I left Prague with a bit of a cold. When I wake up, the first thing I do is take an analgesic and repeat the dose throughout the day, depending on how I feel. Last night and this morning I caught a cold and I realized that rhinitis has gotten the better of me. What spasms! My nostrils are stopped up, making it difficult to breathe, a howl-inducing migraine. I ate breakfast and walked to the Hermitage. I went up to the Picasso and Matisse rooms, to start the tour from there. These works were acquired before the revolution to dress the walls of the palace salons built by industrialists and financiers of the time; the newly fledged, extremely rich, educated and with very broad interests, unprejudiced toward the avant-garde, possibly advised by professors of aesthetics, connoisseurs of contemporary trends. And they accepted them effortlessly, indeed, happily. Dance and Music are housed here, immense in size; each of these great paintings could cover the largest wall of a salon. All of the other paintings, dozens, are also of high quality. They horrified the French, and in general the European, bourgeoisie, produced by wild beasts for the amusement of wild beasts. In the center of an exhibition hall stood a magnificent bronze by Donatello. This space was responsible for housing a sample of the new generation: Matisse, Bonnard, the pointillists. People were crossing the room quickly, their eyes half-closed to keep their gaze from pausing on such monstrosities. A critic who walked through the hall wrote an article for a major newspaper with the headline: “Donatello among the wild beasts,” and the young painters were happy and took the name: Wild Beasts (fauves). The Russian aristocracy loathed these objects viscerally, even more than the French bourgeoisie. It was the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of their former serfs, the new wealthy class, who felt comfortable surrounded by the form and color of beasts in their surroundings, which explains why many of the best Picassos and Matisses are still in Moscow and St. Petersburg. They were an integral part of the art nouveau villas of Russian magnates. I stayed a good while in these rooms and then meandered slowly past the others, almost without seeing the paintings due to a new migraine attack. I finally found Zurbarán’s Childhood of the Virgin, which I knew only by photograph, but which in my previous visits was always traveling, and there I was revived…At lunchtime, I told a female employee of the Writers’ Union, who accompanied me at meals and to shows, about my previous visit to the museum, framed by privileged conditions: it must have been in 1980 or 1981. A delegation from Mexico had arrived in Leningrad: Juan José Bremer, Rafael Tovar, Carmen Beatriz López Portillo, and Fernando Gamboa, and from Moscow, Ambassador Rogelio Martínez Aguilar, Elzvieta, his wife, and some officials from our diplomatic mission, including myself, to inaugurate a monumental exhibition of Orozco the following day. The director of the Hermitage had prepared a tour of some of the museum’s rooms. It was Monday, the day when museums close their doors to the public. Our entourage, a dozen people, resembled a tiny group of lost caterpillars in its majestic halls. We toured immense corridors, went up and down imperial staircases. Without the public, the building was once again the Winter Palace, the residence of the Tsars; its dimensions multiplied and escaped to infinity. One could hardly benefit from those conditions to enjoy what awaited: The Venus Tauride, the extensive collection of primitive and Renaissance Italians, the Cranaches, the vast Rembrandt room, the Spaniards, the Impressionists, until finally arriving at Matisse and Picasso on the top floor. What delighted me most, of this superb visual feast, was after having reviewed for several hours the entire history of Western art, upon arriving to the main floor, where Gamboa and his team were putting the final touches to the Mexican exhibition, the works of Orozco did not stand out from the tradition of great painting but rather continued it. The effect was splendid and revealing. Our great artist belonged, just as Matisse and Picasso, although with a distinct poetics, to the great artistic legacy of the twentieth century. In the afternoon, a lightning visit to the home of Alexander Blok, which has just become a museum. Very moving, but I didn’t have anyone to talk about Blok with—about his time, about poetry in general, the Scythians, whom Blok revered, those kinds of things. I don’t know anyone in Leningrad, and despite the city’s undeniable beauty, its more extensive contact with foreign tourists and their customs (in restaurants, at the opera, in museums, in antique shops and bookstores, one hears almost as much Finnish as Russian and, also, a great deal of Swedish and German), its rich cultural traditions, its sumptuous past, its sophistication, it also gives off a sudden aroma of pretentiousness and provincialism that is not perceived in the least in barbaric Moscow, whose vitality has been irresistible, if one accepts the testimony of two centuries of chronicles and novels. Perhaps the Second World War brought an end to the intellectual heyday of this imperial capital. A large number of its writers, artists, scientists, died during the siege or were evacuated to safer places, and when peace came they didn’t return. It was a broken city. Many settled in Moscow, where surely there must have been better conditions: publishing houses, universities and schools, libraries, research centers, a literary press, the movie studios. For this remarkable city to be truly perfect—perfect for me, that is—it would require the existence, inserted in the folds and crevices of its oldest neighborhoods, of a Kitay-gorod, that invisible Asian city that Boris Pilnyak yearned for, which according to him is hidden inside all authentically Russian cities, where countless eyes, mere horizontal slits drawn on an inscrutable facial surface, contemplate everything, study it, interpret it, and where in the darkness of the seedier areas marinates an indescribable mixture of fierce emotions, atavistic terrors, unfathomable mysteries, adventures and exorbitant mountains of dust, layers of innumerable coats of paint embedded on the old walls; in short, to hear the echo of the Scythians invoked by Blok, a Mongolian appetite to stain the European city…In the afternoon, a brief but torrential rain. When the sky cleared, and the lead weight on the atmospheric pressure vanished, my nose began to open up and my migraine vanished immediately. I went to the theater to see Gogol’s The Wedding. A less-than discrete performance, an excessively convoluted stage direction, with all the refined, useless, and unbearable affectations to which Stanislavsky has been reduced in the hands of certain pretentious directors. It is impossible to compare this Wedding with the intelligent production of The Inspector I saw a few days ago in Moscow! We left the theater under a heavy rain. I’ll try to read some of Mandelstam’s Journey to Armenia, which I began after lunch. I’ve had too much bread, creams, pastries, blinis, and caviar. My clothes feel tight. Starting tomorrow, I’ll make the necessary adjustments…Later, I lost the desire to read, not even Mandelstam. At midnight, I couldn’t resist the temptation and went out to wander beneath an entirely white sky. I walked the length of Nevsky Prospect from the railway station to the Hermitage; the grand avenue is a recurring scene in Russian literature, from Pushkin to the present. I am and am not in Leningrad. Am I? Of course I am! It’s as if I never left. What a lie! My heart is somewhere else.