LITMIR.BIZ

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you.”

      She began to giggle despite the fact that she was highly incensed.

      “Listen, if you had asked me if I were jealous of you, much as I hate to admit it, I would have said yes. I’m not ashamed to confess that it humiliates me to think someone like you can make me jealous. You’re hardly the type I would have chosen for a rival. I don’t like morphodites any more than I like people with double-jointed thumbs. I’m prejudiced. Bourgeois, if you like. I never loved a dog, but I never hated one either. I’ve met fags who were entertaining, clever, talented, diverting, but I must say I wouldn’t care to live with them. I’m not talking morals, you understand, I’m talking likes and dislikes. Certain things rub me the wrong way. It’s most unfortunate, to put it mildly, that my wife should feel so keenly drawn to you. Sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it? Almost literary. It’s a goddamned shame, is what I mean to say, that she couldn’t have chosen a real man, if she had to betray me, even if he were someone I despised. But you . . . why shit! it leaves me absolutely defenseless. I wince at the mere thought of someone saying to me—“What’s wrong with you?” Because there must be something wrong with a man—at least, so the world reasons—when his wife is violently attracted to another woman. I’ve tried my damnedest to discover what’s wrong with me, if there is anything wrong, but I can’t lay a finger on it. Besides, if a woman is able to love another woman as well as the man she’s tied to, there’s nothing wrong with that, is there? She’s not to be blamed if she happens to be endowed with an unusual store of affection, isn’t that so? Supposing, however, that as the husband of such an extraordinary creature, one has doubts about his wife’s exceptional ability to love, what then? Supposing the husband has reason to believe that there is a mixture of sham and reality connected with this extraordinary gift for love? That to prepare her husband, to condition him, as it were, she slyly and insidiously struggles to poison his mind, invents or concocts the most fantastic tales, all innocent, of course, about experiences with girl friends prior to her marriage. Never openly admitting that she slept with them, but implying it, insinuating, always insinuating, that it could have been so. And the moment the husband . . . me, in other words . . . registers fear or alarm, she violently denies anything of the sort, insists that it must be one’s imagination which invoked the picture. . .. Do you follow me? Or is it getting too complicated?”

      She sat down, her face suddenly grave. She sat on the edge of the bed and looked at me searchingly. Suddenly she broke into a smile, a Satanic sort of smile, and exclaimed: “So this is your game! Now you want to poison my mind!” With this the tears gushed forth and she took to sobbing.

      As luck would have it, Mona arrived in the very thick of it.

      “What are you doing to her?” Her very first words. Putting an arm around poor Stasia, she stroked her hair, comforted her with soothing words.

      Touching scene. A little too genuine, however, for me to be properly moved.

      The upshot—Stasia must not attempt to go home. She must stay and get a good night’s rest.

      Stasia looks at me questioningly.

      “Of course, of course!” I say. “I wouldn’t turn a dog out on a night like this.”

      The weirdest part of the scene, as I look back on it, was Stasia’s turn out in a soft, filmy nightgown. If only she had had a pipe in her mouth, it would have been perfect.

      To get back to Feodor. . . . They got me itchy sometimes with their everlasting nonsense about Dostoevski. Myself, I have never pretended to understand Dostoevski. Not all of him, at any rate. (I know him, as one knows a kindred soul.) Nor have I read all of him, even to this day. It has always been my thought to leave the last few morsels for deathbed reading. I am not sure, for instance, whether I read his Dream of the Ridiculous Man or heard tell about it. Neither am I at all certain that I know who Marcion was, or what Marcionism is. There are many things about Dostoevski, as about life itself, which I am content to leave a mystery. I like to think of Dostoevski as one surrounded by an impenetrable aura of mystery. For example, I can never picture him wearing a hat—such as Swedenborg gave his angels to wear. I am, moreover, always fascinated to learn what others have to say about him, even when their views make no sense to me. Only the other day I ran across a note I had jotted down in a notebook. Probably from Berdyaev. Here it is: “After Dostoevski, man was no longer what he had been before.” Cheering thought for an ailing humanity.

      As for the following, certainly no one but Berdyaev could have written this: “In Dostoevski there was a complex attitude to evil. To a large extent it may look as though he was led astray. On the one hand, evil is evil, and ought to be exposed and must be burned away. On the other hand, evil is a spiritual experience of man. It is man’s part. As he goes on his way man may be enriched by the experience of evil, but it is necessary to understand this in the right way. It is not the evil itself that enriches him; he is enriched by that spiritual strength which is aroused in him for the overcoming of evil. The man who says ‘I will give myself up to evil for the sake of the enrichment, never is enriched; he perishes. But it is evil that puts man’s freedom to the test. . . .”

      And now one more citation (from Berdyaev again) since it brings us one step nearer to Heaven. . . .

      “The Church is not the Kingdom of God; the Church has appeared in history and it has acted in history; it does not mean the transfiguration of the world, the appearance of a new heaven and a new earth. The Kingdom of God is the transfiguration of the world, not only the transfiguration of the individual man, but also the transfiguration of the social and the cosmic; and that is the end of this world, of the world of wrong and ugliness, and it is the principle of a new world, a world of right and beauty. When Dostoevski said that beauty would save the world he had in mind the transfiguration of the world and the coming of the Kingdom of God, and this is the eschatological hope. . . .”

      Speaking for myself, I must say that had I ever had any hopes eschatological or otherwise, it was Dostoevski who annihilated them. Or perhaps I should modify this by saying that he “rendered nugatory” those cultural aspirations engendered by my Western upbringing. The Asiatic part, in a word, the Mongolian in me, has remained intact and will always remain intact. This Mongolian side of me has nothing to do with culture or personality; it represents the root being whose sap runs back to some ageless ancestral limb of the genealogical tree. In this unfathomable reservoir all the chaotic elements of my own nature and of the American heritage have been swallowed up as the ocean swallows the rivers which empty into it. Oddly enough, I have understood Dostoevski, or rather his characters and the problems which tormented them, better, being American-born, than had I been a European. The English language, it seems to me, is better suited to render Dostoevski (if one has to read him in translation) than French, German, Italian, or any other non-Slavic tongue. And American life, from the gangster level to the intellectual level, has paradoxically tremendous affinities with Dostoevski’s multilateral everyday Russian life. What better proving grounds can one ask for than metropolitan New York, in whose conglomerate soil every wanton, ignoble, crackbrained idea flourishes like a weed? One has only to think of winter there, of what it means to be hungry, lonely, desperate in that labyrinth of monotonous streets lined with monotonous homes crowded with monotonous individuals crammed with monotonous thoughts. Monotonous and at the same time unlimited!

      Though millions among us have never read Dostoevski nor would even recognize the name were it pronounced, they are nevertheless, millions of them, straight out of Dostoevski, leading the same weird “lunatical” life here in America which Dostoevski’s creatures lived in the Russia of his imagining. If yesterday they might still have been regarded as having a human existence, tomorrow their world will possess a character and lineament more fantastically bedeviled than any or all of Bosch’s creations. Today they move beside us elbow to elbow, startling no one, apparently, by their antediluvian aspect. Some indeed continue to pursue their calling—preaching the Gospel, dressing corpses, ministering to the insane—quite as if nothing of any moment had taken place. They have not the slightest inkling of the fact that “man is no longer what he had been before.”

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      Ah,

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