His inmost thoughts are discussed at nightfall, in manual alphabet, by darkly gesticulating trees.  Pebbles or stains or sun flecks from patterns representing in some awful way messages which he must intercept.  Everything is a cipher and of everything he is the theme.  Some of the spies are detached observers, such as glass surfaces and still pools; others, such as coats in store windows, are prejudiced witnesses, lynchers at heart .... he must be always on his guard and devote every minute and module of life to the decoding of the undulation of things.  The very air he exhales is indexed and filed away.

Some may consider the above description a perfect clinical analysis of one of science's great advances in human psychology; others more discerning in their perceptions, however, might see something else.  Instead of a young man with no future, we might be dealing with a young man who sees the future, past, and present simultaneously;  instead of an illness we might see an obsessive and creative part of our consciousness that devours all slaves to art from their first moments of self-awareness to their dying breath; and instead of an arrogant eccentric, we might see the outline of a great artistic soul imperiled by a tidal wave of sensation, the totality of an open mind exposed to an endless universe.  In those cases, as it were, the universe will always win.    

A lesser writer might have said much more about our patient, who is obviously talented (after all, his cousin, perhaps the paranoid protagonist of this novel, is a chess grandmaster) if unsociable.  But Nabokov lets us examine the patient from the point of view of his parents who are impoverished, unable to communicate well in English, and completely distraught over the separation from their beloved offspring.   Mothers tend to take such things a bit harder, and his proves to be no exception:

After all, living did mean accepting the loss of one joy after another, not even joys in her case – mere possibilities of improvement.  She thought of the endless waves of pain that for some reason or other she and her husband had to endure; of the invisible giants hurting her boy in some unimaginable fashion; of the incalculable amount of tenderness contained in the world; of the fate of this tenderness, which is either crushed, or wasted, or transformed into madness; of neglected children humming to themselves in unswept corners; of beautiful weeds that cannot hide from the farmer and helplessly have to watch the shadow of his simian stoop leave mangled flowers in its wake, as the monstrous darkness approaches.

And the story (taken from this magnificent collection) draws to an unexpected close.  The lonesome couple is bent over a kitchen table as a phone rings again and again and a voice asks, rather insistently, a most peculiar question.  We are told little more than that "it was an unusual hour for their telephone to ring" and that "the same toneless anxious voice asked for Charlie."  What is a young girl calling an old couple in the middle of the night about a young man a symbol of?  I for one can think of a few things.  But they, like the thoughts of our clearly sick patient, do not need to be expressed.

Turgenev, "Весенний вечер"

A poem ("An evening in the spring") by a young Ivan Turgenev.  You can read the original here.

O golden beams that wave and prance    
Above the land in restful lay;                    
O spacious fields in silent trance        
That glisten, gorged on dewy day;      
O streams that purl in valley's dark   
Beyond the springtime thunder's break,   
And lazy winds sweep aspen bark,           
As wings wax lightly in their wake. 

O lofty woods, O soundless thrill,             
So green and dark this forest deep!         
Where thickest shade can linger still    
And court these leaves deprived of sleep.
O star awake in sunset's flame,         
O beauteous star where love can't die ,      
My soul's as light  as spirit's name, 
As light as childhood years gone by.

Tsvetaeva, "Германии"

A work ("To Germany") by this poet written in Moscow about a decade and a half into the last century, including a reference to a beautiful city in which I once studied.  You can read the original here.

From all the world thou hidest as prey,
Thine enemies are legions long.
How can I then thy love betray?
How can I then chant treason's song?

What wisdom would I drink  in wine:
"An eye for an eye, blood for blood"?
O Germany, o madness mine!
O Germany, my only love!

Нow can I then so turn my back
On my surrounded Vaterland,
Where still through Königsberg fall tracks
Of narrow-faced and quiet Kant?

And cherishing a Faustian psalm,
On long-forgotten village routes,
Geheimrat Goethe, with cane in palm
Makes rugged use of gilded boots.

How can I then forsake thee now,
Germanic star, my sky of rhyme?
How then to halve my love's bold prow,
I have not learned – and at the time,

In ecstasy from thy sweet voice,
The captain's spurs I do not hear,
When good Saint George made me his choice
And Freiburg's Schwabentor appear?

Am I engulfed by utter rage
When Kaiser whiskers steal the sun?
When I have pledged at every age
My love to thee, my only one?

No wiser or more magical
A  fragrant land is there than thine,
As Lorelei her flaxen curls
Reflects in the eternal Rhine.