MARCH 31, 1913
Nighttime. I’ve just come back from the Zimin Theater, where I saw Sadko. I suffered because you weren’t with me to enjoy it. It’s all so wonderful, so intriguing. All of the costumes designed by Egorov. Every single costume was a miracle. The conductor was Palitsyn.
I want to sleep. I hardly slept at all last night. Good night, Jacob, my love. Oh, how tired I am! And I always feel this exhaustion lately.
Still, it’s hard to make myself stop writing. There’s so much I need to tell you.
Once, Mikhail said to me, “If you write Jacob, don’t forget to send him my greetings—double greetings, in fact.” That’s what he said. Yes, Jacob, we already have a big family. You already have three new brothers. Well, goodbye, then, my dear. And now I’ll go to sleep and kiss you all night long. Telegram
APRIL 15, 1913
ILL DETAILS TO FOLLOW IN LETTER YOURS YURYUZAN–MOSCOW JACOB TO MARUSYA
APRIL 16, 1913
What kind of illness is it? Are you confined to bed? It’s almost impossible for me to imagine you sick; sometimes I don’t want to believe anything. You have too much theoretical health to fall ill! Get well, Marusya! If I were there I would make you some tea with lemon and Cognac, and it would take all your exhaustion away, just like that. But I’m going to bed. It’s evening here, and already late for me (ten o’clock). I did some domestic chores before bed. I laid out my linen, sprinkling it with the cyclamen you love. Why did I do it? You’re not here! I also washed a handkerchief.
I’m going to get undressed. But you’re not here.
APRIL 18, 1913
Good day, Marusya! Are you feeling better today?
It’s evening here, and my eyelids feel heavy and want to stick together. I’ve said hello to you, kissed your hands, and now I’m bidding you good night again.
I’m going off to dreamland.
“My wife is ill, her bed is two thousand versts away.”
How terrible it sounds. I can’t imagine you ill.
Goodbye, little one, be a good girl and get well soon!
APRIL 23, 1913
It’s so strange, and just not right—you are sick, and I want to talk to you more than ever, but I can only write about myself. You are sick, and I’m writing about my worries, my thoughts, my hopes.
Well, never mind. Let it be this way, then. Please refrain from writing me, or at least don’t send me anything longer than a postcard, so as not to exhaust yourself. Telegram
APRIL 25, 1913
TELEGRAPH ME HOW IS HEALTH I’M WORRIED JACOB MOSCOW–YURYUZAN MARUSYA TO JACOB
MAY 4, 1913
My sweet husband! My Jacob! I am beside myself. I have real reason to suspect that my life is going to change, in such a way that your secret wish—that I leave the stage—will come true. And our dreams that we spun and believed were still far away are already here, now, when I am not at all ready to change my life, to abandon the theater and become the respectable wife of a respectable husband. It’s terrible. And this is what constitutes the tragedy of a woman’s existence, her slavery to nature. You and I have talked about how we will have a big family and many children, and how our children will be happy, with parents who raise them to be free and well-adjusted people. But this will mean that my artistic life must end before it has really begun. Now I can’t help seeing my mother in myself—buried in her humdrum everyday existence, frying pans, collars, sewing, and anxieties. I hate all of that! And my mother (you don’t know this) wrote poetry in her youth, and has kept her journal with lyrical jottings commemorating her unfulfilled life. YURYUZAN–MOSCOW JACOB TO MARUSYA
MAY 12, 1913
My little one! Pride, and fear, and ecstasy, and much more I can’t name! I found out about the possibility of getting married officially here, although you would have to travel for four days by train again. Perhaps I could try to talk them into granting me furlough? But try to find out, in any case, if among your “high-society” friends there is a lawyer who can tell you about the consequences of having a child out of wedlock. Also about children out of wedlock who are legally assigned to the mother and then adopted by the father. I have some thoughts about this myself. I studied all of this at one point, and passed an exam on it, but I’ve forgotten it all. I have no volume ten of the Legal Code here.
Do not feel anxious and overwhelmed by all of this. You have a husband, and he will take all the burdens onto his own shoulders.
23 A New Direction
(1976–1982)
It wasn’t the doctors who finally healed Vitya’s psychological ailment, or whatever one might call it, but Grisha Lieber, his former schoolmate. Rotund, bald, and satisfied with life, Grisha resurfaced out of the oblivion of the past, after a long absence. He was married, had a son, and was brimming with plans, including that of emigration. But this was something he did not share with Vitya.
During the year when Vitya entered the Department of Mathematics and Mechanical Engineering, Grisha was admitted to a chemistry institute, where there was a strong mathematics department and a relatively lax policy on accepting clever Jewish students. He graduated with high marks, and began working as a junior researcher in a laboratory that practiced and researched a real science whose precise name had not yet been determined.
The researchers in the laboratory were reluctant to describe to outsiders what they were doing. In particular, they were trying to establish the difference between living and nonliving matter, to grab the elusive secret of the structure of the world by the tail. Discussions about this subject inspired perplexity and doubt among the majority of scholars who were not involved in these audacious speculations. Their activities concerned the quivering, volatile forefront of scientific knowledge, a frontier whose existence most people didn’t even suspect. But those who did suspect—who acknowledged that it was precisely here that a new breakthrough in science was under way, a stunning flowering of consciousness—numbered only ten or so on the planet, roughly half of them in Russia: Kolmogorov, the world-renowned academician; the underrated Gelfand, who was highly regarded in narrow circles; and two or three others.
Scientific thought of truly global significance boiled and seethed around these chosen few. Grisha was lucky enough to be stewed in this remarkable cauldron, and it was Gelfand who tended the fire. Grisha was among the devotees, but devotees of the very lowest degree. He accepted with resignation that the level of his devotion was determined by nothing more than the speed of neurons, the capacity of the brain to acquire and process information—that is, measurable biological parameters still to be discovered and named. Grisha guessed that, because of his ethnic origins, Gelfand had had to have read the Bible at some point; but he had been barred from the right to secular higher education. It was unbelievable, but he didn’t even have a higher degree. Still, Grisha was sure for some reason that Gelfand’s origins alone predisposed him to share the idea that so preoccupied Grisha: in science, modern man was doing the same thing that Adam had done long ago when he bestowed names on nameless creatures; he was calling by name the first things he encountered and took to be living facts of life. Grisha was canny and gifted enough to appreciate this project, and the proximity to genius was the source of happiness and meaning of his life.