The whole way home, she dozed, dreaming lightly, feeling the rocking of the train, which sped along sometimes, then slowed down, and sometimes halted altogether. She had that strange feeling of suspension, of being in some indeterminate temporal dimension. She held the wooden jester in her hands, and from time to time he ended up in her dream. This was how her work on the project began.
She still had to read a bit more—about the Transfiguration. First, Mount Tabor. The disciples fall down in a faint, because they can’t bear the light of Transfiguration; it plunges them into a sleeping dream. Not a dream, of course, but a sort of narcosis. It’s impossible for a human being to withstand, like leaping into the fourth dimension. That’s what I need. This is the finale, when Lear emerges into another dimension, beyond human cares and concerns, but is not yet dead—he’s in another, transformed state. The people who surround him, still alive, cannot perceive this state. They, and the audience with them, are agitated and shaken, and cannot comprehend what has happened.
Then Tusya gave her a book by the philosopher Berdyaev. There, too, Nora found what she needed. It was articulated in somewhat complex language, but, simplified to the level that suited Nora’s needs, it came down to the idea that everything is infused with spirit, though the spiritual content of human beings is more capacious than that of animals; trees and other plants also partake of the spiritual principle, but to a still lesser degree. Even inert matter, such as a rock, is not completely dead; it also contains a trace of spirit. Which is very important in this case, since the storm in Lear is a mutiny of living elements—water, wind, fire. This is where Lear has his epiphany about naked man. Precisely here. And with this insight he begins to grow younger and younger as the play progresses. It begins as a story of an old man, and ends—through Transfiguration—with Lear casting everything off. Well, he begins to divest himself even before. And the first thing he casts off is power. But he still doesn’t understand what will follow from this.
The first drawing that Nora made was Lear in the first act. He is dressed in multilayered garments. They hang from him as though on a standing coatrack, with extended hooks and arms, and over all the layers is draped his royal mantle. He takes it off, announcing that he is ceding his power to his daughters. His gnarled, emaciated hands, with their enormous swollen joints, are, possibly, trembling. His face is covered with deep wrinkles, folds of sagging skin, with hanging lips and jowls, and two tendons in his neck, between which a flaccid sack of skin hangs down under his chin.
I’ll make a mask out of latex, Nora thought. I can try, at least. And old-man’s warts with tufts of hair growing from them. And overgrown shaggy eyebrows that hang down, nearly covering his eyes. After his rejection of Goneril and his flight to take refuge with Regan, he is wearing less clothing. Part of it he threw off in rage. His face looks younger, sterner, and more defined—let’s say he looked ninety before, and now he has become younger by twenty years. And after the storm—we’ll simply rely on good old-man’s makeup, without any of the extras. We’ll remove all the facial molding … And now he’s wearing only his undergarments. And in the final act, at the very end, he’s a young man, with the young Cordelia in his arms—they are the same age. No makeup at all. A young face, a young body. And let Lear be played by a young actor, in his early thirties. So here there must be complete transformation—no clothes whatsoever, absolutely naked. Well, in a flesh-colored bodysuit, without any hair, without any visible sexual traits—because sex is also cast off. Denuded man!
The set will be spare in the extreme. Only the cliffs. But in the first act, the cliffs are covered with rugs, priceless tapestries, and fabrics; then, with the first banishment, and the second, the rugs and tapestries disappear. During the storm, only rags blow across the stage. And in the finale, there is not a scrap of anything left. Corpses, the sentries pressed against the cliffs, are strewn somewhere below. Lear carries the dead Cordelia in his arms and climbs up one of the cliffs. Naked, without any covering at all.
Edgar, the Jester, and Kent watch them from below, like Jesus’ disciples at the moment of his Transfiguration. The light is unbearable. The cliffs begin to light up. That’s what we’ll do. And Lear and Cordelia remain, standing in the rays of light. The End. Applause.
16 A Secret Marriage
(1911)
Marusya spent just a few days in Moscow, but when she returned home, it seemed to Jacob that she was now older than he was. She was, indeed, older than he was—by eleven days. Jacob, with all his inclination to philosophize, had not yet stumbled on this notion—the incommensurability of the flow of time and age, and, especially, the disparate rhythms and cycles of age in men and women. That note of condescending tenderness that he had acquired through the years of interacting with his younger sisters, and which he at first transferred to Marusya, seemed misplaced or insufficient. Marusya’s unexpected maturation forced him to grow up, too. He wrote an entry about it in his diary soon after her return:
Everything that has happened to me up until today was simply a puppy’s ecstasy at the sight of a pretty young woman. Even our wonderful conversations are meaningless, because they are just the dreams of underdeveloped, puerile young people. Now I understand that only manly behavior, powerful masculine action, can correct this. If not, I’m lost. I remember with shame how we stood by the ravine in the Royal Garden, and the moment was perfect, but even then I didn’t dare kiss her. Even writing the word “her” makes me uncomfortable. Our relationship has formed on the basis of interests we share, and the fact that we belong to different sexes, that there is something between us that is purely “sexual,” should not be that important. It’s almost a kind of captivity, and it can only be overcome through unity, through wholeness and integration. Indeed, if I understand Plato correctly, this is the idea behind the “androgyne”—to be such an integrated being that sex doesn’t undermine the unity.
Jacob, following his tried-and-true custom of sharing his deepest thoughts with Marusya, outlined his notions for her in a less coherent form. Yes, she also thought about the subject of sex, and the biology lectures in her studies had made a strong impression on her. From them, Marusya had gleaned that women pay a high price for their childbearing capacity, and the inequality of the sexes derives directly from the divergent biological functions of the male and the female. But this view led her in the opposite direction—not toward androgyny, but in the direction of the authentic emancipation of women in the psychological, intellectual, and spiritual realms. There could never be any equality on the level of biology, since nature had assigned women the role of the continuation of the species, the birth and nurturing of children. This inhibits the full development of her capacities. Jacob completely shared Marusya’s views on emancipation, and even pointed out to her that men were obliged to share these views; otherwise, an intelligent, rational partnership would become a competition, and no good would come of it.
These conversations brought them closer and closer together, and Marusya’s thoughts in some way fed his courage. They finished their exams in June. Jacob qualified to enter the second year of the Commercial Institute, he passed his in absentia exams in the program of music theory at the conservatory, and Marusya received a certificate of completion of the Froebel Courses. Jacqueline Osipovna offered her the chance to work in the Froebel Society as an assistant until autumn. Now Marusya and Jacob met nearly every day; he came to see her at home, and got to know her parents and her brother Mikhail, who had just arrived from St. Petersburg. On July 12, having been detained in town for two weeks because Rayechka was ill, the Ossetsky family left for a dacha in Lustdorf, near Odessa, where they had rented a spacious house for many years running.