I woke up in a mood from hell. I still don’t know if I’ll go to Georgia, and if so, when and for how many days. I took a long walk through parts of old Leningrad. I realize that I know nothing about the city, or very little. The same happens when I return to Rome, where I lived a few months in my youth, to Venice, where I have been several times, and Prague, where I have resided for three years. I get excited when I arrive, and I am stunned at the splendor of those dazzling cities; I realize that I continue to be in love with them, but I find that I am still a long way away from knowing them, that I have not managed to cross the threshold, that I’m just beginning to scratch their surface, and sometimes not even that. I have an urgent need to reread Andrei Bely’s Petersburg, perhaps the most important Russian novel of the century. Mann read it in his youth and that reading marked him forever. At that time he detested that the novel had not remained in Stendhal, Tolstoy, or Fontane. They were extraordinary, no one could doubt it, but he found in Bely an almost secret parodic form. The culminating scenes, the violent climaxes that abound in the story are bathed in a gentle sarcasm that almost nobody noticed at the time. He did, and he began to study the construction of situations that could combine pathos with caricature. An example can be seen in the tuberculosis spots on the lungs of Mme Chauchat seen in an X-ray by Hans Castorp and the verbal spasm, the exquisite rhetoric with which this young man makes us aware of his romantic passion by way of these spots. I would like to read Bely’s other novels: The Silver Dove, his most experimental, an intrauterine monologue that struggles, through babbling, to reach some meaning, and moreover, to soak in the amazing literature of early twentieth century at the end of teens and twenties: Akhmatova, Rozanov, Kuzmin, Tsvetaeva, Mandelstam, Tynyanov, Pasternak, Platonov, and Khlebnikov—for some the latter is the most radical poet of form at the time. Both Ripellino and Shklovsky, who have studied him thoroughly, agree that he is the true transformer of Russian lyrical poetry, who frees it from symbolism and directs it toward the avant-garde, toward futurism in particular. In the afternoon, a pleasant outing to the house-museum of Repin, a painter from the end of the nineteenth century; we are indebted to him for the faces known to us of the great figures of the nineteenth century: Tolstoy, Turgenev, the whole lot. The house is on the Karelian peninsula, not far from the border with Finland. I grew bored during the outing; I continued to rehash my regret for having alienated the Russians. Only one of my books does not cause me to blush, Vals de Mefisto [Mephisto’s Waltz], perhaps because when I wrote it, during the long period I lived in Moscow, I had immersed myself full-time in those waters. And in the evening a perfect Eugene Onegin at the Maly Theater. The only works of Tchaikovsky that really interest me are his operas. Orchestra, voices, musical and stage direction, set design, everything was remarkable in that masterful opera. I left the theater thoroughly refreshed. Happy to discover that my love of opera has not become extinct, as I sometimes feared. What bombs I’ve had to endure in Mexico in recent years! I remember an I puritani by Bellini11 that Luz del Amo took me to see some time ago at Bellas Artes to calm my nerves the night before my standardization exam in the Foreign Service, and I still get shudders remembering that performance. But one can also experience these disappointments in Prague: whether out of apathy, desolation, or laziness, opera has become tedious, except when a major international figure arrives, then the singers and the orchestra give it everything they can, and the improvement is obvious. During intermission, I heard both Russian and Finnish. I have a nagging desire to go out onto the street. But I restrain myself. I think about cities: Prague, Moscow, and Leningrad. Prague is one of the most beautiful cities in the world, as everyone knows, and also the most hermetic. But the hopelessness of its inhabitants creates a gloom that permeates everything and penetrates to the marrow. Moscow has wonders: the churches of the Kremlin, St. Basil’s, old neighborhoods—but also large areas of horrendous architecture. The monumental towers constructed during Stalinism are truly frightening, the megalomania of cement and reinforced concrete. An architecture that evinces a complete disregard for dreams, for any sense of play. But the city is alive, its breath can be felt everywhere. At the very moment I write this, there are probably thousands of Muscovites in open conflict, arguing,
showing solidarity for each other, wanting to kill each other. Leningrad, the city of Peter, is also wonderful, and much more, is it not? But during these two days I have not felt its pulse. Sure, I have friends there, or acquaintances, and none here, and that makes a major difference. But there, even if someone brings up a political topic, even strangers say what they think. They are either followers or enemies of something. When I have tried here to cautiously talk about what is happening in the country, I encounter evasion, silence, polite changes of subject…
11 Pitol mistakenly attributes the opera to Donizetti in the Spanish text.—Trans.