APRIL 1849
Natalie looks around. She reacts to an (imaginary) painting. Maria enters, robing herself.
MARIA I’ve already written to Nick … I told him I had no intention of marrying again, and so had no need of a divorce.
NATALIE No … the need is Nick’s.
MARIA Exactly. Mine is to protect my position as his wife.
NATALIE Your position? But Maria, you haven’t been his wife for years now, except in name.
MARIA That’s a large exception, and while it’s so, there’s three hundred thousand roubles in the six-per-cents, secured against his property. Where would it leave me if I were divorced? Worse still when there’s a new wife with her own ideas about her position. You know what a child Nicholas is about money. Anyone can get round him. He had four thousand souls when his father died, and almost the first thing he did was hand over the largest property to his serfs. He’s simply not someone you can depend on. And now he sends you to plead for him and his eager bride. Do you know her?
NATALIE (nods) The Tuchkovs went home last year. Nick knew her before, but it was only when she returned from abroad … well, you know … and anybody would fall in love with Natasha, I fell in love with her myself!
MARIA Really? Really in love?
NATALIE Yes!—really, utterly, transported by love, I’ve never loved anyone as I loved Natasha, she brought me back to life.
MARIA You were lovers?
NATALIE (in confusion) No. What do you mean?
MARIA Oh. Utterly, transportedly, but not really. Why won’t you look at my picture?
NATALIE Your …? Well … it seems rude to …
MARIA You’ve always idealised love, and you think—surely this can’t be it? (She laughs.) Painted from life, one afternoon when we lived in the Rue de Seine over the hat shop, do you know it? I’ll take you there, we’ll find something that suits you. Go on, have a good look.
NATALIE (looking) He’s got the porcelain quite well … What do you do with it when just anybody comes, your … companion’s friends, the landlord, strangers …? Do you cover it up?
MARIA No … it’s art.
NATALIE And you don’t mind?
Maria shakes her head.
MARIA (confidentially) I’m in the paint!
NATALIE What do you … (mean)?
MARIA Mixed in.
NATALIE (Pause.) I’ve only been sketched in pencil.
MARIA Naked?
NATALIE (laughs shyly) Alexander doesn’t draw.
MARIA If an artist asks you, don’t hesitate. You feel like a woman.
NATALIE But I do feel like a woman, Maria. I think our sex is ennobled by idealising love. You say it as if it meant denying love in some way, but it’s you who’s denying it its … greatness … which comes from being a universal idea, like a thought in nature, without which there’d be no lovers, or artists either, because they’re the same thing only happening differently, and neither is any good if they deny the joined-upness of everything … oh dear, we should speak German for this …
MARIA No … I could follow it, being in much the same state when I met Nicholas Ogarev at the Governor’s Ball in Penza. A poet in exile, what could be more romantic? We sat out and talked twaddle at each other, and knew that this was love. We had no idea we were in fashion, that people who didn’t know any better were falling in love quite adequately without dragging in the mind of the Universe as dreamt up by some German professor who left out the irritating details. There was also talk of the angels in heaven singing hosannas. So the next time I fell in love, it stank of turpentine, tobacco smoke, laundry baskets … the musk of love! To arouse and satisfy desire is nature making its point about the sexes, everything else is convention.
NATALIE (timidly) But our animal nature is not our whole nature … and when the babies start coming …
MARIA I had a child, too … born dead. Yes, you know, of course you know—what wouldn’t Nicholas tell your husband? … Being taken to meet Alexander for the first time was like being auditioned for my own marriage.
NATALIE It was the same for me, meeting Nick, and I was expecting Sasha.
MARIA Poor Nick. Even my having another man’s child, it was nothing to the agony he went through when he found himself caught in the middle between his wife and his best friend.
NATALIE But we all loved each other at the beginning. Don’t you remember how we joined hands and knelt and thanked God for each other?
MARIA Well, I didn’t want to be the only one standing up.
NATALIE That’s not so, is it?
MARIA Yes—it is so. I found it embarrassing … childish—
NATALIE Even at the beginning! How sad for you, Maria … I’m sorry …
Maria, to Natalie’s complete surprise, suddenly gives in to her rage.
MARIA Don’t you look down on me with your stuck-up charity, you’re still the simpering little fool you always were—giving away your birthright, idealising it away in your prattle of exalted feelings … You can tell Ogarev he’ll get nothing out of me, and that goes for all his friends!
The interview is evidently over. Natalie remains composed.
NATALIE I’ll go, then. I don’t know what I said to make you angry. (She gathers herself to leave.) Your portrait, by the way, is a failure, no doubt because your friend thinks he can produce the desired effect on canvas in the same way he produces it on you, by calculation … If he dips his brush here and prods it there, he’ll get this time what he got last time, and so on till you’re done. But that’s neither art nor love. You and your portrait resemble each other only in crudeness and banality. But that’s a trivial failure. Imitation isn’t art, everyone knows that. Technique by itself can’t create. So, where do you think is the rest of the work of art if not in exalted feeling translated into paint or music or poetry, and who are you to call it prattle? German philosophy is the first time anyone’s explained everything that can’t be explained by the rules. Why can’t your expert lover satisfy a desire to paint like Raphael or Michelangelo? That would shut me up, wouldn’t it? What’s stopping him? Why can’t he look harder and see what the rules are? Because there aren’t any. Genius isn’t a matter of matching art to nature better than he can do it, it’s nature itself—revealing itself through the exalted feeling of the artist, because the world isn’t a collection of different things, mountains and rain and people, which have somehow landed up together, it’s all one thing, like the ultimate work of art trying to reach its perfection through us, its most conscious part, and we fall short most of the time. We can’t all be artists, of course, so the rest of us do the best we can at what’s our consolation, we fall short at love. (She pauses for a last look at the portrait.) I know what it is. He’s got your tits too high and your arse too small. (Natalie leaves.)