When I try to resurrect the image, I see that it’s already very pale and blurry, and will soon fade away altogether.
On the way home, I felt angry with myself. I remember dozens of faces I see in passing, on the street, on the trolley, but I am already forgetting this particular sweet face.
Just now I started dreaming: I’m walking down the street, and I run into her. She is alone (definitely alone). I go up to her and introduce myself; then we go together to the theater … I just imagined what I would say to her at that moment …
If I see her on the street … I’ll immediately recall her face and remember it for a long time. If only I could run into her.
I sat down to write about something else, and saw the last line I had written: “If only I could run into her.” The thought already seemed stale and old. Today I’ve only thought once about that young lady, in the morning. That was the only time.
Recently, I’ve started being aware, truly aware, of my own happiness. Truly, I have everything I need. I have music, my studies, a clean room, a new suit, a good coat to wear, Beethoven’s sonatas … What else do I need?
If someone were to give me twenty rubles right now, I wouldn’t know what to do with it. Of course, I could spend it: I’d buy sheet music (which I can’t play), I’d buy a harmonium, or something. I could “make an effort” to spend it. But I have no strong urge, no strong desire—just small desires, bordering on vulgarity (and I have money—enough to go to the theater, at least).
I’m sitting in my room now, studying German.
I brought a cup of tea into the room for myself. When I drink tea, I am enveloped by a feeling of peace, comfort, and … domesticity.
The nickel-plated lamp reflects a small figure drinking tea. And it seems to me that, from somewhere up above, I’m watching the miniature person, J. Ossetsky, watching his life. He’s as tiny as can be.
Quiet … Calm …
DECEMBER 5
I read some of Chekhov’s stories. He writes a great deal about women. And for the most part, it seems, pejoratively. Like someone who had suffered a great deal at the hands of women might write. I have to think more about this. “Anna on the Neck”! How Anna, sensing her power, drives Modest Alexeyevich away: “Be off, you blockhead!” It just takes your breath away. In a split second, such a reversal of character! And how she rides down the street, and her drunken father, her brothers, are described with such sympathy, but she drives right on past … “Slime” is especially horrible. What a terrifying woman. As though he is taking revenge for the fact that he himself can’t refuse her! And with a touch of anti-Semitism, too. But after Tolstoy, Chekhov is our greatest writer! There is something here I don’t understand—as though all the charm of a woman, her elegant hands, her white neck, and the curls that escape from her hairdo, are created just to awaken the basest instincts in a man. But this is not at all the case!
Strauss’s Sonata for Violin and Piano.
The muted violin, the piano passages, pianissimo.
Very pretty! Lately, because of my busy days, I’ve almost stopped dreaming. And it’s for the best! Good riddance! I think only about the most useful way to spend the day, about music lessons, about German.
They finished the second movement—“improvisation.”
Now for the finale.
My most distant dreams reach only to the end of this summer, which I’m hoping to spend productively.
The last few days have been frustrating in terms of my music. Quartet in E-flat minor.
I read about Brahms. He died in 1897. That means that I was already seven years old when he died.
On symmetry:
There is no symmetry in nature. Nature is neither symmetrical nor asymmetrical. Nature transcends it.
Symmetry is found only where there is a human being who notices it. Only a human being notices such a phenomenon in nature: two halves that seem to resemble each other.
Aesthetics don’t exist in nature, either. Physics, chemistry, especially mechanical physics, do exist, but aesthetics (and several other disciplines) do not. Nature has no classification, nothing significant or insignificant. All this is created by the human being.
DECEMBER 19
I’m sad … I’m also sad because I will now write about ordinary sensations in ordinary words.
I just finished a book by Dymov, the saddest, the tenderest poet I’ve ever read. Even more tender than Chekhov. Why am I so sad?
I listen to music—I feel sad because I can’t play that way, because I can’t even play my own pieces as well as I’d like …
I look at people who are strong, and people who are beautiful, and again my heart protests: why?
While I write this, I’m remembering Dymov’s story “Evening Letters.”
UNDATED (LAST ENTRY OF THE NOTEBOOK)
Perhaps it is precisely art that must proclaim what is unsubstantiated, groundless.
There are no criteria, there is no theory of art. There is just an artist; there is no history of art, but a catalogue of paintings.
Every person takes what he likes from art. There is no objectivity, only subjectivity.
The art of Isadora Duncan.
One can manage to capture the basic characteristics of modern art, but to delineate a theory that fits all epochs and media is completely impossible.
Tannhäuser (all of Wagner).
1. An artist’s creative output depends on his personality, his epoch, and his milieu. And the artist does not mimic his milieu, but creates an ideal version of it.
2. The lack of criteria in art. However hard this may be for artists, and particularly critics, and the public.
3. The character of modern creativity: longing for might, the urge to power. Rodin, Vrubel, Wagner, Bryusov, Böcklin, Roerich.
4. The reflection of Art Nouveau in architecture.
5. The methods and technical means available to modern art.
6. Modern art as a whole does not reflect what I have just described. It is only the outlines of these tendencies that are visible.
7. The urge in modern art toward archaism, toward the Renaissance. Roerich, Somov, Benois, Borisov-Musatov.
8. The inadequacies of this urge.
9. Art must be contemporary. We must remember that history will understand the incomprehensible.
10. The weak reflection of modernity in our art.
11. The weak dissemination of art in its applied forms.
Artists don’t like to serve industry. But this is the truest path. The Old Masters.
In The Queen of Spades, at the moment when the old countess appears, there is a spectrum of whole tones in the orchestra.
Faust
6 petits préludes pour les commençants
12 petits préludes
ou exercices pour les commençants
Vrubel, Botticelli
Rodin, Böcklin, Beardsley
Riehl, Baumbach
Dominant chord (fifth, sixth, third, fourth)
Read:
Taine, Readings on art
Jean-Marie Guyau, Art from A Sociological Perspective
Lessing, Laocoön
Lieber, The History of Western Literature
Yudin, Art in the Family