Trafika Europe 13 - Russian Ballet

Judeophile

love everyone, but the sad love only themselves and the other worldly, to which dreams lead to, in order to attain an immutable certainty. Even in a woman, these “prisoners of the flesh” seek out some sort of “mystery” or “magic”. The continuation of the race is an insult to them, they crave to continue themselves. They pursue eternity through the efforts of their (pro)creative will. “More bitter than death, the woman whose heart is snares and traps, whose hands are chains. “ That damned dualism. Nothing else has ruined a healthy sexual life for us more than monotheism. Andnow, I believetheRussians tobethemostmelancholic of peoples, and Russian literature, that ancient one, to be an expression of this toxic melancholy. For them, even love for history is but a concession to melancholy. It lacks the “pathos of eternity,” as Pyotr Naumovich used to say, it lacks that Jewish will to immortality. Even among the Jewish-Russian poets, melancholy is not a predominant characteristic. Mandelstam is solemn. The sharp salt of solemn grievances. And Pasternak was altogether an optimist (such a scathing little word); My Sister, Life – one can’t imagine a more Jewish sounding title for a book... It was as though Isaac Levitan had imbibed his longing for opaque landscapes together with the autumnal smoke. With the passage of time, once I was in Israel, my melancholy passed. It shriveled up in this heat, and it lost its appealing taste. Only its smell remained, that sudden, dizzying smell of awakened memory, of the

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