About contracts with the Devil
Those contracts, as the angels told me, take on a wide variety of forms. The stipulations can seem innocent; most often they have to do with buying and selling. Your assent and signature is important; the content is later edited in the administrative offices of hell. Truth be told, the Devil is usually honest in carrying out his obligations: within the allotted time he heaps money, fame, beautiful women, and luxurious villas on the other party, but the annexes to those contracts, delayed for some future time, contain very unpleasant duties. I would not like to say anything more about that. But one other advantage of the aristocracy is concealed here. None of them ever sign anything. Aristocrats are taken at their word.
About one of the chambers of hell
It would be a good idea to describe, in human language, the part of hell intended for Fadeyev. Fadeyev, the angels say, after death will reside at an enormous and magnificent construction site, equated with a literary character from his novels, some sort of engineer, the site manager for the construction of the Insane Asylum for 20,000,000 patients. At the moment when he appears in hell, construction will be near the halfway point; the gigantic construction will block out the horizon and, full of enthusiasm, he will get down to the task of finishing the construction. And that is where the hellish torment begins: the workers are obedient and hard-working (they are those whose goal had been to build a house!); everything is going according to plan, but suddenly there is no more cement and everything stops. The second day, right after the cement comes and they make up for lost time, part of the structure inexplicably sinks into the ground. The day after, a river floods and causes enormous damage. Meanwhile, the telephone rings… Stalin’s icy voice asks how far the job has come and is suspicious of sabotage… And so on into eternity.
The justification of hell
The few devotees of my rather small and insignificant literary works will certainly notice that I am coming into conflict with my earlier claims that there is no hell and that everyone will be saved. However, earlier I was a plebe, the son of a cobbler with an affinity for alcohol, the Caballah and poetry, but now I am the Count de Kowalsky and that gives me the right to be contradictory more than ever. Only when a man becomes a noble does he realize the extent to which hell is a necessary and useful institution. Hell puts things where they belong. The mediocre who choose this-worldly heaven and happiness should not complain: this-worldly heaven is hell in Heaven, this will be proven when everything becomes heaven. Nothing changes here in the slightest. On the contrary, everything is perfected and gains completeness. The only thing that becomes clear to everybody is that they all made the wrong choice. That will be the time for wailing and the gnashing of teeth, but the Devil shows up and shows the contract, black on white, with a signature.
On demonstrations
One of the things that drives me to withdraw ever deeper into solitude, one of the things that will destroy democracy, is indeed the phenomena of demonstrations. I am slightly afraid of those threatening, crowding bodies, those hands holding up banners full of words like “DOWN,” “WE WANT,” “WE,” “MORE,” “BETTER,” etc. There you go, just now as I am writing these lines, there is a group of young men and women under my windows, riled up by the Council of Great Lovers, Time, Space and Heaven, and they are shouting: “Down with Kowalsky! Down with the renegade of the working class, servant of counts and kings!” Pure envy. I, too, used to be one of them, and now they are rebelling because I am a count, because I will not die, because I do not desecrate the sacred things of tradition and religion; because I am decadent and disgusting. Cross my heart, I was always decadent; progress does not bring anything good. Indeed, now without prejudice, why would the word “progress,” which implies movement ahead but not the quality of what is ahead, why should such a word be so deserving of the respect it is given? When I think about it more clearly, as early as seventeen years ago, at that congress in Moscow, when I saw all those scoundrels lying about in the imperial bed, it became clear to me that a new society was not their goal; that all they really wanted was to take the palaces for themselves.
About the gift of a fountain pen
Recently, in order to be as decadent as possible, I began writing with a quill and ink. I gave my fountain pen to the building superintendent, who was unusually happy, thinking about how he would sign my death sentence with that same pen. He did not guess how close he was to the truth. The angels showed me this in a dream. Not even a full ten years later, my former fountain pen, in the right hand of my former superintendent, would sign a multitude of death sentences, but I will, thank God, get away and instead of me another gentleman will go to the gallows, even though he never gave anyone a fountain pen. That is why you should be selfless, that is why the Gospels advise us: if you have two coats, give one to your neighbor.******** As far as the pen goes, I intended to begin writing with an even more decadent device — a goose quill — but there are no geese in this damned town and it will not, like Rome, be saved when the hordes reach the tile walls of the city. And it shouldn’t be. A city that doesn’t have goose quills doesn’t deserve to walk the face of this earth.
Alchemia microcosmica
I realized not long ago that I am a fecal type. In no way a philanthropist, a bicyclist, or a mystic, as some of the hacks have suggested. There are no generals, clerks, presidents — those are people-symbols of the Worldly Kingdom and they are only symbolic people — there are only oral, anal, phallic, visual and tactile types. First I will speak of the fecal type, which I am myself, and then I will describe the others. Friedrick the Great, Socrates, Spinoza, Paracelsus, and many others belonged to the fecal type. Their basic characteristic is that they immediately eject everything from themselves. In the physical realm, this is manifested in their fast metabolism. To force everything out, to superficially digest, to free yourself of poisons — that is, briefly, the bodily manifesto of fecal types. They are not to be credited with this personally, it is an inborn alchemical feature. In it, ascetics go the farthest, those who give up food altogether. That is why they smell like suckling babes in the end.
Napoleon is a typical example of the phallic type, which also includes Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini. The characteristic of this type is that they begin from zero and penetrate to the very top. Once they finally take their place, they begin to take on the symbolic appearance of an erect phallus, which can be confirmed by a quick look at the photographs of the abovementioned statesmen. While they maintain their erect appearance, such types have enormous power, but once they go flaccid — they end up in tortuous circumstances. The saying is no accident: Omne animal triste post coitem. As far as I have been able to interpret it, the matter lies in the control of tension and their rule that seems like wild, extended coitus. History will show that Mussolini — who is somehow too highly erectus — will disappear first from the historical stage; he will be followed by Hitler, and in terms of Stalin, who rules with the eastern art of delayed ejaculation, the end of his rule cannot be determined with certainty, but it is clear that it will be long and fertile; I want to say that it will result in the birth of numerous hydrocephalic descendants.