simpler formulation: if we know more about sex, they knew more about love.
Or perhaps this is quite wrong, and we mistake the gradations of courtly style for realism. Perhaps foot-kissing always meant toe-sucking. He also wrote to her: “I kiss your little hands, your little feet, kiss everything you will allow me to kiss, and even that which you will not.” Isn’t this clear enough, to both writer and recipient? And if so, then perhaps the converse is also true: that heart-reading was just as coarsely practised then as it is now.
But as we mock these genteel fumblers of a previous era, we should prepare ourselves for the jeers of a later century. How come we never think of that? We believe in evolution, at least in the sense of evolution culminating in us. We forget that this entails evolution beyond our solipsistic selves. Those old Russians were good at dreaming a better time, and idly we claim their dreams as our applause.
While her train continued towards Odessa, he spent the night at a hotel in Oryol. A bipolar night, splendid in his thoughts of her, miserable because this prevented him from sleeping. The voluptuousness of renunciation was now upon him. “I find my lips murmuring, ‘What a night we should have spent together!’” To which our practical and irritated century replies, “Take another train then! Try kissing her wherever it was you didn’t!”
Such action would be far too dangerous. He must preserve the impossibility of love. So he offers her an extravagant if-only. He confesses that as her train was about to leave he was suddenly tempted by the “madness” of abducting her. It was a temptation he typically renounced: “The bell rang, and ciao , as the Italians say.” But think of the newspaper headlines if he had carried out his momentary plan. “SCANDAL AT ORYOL RAILWAY STATION,” he delightedly imagines to her. If only. “An extraordinary event took place here yesterday: the author T—, an elderly man, was accompanying the celebrated actress S—, who was travelling to Odessa for a brilliant season in the theatre there, when, just as the train was about to pull out, he, as though possessed by the Devil in person, extracted Madame S—through the window of her compartment and, overcoming the artiste’s desperate efforts, etc., etc.” If only. The real moment—the possible handkerchief being waved at the window, the probable station gaslight falling on the whitened crest of an old man—is rewritten into farce and melodrama, into journalese and “madness.” The alluring hypothetical does not refer to the future; it is safely lodged in the past. The bell rang, and ciao , as the Italians say.
He also had another tactic: that of hurrying on into the future in order to confirm the impossibility of love in the present. Already, and without “anything” having happened, he is looking back on this would-have-been something. “If we meet again in another two or three years, I shall be an old, old man. As for you, you will have entered definitively upon the normal course of your life and nothing will remain of our past …” Two years, he thought, would turn an old man into an old, old one; while “normal life” is already waiting for her in the banal yet timely shape of an officer of hussars, clanking his spurs offstage and snorting like a horse. N. N. Vsevolozhsky. How useful the thunderous uniform was to the gauntly bent civilian.
We should not, by this point, still be thinking of Verochka, the naïve, unfortunate ward. The actress who embodied her was robust, temperamental, bohemian. She was already married, and seeking a divorce to acquire her hussar; she would marry three times in all. Her letters have not survived. Did she lead him on? Was she a little in love with him? Was she, perhaps, more than a little in love with him, yet dismayed by his expectation of failure, his voluptuous renunciations? Did she, perhaps, feel just as trapped by his past as he did? If love for him
Or perhaps this is quite wrong, and we mistake the gradations of courtly style for realism. Perhaps foot-kissing always meant toe-sucking. He also wrote to her: “I kiss your little hands, your little feet, kiss everything you will allow me to kiss, and even that which you will not.” Isn’t this clear enough, to both writer and recipient? And if so, then perhaps the converse is also true: that heart-reading was just as coarsely practised then as it is now.
But as we mock these genteel fumblers of a previous era, we should prepare ourselves for the jeers of a later century. How come we never think of that? We believe in evolution, at least in the sense of evolution culminating in us. We forget that this entails evolution beyond our solipsistic selves. Those old Russians were good at dreaming a better time, and idly we claim their dreams as our applause.
While her train continued towards Odessa, he spent the night at a hotel in Oryol. A bipolar night, splendid in his thoughts of her, miserable because this prevented him from sleeping. The voluptuousness of renunciation was now upon him. “I find my lips murmuring, ‘What a night we should have spent together!’” To which our practical and irritated century replies, “Take another train then! Try kissing her wherever it was you didn’t!”
Such action would be far too dangerous. He must preserve the impossibility of love. So he offers her an extravagant if-only. He confesses that as her train was about to leave he was suddenly tempted by the “madness” of abducting her. It was a temptation he typically renounced: “The bell rang, and ciao , as the Italians say.” But think of the newspaper headlines if he had carried out his momentary plan. “SCANDAL AT ORYOL RAILWAY STATION,” he delightedly imagines to her. If only. “An extraordinary event took place here yesterday: the author T—, an elderly man, was accompanying the celebrated actress S—, who was travelling to Odessa for a brilliant season in the theatre there, when, just as the train was about to pull out, he, as though possessed by the Devil in person, extracted Madame S—through the window of her compartment and, overcoming the artiste’s desperate efforts, etc., etc.” If only. The real moment—the possible handkerchief being waved at the window, the probable station gaslight falling on the whitened crest of an old man—is rewritten into farce and melodrama, into journalese and “madness.” The alluring hypothetical does not refer to the future; it is safely lodged in the past. The bell rang, and ciao , as the Italians say.
He also had another tactic: that of hurrying on into the future in order to confirm the impossibility of love in the present. Already, and without “anything” having happened, he is looking back on this would-have-been something. “If we meet again in another two or three years, I shall be an old, old man. As for you, you will have entered definitively upon the normal course of your life and nothing will remain of our past …” Two years, he thought, would turn an old man into an old, old one; while “normal life” is already waiting for her in the banal yet timely shape of an officer of hussars, clanking his spurs offstage and snorting like a horse. N. N. Vsevolozhsky. How useful the thunderous uniform was to the gauntly bent civilian.
We should not, by this point, still be thinking of Verochka, the naïve, unfortunate ward. The actress who embodied her was robust, temperamental, bohemian. She was already married, and seeking a divorce to acquire her hussar; she would marry three times in all. Her letters have not survived. Did she lead him on? Was she a little in love with him? Was she, perhaps, more than a little in love with him, yet dismayed by his expectation of failure, his voluptuous renunciations? Did she, perhaps, feel just as trapped by his past as he did? If love for him
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