y profession, or rather by the cumulative effect of \vhat I've been doing over the years , I am a writer; by trade, however, I am an academic, a teacher. The winter break at my school is five weeks long, and that's what in part explains the timing of my pilgrimages here—but only in part. What Paradise and vacation have in common is that you have to pay for both, and the coin is your previous life. Fittingly then, my romance with this city—with this city in this particular season—started long ago: long before I developed marketable skills, long before I could afford my passion.
Sometime in 1 966—I was twenty-six then —a friend lent me three short novels by a French writer, Henri de Regnier, translated into Russian by the wonderful Russian poet Mikhail Kuzmin. All I knew about Regnier at that time was that he was one of the last Parnassians, a good poet but no great shakes. All I knew by heart of Kuzmin was a handful of his Alexandrian Songs and Clay Pigeons—plus his reputation as a great aesthete, devout Orthodox, and avowed homosexual—I think, in that order.
By the time I'd got those novels, both their author and their translator were long dead. The books, too, were quite moribund: paperbacks, published in the late thirties, with no bindings to speak of, disintegrating in your palm. I remember neither their titles nor their publisher; in fact, I am quite vague on their respective plots also. Somehow I am under the impression that one of them was called Provincial Entertainments, but I am not sure. I could double- check, of course, but then the friend who lent them to me died a year ago; and I won't.
They were a cross between picaresque and detective novels, and at least one of them, the one I call in my mind Provincial Entertainments, was set in Venice in winter. Its atmosphere was twilit and dangerous, its topography aggravated with mirrors; the main events were taking place on the other side of the amalgam, within some abandoned palazzo. Like many books of the twenties, it was fairly short— some two hundred pages, no more—and its pace was brisk. The subject was the usuaclass="underline" love and betrayal. The main thing: the book was written in short, page or page-and-a-halfchap- ters. From their pace came the sense of damp, cold, narrow streets through which one hurriesin the evening in a state of growing apprehension, turning left, turning right. For somebody with my birthplace, the city emerging from these pages was easily recognizable and felt like Petersburg's extension into a better history, not to mention latitude. However, what mattered for me most at the impressionable stage at which I came across this novel was that it taught me the most crucial lesson in composition; namely, that what makes a narrative good is not the story itself but what follows what. Unwittingly, I came to associate this principle with Venice. If the reader now suffers, that's why.
hen one day another friend, who is still alive, brought me a disheveled issue ofLif magazine with a stunning color photo of San Marco covered with snow. Then a bit later a girl whom I was courting at thetime made me a birthday present of an accordion set of sepia postcards her grandmother had brought from a pre-revolutionary honeymoon in Venice, and I pored over it with my magnifying glass. Then my mother produced from God knows where a small square piece of cheap tapestry, a rag really, depicting the Palazzo Ducale, and it covered the bolster on my Turkish sofa—thus contracting the history of the republic under my frame. And throw into the bargain a little copper gondola brought by my father from his tour of duty in China, which my parents kept on their dressing table, filling it with loose buttons, needles, postage stamps, and—increasingly—pills and ampoules. Then the friend who gave me Regnier's novels and who died a year ago took me to a semiofficial screening ofthe smuggled, and for that reason black-and-white, copy of Visconti's Death in Venice with Dirk Bogarde. Alas, the movie wasn't much to speak of; besides, I never liked the novel much, either.
Still, the long opening sequence with Mr. Bo- garde in a deck chair aboard a steamer made me forget about the interfering credits and regret that I was not mortally ill; even today I am still capable of feeling that regret.
Then came the Veneziana. I began to feel that this city somehow was barging into focus, tottering on the verge of the three- dimensional. It was black-and-white, as befits something emerging from literature, or winter; aristocratic, darkish, cold, dimly lit, with twangs of Vivaldi and Cherubini in the background, with Bellini/Tiepolo/Titian-draped female bodies for clouds. And I vowed to myself that should I ever get out of my empire, should this eel ever escape the Baltic, the first thing I would do would be to come to Venice, rent a room on the ground floor of some palazzo so that the waves raised by passing boats would splash against niy window, write a couple ofelegies while extinguishing my cigarettes on the damp stony floor, cough and drink, and,when the money got short, instead ofboarding a train, buy myself a little Browning and blow my brains out on the spot, unable to die in Venice of natural causes.
perfectly decadent dream, of course; but at the age of twenty-eight everyone who's got some brains is a touch decadent. Besides, neither part of that project was feasible. So when at the age of thirty-two I all of a sudden found niysclf in the bowels of a different continent, in the middle of America, I used my first university salary to enact the better part of that dream and bought a round- trip ticket, Detroit-Milano-Detroit. The plane was jammed with Italians employed by Ford and Chrysler and going home for Christmas. When the duty-free opened mid-flight, all of them rushed to the plane's rear, and for a moment I had a vision of a good old 707 flyingover the Atlantic crucifix-like: wings outstretched, tail down. Then there was the train ride with the only person I knew in the city at its end. The end was cold, damp, black-and-white. The city came into focus. "And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters," to quote an author who visited here before. Then there was that next morning. It was Sunday, and all the bells were chiming.
always adhered to the idea that God is time, or at least that His spirit is. Perhaps this idea was even of my own manufacture, but now I don't remember. In any case, I always thought that if the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the water, the water was bound to reflect it. Hence my sentiment for water, for its folds, wrinkles, and ripples,and—as I am a Northerner—for its grayness. I simply think that water is the image of time, and every New Year's Eve, in somewhat pagan fashion, I try to find myself near water, preferably near a sea or an ocean, to watch the emergence of a new helping, a new cupful of time from it. I am not looking for a naked maiden riding on a shell; I am looking for either a cloud or the crest of a wave hitting the shore at midnight. That, to me, is time coming out of water, and I stare at the lace-like pattern it puts on the shore, not with a gypsy-like knowing, but with tenderness and with gratitude.