Encyclopedia of a Life in Russia Read Online Free

talent, more convinced I would be able to bring my project to fruition as long as I was wearing these formidable shoes, so fully aligned with the stars, so perfectly calibrated to the zeitgeist, so delicately musical. (Yes, incredibly enough: this whole rich gamut of sensations.)
    I. Mere contact with certain objects of a reality not abandoned to its free play but organized according to strictly hierarchical criteria of quality and class inculcated me with a strong notion of authenticity, of absolute worth, a mental alteration that, over time, redounded to the benefit of previous efforts to correct my careless ways.
    I will illustrate this with an example. On one occasion I spent several days contemplating the purchase of two pairs of shoes, both made of genuine leather and both in the very latest style, but each in a different color: one gray, the other blue. Gray and blue! The possibility of buying them (I had the money), reinforced by the other and even more hallucinatory possibility of choosing between two pairs of new shoes, not at all flashy, magnificently well made, occupied my mind for a week. In the end I acquired neither pair, but I had enjoyed the pleasure of taking them, albeit abstractly, into my life’s eccentric orbit, which, in the wake of that experience, came to revolve around truly notable things, things guaranteed by certificates of authenticity to belong tothis new world that had taken so long—it was so far away and I was beyond the reach of its gravitational pull—to draw me toward it, but that, once I was beneath its influence—like those wandering comets that pass by the solar system only to remain confined forever within it—was a world I could never abandon, dazzled by the brilliance of its genuine elegance. Then, after that profound contemplation of the symbols of this new religion—the shoes resting on a velvet cushion, their little altar protected by a bell jar—and in full knowledge of what this step would mean for me, I began to make use of the fork, and my former affinity for eating with the knife alone, and far more rapidly than anyone else at the table, came to seem (and in fact is) a barbarity of which, inexplicably, I had previously remained unaware. I don’t mean I’d never heard any criticism of the practice; only that I was incapable of acknowledging or attributing significance to it. The same thing happened with other innocent vices, less graphic ones that are more difficult to explain (such as the habit of urinating into the sink, which can be very convenient for those of average or above-average stature), which, when I finally became conscious of them, struck me as equally serious.
    B OSCAGE ( or F OREST, CONIFEROUS ). We can lose our way in the FOREST . “Once, as children, we went into the FOREST for mushrooms and got lost. We shouted and shouted . . .” A person might wander for hours among identical trees without finding the way out, the moss on the tree trunk, the newly cut stump. Real wolves lurk there, heads thrown back in a howl, and that little hummock of bones is all that remains of an unfortunate passerby. There’s the story of the little girl in the taiga who was killed by mosquitoes that sucked out her blood. People go into the forest in summertime to gather mushrooms and wild berries. Preparations for this journey are the same as those madefor excursions to the beach during my childhood: thermoses, insect repellent, and the soup tureen, a solemn ritual we must undertake with absolute seriousness.
    “Russia has the greatest reserve of timber-yielding trees in the world . . .” We read this and other facts of much interest in the pages of The Russian Forest, a novel by Л. Леóнов [L. Leonov] that is as heavy as a wooden tenpin. In spring, immense rafts of logs are formed, which never reach their destination but sink to the bottom of the great rivers of Siberia. For Russia, too, is a consumer nation, but only of raw materials. This metaphysical