nuttyluminaryalpaca

[nuttyluminaryalpaca]

Lukashka

Writes Olenin --  Three months have passed since I saw the Cossack boy Lukashka for the first time.  The ideas and prejudices of the world from which I have emerged were still fresh in me,  At that time I did not believe I could love this man.  I admired him as I admired the beauty of the mountains, the sky and could not help in admiring him for he was lovely as they were.  Then I felt contemplation of his beauty became a necessity in my life, and I began to ask myself: did I not love him?  But I could not find in myself anything that resembled what I had imagined that feeling to be like.  This was a feeling that neither resembled the melancholy of loneliness nor the desire for wedlock, nor Platonic love, nor even carnal love, all of which I had experienced.  I needed only to see him, hear him, know that he was near and I was not only happy, but calm.  After the party in which I was together with him and touched him, there existed between this man and myself  an inseperable, though unackowledged bond, against which it was impossible to struggle.  But I did still struggle.  I said to myself, “Can I really love this man who will never understand the sincere interests of my life?  Can one really love a man as though he were a statue?”  I asked myself but I already loved him., even though I did not yet believe in my feeling.

After the party at which I spoke to him the first time, our relations altered.  Previously he had been for me an alien but majestic object of external nature; after the party he became a human being for me.  I began to meet him, talk to him... And in those close encounters he remained in my eyes just as pure, inaccessible, and majestic.  He replied to every question with equal calm, pride & indifferent gaiety.  Sometimes he was affectionate, but for the most part his every look, his every word, every movement expressed that indifference, not contemptuous but overwhelmingly bewitching.  Every day with a feigned smile on my lips I tried to dissemble to some degree and with a torment of passion and desire in my heart engaged him in flippant conversation.   He could see that I was pretending; but would look at me directly, cheerfully & simply.  This situation became unendurable to me.  I wanted not to lie to him.  And wanted to tell him everything I was thinking and feeling...In despair I asked myself: “what am I to do?”  In absurd dreams I imagined him now as my lover, now as my wife.  Now if only I could make myself into a Cossack steal: steal horses, get drunk, sing loud songs, kill people and climb through his window when drunk without even a thought of who I am or what I am for.  Then we might understand each other and then be happy.

I tried to abandon myself fto this sort of life but it made feel all the more keenly how weak and affected I was.  I was unable to forget myself and complex, disfigured past that lacks all harmony.  And my future seems to be even more hopeless.  Every day I am confronted by the distant snowy mountains and this majestic, happy man.  He is happy; he is like nature, calm and self contained.  While I, a weak corrupted being, want him to understand my torments... I LOVE this man with a love that is genuine for the first and only time in my life.  I know what has happened to me and I am not afraid to degrade myself by emotion, am not ashamed of my love, am proud of it.  I am not to blame for having fallen in love.  It has happened against my will.  I tried to runaway from my love in self sacrifice.  I tried to invent some joy in the love of Lukashka and Mihir, but merely intensified my own love and jealousy.  This is not the ideal exalted love I had experience earlier; not that feeling of attraction in which one admires one’s own love, feels within oneself the source of one’s feelings and does everything oneself.  I have experienced that too.  Perhaps in him I love nature, the personification of all that is beautiful in nature; but I do not have a will of my own, but what loves him is some elemental force passing through me: all of God’s world, all of nature presses this love into my soul and says “LOVE.”  I love him not with my mind, not with my imagination, but with all my being.  Loving him I feel myself to be an inseparable part of God’s happy world.  

I wrote earlier about my new convictions I had derived from my solitary life; but no one came to know the toil in which they were elaborated in me.  With what joy I became conscious of them and saw a new, open path in life.  Nothing was dearer to me then those convictions...well...love has come and they are no longer here, not even any regret for them.  Even the thought that I could have prized such a cold, cerebral state of mind is difficult for me to entertain.  Beauty came and scattered into ash the whole Egyptian labour of my inner world--

1863