Trafika Europe 13 - Russian Ballet

Judeophile

enthusiasm, almost with tears in his eyes – and the tears of a poet, damn it, are infectious – so that even I was touched. I was particularly moved by the following: “My heart will be engulfed by flame and scorched to its very bottom, when the walls … the walls of Jerusalem rise up, clear as day...” At this point in the poem, we could no longer hold back our fraternal weeping, only I “secretly,” instead of “the walls of the New Jerusalem” (I was bothered by the “irregular measure” here, as well as by the very real ruins of the New Jerusalem monastery, where I would lug myself on the suburban train to see a certain Tanya, so that this evoked in me an entirely different “set of associations”) twice repeated the word “walls,” whispering: “the walls... the walls of Jerusalem...” Moreover, this was so because the poem, of course, dealt with the eternal city, and I wanted to weep for the earthly one. And so, we wept in a friendly fashion, but each after his own heart. (And here, now, the dates on the palms are finally ripening, and their mighty, red clusters among the gray, parched by the endless summer and cracked by the weight of the harvest branches, are on fire among the tree tops, in the impenetrable azure...) Autumn is the holy mystery of death. Lest we forget the “sweetest harvest” to come. And isn’t the work of the historian like that? “When the reins of life, rewarding the labors of your days, are preparing to serve you its fruits and the harvest ripens and, in the grains of its thoughts, you gather in the fates of mankind who had

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