Trafika Europe 13 - Russian Ballet

Igor Sakhnovsky

his thirty sixth winter upon the earth, without any warning fell into such a state of despairing absence, such a self-enforced AWOL, that he became all at once beyond the reach of all earthly laws. In Old Crimea, there lived a Writer ’s Widow, already with one foot in the grave, one of those grand impoverished widows who had managed to survive a second or even a third sequel of the lethally self- righteous Soviet “cinema” – for her own part, and in the names of her genius husbands, who had been wiped off the big screen and tossed onto the junk- heap of history way back in the first installment. The nearly silent judgments of these underappreciated old women, measured nearly in carats and published on both sides of the waters, negotiated the collisions of the best minds of Cambridge and Princeton, at the same time that these makers of taste themselves, mired in complete anonymity, struggled with such essential problems of life as what is to be done about the last pair of ragged house slippers and how one may stretch out the remnants of yesterday’s already watery soup. The widow inhabited the same little house where her once famous spouse had once lived, sleeping on the same cot of a bed, sitting in the same chairs, and applying patches to the same worn-through clothes…. Occasionally, she would receive sun-tanned tourists who arrived with an air of self-importance and whose

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