#gazdanov

«Abbiamo ereditato una determinata continuità culturale, e sa bene anche lei di cosa parlo. Ora, invece, dopo il sesto secolo avanti Cristo, dopo il Cristianesimo e il Rinascimento, dopo la filosofia tedesca e l’Ottocento, ci propongono di rinunciare volontariamente a tutto quanto, di rincretinirci del tutto, di dimenticare ciò che sappiamo e di scendere al livello di un apprendista semianalfabeta. D’altro canto l’Europa del dopoguerra è uno spettacolo talmente miserando…»

[...] mi convincevano, anzi, una volta di più che la maggioranza del genere umano non è in grado di compiere lo sforzo titanico necessario a comprendere una persona di un altro ambiente, con altre origini e con un cervello diverso da quello cui si è abituati.

[...] passava le sue serate sui libri e più leggeva - confessò - più la sua vita le appariva desolata.

Here's a passage from Gaito Gazdanov's AN EVENING WITH CLAIRE. The author of The Spectre of Alexander Wolf, Gazdanov is widely considered an unsung Russian master. AN EVENING WITH CLAIRE is his first novel.

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CLAIRE  HAD  BEEN ILL; I HAD  BEEN SPENDING  EVERY EVENING with her and, after taking my leave, would invariably miss the last metro and end up going on foot from rue Raynouard to Place St. Michel, which was not far from where I lived. I would walk past the Ecole Militaire; from there one could hear the clanging of the chains to which the horses were tethered and smell the dense equine odor so unusual for Paris; I would then stroll down the long, narrow rue Babylone and at the end of this street, in the artificial light of distant street lamps, the face of an illustrious writer, composed of sloping planes, would stare at me from the window of a photographer’s studio; a pair of omnis- cient eyes behind European horn-rimmed glasses followed me halfway down the block until I finally crossed the black, glitter- ing strip of the Boulevard Raspail. At last I would reach my hotel. Resolute old ladies in shabby dress hobbled past me on their weak legs; above the Seine, drowned in darkness, shone a myriad of lights, and when I stared at them from the bridge it would begin to seem as if I were standing above a harbor and that the sea was covered with foreign ships on which lanterns had been set ablaze. After glancing back at the Seine a final time I would go up to my room, lie down, and instantly sink into the profound gloom; strange forms stirred within this gloom which sometimes had no time to form into familiar images before my eyes and would vanish, having never materialized; and in my sleep I would regret their disappearance, sympathize with their imaginary and incomprehensible sorrows, and I lived and dozed in this ineffable state which I could never recapture while awake. This should have distressed me but in the morning I would com- pletely forget about what I had seen in my sleep, and the last memory of the previous day would be that I had once again missed the train. In the evening I’d set off again for Claire’s. Her husband had left for Ceylon several months earlier: We were alone, and only the maid, bringing tea and biscuits on a wooden tray with a frail chinaman delicately drawn on it, a woman of about forty-five who wore a pince-nez and for this reason was unlike a servant, always brooding about something and forget- ting either the sugar tongs or the sugar bowl, a saucer or spoon—only this maid disturbed our little twosome as she en- tered the room and asked whether Madame needed anything else. And Claire, who for some reason was certain that the maid would take offense if you did not ask her for anything would say, “Yes, please bring us the grammophone from Monsieur’s study,” although nobody wanted a grammophone and after the maid had left it would remain exactly where she had put it down and Claire would instantly forget all about it. The maid came and went four or five times in an evening, and when I mentioned to Claire that her maid was certainly well preserved for her age and that her legs possessed a positively youthful indefatigability, but that all the same I thought she was not quite right in the head—either she had a movement mania or simply an unde- tected but unquestionable weakening of the mental capacities related to the onset of old age—Claire looked at me pityingly and answered  that I would do better  to exercise  my special Russian wit on others.

And first of all, according to Claire, I should have remem- bered that yesterday I once again appeared in a shirt with two different cufflinks and that I could not, as I had done the day before yesterday, simply throw my gloves down on her bed and grab Claire by the shoulders, something that wouldn’t pass for a proper greeting anywhere on earth, and that if she wanted to enumerate all my violations of the elementary rules of propriety she would have to talk for . . . here she thought for a moment and said: five years. She said this with a serious face and I began to feel sorry that such trivialities could upset her and I wanted to ask her forgiveness. But she had turned away and her back began to tremble; she brought her handkerchief to her eyes and when, finally, she looked at me, I saw that she was laughing. She told me that the maid was just recovering from her latest love affair, and that the man who had promised to marry her now re- fused in no uncertain terms. “That’s why she is so pensive.” “What’s there to brood about in that?” I asked. “So he refused to marry her. Does it really require so much time to comprehend something so elementary?” “You always put the question too simply,” said Claire. “With women that just can’t be done. She’s pensive because she’s upset, can’t you see?” “Did the romance last a long time?” “No,” Claire answered. “Two weeks in all.” “That’s strange. She’s always been like that,” I remarked. “A month ago she was just as melancholy and distracted as she is now.” “My goodness,” said Claire, “she was simply having an- other love affair then.” “So it is actually quite simple,” I said. “Forgive me, I didn’t realize that behind the pince-nez of your maid lay concealed the tragedy of a female Don Juan who, how- ever, wants someone to marry her, contrary to the Don Juan of literary renown who disapproves of marriage . . .” But Claire in- terrupted  me, reciting  with great  pathos  a phrase  which she picked up from a billboard and which, upon reading, made her laugh until tears came to her eyes:

  Happy owners of the true ‘Salamanders’ Never abandoned by the builder!

  Then the conversation returned to the topic of Don Juan, passing somehow to ascetics, then to the arch-priest Avvakum, but coming to the temptation of St. Anthony I halted, since I re- membered that Claire didn’t much care for that sort of talk. She preferred other subjects, such as music or theater; but most of all she loved jokes, of which she knew many. She would recount these extraordinarily witty and thoroughly indecent jokes, and then the conversation would take a strange turn and the most innocent phrases would seem to conceal double entendres, and Claire’s eyes would begin to shine; yet when she had stopped laughing her eyes grew dark and criminal and her thin brows knit. But as soon as I moved closer to her she would say in an angry whisper, “But you’re mad!” and I would step back. She smiled and her smile clearly said, “My god, is he naïve.” Then, continuing the interrupted conversation, I began to inveigh against things towards which I normally felt completely indifferent. I tried to sound as harsh and offensive as possible, as if to take vengeance for the defeat I had just suffered. Claire mockingly agreed with all my arguments and because she conceded so easily my own defeat became even more apparent. “Yes, mon petit, that’s very interesting,” she would say, not concealing her laughter which referred, however, not to my words but to my defeat, and by emphasizing this scornful “lá” she demonstrated that she didn’t attach the slightest meaning to any of my arguments. I pulled myself together, once again resisting the temptation to draw nearer to Claire as I understood that it was already late, and forced myself to think about something else. Her voice reached me half-muffled; she was laughing and telling me all kinds of nonsense which I listened to with strained attention until I noticed that Claire was simply entertaining herself. It amused her that at such moments I could not understand a word she said. The next day I came to make amends. I promised my- self not to approach her and to choose only those topics which would eliminate any danger of repeating the previous evening’s humiliating moments. I spoke of all the sorrows I had known, and Claire recounted, in her turn, the death of her mother.

“Sit here,” she said, pointing to the bed. And I sat down right beside her and she rested her head on my knees and said, “Yes, mon petit, it’s sad, we are unhappy even so.” I listened to her, afraid to move,  as if my slightest movement would offend her sorrow. Claire slowly stroked her hand from side to side across the blanket, and it was as if her sorrow were exhausted in these movements which, at first unconscious, began to attract her attention and ended with her noticing the poorly trimmed cuticle of her little finger and reaching out to the scissors on the night table. Once again she smiled a lingering smile, as if she had perceived and traced within herself some long train of memories which had ended on an unexpected, though not unhappy, thought; and Claire glanced at me with instantly darkening eyes.

Gingerly I placed her head on the pillow and said, “Excuse me, Claire, I’ve forgotten my cigarettes in the pocket of my rain- coat,” and went out to the foyer; I could hear her soft laughter coming from the other room. When I returned she remarked, “I was surprised just now, I thought you always carried your ciga- rettes with you, in the pocket of your trousers, as you have done up until now. Have you changed your custom?” She looked me in the eye, laughing and pitying me, and I knew that she knew perfectly well why I got up and left the room. To top it all off I was careless enough even then to take a cigarette case out from the back pocket of my trousers. “Tell me,” said Claire as if en- treating me to tell her the truth, “what’s the difference between a raincoat and a pair of trousers?”

“Claire, that’s very cruel,” I answered.

“I don’t recognize you, mon petit. Put the record-player on again, it’ll distract you.”

That evening after I said goodbye to Claire I overheard the cracked and faint voice of the maid coming from the kitchen. She was mournfully singing a cheerful song and it surprised me:

  It is a pink blouse

With a small woman inside,

Fresh as a newly blossomed flower, Simple as a wildflower.

  She put so much melancholy into these words, so much vain sorrow, that they began to sound different from usual and the phrase “fraiche comme la fleur éclose” immediately reminded me of the maid’s elderly face, her pince-nez, her love affair and her eternal pensiveness. I told Claire about this and she felt sorry for the unhappy maid, because nothing of the sort could happen to Claire and because this sympathy did not arouse her own emo- tions or apprehension—and she was also quite fond of the song:

  It is a pink blouse

With a small woman inside.

She would give this verse the most diverse inflections—at times questioning or assertive or festive and mocking. Every time I heard this tune on the street or in a café I would start to feel out of sorts. Once I went to see Claire and began to curse the song, insisting that it was too French, that it was cheap and that no self-respecting composer would be taken in by such a piece of frivolity; this was precisely the main difference between the French way of thinking and serious things. I said, “This art is as unlike the real thing as fake pearls are to genuine ones. It lacks the main ingredient,” I went on, having already exhausted my arguments and growing angry with myself. Claire nodded her head, then took my hand and said:

“There’s only one thing missing.” “Namely?” She began to laugh and sang:

  It is a pink blouse

With a small woman inside.

  When Claire had recovered and had already been out of bed for several days, either in the armchair or the chaise lounge, and felt completely well, she asked me if I would accompany her to the motion pictures. Afterwards we sat for nearly an hour in a café.  Claire  was  quite  short  with me, interrupting  me often; when I made a joke she would restrain her laughter and, smiling in spite of herself, say “No, that’s not funny.” And because she was, it seemed to me, in such a bad mood, she projected her own dissatisfaction and irritability onto everyone else. In astonish- ment she asked me: “What is wrong with you tonight, you’re not yourself,” although I wasn’t behaving out of the ordinary. I escorted her home; it was raining. When I kissed her hand at the door she said irritably, “Well, come on in and have a cup of tea.” She said this in such an angry tone that one would have thought she wanted to drive me away: “Well, get out of here! Can’t you see I’m sick of you?” I entered. We drank our tea in silence. I felt uneasy and, going up to her, said: “Claire, don’t be angry with me. I have waited to be with you like this for ten years. I ask nothing of you.” I wanted to add that such a long wait entitled me to request at least the simplest, most minute concessions, but Claire’s eyes had turned from grey almost to black; I noticed with horror—for I had waited far too long and had long ago ceased hoping for this moment—that Claire had come right up to me and that her breast was pressing against my buttoned, double-breasted coat. She embraced me, her face drawing nearer to mine. The chilling smell of the ice cream she had eaten at the cafe suddenly struck me unusually and Claire said, “How could you not have understood?” as a tremor swept through her body. Claire’s cloudy eyes, gifted with the power of so many metamorphoses—cruel one moment, shameless or laughing the next—I saw these turbid eyes in front of me for a long time, and when she had fallen asleep, I turned my face towards the wall and a former sorrow visited me. This sorrow was in the air and its transparent waves floated above Claire’s white body, along her legs and breast; sorrow escaped from Claire’s mouth in invisible breath. I lay next to Claire and could not fall asleep. Glancing away from her pale face I noticed that the blue of the wallpaper in Claire’s room suddenly seemed lighter and strangely trans- formed. The dark blue which I saw in front of my closed eyes always reminded me of a mystery that had been solved; and this resolution had been dark and sudden, as if it had frozen before having succeeded in revealing everything completely. It was as if the effort of some kind of spirit had stopped in its tracks and died, and in its place this dark blue background had sprung up. Now, as if the effort had not yet come to an end, it had turned light, and in becoming lighter the blue had discovered within it- self this dull-mournful shade, so oddly in keeping with my feelings and undoubtedly related to Claire. Light-blue apparitions with lopped-off hands sat in the room’s two armchairs; they were indifferently hostile to one another, like people whom the same fate has befallen sharing the same punishment but for different crimes. The lilac border of the wallpaper curved in a wavy line like the conditional designation of the path by which a fish swims in the deep-blue sea; through the fluttering curtains of the open window a distant current of air was striving to reach me but failed. It, too, was tinted in the same light blue and brought with it a long gallery of memories, which fell as regularly and as irrepressibly as rain. But Claire turned, waking up and muttering, “You’re not asleep? Go to sleep, dear, you’ll be tired in the morning,” and once again her eyes seemed to cloud over; she didn’t have the strength to overcome her torpid slumber and, scarcely having uttered the phrase, fell back asleep. Her brows remained raised and in her sleep she looked as if she were surprised at what was happening to her. There was something extraordinarily characteristic in this surprise: Surrendering to the power of sleep, or sadness, or yet another emotion, no matter how strong the emotion was she never ceased being herself; and it seemed that the mightiest tremors were powerless to alter this perfectly completed body, could never destroy this final invincible charm which had induced me to waste ten years of my life in pursuit of Claire, and which had made it impossible for me to get her out of my mind at any time, any place. “But in every love there is sorrow,” I remembered. Sorrow for the end and approaching death of love, if it has been a happy one, and, if the love has been in vain, sorrow for that which never belonged to us. And how I longed for the riches I did not possess, as earlier I had grieved that Claire belonged to another; and how too now did I grieve, lying on her bed in Paris, in the light blue clouds of her room which until this evening I would have thought unattainable, indeed non-existent, the clouds which circled above the white body of Claire covered in three places by such shameful and agonizingly alluring hair, that never again could I dream about Claire as I had always dreamed about her, and that much time would have to pass before I would come to form another image of her and before this image would become in its own way just as unattainable for me as had been this moment, this body, this hair, these light-blue clouds.

I thought about Claire, about the evenings I had spent with her, and gradually I came to remember everything that went be- fore them; and the impossibility of understanding and expressing all of it weighed heavily upon me. This evening it was even more apparent than usual that there was no way for me to embrace and feel that endless succession of ideas, impressions and sensations which, in their totality, rose up in my memory like a row of shadows reflected in the dim and fluid mirror of a seasoned imagination. It was to music that I owed the most wonderful, the most intense emotions that I had ever felt; but I am only able to strive perpetually for music’s enchanting and momentary ex- istence—I cannot live it. Quite often at a concert I would sud- denly begin to understand things which had eluded me up until then; the music would suddenly awaken strange physical sensa- tions which I had thought myself incapable of feeling. But with the last dying notes of the orchestra these sensations would van- ish and once again I would find myself in the obscurity and un- certainty that was so often a part of me. The illness which had created in me the improbable state between the real and the imaginary consisted in my inability to distinguish the various ef- forts of my imagination from the genuine, spontaneous feelings which events aroused in me. It was like the absence of the gift of a spiritual sense. In my eyes every object was almost entirely de- void of precise physical boundaries, and because of the severity of this strange deficiency, I was never able to do even the most feeble drawing; later, in school, try as I might I could not picture the complicated lines of a sketch, although I understood the ob- vious result of their combination. On the other hand, my visual memory had always been well developed and to this day I don’t know how to reconcile this blatant contradiction. Such was the first of those innumerable contradictions which later were to plunge me into impotent reverie; they reinforced my awareness of the fact that I could not penetrate to the core of abstract ideas, and this awareness in turn engendered uncertainty in myself. I was thus quite timid, and the reputation I had in childhood for being an insolent boy could be explained, as several people (for example, my mother) saw it, by my strong desire to overcome this perpetual lack of self-confidence. Later on I developed the habit of associating with the most diverse people and I even de- veloped certain rules of conversation which I very rarely trans- gressed. These consisted in the use of several dozen subjects which, accessible to any interlocutor, seemed complex but were actually quite primitive; but I found the essence of these simple, conventional and obligatory rules thoroughly alien and devoid of interest. I was nonetheless unable to master my own petty cu- riosity, and it gave me the greatest pleasure to induce people to talk about their innermost selves; their humiliating and worthless confessions never fully aroused what might have been my right- ful and understandable disgust. It should have, but it never did. Perhaps this was because it was unusual for me to have strong negative feelings about anything: I was far too indifferent to ex- ternal events; my deaf inner existence remained incomparably more significant to me. In childhood this inner existence was, in any case, more connected with the outer world than later on; gradually it left me, and in order to return to that dark place with its heavy, palpable air, I had to cover a distance which be- came greater as my life experience—that is, my supply of visual or sensory experience—became greater.