Trafika Europe 13 - Russian Ballet

Naum Vaiman

“Where where, to Israel.” He pronounced the word with an emphasis on the last syllable, mocking the tone of the government leaders. The struggle for the right to emigrate was already in full bloom, and I, of course, thought about it, but had no desire to leave. Which is what I told him. “Why?” “I don’t know… ‘I love my own poor country, because I’ve known no other….” 3 “The history of this empire is coming to an end. It has come to a dead end. We must, hence, think about the future.” “Of the ‘historic’ future, is it? What do I care about history? And what if I just want to write poems; I can’t do it in any language other than Russian? It would be like losing one’s soul.” “Soul!” he said with sarcasm in his voice, almost angrily. “Then you didn’t understand a thing I told you about history. The soul is precisely that – history. So that in choosing a history, people choose their soul. There’s not always the freedom to choose, but if it exists….” “And what’s wrong with Russian history? If you happen to have been born in Russia….” “That which we call ‘Russia’ is but a century and a half of Germanized imperial statehood, from Catherine the

Osip Mandelstam

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