An excellent chocolate mousse could not mellow the General's frustration. Nor did mocha end it. The dinner party was eventful, though not as personally piquant as one had hoped. Before the night was out, however, Frau von Reininghaus took our diarist, Herr Redlich, aside. It was so valorous of the General, she breathed in Redlich's ear, to press for action, since the General had three sons of military age; in fact, he had confided to her his premonition that his eldest, Herbert, would fall before the enemy….
As April ended, rain came to Vienna at last. Then the sun broke through, and the flowers burst forth. Suddenly spring swept through the streets like a galloping pageant. Suddenly the Vienna Woods interlaced so closely with the pavement that cobbles became fragrant. In the West and the South where the vineyards touched the sidewalks, they touched them with the pearly blossoms of the grapevine. The hills looming so closely above the roofs-those "house mountains" beloved of the Viennese like Kahlenberg, Cobenzl, Leo- poldsberg-turned into waves of vivid hue: crocuses, cyclamens, primroses, daisies, lilacs, all blessed with the songs of blackbird and thrush. Along the banks of the Danube cherry orchards flamed into color.
In the city itself blossoms swamped bricks. Violet vendors surrounded the Opera and scented the piazzas. In parks like the Stadtpark and Volksgarten peacocks jaunted under festive trees. White roses garlanded the fiacres that brought children to their First Communion: the girls like buds unfolding in their snowy lace, the boys with white carnations glowing from their buttonholes.
Elsewhere in Europe spring happened to other cities as well. But here it burgeoned as a gala that was intimately Viennese. It affected someone so no-nonsense as Trotsky's wife. "From our windows we could see the mountains," she wrote. "One could get into the open country through a backgate without going to the street… In April the scent of violets filled our rooms from the open windows…"
In Vienna spring belonged to culture more than to nature. Here spring merged its green arts into the town's architecture, whose seasons bloomed from romanesque to rococo, sprouted as gargoyles, fountains, statues. With its vernal rose windows, its tendrilled friezes, its sculpted bowers and garden amorettos, the Maytime city conjured the poetry of the West. Now it exuberated in the same vein with leaf and petal. Vienna experienced spring as yet another urban fancy, opulent and stylish, moving through its dream of history.
Here, against this time and this place, against this backdrop, Leon Trotsky wrote some somber lines. In an essay for Kievan Thought he shuddered at the barrenness of his country's past. It seemed so tundra-dreary compared to the occidental succulence surrounding him in Vienna. "We are poor," he said of Russia, "with the accumulated poverty of over a thousand years… The Russian peoples were as oppressed by nobility or by the church as the peoples of the West. But that complex and rounded-off way of life, which on the basis of feudal rule grew up in Europe-that gothic lacework of feudalism-has not grown on our soil… A thousand years we have lived in a humble log cabin and stuffed its crevices with moss. Did it become us to dream of vaulting arcs and gothic spires?… How miserable was our gentry! Where were its castles? Where were its tournaments? Its crusades, its shield bearers, its minstrels and pages?… Its fetes and processions?… Its chivalrous love?"
Asking such questions in Vienna amid the prodigalities of an elegant tradition, Trotsky laments that its absence in Russia impoverished all classes, including Russia's radical intelligentsia of the new century, to which he himself belonged:
Russia was too far away"… from the sunlit zone of European ideology… We have been shaken by history into a severe environment and scattered thinly over a vast plain." And there, isolated from the very people it wanted to liberate, the intelligentsia". found itself in a terrible moral tension, in concentrated asceticism." Psychologically its members could maintain their strength only by a "fanaticism of ideas, ruthless self-limitation and self-demarcation, distrust and suspicion and vigilant watching over their own purity…"
Some twenty years later Trotsky's freedom from such paranoia and puritanism prepared his downfall, as did his Viennese sense of the uses and pleasures of style: felicities that earned him the anger of a ruder rival in the Kremlin; because of them he fell all the more easily victim to the superior "distrust and suspicion and vigilant watching" of the nonWestern Stalin.
This same Stalin was shipped in the spring of 1913 to one of the world's most un-Austrian regions-Siberia. After his stay in Vienna, and as if by way of a bizarre postscript to the Viennese carnival, he had been arrested wearing a woman's clothes, on February 23, in St. Petersburg. That evening the legally published Pravda held in the Russian capital a musical benefit which some "illegals" attended. When the police raided the show, one of them tried to escape in an actress's coat and wig. The police ripped away the disguise and identified the pockmarked insurrectionist. Before long Stalin was exiled to the village of Turkhansk in the Arctic Circle. For more than three years he lived in just the log cabin-its crevices stuffed with moss-where Trotsky, from his Austrian vantage point, had seen Russian backwardness linger for ten centuries.
***
Meanwhile Trotsky basked in "the sun-lit zone"-in the sumptuousness of the Viennese spring. Accompanied by his art-minded wife Natalya, he visited the great classic collections of the Kunsthistorisches Museum. But he did not neglect newer painters shown at the Sezession building or the avantgarde galleries scandalizing civic virtue with Kokoschka and Schiele. All these he included in the cultural chronicles he contributed along with his political reportage to Kievskaya Mysl (Kievan Thought), to the Berlin Vorwarts and Le Peuple in Brussels.
In Vienna he developed more fully his sensitivity to new esthetic directions. And with his smooth German (his children had already mastered Viennese dialect), his gift for pamphleteering not only with the pen but with the tongue, he savored the intellectual voltage of the coffeehouse, where repartee flashed from spoonful to spoonful of whipped cream.
Years later, from the perspective of a revolutionary leader, he would sniff at the smug, overly patriotic mocha-Marxists of Vienna and their weak-kneed reformism. Yet while in the city he remained a zestful partaker of the Viennese scene and of the cakes, cigars, conversation of its cafe life. Even the Socialist intellectuals with whose chauvinist ways he disagreed impressed him: "They were well-educated people, and their knowledge of various subjects was superior to mine. I listened to them with intense and, one might almost say, respectful interest in the Cafe Central."
To the Central Trotsky brought some fellow Russians, not least A. A. Joffe, chief contributor to his Vienna Pravda (later to be the Soviet Ambassador to Germany). It was at the Central that Trotsky wanted Joffe to chat and sip away the nervous tension that plagued his friend. It was here that Trotsky introduced Joffe to Alfred Adler. It was through this introduction that Joffe became Adler's patient. And it was Joffe's experience with Adlerian therapy that acquainted Trotsky (as he states in his autobiography) "with the problems of psychoanalysis, which fascinated me."