I press your hand warmly.
Your J. JACOB TO MARUSYA
NOVEMBER 25, 1934
You ask about my household affairs. I’ll tell you. First, I buy commercial bread, not subsidized. You can buy it here easily now; there’s no standing in line. It used to be hard to come by. When there are interruptions in the supply, I have a stash of dried bread that the landlady made. There was such a shortage recently, and I ate dried bread from my sack of provisions for a whole week. When it was almost gone, they opened the bakery. Now I’m building up a supply of dried bread again. Moreover, I was given eight kilos of flour at work, and this will also become part of the emergency supply, in case of shortages. I eat in the House of Workers’ Education. The first course costs 60–80 kopecks, and the main dish, with meat, costs 1.50 to 1.80 rubles.
I’ve been working in the Butter Trust for nearly a month already, and I still haven’t received my salary. They promise to give it to me tomorrow. I eat breakfast and lunch at home—bread with the same butter they give me at work. All in all, I eat quite well. I still don’t have any electricity. I’m waiting for them to give me my pay.
My room is very warm. I’m sitting here writing you wearing only a shirt. The windows in Biysk are made without any ventilation panes, but I have an air vent in the wall. After an evening of work by the light of the kerosene lamp, the air is very bad. It will be much better with electricity.
In the last issue of New World, there is an excellent article about a modern family in Germany. You would relish reading it as much as I did. It addresses all the issues that especially interest you, and the approaches of all the various schools of German educational ideologists are cited here, too. Among them you will find many who share your own views. It will be especially interesting for you to discover these faraway kindred spirits.
The article contains a long bibliography on this issue (in German). Read Kellerman as soon as possible, for advice about further reading.
I will send you this issue. There are many things I could add to what the author has said. The article gave me an interesting idea—to write a book about women’s labor in various countries. If you would like to take up this theme, I am ready to offer you my secret co-authorship.
I read your review in Our Achievements about the partisan collection. I would like to see a more detailed explication of the book itself. Reviews seldom inspire one to read a book; they often end up as substitutes for a book, and for this reason should be more detailed and exhaustive.
I embrace you, my marvelous friend. J.
JANUARY 30, 1935
Yesterday I received your letter of January 22 about Genrikh’s illness. His heredity isn’t bad, so his body will be able to cope with it. Our financial situation will improve, and with it his diet. I’ll be sending you butter now every month—eight or ten pounds of it. I already sent you two shipments: one on January 16 with ten pounds, and another on the 26th with four. I’m afraid the first shipment might get lost in the maiclass="underline" it was not registered, and I had to send it without declaring the value. The second will reach you: I sent it registered with a declared value of sixty rubles. If I get a notice that it has been received, I’ll send you the next shipment. I have sixty rubles set aside for the next one. As of the beginning of February, I’m going to be working as the choir director at the social club. I requested two hundred rubles. They apologized, but could only pay me one hundred, saying they would supplement it in some other way. I tentatively agreed. I think I’ll be earning what I am worth. In addition to the butter, I can still send you a hundred rubles a month. With this support, I think we will be able to help Genrikh recover very quickly from his illness. Write me and tell me what condition the butter is in when it reaches you. Altai butter is considered to be the best. Tell me what kind you like most—sweet, salty, or clarified.
I already wrote you that nothing came of the English lessons. I was told that whoever had given permission for the classes later withdrew it. But how wonderful it would have been to give a language course in the library!
My monthly budget breaks down like this: Dinner is expensive (three rubles a day). Bread costs one ruble a day, and the rest of the food for one day costs another ruble. Thus, about 150–160 rubles a month go for food. The room is twenty rubles; heating, twenty rubles. The wash, bathhouse, kerosene, and other incidentals come to about thirty rubles a month. It all adds up to 220–230 a month. My salary is supposed to be 350, but in fact it is 310.
Tell me about where you eat, where Genrikh takes his meals, how much lunch costs, what kind of nourishment you are getting.
I’ve started taking a keen interest in history. I’m reading a wonderful book by Mehring: The History of Germany. I regret that I didn’t discover this book years ago. I delight in every line. In his analysis of the Middle Ages, the papacy, and Christianity, there is an enormous breadth of generalization.
My incidental reading is four volumes of the tiresome Jean-Christophe, the curious French writer Giraudoux (that is who Olesha takes his cues from), Masuccio Salernitano (a contemporary of Boccaccio), and Schopenhauer on the essence of music. Interesting, but somehow fails to elaborate on some very important points.
I work on my story “Man and Things.” It’s expanding, much to my chagrin. It’s already nearly a novella, about forty or fifty pages. The work is going very slowly. I polish word by word, phrase by phrase. Every day I read it ten times over—no, countless times. The plot has already assumed its final shape; now I need to work on the details, the characters, who must be revealed in passing, through precise, incisive traits. The erotic scene came out very well, I thought.
Adieu. When will I finally get word that you have received the butter? I can’t wait. J.
FEBRUARY 8, 1935
You write that my political evolution estranges me from you, that the fissure that has been present all these years is deepening. That is because we cannot have a deep and serious conversation. I await the time when we can converse and be together again, not only in letters but in person. I would be able to allay many of your anxieties. You understood me wrong when I said that there was no sense in attending the Party-history study circle. If you have decided to take up that study, you by all means should. There is nothing wrong with that. There cannot ever be anything wrong in learning new things. The current level of teaching is not up to par, in my opinion. I could be wrong, of course. When you begin to study, write and tell me whether it is interesting.
Forty-five years old is nothing! Now it is already clear that even at sixty-five I will be the same person I am today. With the years, you mature, your capacity for work increases, and, to be honest, you become smarter. We’ll live to be at least seventy.
… books on literature. Four volumes of Kogan. The History of Modern Russian Literature. I took it only because of Bryusov, who has become a beloved poet of mine, but I ended up reading the whole book. I am learning a great deal that I should have learned long ago. Kogan’s study is not deep, but extremely packed with material and even ideas that he has evidently borrowed from others.
And Lunacharsky’s On Literature and Art is lying on the table, waiting its turn. I try to keep myself in check—otherwise, I would have another enormous stack of books about natural history, about physics. Nonetheless, The History of the Continents (about geography) is already on my desk, waiting to be read. History will occupy me at least until spring, or maybe even summer. I’m in the Middle Ages, and there is still Russian and modern history to go. I’m in a terrible hurry, as though I don’t have much time to live, or as though exams are coming up. And from every book I read, something remains in my notes.