My Several Selves, Imaginary and Real 24 страница
The final scene, the duel with Laertes and Hamlet’s death, was a shattering experience: I wept bitterly over my own and my hero’s death. So overwhelming was the impression the play had made on me, that for days afterwards I could not think or talk of anything else, and I could not talk of it without my voice breaking and my eyes filling with tears. I talked of it to my classmates, to Zena, even to my aunt, the least sympathetic of my listeners. My principal desire during the week that followed was to repeat the experience, however searing, to see my beloved prince live — and die — again. My aunt however declared that I was making myself ill, as it was, about ‘this Hamlet’, and that I looked and behaved as if I had fever. On no account would she agree to my seeing the play a second time, and for once my uncle was in agreement with her, because he grudged sending the horse to fetch me. I told Aunt Katia that she ‘just didn’t understand what it meant to me’, and withdrew into my room to rave and storm in solitude against the tyranny of ‘the stupid and the insensitive’ and to weep over my frustrated hopes, shutting my door even against Zena who wanted to comfort me.
My bitter and restless mood might have lasted much longer if, by a fortunate chance, one of the themes set to us for an essay in the following week had not happened to be: ‘The Play that made the Strongest Impression on me.’
We had an hour to write it. During that hour I wrote fifteen pages, but when the bell rang for the break and the monitors began to collect our papers, my essay was still unfinished. I had not only re-told the plot, but described the actions, quoted the speeches, and poured out my own thoughts and feelings about the characters in the play. I wrote without stopping, my face flushed and hot, my eyes constantly filling with tears. It was a true catharsis, a stormy passage with the prospect of calm at the end. I was going to conclude with my own meditations on the theme of ‘conscience does make cowards of us all’, for it was the thought which disturbed me perhaps more than any other in the play so full of disturbing thoughts. Shimkóvich looked sympathetic, as I protested that I had not finished yet, while Mania Komarovskaya stood irresolutely over me, a pile of bright exercise books held in the crook of her arm.
‘You can add a postscript to it when it comes back from me,’ Shimkóvich said with a smile, and I handed over my life blood to Mania, my throat tightening as I watched it being passed on to the teacher’s desk.
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When he brought our essays back a week later, my book was again on the top. ‘This essay, ’ he said, ‘is very interesting in that the author writes of Hamlet as if he were a real person she knew, not a character in fiction. She has taken his struggles and sufferings to her heart and is participating in them. Such sympathy with the main character may be the most direct way to understanding a great work of art, but living the character to that extent must be exhausting and can be very distressing. I hope it was not too distressing in this case . . . ’
He began reading out passages. Everyone knew that it was my essay and some of the girls stole half-sympathetic, half-mocking glances at me. I sat without looking up, feeling as if I had been dragged out into a market place stripped to my skin. My apprenticeship for qualifying as an author was beginning in earnest. I did not yet see myself as the victim of a daemon that entices you to pour yourself into words, then flings the doors open to all the world to gaze into the exposed pool of your effusions and to throw stones and insults into it. But I was beginning to realize that the urge to put my experiences into words was becoming irresistible, and that its satisfaction could result in further strife and more pain. The very thought of exposing my writing to criticism made me writhe inwardly; the embarrassment of being praised was almost as painful. How could I write books that were to be read, and survive the ordeal? How could I reconcile my extreme vulnerability with the need to display some of my most intimate feelings to public examination? Which would prove the strongest, the revulsion from shame and pain, or the urge to make the inarticulate and the obscure revealed and clarified in words? I had no answer to these questions as yet, I had not even formulated them, but I already knew that writing was my vocation and that unless I followed it, my life would not be worth living.
My novel about the two children, Henri and Margot, who grew up and married at the court of Henry IV of France, was finished. It had been illustrated by the joint efforts of Kolia Avílov and myself, and typed on thick paper by the ever-obliging Mitya. A thick book, bound in lilac satin, it lay on my mother’s writing desk where it was relatively safe from my brother’s irreverent handling and sardonic comments. My mother proudly showed it to most of her friends and even lent it to their children who, she said, found it quite absorbing. I was proud of it, too, as a visible proof and token of my industry: had not some literary critics written that Russians always begin but never finish anything? This generalization nettled me into pledging myself, there and then, always to complete whatever I might begin, especially if it were a piece of writing. Having finished it, however, I hardly ever looked at it again, partly through fear of finding that my brother’s jeers were justified, and that much of what I had written was so childish that it would make me blush for the person I had been.
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My appreciation of literary style was developing so rapidly, that the aspiring author in me writhed with shame as the literary critic, my alter ego, turned over the pages I had written a year or even six months before. How could I have produced anything so naive, so awkward, so utterly trite? Could I really have been so infantile? What if these pages fell into the hands of my brother, or of Shoora Martynov? They would have every justification for laughing at me . . . That must not happen, no one must see them ever! But how to make sure of this? Of course, Pushkin burned some of his poems, Gogol threw the first version of the second part of The Dead Souls into the fire. Yet, somehow I could not bring myself to follow their illustrious example: these pages, covered from end to end with uneven, half-formed handwriting, were not just ink and paper — they were a part of myself I valued most, and I shuddered at the thought of destroying them. Why should I, I asked in self-justification. They might, after all, prove instructive as a story of one person’s development.
I continued to live the double life of day-to-day reality and of romantic imagination, although my fantasy of being the King of Rome was beginning to wear thin. Perhaps, I told myself, it had been only one of my many incarnations. Still, I gazed at the portraits of the Duke of Reichstadt in his white uniform, blond, slender, large-eyed, full-lipped, and scrutinized it for resemblances between him and his father, and between him and myself. Why, I wondered, should I be so fascinated, so intensely moved by his fate unless there was a mysterious bond between his life and mine? It had not dawned on me — how could it? — that the bond might have been, as it was between me and Hamlet, my half-conscious longing for an ideal father, and the awe-struck pity for one who, in losing a father, lost all his brilliant future as well.
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I wrote two long short stories at the time: one a pure wish-fulfilment fantasy about a girl being whisked off — in a dream — to Spain by a handsome matador; the other reflecting a basic conflict about love — that of dominance and submission. The young girl in the story has an accomplished and good-looking man for a guardian, who is, rather improbably, only a few years older than herself. He treats her as a child; she hates him for this, then, to her distress and humiliation, realizes that she is in love with him. The story had a happy ending: she discovers that he loves her too, though somewhat de haut-en-bas.
Mitya, whom, as a fellow writer, I allowed to read this story, declared himself to be greatly impressed. He could hardly believe, he said, that anyone so young was able to describe transformation of hatred into love so convincingly. How did I know what it felt like? He seemed to take it for granted that at the age of thirteen I had not yet been in love.
Nor had I — except in my imagination — but the emotions I lived through when I wrote, or read, or looked at my favourite pictures were so intense and so contradictory, that I could not talk about them even to my sister, for fear she would show little sympathy or even smile at them. How could I explain why I felt so furious with my brother when he teased me by talking baby language to me, while a few hours later I would gaze at a Gerard painting of Napoleon playing with his son, and wish ardently to be that adored and precious infant? Why did I feel so indignant at the very mention of ‘obedience’ or ‘submission’, yet derive a curious, shamefaced pleasure from picturing myself as Tatiana to whom Oniéghin preached while telling her he loved her only as a sister? Writing was one outlet for these disturbing emotions, dreams provided another. One particular dream I remember from that period of my life haunted me for several years. Most people have a few such revealing dreams in their lifetime — often their meaning becomes clear only after years of experience and meditation.
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I saw myself in that dream as a very young child, three years old perhaps, standing alone in some kind of starlit, featureless space. Soft air was blowing about me and nothing but the sky and the stars were in sight. I felt no fear — I was merely elated and expectant. Out of the luminous darkness a man rode on horseback, bent down to me, lifted me up, and set me before him on his horse, covering me with a part of his cloak. As I raised my head to look at him, starlight shone into my eyes and his face was only dimly visible, but I could see that he was young and handsome and was smiling at me. And I knew that he was my father. Overcoming my shyness, proud, delighted, full of trust, I pointed at a star above his head and asked him a question — I have no memory of what it was — and he replied, gravely, tenderly, while we rode on into the luminous night.
The dream was vivid, almost overwhelming in its intensity, and I awoke from it glowing with happiness, but an emotion verging on despair gripped me when I realized I had been only dreaming. Then I felt angry with myself for having had such a tantalizing dream. What was the sense of it? That wonderful dream father — what had he to do with my real father as I knew him? True enough, my father sometimes wore a long grey cloak and he rode a horse —but I dismissed these thoughts as quite irrelevant. I only wished I could dream that dream again. I never did.
I have wondered since if every girl carries an ideal image of a life companion in her unconscious, a husband who would also be a lover, son, friend and father in one? And whether every young man dreams of a wife who could combine the qualities of a mother, sister and mistress?
I was writing these stories and dreaming these dreams in the summer of 1914. I was also reading a great deal, and one of the books which fell into my hands was Leonid Andryeev’s The Seven that Were Hanged.
I came upon this book by accident as I was searching for something in a chest of drawers belonging to my sister: it had been pushed in among some linen as if she had wanted to hide it. Everything about it — the print, the paper, the title page — were unusual, and I sensed that it must be one of the ‘forbidden’ books, printed secretly by the ‘revolutionaries’. My sister flushed when she saw me holding it and quickly told me not to take it out of her bedroom. ‘Read it here if you want to,’ she said. ‘No one else must see it.’
Once I started to read it, I had to go on. Its fascination was terrible. Andryeev described the behaviour, the characters, feelings and thoughts of five revolutionaries and two common murderers who had been condemned to death and were to be executed at the same time. Of the five revolutionaries two were young women, and it was the description of one of them that I found particularly affecting. At the trial and in the days preceding their execution she had no thought for herself, only concern for her companions and how she could make things easier for them, especially for one of the men who was terrified of dying and was in danger of breaking down at any moment. She made me think of my sister: I could imagine her behaving in such a selfless, self-forgetting way. I saw myself as more like the other girl, courageous but detached, going to her execution hand-in-hand with a common murderer while her lover was leading and supporting the other terrified criminal.
Before I read this story I had already believed that revolutionaries were heroes; now I saw them also as saints. Those who sent them to their death were blind or criminal, or both . . . Before I read this story I thought of my future as a writer; now, burning with compassion, pity and horror, I made an entry in my diary: ‘I will dedicate my life to the struggle for the liberation of my country! ’
Liberation from the power of a government my father was serving ... In this obvious thought all the tangled threads of my fantasies and feelings might have come together: the tragedy of The Gadfly, the theme of The Guardian and his ward, my many identifications — with Napoleon’s son, with Hamlet and even with Mtzyri. But they did not do so for me, at least not yet, at that time. Consciously, I had quite accepted that it was impossible for my father to share any of my interests, and that I existed for him only in so far as he had to provide for my sustenance and education. From early childhood I had become accustomed to being ignored by him; the only change that came about in adolescence was that I began to resent it, instead of just feeling constrained and uneasy in his presence. He had a disconcerting habit of not replying when one of us children asked him a question, and I was beginning to feel I wanted to break through this barrier of silence. When he was at home he would be nearly always reading a newspaper or working in his study. During meals he hardly ever spoke. On the rare occasions when I found myself alone with him, I could think of nothing to say. One such attempt at a ‘break through’ remained in my memory.
It was on an evening at Fyeny. We were sitting on the veranda, watching the summer lightning flare up every few minutes in the sky. The night was very dark and still, with the feel of thunder in the air, and my nerves were taut with the expectation of an approaching storm, with the excitement of this dramatic spectacle. Tree tops and clouds were suddenly snatched from the surrounding darkness, stood out, etched in black, against the white, pulsating sheet of light and disappeared again.
I imagined that over there, far away, a thunderstorm was raging, trees lashed by heavy rain, houses struck by lightning — while to us, at this distance, it was all like a great, awe-inspiring pantomime, violent action without a sound to be heard.
I turned to speak to my mother and suddenly realized that she had gone indoors. My father alone was there: he was leaning back in a wicker chair, smoking silently. He, too, seemed to be watching the sky. For a moment, my need to communicate proved stronger than the fear of interrupting his meditations. I made some remark about the strangeness of the silent lightning and wondered why we could not hear the thunder.
My father did not reply. Perhaps he was so deep in thought that he had not heard me, or perhaps he did not like to say that he did not know the answer to my question. In another mood I would have accepted this as normal, but on that occasion I felt I could not leave it alone, and that I had to obtain some response from him. After a pause and in a voice unsteady with a mounting sense of humiliation, I tried again.
‘This lightning seems to put out the stars . . . but of course some of the stars may not be there at all . . . The light from some of them takes several hundred years to reach us . . . the stars we see now may have disintegrated hundreds of years ago . . . ’
Still my father said nothing. I had no doubt now that he thought me ridiculous, trotting out my recently acquired knowledge to impress him, yet I felt deeply hurt by his lack of response. At that moment my mother returned from the house, and I turned to her with an indignant question: ‘Mamma, why does Father never speak to us? Why does he never answer when I ask him something?’
My mother stopped on the way to her chair, startled by the exasperation in my voice. The summer lightning flashed, lighting up for a moment my father, leaning back in his chair, my mother standing there, and myself — between them. I did not wait for her reply but rushed past her into the house and up the stairs to my room in the mezzanine, where I could let myself go in a passionate, silent denunciation of my father’s unjust, contemptuous treatment of me. I wished the thunderstorm would come and the heavy rain pour down, so that I could throw myself into the battle of the elements and mingle my violence with theirs, and share with Nature herself the emotional tumult within me. I flung open the window and leaned out, gulping the damp, fragrant air and staring into the inky darkness, waiting for the throbbing light to flash again. I heard myself muttering: ‘It’s no use ... no use whatever . . . never again! ’
Half an hour later my mother came up to me. I told her I had a headache. She spoke, as she often did, of my being too highly-strung and of the storm in the air affecting me. Then she added that my father had said my remarks on the veranda did not require an answer, and that, anyway, he never talked much. This did not mean that he did not care for us — everything he did was really for our sake, for the good of the family.
I replied bitterly that I was sure he would not notice if I disappeared altogether. My mother said I was talking nonsense. My father had a great deal on his mind: he had important duties as a servant of the government and of his country.
‘Duty, always duty!’ I protested. ‘Why should duty always come first? Why not love?’
My mother made it clear that she regarded duty as paramount to anything else: duty towards one’s country, parents’ duty towards their children, children’s duty towards their parents. Love was something that could be added to it, but was not really indispensable. With that I passionately disagreed. To me duty was the synonym of compulsion, and it cut right across my idea of freedom. Love was the only compelling thing: what one did from love was a free act, what one did from a sense of duty was done under compulsion. ‘Freedom’ was a sacred word: it sanctified anything done in its name — even terrorism.
‘Freedom can be used to justify licence and self-will,’ said my mother. ‘If duty is forgotten and order destroyed, chaos will follow. ’Was this one of her ‘prophetic’ remarks? Who could have linked it at the time with the news we read in the papers in July 1914? I hardly ever read the papers: they looked most unattractive, those columns of smudgy paragraphs smelling strongly of printer’s ink. But on that day there were pictures on the front page, photographs of the Austrian Archduke and his wife assassinated at Sarajevo. The heir to the Austrian throne ... I was surprised that somebody so obviously middle-aged could still be ‘an heir’. A photograph of the family group with their several children wrung my heart. At once I imagined what I would feel if someone came to tell me that both my parents had been killed . . . But what about the killer? What did he feel as he prepared to strike, as he fired his gun at the smiling couple in the carriage, then tried to escape through the surrounding crowd? I could easily put myself in his place, for was he not one of those fighters for freedom, a patriot who wished his country to throw off the Austrian yoke?
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