The Jetsam - Lara Biyuts (best adventure books to read .TXT) 📗

in love with young gold-haired violet-eyed Leonardo, I shall end with my prose poem:

 

The artist with the cat-like perfect body,

the graceful snake, the wise nocturnal bird,

whose procreations have the subtle smell

of hemlock, belladonna, myrrh and nard.

The bard, he used to enamour Dream Weaver.

The mage, he fostered every mystery of life.

His name was Leonardo -- Winged Man-Lion.

His keen violet eyes perceived so much.

The transient below could never stop

his flight to other heights -- in streams of humans

he saw himself as adorable model.

 

2009

 

Writing in the Margins

(essay)

 

Oscar Wilde and Anton Chekhov. I don’t know whether anybody tried to compare them. On the face of it, there is no need to do it -- but I’ll try to, because, when you come to think of it, the biographies of these two great writers have at least several attributes in common. First and most, both of them lived at the same historical period. Confer: Wilde (1854-1900), Chekhov (1860-1904). Wilde’s essays, dedicated to Dostoevsky’s novels are known, and most likely he heard of other Russian writers, and of the new writer of the name of Anton Chekhov. Undoubtedly, Chekhov knew of Oscar Wilde, though we can’t find any mentions of Wilde in his letters. But the Wilde trial had reverberations at some levels of Russian society, especially at the literary set and in the midst of intellectuals. According to Professor of Russian literature at Princeton Nina Berberova (co-author of the article Death of Tchaikivsky), the most part of the Russian civic newspapers regarded the trial as an “example of a hypocritical persecution”, and reading the newspapers Chekhov thought of the writer of the name of Oscar Wilde, though he never shared his thoughts on the subject with his younger brothers and sister, therefore they could not leave their evidence of that. Both of them were tall and handsome men. Looking narrowly at their photos, we can see the eye of Chekhov and Wilde eyes bear resemblance, just Chekhov’s eyes, these screwing up, myopic eyes are smaller that Wilde’s, yet the same all-understanding and all-forgiving. Both of them succeeded in the career of a writer; both of them wrote plays; both of them mingled in the theater circles; both of them lived a life of a super-star. Anton Chekhov was my first literary love. I read his all works and his Letters (if I did not want, nobody in the world could make me do it), and I don’t believe his stories or plays are boring -- if my reader read his early writings, all the humorous stories of his early period, then the reader would understand Chekhov’s attitude towards life, his views and tastes much better, as much as I know him. Soon after I read his all works, I had got access to the works by other great writer, Vladimir Nabokov, and Nabokov had become my supreme authority of good literary taste, true, slightly snobbish. Then I learned of the works and life of Oscar Wilde, and Wilde still is my idol -- one of my idols, godfather and holy patron of all of us, the aesthetes. My reader knows all about Wilde’s life and death, therefore let’s talk of the life of Anton Chekhov. With all my acceptance of his person, I’d like to ask the question that I don’t believe to be detractive or improper: does my reader know that Chekhov was a morphine addict for the last four years of his life? He was seriously ill; it was consumption. Morphine could be prescribed by a doctor, since the doctors diagnosed tuberculosis on the upper part of his lungs, but Chekhov was a doctor himself. He took morphine to sleep and to relive pain (he suffered a major haemorrhage of the lungs). Fairly soon he became a drug addict. Without morphine he could neither sleep, nor eat nor breathe. His last portraits that show him as a well-dressed gentleman and famous writer at his mature age were portraits of a morphine addict. In regard to his sexual orientation, it is obvious, and yet something odd I find in his relationship with women. As a super-star he had many friends, men and women; sexually, he preferred swift liaisons, and one day, he turned down the love of one uncommonly beautiful and well-educated young women of noble birth. Her name was Lyka. The young lady was his sister’s friend. His sister introduced her to the Chekhovs. His brothers and parents dearly loved Lyka, and all his friends and relatives intended her as his wife. As a representative of the new generation of women, who wanted to continue their study, to work and to live independently, she was Chekhov’s ideal, if we come to think of it. Was she too sublime? Not enough sublime? Too sexy? Too much exaltation? I don’t know. Her heart was broken by Anton’s frigidness to her love, and shortly soon she went abroad along with other writer, other handsome man who was married and who broke his heart too. After she buried her dead baby, in Paris, she began taking lessons of singing being about to start a career of opera singer. As for Chekhov, the story of the young woman, who loved him to distraction, had become a small plot for his new play The Seagull, no more. That’s an oddest episode of his sexual life in my view. He settled down to married life much later, 2 years before his death. Once he wrote in a letter to his older friend: “I shall get married, if you wish. But on the following conditions: everything must be as it has been hitherto -- that is, she must live in Moscow while I live in the countryside, and I will come to see her… Give me a wife who, like the moon, won't appear in my sky every day.” In 1901 he married Olga Knipper -- quietly, owing to his horror of weddings -- she was the young actress and rising star, whom he had first met at rehearsals for The Seagull, and the letter cited above proved to be prophetic of Chekhov's marital arrangements with Olga: he lived largely at Yalta, she in Moscow, pursuing her acting career. The more I am looking at her photos now, the more I am surprised how much she looks like Wilde’s wife Constance. The same boyish features, the same slender, boyish body. Amazing. In 1902, Olga suffered a miscarriage; and Donald Rayfield has offered evidence, based on the couple's letters, that conception may have occurred when Chekhov and Olga were apart. There is no evidence and nobody suspected he was homosexual, but he was a doctor and a man of letters who was able to understand and understood much as well as homosexuals and other victims of nineteenth-century materialism and moral self-righteousness, therefore, I submit, he was straight but not narrow-minded. Like Wilde, he was an aesthete, true, at heart. “A human must be beautiful…” -- these words is his small timid bow to aestheticism -- timid and perhaps the only, because he did not dare to declare himself as an aesthete openly; he feared to do it. What or who did he fear? The contemporary Russian newspapers and public opinion that accused him and his writings of lacking both principles and ideas. “The more refined one is, the more unhappy,” he said, and it sounds as though he told about himself. The undiscovered Chekhov could say it. Wilde wrote the essay The Soul of Man under Socialism -- Chekhov wrote: “Aristocrats? The same ugly bodies and physical uncleanliness, the same toothless old age and disgusting death as market-women’s…” -- and so forth, and so forth. In short (this will be brief and to the point, for “brevity is the sister of talent”, as my reader knows) everyone can find yet more evidence for the fact that Anton Chekhov has essentially a lot in common with Oscar Wilde and other fin-de-siecle aesthetes, at least in some respects.

And more about the similarity. Chekhov’s books were and are loved by British readers -- in his turn Wilde, soon after he was sentenced, had become most popular in Russia, and event more: he had become a national Russian writer in a way. How so? Because he had become a martyr, a true martyr in the view of Russian writers, and they in old Russia loved martyrs. Thus, the epoch-making literary exchange took place: Britain gave as a present Oscar Wilde -- Russia gave as a present Chekhov. For, really, Tchaikovsky’s music and Chekhov’s stories and plays is all that Russia has to take pride in (we won’t mention of Nabokov’s brilliant works in this regard, because they belong rather to the whole world, rather it’s a cosmopolitan phenomenon, and Nabokov is a great American writer).

 

2007

 

Your Favourite Oscar Wilde Quotes

 

 “I don’t regret for a single moment having lived for pleasure. I did it to the full, as one should do everything that one does. There was no pleasure I did not experience. I threw the pearl of my soul into a cup of wine. I went down the primrose path to the sound of flutes. I lived on honeycomb.” (De Profundis)

 “…that while Metaphysics had but little real interest for me, and Morality absolutely none…” (De Profundis)

“Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.” (De Profundis)

 “… and the love of children and flowers -- for both of which, indeed, in classical art there was but little place, hardly enough for them to grow or play in, but which, from the twelfth century down to our own day, have been continually making their appearances in art, under various modes and at various times, coming fitfully and willfully, as children, as flowers, are apt to do: spring always seeming to one as if the flowers had been in hiding, and only came out into the sun because they were afraid that grown up people would grow tired of looking for them and give up the search; and the life of a child being no more than an April day on which there is both rain and sun for the narcissus.” (De Profundis)

 “To get back one's youth one has merely to repeat one's follies.”

 “The world is changed because you are made of ivory and gold. The curves of your lips rewrite history.” (The Picture of Dorian Gray)

 “The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself.”

 “Either this paper goes or I do.”

“If the Socialism is Authoritarian; if there are Governments armed with economic power as they are now with political power; if, in a word, we are to have Industrial Tyrannies, then the last state of man will be worse than the first.” (The Soul of Man under Socialism)

 “Yes, the objective form is the most subjective in manner. Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask and he will tell you the truth.” (The Critic as Artist)

 “…At any rate, wherever he lay -- -whether in the little vineyard at the gate of the Gothic town, or in some dim London churchyard amidst the roar and bustle of our great city -- -no gorgeous monument marked his resting-place. His true tomb, as Shakespeare saw, was the poet's verse, his true monument the permanence of the drama. So had it been with others whose beauty had given a new creative impulse to their age. The ivory body of the Bithynian slave rots in the green ooze of the Nile, and on the yellow hills of the Cerameicus is strewn the dust of the young Athenian; but Antinous lives in sculpture, and Charmides in philosophy.” (The Portrait of Mr W. H.)

 “…Many curious stories were related about him at this period. It was said that a stout Burgomaster, who had come to deliver a florid oratorical address on behalf of the citizens of the town, had