Russian Literature – Children Books – Russian Poetry – Ivan Turgenev – A Correspondence – Contents
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XV
From Alexyéi Petróvitch to Márya Alexándrovna
Dresden, September, 1842.
I write to you, my dear Márya Alexándrovna, and I write only because I do not wish to die without having taken leave of you, and without having recalled myself to your mind. I am condemned by the doctors … and I myself feel that my life is drawing to a close. On my table stands a rose; before it fades I shall be no more. But that comparison is not quite just. The rose is far more interesting than I am.
As you see, I am abroad. I have been in Dresden six months. I received your last letters—I am ashamed to confess: I lost several of them more than a year ago, and did not answer you…. I will tell you presently why. But, evidently, you have always been dear to me: with the exception of yourself, there is no one of whom I wish to take leave, and perhaps I have no one to whom I could bid farewell.
Soon after my last letter to you (I was quite ready to set out for your parts, and was making various plans in advance), there happened to me an episode which had, I may say, a strong influence on my fate,—so strong that here I am, dying, thanks to that event. To wit: I set out for the theatre, to see the ballet. I have never liked the ballet, and have always felt a secret disgust for all sorts of actresses, singers, and dancers…. But, obviously, one cannot change his fate, neither does any one know himself, and it is also impossible to foresee the future. In point of fact, nothing happens in life except the unexpected, and we do nothing all our life long but adjust ourselves to events…. But I believe I am dropping into philosophy again. Old habit!… In a word, I fell in love with a dancer.
This was all the more strange because she could not be called a beauty. She had, it is true, wonderful golden hair, with an ash tinge, and large, bright eyes, with a pensive and, at the same time, a bold glance…. Haven’t I cause to know the expression of that glance? I pined and languished for a whole year in its rays! She had a splendid figure, and when she danced her folkdance, the spectators used to stamp and shout with rapture…. But I do not think any one besides myself fell in love with her—at all events, no one fell in love with her as I did. From the very minute that I beheld her for the first time—(will you believe it? all I have to do even now is to shut my eyes, and immediately here stands before me the theatre, the almost empty stage, representing the interior of a forest, and she runs out from behind the side-scenes on the right, with a wreath of vine-leaves on her head and a tiger-skin over her shoulders)—from that fatal minute I belonged to her wholly,—just as a dog belongs to his master; and if now, when I am dying, I do not belong to her, it is merely because she has cast me off.
To tell the truth, she never troubled herself especially about me. She barely noticed me, although she good-naturedly made use of my money. I was for her, as she expressed it in her broken French jargon, “oun Rousso buon enfan,”—and nothing more. But I … I could no longer live anywhere where she was not; I tore myself at one wrench from all that was dear to me, from my native land itself, and set out in pursuit of that woman.
Perhaps you think that she was clever?—Not in the least! It sufficed to cast a glance at her low brow, it sufficed to note, if only once, her lazy, heedless smile, in order instantly to convince one’s self as to the paucity of her mental abilities. And I never imagined her to be a remarkable woman. On the whole, I did not deceive myself for a single minute on her score. But that did not help matters in the least. Whatever I thought of her in her absence, in her presence I felt nothing but servile adoration…. In the German fairytales the knights often fall into that sort of stupor. I could not tear my eyes from her features; I could not hear enough of her remarks, or sufficiently watch every movement of hers; to tell the truth, I actually breathed to her breathing. However, she was good-natured, unconstrained—too unconstrained even; she did not put on airs, as the majority of artists do. She had a great deal of life, that is, a great deal of blood, of that splendid Southern blood, into which the sun of their land must have dropped a portion of his rays. She slept nine hours a day, was fond of good eating, never read a single line of print, unless, perhaps, the articles in the newspapers in which she was mentioned, and almost the sole tender sentiment in her life was her attachment to il signore Carlino, a small and greedy Italian who served as her secretary and whom she afterward married. And with such a woman as this I, who have tasted so many varied intellectual subtleties, I, already an old man, could fall in love! Who could have expected it? I never expected it, at all events. I did not anticipate the part which I should be compelled to play. I did not expect that I should haunt rehearsals, freeze and get bored behind the scenes, inhale the reek of the theatre, make acquaintance with various unseemly individuals … what am I saying?—make acquaintance—bow to them. I had not expected that I should carry a dancer’s shawl, buy new gloves for her, clean her old ones with white bread (but I did it, I take my oath!), cart home her bouquets, run about to the anterooms of journalists and directors, wear myself out, give serenades, catch cold, lose my strength…. I had not expected that I should acquire at last in a certain little German town the ingenious nickname of “der Kunst-barbar.”… And all this in vain—in the fullest sense of the word, in vain! There, that is precisely the state of the case….
Do you remember how you and I, orally and by letter, argued about love, into what subtleties we entered? And when it is put to the proof, it turns out that real love is a feeling not at all resembling that which we imagined it to be. Love is not even a feeling at all; it is a malady, a well-known condition of the soul and body. It does not develop gradually; there is no possibility of doubting it; one cannot dodge it, although it does not always manifest itself in identically the same fashion. It generally takes possession of a man without being invited, suddenly, against his will—precisely like the cholera or a fever…. It lays hold upon him, the dear creature, as a hawk does upon a chicken; and it will bear him off whithersoever it wishes, struggle and resist as he may…. In love there is no equality, no so-called free union of souls and other ideal things, invented at their leisure by German professors…. No; in love one person is the slave, the other is the sovereign, and not without cause do the poets prate of the chains imposed by love. Yes, love is a chain, and the heaviest of chains at that. At all events, I have arrived at that conviction, and have reached it by the path of experience. I have purchased that conviction at the price of my life, because I am dying a slave.
Alack, what a fate is mine! one thinks. In my youth I was resolutely determined to conquer heaven for myself…. Later on, I fell to dreaming about the welfare of all mankind, the prosperity of my fatherland. Then that passed off: I thought only of how I might arrange my domestic, my family life … and I tripped over an ant-hill—and flop! I went headlong on the ground, and into the grave…. What master hands we Russians are at winding up in that fashion!
However, it is high time for me to turn away from all this,—it was time long ago! May this burden fall from my soul along with my life! I wish for the last time, if only for a moment, to enjoy that good, gentle feeling which is diffused within me like a tranquil light as soon as I call you to mind. Your image is now doubly dear to me…. Along with it there surges up before me the image of my native land, and I waft to it and to you my last greeting. Live on, live long and happily, and remember one thing: whether you remain in that remote nook of the steppes, where you sometimes find things so painful, but where I should so like to spend my last day, or whether you shall enter upon another career, remember: life fails to disappoint him alone who does not meditate upon it, and, demanding nothing from it, calmly accepts its sparse gifts, and calmly makes use of them. Go forward, while you can: but when your feet fail you,—sit down near the road, and gaze at the passers-by without vexation and without envy: for they will not go far! I have said this to you before, but death will teach any man whomsoever; moreover, who shall say what is life, what is truth? Remember who it was that gave no answer to this question…. Farewell, Márya Alexándrovna; farewell for the last time, and bear no ill will to poor—
Alexyéi.
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Russian Literature – Children Books – Russian Poetry – Ivan Turgenev – A Correspondence – Contents
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