The other day, I read Women and Ladies, by Mr. Amfiteatrov. Yura brought it over, it’s brand-new. And it’s a pathetic excuse for literature. Lightweight feuilletons, sketches, anecdotes. Every single woman he describes in this collection is a nonentity. What has happened to that sense of self-worth that Pushkin ascribed to women? If we elaborate this further, we see that only Pushkin wrote about personal self-worth, about the dignity of the human being—male (Pyotr Andreyevich Grinev) and female (Masha Mironova and Tatiana Larina). This is the foundation of foundations. From the artistic point of view, Amfiteatrov’s writing is lively, but the style is journalistic, unrefined. Again, I can’t help noticing that Dina, a Jewish female character-type, deals in contraband, and resembles Chekhov’s Susanna Moiseyevna. It’s astonishing, but all the Jewish girls I know, like Marusya, Beti, Asya, are students—some study pedagogy, others medicine. Verochka Grinberg works in a library. Yet in the stories of Mr. Chekhov and Mr. Amfiteatrov, they all seem to be pawnbrokers. Dostoevsky’s old woman pawnbroker inspires less intense disgust than these Jewish pawnbrokers. Maybe it’s because the old woman is Russian, and not Jewish?
The woman question will become more and more important, I think. This is only the beginning of the process, and in a hundred years everything will change—women will be different. Doctors, senators, even government ministers, will be women. And these young ladies, girls who plunge into education and learning, are just the beginning of the process of development. Turgenev, fragile, refined Turgenev, created a single, integrated type, the “Turgenev woman.” But he chose a formidable woman, a singer, a world-renowned figure, as his lover, as his own companion. Emancipated, in other words? Or am I judging the matter incorrectly?
I even had two ideas for stories—fairly good ones, if I do say so myself.
One is about a young girl who falls in love with an old man and meets with him in secret, even bearing his children, two or three of them. She conceals from everyone else who the father is. Everyone looks down on her and judges her; not even her mother understands where these children have come from. The old man dies and leaves her a small fortune in his will. She leaves the children and goes away to study. Like our Beti, for example, to Switzerland. She becomes a dentist, or maybe a gynecologist, then returns home to her children. She works, and gives them a good education. And the whole time she is studying, the children stay with her mother, their grandmother, and everyone thinks she has abandoned them. I’ll have to ask Beti about her studies in Switzerland to give the story verisimilitude.
I also thought of another story, in the vein of Sholem Aleichem—about a tailor, very famous and sought-after, someone like our Meyerson, for example, who is gradually going blind, and his daughter begins to work for him, and no one knows that she has taken his place. Her father is dying, and she becomes … I have to think a little more about how her life will take shape, independent of men. And she herself is not pretty, not married, yet she is content with her life, and feels fulfilled.
Marusya is right: world culture suffers without education for women. Truly, these are revolutionary times.
SEPTEMBER 16
I have completely adapted to my new regimen. I need to observe strict discipline. I rise at 5:30. Hygiene. From 6:00 to 7:30, I study science. Then I drink tea and have breakfast and go to the Institute (three versts). I go on foot, so I can exercise my limbs and pass Marusya’s house on the way, rather than taking a trolley. I’m at the Institute by 8:30. I have classes until 2:00. Then I teach a lesson (one lesson in piano; another, starting next week, in mathematics). Three times a week, I have classes at the conservatory. I play regularly, but I can’t manage more than an hour a day. (My education in music theory doesn’t require me to be a first-rate performer, but I consider mastery of an instrument to be mandatory.) I have a late lunch at home. After lunch, I copy Solovetsky’s or Kononenko’s lecture notes (if the lectures are essential), which I missed on the previous day, so that I have no gap in my knowledge of statistics or political economy. At 7:00, we have dinner, and after that I play with the little ones until about 8:00. From 8:00 until midnight is my time for reading, when I don’t go out to a concert. I usually attend concerts at least twice a week. I try to go to bed by midnight, but I don’t always manage. What bliss—the house is asleep, it’s quiet, I roam through the world of science and art in my reading. I borrowed a book on movement and exercise. I read about Isadora Duncan’s school, which borrows from traditions of antiquity; it appeals to me greatly. But—and this I have not said to Marusya—her pedagogy classes, especially concerning education for women, seem to me to be more socially useful than all the recent enthusiasm for Bewegung (contrapuntal motion).
1. New play by Leonid Andreyev
2. The Way to Live: In Health and Physical Fitness, by George Hackenschmidt. On physiological degradation of the modern man despite the advances of medicine in the areas of combating infectious diseases and improvements in nourishment. Increased life expectancy??? Now, that’s a perfect application for statistics!
3. Sigmund Freud, Die Traumdeutung. It hasn’t been translated into Russian. It’s a pity, the book is exceptionally compelling, but not convincing. A hypothesis!
4. Sigmund Freud, Eine Kinderheitserinnerung des Leonardo da Vinci, 1910
5. Boethius—on music—I have to look for sources. Does it exist in Russian? In German? Is it really the oldest tract on music theory?
OCTOBER 1
I’ve taken on so many activities and commitments, and this saves me. Letters from Marusya. I acquired a special box to store my letters and postcards in. I hide it among the books. It’s the most secret part of my life. I can’t even imagine what would happen if these letters fell into the wrong hands. Poor thing, she’s so busy that she can’t always find time to write a letter to me. We agreed to write every other day. I finish my exams on January 15, and on the 16th, I’ll be on the train! The letters stimulate me enormously. Sometimes I think, How is it possible that only four months ago I lived without Marusya? No, this question is disingenuous. How is it possible I lived without a woman? I’m suffering terribly now from the absence of a woman, and I fully understand those young men who go to prostitutes. It’s not a matter of love, only of physiological needs. True, said physiology is so simple you can easily get by without a prostitute, relying on your own means. The aversion one feels, I think, is the same.
NOVEMBER 2
The weather has taken a turn for the worse. Rain. I no longer want to go to the Institute on foot. I take a horse-drawn tram and this saves me half an hour of morning time. But these morning walks gave me energy, and I miss them. Marusya writes that it has been raining in Moscow for a whole month, and it’s cold on top of that. She’s always freezing in her little room at home. Yesterday I sent her twenty rubles that I earned teaching my two classes. I haven’t seen her in so long, sometimes it seems that she never existed—I just imagined it all, it was some kind of hallucination. But on my desk there is a receipt from the post office, as proof that, in some room I’ve never seen on Bogoslovsky Lane, a fire is burning in the stove, and it will be warm.