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September 24323Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ4uRtEhQWYS
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My wonderful Ludmilla, beloved Mama and everyone else at home.323Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡLLurGtv6Na
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Goodness knows when (or from where) this letter will ever be posted! Maybe it's not a letter after all, but a journal? Destined for your own sweet eyes, dear Ludmilla, when I return home again.
All I know about my own heart is that it keeps beating steadily---thump, thump---despite the awful struggles of the last week and more. I suppose you really address the future in such a piece of scribbling as a "private journal." You're full of egotistical hopes that this vague entity, futurity, will disinter all your carefully orchestrated secrets from the desk drawer where you've hidden them---leaving the key in the lock, of course! Whereupon eager futurity will at once declare what a fascinating chap this Eric Saveli Delko was. And it'll all be a big damn joke.
How can I sum up the sequence of days since we quit the Yenisei for our long tramp, 350 versts eastwards, along the banks of the Angara?
Well, there was already enough light snow cover this far north for us to use the sledges, as we'd counted on doing. And that meant fighting our way through branches quite a bit of the time. (I have scratches and cuts all over my mug, as if I've been whipped by invisible forest spirits wielding tiny lashes.) And sometimes we were forced to take to the shallows of the river to haul the sledges upstream somehow, which involved a lot of skidding and stumbling and getting dunked in icy water. We have shivered around campfires----about which I can assure you that there's nothing romantic. Wild ducks and geese have avoided our guns with great dexterity, except for two scraggy specimens potted by Countess Lydia. Yanovich managed to net one salmon-trout, but otherwise I'd hardly describe the Angara as an angler's paradise---the fish didn't seem to know what the game was all about! All in all, this has amounted to a disturbing lack of victuals from the land. No hares, no bears or giant rats. Not even any Tigers.
Just trees. Trees, trees, was the long and short of it: an infinity of snow-dusted spruce, frosted larch and silver fir. And every day more snow fell, gently and persistently, muffling the worlds---till it seems as if our color vision was failing through disuse, and the whole planet had turned white. Often even the air was white with freezing fog.
We passed through a few little human settlements, but on the whole, there wasn't a living thing to be seen. Apart from the motion of the river---flowing in the wrong direction! ----it seemed that life had closed up shop forever. Oh, the silence, how haunting it is. The taiga steals away every sound, until you fear you've gone deaf as well as blind. You mumble to yourself.
Bah, the idiotic joy we felt when we sighted the sloppy huts of Zaimskove a few days back. Why, you'd think we'd arrived outside the walls of Babylon, or seen Stonehenge, that amazing English monument, looming on the horizon. Oh, to renew acquaintance with a bedbug! Oh, to meet a cockroach upon a wall! The experience was positively metropolitan.
And now, at last we're in Kezhma, where the Tungusi from the north trade their furs in the springtime. Almost all the roofs of this fine city are made of sod. Of streets there are exactly two and a half, and this sign of civilization peters out very quickly.
But on the subject of the Tungusi, we have been fortunate enough to hire a guide.
This fellow, Basha by name, has apparently been hanging around Kezhma for the past five or six months, doing odd jobs on what pass for farms in this vicinity instead of tramping off smartly back to his family tents deep in the wilderness. Maybe he's been trying to become an example of Urban Man? But he looks like an Eskimo and speaks Russian accordingly.
I suppose it's all a question of degree! If this Tungusi specimen is Russianized, just so are we Russians Europeanized! We all remain slovenly Asians at heart.
We'll surely be glad of his local knowledge on the next phase of the journey. For here at Khezma is where we strike off overland through the virgin taiga, heading for the trading post of Vanavara, a hundred versts away on the southerly branch of the Stony Tunguska.
Tonight, the snowflakes are drifting down again. And I think I must be crazy to be stuck out in this back of beyond when I could already be home, near to you dear Ludmilla, with all my research on Sakhalin over and done with!
Am I crazy? It's easy to take leave of one's senses in these parts. I've mentioned how people mumble to themselves: often it's the same word or phrase repeated over and over a thousand times, and this is the key to the meaning of life. You get a bee in your bonnet, and it buzzes around all day until its humming is the only sound you can hear in all the world.
My own particular foible, as I found out after six days of sledging and trampling, was to perceive every tree I passed, as a book, bound in bark! For what else are books, but trees in another form? I became quite obsessed with the idea. Here I was, traveling through all my past and future works, set out in a uniform edition. And as regards originality, no book differed by a jot from any other! This one might be called The Spruce Tree and the one after, The Stone Pine Tree, and the one after that, The Larch Tree. But they would all amount to the same thing: another damn tree! Instead of, say, a skylark, or an elephant. Or a dragon. Oh, the ennui of it!
Old Taras Andreev, another one of my contemporaries, told me to write a novel---But, dear me, the characters I dreamed up are all moribund. The fine women I envisaged are wrinkled and senile by now; their skins as coarse and rutted at the bark of these wretched trees!
But here's the true nightmare: supposing this trek into the wilderness was, in its own right, a novel? What persons do I have in it? Why, exactly the kind of people whom I faithfully promised myself never to write about! There's Countess Lydia, a "new" type of woman. There's a "superfluous man"---old Abramovich (reinvigorated but still, I fear, condemned). And there's a het-up, pedantic visionary, Kuzma Mishin, no less.
Of course, I do Tsiolkovsky an injustice! But really, when I hear him going on about the ecstasy of escaping the bondage of gravity and flitting about in free space, my ears detect such a strident metaphor for our own social conditions in Russia. I can already hear all the intellectual lackeys taking up this refrain in a chorus---and completely ignoring what life is really like. They'll get up a subscription to build Tsiolkovsky a rocket, which might blow him to bits, and meanwhile they'll ignore an outbreak of cholera in their own backyard.
Oh, these pilgrimages that we Russians devote our lives to! Is this one any different? Off we go to the holy scientific icon of Tunguska, to unswaddle our souls, and prostrate ourselves before a mystery!
Ludmilla, I must pull myself together. I'm sure we haven't any true hope of solving the mystery awaiting us. We'd be fools to try to! The evidence is what matters. We must gather a portfolio of evidence, then I can escape from all this, and get on boring the public with The Stone Pine Tree or whatever. (I don't think I'll write a comedy about "The Exiled Baron and the World Soul"! But that's another story.)
Of course, if I did put my literary morals aside and write an adventure novel, well, I could have a gruff yet romantic Baron, a dashing Countess conducting an adulterous liaison in her text---we'll overlook the fact that she's already a widow, shall we? And then there's our home-bred Russian Hamlet, Abramovich, equipped with a bold quest to take his mind off suicide. We mustn't forget our noble savage, Yanovich, either---how does he fit in? Will he give his life for us, fighting off a hungry bear? (And I don't mean Baron Mishin!)
Ah, if it were a novel, what garbage it'd be! And what a popular success! I can see the reviews already. "A real change of pace for Mr. Delko; Bravo!" "On the other hand, fellow culture lovers, isn't it just a shade vulgar?"
I coughed a fleck of blood from my left lung yesterday. But it was just one fleck, and that's nothing to worry about. There's nothing basically wrong with my bellows. I blame the cold more than anything else: it sticks daggers into a fellow's chest.323Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡqucx38pTb0
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