DECEMBER 7, 2:00 A.M.
I have just returned from the officers’ club. We played for the gentlemen officers and their ladies. It was interesting to observe from a distance. The girls who waited to be asked to dance, the “wallflowers,” were very touching. You should have seen how one of them bloomed, how her eyes shone, when some scrawny specimen of an officer finally invited her to take a turn on the dance floor. He may not have been much to look at, but he was still a man, for all that. I felt very sorry for the girls.
At the beginning of the evening, there was dancing for the soldiers. That was where it was fun to play! You know that every note pierces the soul of the dancers, and shakes them down to their toes. There were chambermaids, cooks, fine ladies “in hats.” In a soldier’s slang, a “hat” is a lady with pretensions. On the one hand, he is attracted to her; on the other, he is critical of her airs and graces. He can’t choose between the hat and the headscarf.
I so want to read with you, to study the world together.
Yesterday I read a bit of Maupassant in French, and decided to postpone my studies until we are together again. Will you help me work on my pronunciation?
I’m going to bed. I’m sleeping away my last bachelor nights … I kiss your shoulders. Jacob
DECEMBER 20
Dear Marusya! I’m writing from the barracks, where I’ve come to get chocolate and bread.
You will be leaving in a few hours. My heart is aching, but I’m trying to keep myself in check.
We do make a curious pair, don’t we: the happiest and the unhappiest on earth. In happy moments we believe in the first part of the formula, and in unhappy moments the second.
Today we’re unhappy, and there isn’t a drop left of the happiness we’ve been feeling. JACOB TO MARUSYA
DECEMBER 30
Everything is as it was, but a
Strange silence reigns …
And at your window, the dark
Mist of the street sows fear.
—Alexander Blok
Here, no strange silence reigns. Everything is as it was. I received your letter, and so the sweet old papery bond between us has sprung up again. You—a letter; me—a letter; a letter—a vessel of joy; a letter—a tear of sorrow. Everything as it was.
Still, I feel better—I’ve become calmer and more self-assured, like I was in the good old days. I don’t hurry to get anywhere, I have no expectations (since I don’t have your arrival to look forward to anymore). I’m motivated to work. I hope all of this holds true for you as well, my dearest friend.
Immaturity is having a serious attitude toward trivial matters, and to those sincere concerns that trivial matters awaken. Immaturity is an unconscious feeling by definition. As soon as an adult becomes aware of his childishness and tries to continue playing the role, he instantly turns into an affected, unpleasant creature. But unconscious childishness is enchanting. When you see an adult ice-skating, or peering at the ornate handle of an umbrella (your father), or simply smiling all of a sudden, without rhyme or reason (my father), you begin to understand that you have stumbled upon some extraordinarily precious feature in the chaos of everyday life, and you take delight in it.
Today we had another military outing. It’s very cold outside, but there is no greater pleasure than these happy processions. In the letter that got lost, I wrote that the outing is like a whole symphony of experiences in a mass of healthy young bodies. The mood gets transferred from one person to another, and conquers even the most solemn and cheerless souls. When music plays (we are the ones playing it; I play it), the whole mood takes on a rhythmic embodiment. Children rush out from all the courtyards; kitchen maids with galoshes pulled up over their bare legs exchange smiles and laughter with the soldiers, who look at them like a pack of hungry wolves.
Today, during the outing, I had some thoughts about Chekhov. They ran like this. The newspapers bemoan the fact that Moscow is losing its authentic Moscow character because it is overrun by refugees (read: Jews), who are corrupting the Russian language. The paper claims that people regularly mispronounce words, speak with rising intonations when they should be falling, and vice versa … I think that all this nostalgia and mourning for the past, what we read about in The Cherry Orchard, has no basis in real life. All that remains is a vestige, a sort of aesthetic mist enveloping everything.
I am no Lopakhin, but Lopakhin is closer to me than all the other dying people. He’s the only character who is truly alive. But he was conceived as a comic hero! And it is, in fact, a comedy. Chekhov sees the inhabitants of the manor as satirical archetypes. But if that is the case, then Lopakhin is the only person with real agency among them. It’s the death knell of the past, but in mild, comedic form. Yet Stanislavsky staged it as drama: the beautiful manor house with columns, the beautiful suffering of its starry-eyed inhabitants. Chekhov doesn’t laugh; he smiles wanly at the cozy world, the world he himself belongs to, and this is his parting smile. Not because he knows that he will die soon, but because he knows that this world won’t outlive him by very long. Let them hack down the flowering trees—I know that poor, flimsy houses will spring up on crooked little lanes and alleys surrounding the factory. Suffering will increase, the family structure will crumble, but there will be one more step toward consciousness, toward conscientiousness. Whether the next step in the struggle will be taken doesn’t interest me. The greatest evil is impoverished humanity, filthy, uncultured, uncomprehending. And the price we pay for acquiring consciousness is usually centuries of suffering and bloodshed. But it is worth the price.
It seems to me that Chekhov anticipated this. He felt contempt for the old world, but he feared the new one. The suffering of the cherry-orchard keepers is precious, prettified. The other kind of suffering—naked, anguished, hungry, but active, dynamic—transforms itself into something unprecedented and new, which will surpass all the utopias of the first socialists, from Sir Thomas More to Tommaso Campanella, which were conceived and elaborated long before Marx. I think that a hundred years from now, when human culture will have achieved an unprecedented level, theaters will view Chekhov as the greatest monument to a vanished world. But his plays are an indispensable step for achieving something higher, something better.
These days are very busy for me, though the company has holidays back-to-back. The officers invite their ladies, and the soldiers invite theirs. The soldiers seat their best girls and are particularly proud of the fine dresses their beloveds wear. The officers’ ladies survey the kitchen girls with disdain and seat themselves in the front rows with a show of refined dignity. One of the cooks utterly charmed me. She was wearing a white blouse with a very low neckline and a blindingly blue skirt, which might even have been a petticoat. How pleased she was with herself! One sees such characters only among cooks—my goodness, what she managed to do with her bust! Hilarious! The gallery, where the soldiers without girlfriends were sitting, was in very high spirits.
My English studies are proceeding apace. Today I finished “The Happy Prince” by Oscar Wilde. I liked it extremely well. I’m no enemy of apropos moral maxims. I highly recommend the story to you. It’s quite suitable for children’s classes. I’m sending along two stories for you (“The Beast Tree [The Tibetan Statuette]” by Remizov and “The Unforgiven Tree” by Teffi), for the following reason. In order to compose stories yourself, you must familiarize yourself with the folktale elements and features, turns of phrase, examples, stereotypes, allegories, and conventions that are universal for all folk or fairy tales. Ideas, plots might vary, but the core elements remain the same. In these stories, one comes across some new features. The features of Oriental tales, as well as those of exotic peoples such as Negroes, Chinese, or the Hindus, are particularly interesting. But for the most part, stories can embody their own unique laws of existence, which the author creates out of combinations of these familiar conventions.