What pleases me is the evolution of the match theme: those magic ones he had shown me had been trifled with and mislaid, and his armies had also vanished, and everything had fallen through, like my toy trains that, in the winter of 1904–05, in Wiesbaden, I tried to run over the frozen puddles in the grounds of the Hotel Oranien. I hope old Kuropatkin, in his rustic disguise, managed to evade Soviet imprisonment, but that is not the point. The next moment each recognized the other. Petersburg to southern Russia he was accosted while crossing a bridge, by an old man who looked like a gray-bearded peasant in his sheepskin coat. This incident had a special sequel fifteen years later, when at a certain point of my father’s flight from Bolshevik-held St. “That day, he had been ordered to assume supreme command of the Russian Army in the Far East. Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited
#The cinders on venus destiny license#
Lost in thought, he taps his knee with his wandlike pencil, and at the same instant a car (New York license plate) passes along the road, a child bangs the screen door of a neighbouring porch, an old man yawns in a misty Turkestan orchard, a granule of cinder-gray sand is rolled by the wind on Venus, a Docteur Jacques Hirsch in Grenoble puts on his reading glasses, and trillions of other such trifles occur – all forming an instantaneous and transparent organism of events, of which the poet (sitting in a lawn chair, at Ithaca, N.Y.) is the nucleus.” Vivian Bloodmark, a philosophical friend of mine, in later years, used to say that while the scientist sees everything that happens in one point of space, the poet feels everything that happens in one point of time.
Tentacles, not wings, are Apollo’s natural members. The arms of consciousness reach out and grope, and the longer they are the better. “But then, in a sense, all poetry is positional: to try to express one’s position in regard to the universe embraced by consciousness, is an immemorial urge. When challenged to justify the bestial terror that had been sanctioned by Lenin-the torture-house, the blood-bespattered wall-Nesbit would tap the ashes out of his pipe against the fender knob, recross sinistrally his huge, heavily shod, dextrally crossed legs, and murmur something about the “Allied Blockade.” He lumped together as “Czarist elements” Russian émigrés of all hues, from peasant Socialist to White general-much as today Soviet writers wield the term “Fascist.” He never realized that had he and other foreign idealists been Russians in Russia, he and they would have been destroyed by Lenin’s regime as naturally as rabbits are by ferrets and farmers.” My friend knew little of Russia’s past and this little had come to him through polluted Communist channels. But it was also due to simple misinformation. “It is probably true, as some have argued, that sympathy for Leninism on the part of English and American liberal opinion in the twenties was swung by consideration of home politics. True, there was among émigrés a sufficient number of good readers to warrant the publication, in Berlin, Paris, and other towns, of Russian books and periodicals on a comparatively large scale but since none of those writings could circulate within the Soviet Union, the whole thing acquired a certain air of fragile unreality.” The lucky group of expatriates could now follow their pursuits with such utter impunity that, in fact, they sometimes asked themselves if the sense of enjoying absolute mental freedom was not due to their working in an absolute void. What the Tsars had never been able to achieve, namely the complete curbing of minds to the government’s will, was achieved by the Bolsheviks in no time after the main contingent of the intellectuals had escaped abroad or had been destroyed. Those who had not were either withering away there or adulterating their gifts by complying with the political demands of the state. “With a very few exceptions, all liberal-minded creative forces-poets, novelists, critics, historians, philosophers and so on-had left Lenin’s and Stalin’s Russia.
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