Pavel Kuzmich Griboyedov returned from the neighboring barracks where he had played three games of chess with Boris Mihailovich Ivanovich, with figures made from bread dough, losing all three games. He climbed up into his bunk and got the urge to light a cigarette; since the mail would arrive tomorrow, his father would send him some loose tobacco and he would be able to pay Joseph Vartolomeyich back, and also to give him a few extra cigarettes by the way. But Joseph Vartolomeyich was not in his bunk.
“Foma Ilyich,” he called to Zemski, “do you know where Joseph Vartolomeyich is?”
Foma Ilyich nodded his head indirectly toward the building whose name the inmates never spoke aloud.
“Well, yeah,” grumbled Foma Ilyich, “I told him that it’s no good to laugh in the morning. I told him…”
“Yes, you told him, you told him,” Pavel Kuzmich said quietly.
Then he turned over, sighed and continued to write the second volume of the Treatise about Time in his mind, where he shed light on the problem from the subjective point of view: “The fact that man is thrown into time indicates the conclusion to us that time is not in man, that it is not immanent to him…” But he simply could not. For a while, Pavel Kuzmich lay there avoiding all thought of Joseph Vartolomeyich, and then he wanted to go to sleep; he stuck his hand under his pillow (a habit from childhood) and felt a small pouch. Tobacco. Kuznyetsov had left him his tobacco…
While he carefully rolled a cigarette in the dark filled with heavy breathing and snoring, two large hot tears rolled down the cheeks of Pavel Kuzmich, for the first time in many years.
~ ~ ~
~ ~ ~
The Collected Works Of Joseph Kowalsky
KOWALSKY. A BIOGRAPHY
I
Last autumn, the daily papers printed a brief item at the bottom of the cultural column, stating that Joseph Kowalsky, poet, novelist and essayist, had died at the age of sixty-one in Dharamsala, India. Among the educated public, the news passed practically unnoticed. Kowalsky was neither a prolific nor a well-known writer, but his work, scattered about in magazines, was carefully read in certain spiritual circles. It should be noted that among the admirers of his stories and essays were people of such reputation as C. G. Jung, H. G. Gadamer, G. Bataille, and others.
The life of this man is full of unknowns, obscured by the contradictory rumors that Kowalsky made no real attempt to deny. In a letter to a friend in 1937, he wrote:
Every biography is a grand mystification and it seems to me that, the greater the rascal was who it is about, the more brilliant and embellished it is. In that vein, I don’t do anything to refute the rumors about my past. If I didn’t do whatever it is they say, I did many worse things.
The rumors, which are not always far from the truth, just as many attested “truths” are only rumors, present us a Kowalsky in images that are mutually exclusive: sometimes he is an ascetic, a man submerged in his internal world; sometimes he is a lustful young man and matchless conversationalist; some describe him as gentle, full of sympathy; others as being arrogant, rude and cruel. In any case, the life of that man passed in an unpleasant balance of the uranic and the chthonic, the edified and the trivial, the divine and the satanic. Even though he attained remarkable spiritual heights,******** dark and depressive states were not alien to Kowalsky. Only one thing is certain: the real truth about his personality is hidden in silence and mystification.
Kowalsky was born on January 12, 1901 in Tübingen, into the impoverished family of W. Kowalsky, a cobbler who neglected his trade in order to write syrupy lyrical poetry and dubious short stories. W. Kowalsky, purportedly, belonged to the Order of the Little Brothers of the Evangelical Bicyclists of the Rose Cross (which has not been reliably confirmed), to which J. Kowalsky later also belonged (which has been confirmed). He was left without a mother at an early age. In spite of that, he was a brilliant student. He excelled at Latin and Greek. That inclination probably encouraged him to enroll at the Seminary in Tübingen, the same one attended by Hegel and Schelling. At the Seminary he excelled through hard study and exemplary behavior. He was respected as an expert on the Bible, St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas. And then came the turnabout, the first in the series that filled his life. It will never be known what caused him, on October 14, 1919, quite calmly as the eye-witnesses would have it, to stand up in the middle of a lecture, approach the professor, jerk the professor’s watch from its chain and crush it under his heel, saying, “Well, now I’ve had enough,” and to walk out of the classroom forever. A girl named Grete is often mentioned, with whom Kowalsky was in love. There is no doubt that she occupied a certain place in his life (one of Kowalsky’s first poems, “Fellow Traveler,” is dedicated to her), but it is hard to believe that she could have been the only or even the main reason he quit his studies. We are more inclined to the thesis that, reaching the age when young men critically observe the world around them, inspired by fuzzy ideals, Joseph became aware of the hypocrisy and impoverishment of the society in which he lived.
“They say there are two types of people, the honest and the corrupt,” Kowalsky wrote in those years, “but I say that there are just the corrupt and actors; ghosts who are outwardly loyal, kind and honest, while they are thieves and tyrants in secret. I do not want to say that I am better than they are; on the contrary — I am worse, but I do not pretend to be loyal, kind and honest. I was pretending for too long. Moreover, those Philistines, when one thinks about it more carefully, are not corrupt. They are something even worse: they are cowards who gather in their sad lodges and guilds in order to, counting on the slogan ‘there’s strength in numbers,’ establish some kind of credibility and defend themselves from nothingness.”
In the light of such thinking, Kowalsky’s actions become clearer. His beloved, Greta, was a prostitute. That obviously did not bother Kowalsky. For him, prostitutes were just ladies from the upper classes of society, heavily made-up geese who spend their days gossiping and feigning enjoyment of art — a skill that Kowalsky despised his whole life, even though he himself was a pet of the muse. In those years he joined the anarchists, and then — disappointed by their endless theorizing — the much more aggressive Communist Party of Germany. He was constantly on the move. Driven by a powerful desire to change the world, to crush poverty and to put an end to humiliation, he visited the poor and the laborers’ settlements, he gathered financial aid for the most impoverished and spread propaganda.
II
In 1920, Joseph Kowalsky went to the Congress of the Comintern as a delegate. A photograph from that period exists: in a large hall, obviously in a former palace, Jules Humbert-Droz, Bombacsy, and Lepety are sitting at a table and looking at a document that Humbert-Droz is holding. Lucien Laurat, leaning on his elbow, ruminating, is staring out the window. Not far from him is Henri Lefebvre; marked (in the photograph) with an X, in the right corner, is Joseph Kowalsky. He seems to be sleeping. In a letter to a friend, Kowalsky offers some of his impressions from the Congress:
We met in Moscow, in the throne room of the Kremlin. The throne was hidden behind a curtain. The rooms around the throne room served as the residence of the imperial family during their stays in Moscow. Those private rooms were rearranged for the congress into a reading room, a smoking room, a snack bar, and a relaxation room for the delegates. There was a large bed in the last room. Many delegates would take a nap there or spend just few minutes for the satisfaction of stretching out on a bed that was once the bed of emperors.