Trafika Europe 13 - Russian Ballet

Judeophile

its daily affairs, and it seemed to me that it was grinding me down... There was one time I had started a conversation with Vadim on the subject: “We can’t go on living this way”. He misread me, literally, as though it were a revolutionary pronouncement and, chuckling, replied: “But they will tear into your body with steel hooks. What a waste of young flesh!” But I had something else in mind: some sort of a melancholy unease with myself, that perhaps what was best in me was disappearing…. We were young, strong, and handsome. The sexual revolution had struck us with its rebellious wing. The people were avenging themselves upon their oppressors through their rabid promiscuity. The otherwise empty dachas, in the evenings resounded with the pealing of guitars and drunken singing. This was some sort of an uninterrupted send-off; I imagined that I was saying goodbye to Russia, and, already intoxicated with the permanence of the forthcoming parting, greedily gulping in the wind in the broken windows of the vestibule, grasping with the grappling hooks of my soul onto its impassable autumn muddiness, the scruffy coppices, onto its ashen-haired, gray-eyed and receptive girls. And poems, poems; poems between the drinks, the kisses and the declarations of love, in some sort of an all- engrossing enthusiasm marking a turning point. I was saying goodbye to Russia, in order not to think that I was bidding farewell to myself. To leave! To shatter

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