Encyclopedia of a Life in Russia Read Online Free Page A

consumerism does not require the laborious elaboration of bulky products or tiresome marketing campaigns, but merely the cutting down of countless hectares of virgin forest or the pumping of great quantities of petroleum, only to burn it off, just like that, without putting it to further use. If the ESTEPA ( or STEPPE ) represents the field of action, of deployment, the forest is where the Russian nation turns in times of danger.
    The BOSCAGE is cold, dark, and silent, an aspect it lends to Russia itself, which, seen from afar, may resemble a “dark wood,” una selva oscura .
    B READ FOR THE M OUTH OF M Y S OUL ( see : P ANIS ORIS INTUS ANIMAE MEAE or P.O.A.).
    B RILLIANT C ORNERS. When he least expected it and in the least appropriate places, T HELONIOUS would sometimes suffer a serious relapse of his malady. For example, the face of a woman with whom he was having an animated conversation would suddenly go flat, recede to an inaccessible distance and blur as if a ghost had passed in front of it. The image that a few moments earlier had been his talkative friend would first regress into an accumulation of featuresthat still, for a second, preserved a vague familial resemblance to their owner, then come apart into a chaos of basic geometric figures. At that point, T HELONIOUS would intuit that this was a woman’s face; he would distinguish the clean outline of an oval (different from a circle because its perimeter is not equidistant from the center), two opalescent spheres (the eyes?) covered with a thin film (the eyelids?), the lashes (short, stiff hairs = bristles), the mouth, reducible to the figure of a broken ellipse. As if he were studying an X-ray, a purely geometric outline, the stroke of charcoal on canvas. Only then, as he went along losing points of contact, to be left wandering across immensities of blank plaster, immersed in a silence that was shattered, visually, by intense red flashes, sudden proximities, blooms of flame blindly spinning. Desperate, T HELONIOUS tried to grasp hold of the two red half-moons that were patiently modulating words with secret urgency: he followed that vermilion flutter with apparent attention, aware that he was the person being addressed by this discourse that now, thousands of kilometers away, he could no longer grasp. With great care, fearful of losing his footing, he approached slowly, advancing along the narrow path of two rosy protuberances (almost certainly the cheeks), reordering this assortment of geometric figures that, evidently, formed part of his world, and that might plausibly be composed into a woman’s face, seeking to determine the nature of that patch of red, now immobile in a pout of reproach. “But weren’t you listening to me?” And since at that very moment he had discovered, finally, what it was (a pair of lips) and then immediately recognized their owner, the sound switched back on and with it, as if by magic, the meaning of the spiel she had just directed his way.
    His malady was the product of a logical breakdown in the natural and involuntary gift of seeing. He was aware of the way we distinguish objects by the contrast between surface and background, the drop-offin light values around the edges, the intricate process of correlation required to endow the naked primary blocks that appear at first sight with meaning. He knew how, in slow evolution, those blocks acquire practical significance, the connotation of a known object: “a fireplace poker” and then not simply a poker but a magnificent poker, the patina on its bronze. In that sense, T HELONIOUS found himself as distant from other humans as mankind is from the blackbird: the blackbird that has no history, not the slashed sleeves of a Renaissance tunic nor the voluptuous blooms of Jugendstil, or Art Nouveau. T HELONIOUS could, at will, slip through the cracks of sight, descend into a total decomposition of the image, and then ascend back up to admirable syntheses, reaching a point where he saw