On October 25, by the old calendar, The Human Beast premiered (that cinema on Nevsky Prospekt still exhibits the film’s poster, behind glass). This prophetic title was followed in that season’s program, as we can see, by others no less foreboding: Wounded Soul, Be Silent My Sadness, and finally a filmed version of a story by Tolstoy that was a true premonition: The Living Corpse.
When the contract ended in 1919 it was easier to die of typhoid fever than of La Española, the flu pandemic with a name that sounded like one of her melodramas, the last one, and that killed La Kholodnaya on February 16 at the age of twenty-five.
LINDA EVANGELISTA. As if I were called THELONIOUS MONK and she were LINDA EVANGELISTA.
I knew how to lead a false existence under those names; we had only to believe in our metamorphosis, leap onto the magic carpet of a perfect life, and contemplate from there the ciphers that denoted a bad year, any bad year—1990, 1991—as if it were 1819 or 1099 or some other historically significant combination of numerals, viewed from a distance.
I’d discovered the name in Vogue one afternoon as I was analyzing the season’s latest accessories with all the interest and archaeological passion of a scholar who specializes in Greek togas. The alias was so perfectly suited to my project that I never hesitated for a second to make use of it. Moreover, there was LINDA herself, whom I encountered swimming in the fragrance of a page impregnated with OPIUM. I still have the pictures: LINDA poses beneath the arch of a dark medieval bridge, as if abandoned there by a perverse djinni out of the Thousand and One Nights. She is gazing into the distance toward a love, an impossible love, and, in a gesture of farewell, has extended arms that are covered in dazzling fake gems. Heavy chains emphasize her waist; their sparkle heightens the black of a dress that clings to her body like “a second skin” but which, from the hips down, floats into airy flights of tulle, a sfumato through whose transparences can be seen, in fierce outline, LINDA EVANGELISTA’S swooningly perfect legs: fishnet stockings, a capricious pair of pointy-toed pumps. An invitation to buy a few of Yves Saint Laurent’s atomizers and also perchance to reflect upon the fleeting nature of our earthly existence.
For I would never be able to encompass all the women who floated toward me down Nevsky Prospekt, each a captive within the watertight bubble of her own beauty.Тысячи сортов шляпок, платьев, платков, — пестрых, легких, к которым иногда в течение целых двух дней сохраняется привязанность их владетельниц, ослепят хоть кого на Не-вском проспекте. Кажется, как будто целое море мотыльков поднялось вдруг со стеблей и волнуется блестящею тучею над черными жуками мужеского пола. . А какие встретите вы дамские рукава на Невском проспекте! Ах, какая пре-лесть! Они несколько похожи на два воздухоплавательные шара, так что дама вдруг бы поднялась на воздух, если бы не поддерживал ее мужчина; потому что даму так же легко и приятно поднять на воздух, как подносимый ко рту бокал, наполненный шампанским.(Which is to say: Thousands of varieties of hats, dresses, and kerchiefs, flimsy and bright-colored, for which their owners feel sometimes an adoration that lasts two whole days, dazzle everyone on Nevsky Prospekt. A whole sea of butterflies seems to have flown up from their flower stalks and to be floating in a glittering cloud above the beetles of the male sex. . And the ladies’ sleeves that you meet on Nevsky Prospekt! Ah, how exquisite! They are like two balloons and the lady might suddenly float up into the air, were she not held down by the gentleman accompanying her; for it would be as easy and agreeable for a lady to be lifted into the air as for a glass of champagne to be lifted to the lips. — “Nevsky Prospekt,” Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol, translated by Constance Garnett.)
I was consoled by the sheer quantity of beauties I saw, each one so perfect, and they came to merge into a single being; their multiplicity — like the innumerable apparitions of LINDA, the real LINDA, in that same issue of Vogue: strolling through a meadow in a yellow jacket and matching skirt, wearing a leopard-print cap and shirt; coming through the door of an artist’s studio dressed in strict tweeds; drinking cocktails next to a swimming pool’s fathomless blue, her striped bathrobe falling open — was merely apparent; in essence they were all the same woman. I imagined LINDA, my heroine, as the mathematical average of all the beautiful women I’d known in Russia, their profiles superimposed. I believed that there, along Nevsky Prospekt, I would find the woman I was seeking, and as you shall see I was not mistaken. So many Russian women are so beautiful!
Next to the Imperial Theater, I discovered a fresh face in the crowd. A specimen with sweet eyes beneath delicate brows. It might be LINDA. She moved forward without relaxing her straight shoulders, her gaze cast down, pressing a slim portfolio against her chest. I radioed my urgent message to her but she passed without detecting the signals that I, a lighthouse in deep fog, was sending out. I turned to watch her walk away. She was almost what I was looking for. Her hair.
The girl with the slim portfolio was immediately replaced by others, all equally beautifuclass="underline" blondes with soft faces, sharp-profiled women with light brown hair. Standing there as they streamed by, I let myself bathe in those faces and envelop each one in a story that took shape from the point zero of a pair of lips, a gesture, the Asiatic cast of a cheekbone, a story that would flash across my mind — maritime excursions, dancing until dawn — to burn out in an instant, its mistress borne off on the waters of that human river.
LONDON DANDY, THE. To Nabokov, Onegin, Pushkin’s alter ego, is not a dandy in the pure sense of the term. In his annotated translation of Eugene Onegin (New York, 1956) Nabokov cites the following line from The Life of George Brummell Esq., Commonly Called Beau Brummelclass="underline" “Brummell most assuredly was no dandy. He was a beau. . His chief aim was to avoid anything marked,” adding, “Onegin, too, was a beau and not a dandy.” A distinction that strikes me as misguided and that seems to have been dictated by the slightly pejorative sense of the word “dandy” to the Russian ear. I don’t believe Pushkin himself would have accepted Nabokov’s dictum. His dandy-ism was as elemental as his way of breathing in French, though he did not imitate Brummell’s practice of sandpapering the silk of his brand-new suits to eliminate the shine in order to wear them with nonchalance. Pushkin’s biographers also fail to mention any invention on his part of a new type of buckle for his shoes. Nevertheless, the poet managed to coin a phrase — Денди лондонский, Dendi londonski—that would take on singular importance for his cold country, the extension of Asia. And that fact is of greater weight and consequence than Beau Brummell’s innocent shoe buckle. It was a title of nobility, the iron cross sported by those who boasted of belonging to the species homo occidentalis, the Russian zapadniki (or Westerners). (Technically PETER I was the first zapadnik and arbitrum elegantiarum of Eurasia. Not content with shaving the boyars’ beards and dressing them in European fashion, he was led by a pure and metaphysical dandy-ism to build a city for himself in much the same way one orders a bespoke suit.) This homo occidentalis disappeared into the depths of the Gulag toward the end of the 1920s and reappeared, intact, during the thaw; this time beneath the inoffensive aspect of Moscow’s stiliagi, a tribe of Apaches who greased their hair and wore pointed shoes, all of them deserters from the clearing of the Virgin Lands.