By Georgiy Ivanov
(1937)
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…I am breathing. Could it be, that this air is poisoned? But this is the only air given to my breath. My awareness of various things is intermittently vague and tortuously pronounced. Could it be, that it’s useless to speak of these things? But is life itself useful or useless, are trees being clever or stupid when they rustle, is the evening as it sets in, is the rain when it pours? I experience towards my surroundings a strange mixed attitude of superiority and weakness: within my consciousness the laws of life are intimately entwined with the laws of sleep. It must be thanks to this that the perception of the world in my eyes is significantly skewered. But it is precisely this which is the only thing I treasure; the only thing which still separates me from the all-consuming worldwide ugliness.
I live. I walk down the street. I walk into a cafe. This is the present day, this is my unrepeatably singular life. I order a glass of beer and drink it with relish. At a neighboring table sits an elderly gentleman with a rosette. In my opinion, these high-earning old-timers ought to be exterminated. You are old. You are sensible. You are the patriarch of a family. You have a wealth of life experience. Ah, you vicious lousy mutt! Take this! A gentleman with presentable outward appearance. This is highly valued. What bullshit: presentable. Give me beautiful, pitiful, frightful, just about anything else. But no, it is exactly presentable. They say that in England they even have professional false witnesses with the sort of presentable looks that inspires trust in judges. And not only inspires trust, but itself serves as an inexhaustible source of self-confidence. One of the characteristics of the worldwide ugliness is that it’s presentable.
***
In essence, I am a happy person. Meaning, I am a type of person predisposed to feeling happy. This is not all that common to encounter. All I want are some of the simplest, most unremarkable things. I want order. It’s not my fault that all sense of order had been demolished. I want soulful tranquility. But the soul is like an agitated trashcan - a herring’s tail, a dead rat, half-gobbled food-scraps, cigarette butts which alternately dive towards murky depths and surface back up, all-the-while racing onwards against each other. I want clean air. And semisweet decay - the breath of the worldwide ugliness - keeps pursuing me, just like fear.
I’m walking down the street. I’m thinking about various things. Salad, gloves… Among the persons sitting in the cafe at the corner, someone would die first, someone last - each and every one of them at their own precise time, prefigured down to the second. It is dusty, warm. That woman is, of course, beautiful, but I don’t find her attractive. She’s wearing a festive dress and smiles as she walks, but I imagine her naked, lying on the floor with her skull split apart with an axe. I think about salaciousness and repulsion, about sadistic murders, about how I’ve lost you forever, certainly. “Certainly” - what a pitiful word. As if not all words are equally pitiful and horrifying, if one were to focus in a bit more thoroughly on what one hears? And meaning, that watery little antidote, which ceases to work with remarkable expediency, and behind it the deaf-mute void of loneliness. But what did they understand about what’s pitiful and horrifying - they, who held great faith in words and in meaning, all the dreamers, children, undeservedly spoiled by fate!
I think about the necklaced cross that I’ve worn since childhood, like how some carry a revolver in their pocket - in the eventuality of danger it is supposed to defend, to save. I think about an inevitable fatal error. About the shimmering glow of deceptive miracles, which alternately enchant and disenchant the world. And I think about the sole reliable miracle - about that indestructible yearning for miracles itself, which lives inside of people no matter what happens. And I think about the enormous significance of this. I think about the refraction of this within every consciousness, and especially the Russian one.
Oh, that Russian, that wavering, faltering, musical, disdainful consciousness. Endlessly circling around the impossible, like a swarm of flies around a candle. The laws of life grown fused together with the laws of sleep. Terrifying metaphysical liberty and physical obstacles at every step. A bottomless source of superiority, of weakness, of ingenious misfortunes. Oh, those strange variants of ours, those restless shadows roaming to this day across the whole world: the anglophiles, the Tolstovians, the Russian snobs - the meanest snobs on the planet - and all the different Russian boys, the sticky pages, and the quintessential Russian type, the knight of the noble order of the intelligentsia, the rascal with a pathologically overdeveloped sense of responsibility. He is always standing guard, he is like a sleuth, sniffing out injustice wherever he goes. How is a regular person supposed to catch up with him? Oh, our past and our future, and our present repentant longing…
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