Encyclopedia of a Life in Russia Read Online Free Page B

the world as we will see it several centuries from now, for our way of seeing is also subject to an evolution and every era introduces changes into the world’s appearance. Two years earlier, T HELONIOUS had admired some watercolors by Dührer—Alpine vistas made during the painter’s first journey to Italy—that, according to the caption, were the first landscapes in the history of European painting. Some of the sights T HELONIOUS enjoyed after his terrible seizures might also have been the first glimpses of an art yet to be created. In the visions bestowed by his malady were present all of modern art’s moves toward blankness, beginning with an entirely impressionist luminosity and passing through the coldness of cubism and the abstractionist aphasia to disappear into a polychrome whirlwind, entirely unforeseen. Except he’d lost control over his gift and let himself “see” in unexpected ways while remaining blind to simple sights, utilitarian visions. He would stop, entranced, before the irregular striping of a fold of satin, given over to the pleasure of studying it, endowing it with a meaning inaccessible to ordinary men. He would concentrate on things that might appear trivial but that meant everything to him: the beauty of a double row of buttons, the sunflowercolor of a friend’s silk blouse, the slow curves of the chairs in a café . . . Then, overcome by an emotion that cannot be narrated—the true and absolute importance of those lines—he would fall, dragged down by vertigo and left blind, the world decomposed into tessellations, and he deep within them, groping for clarity, desperate.
    But there was L INDA , to save him.
    B RODIAGA (БРОДГА: lit., wanderer). The garden beneath my window was like a scaled-down replica of the world I would one day resolve to venture into. I had only to abandon the blank page on my desk and go forth, advancing from tree to tree, my house receding into nothingness amid the birches. What was the breadth of this world? Immense: all Russia. The Volga, and Astrakhan on the Volga, and Samara, its fluvial docks with their barges of watermelons. Vast spaces overrun by the Russian soul; there one could dilute oneself without leaving a trace, lose all track of one’s identity and earn kopecks enough for a meager dinner by unloading watermelons until nightfall, barefoot on that dock. I was not, in fact, Russian but I was well aware of the BRODIAGA life that several of its writers had led and though it wasn’t the type of experience I believed to be important at the age of twenty-three, whenever I felt tempted to make a radical change in the course of my existence I entertained intense thoughts of the striped watermelons of Astrakhan.
    To be a BRODIAGA is a state that separates us from the fragile edifice of the day’s order, coffee at breakfast, a poorly remunerated job.
Quand tous mes rêves se seraient tournés en réalités, ils ne m’auraient pas suffi; j’aurais imaginé, rêvé, désiré encore. Je trouvais en moi un vide inexplicable que rien n’aurait pu remplir, un certain élancement du coeur vers une autre sorte de jouissance dont je n’avais pas d’idée et dont pourtant je sentais le besoin.
    Which is to say: If all my dreams had become realities, that wouldn’t have been enough for me; I would have kept on dreaming, imagining, desiring. I found an inexplicable void within myself that nothing could have filled, a certain movement of the heart toward another type of satisfaction that I could not conceive of but for which I felt the need. (Letter from Rousseau to Malesherbes, January 26, 1762)
    At this point in our reflections, we’re ready to throw ourselves into vagabonding, to brodiazhnichat. Naturally the world abounds in empty-headed BRODIAGA —and ordinary men—who don’t interest us, but I’ve met several contemplative or скиталцы вроıауа and occasionally we’ll see one of them being interviewed on TV. For the BRODIAGA has