PARTISAN REVIEW
Another will in me turns always, with anguish, from culture, from
everything that is being done and said around me. It finds all this
boring and useless, like a struggle of phantoms rushing about in the
void; it knows another world, foresees another life, such as are not yet
on the earth, but that will be and cannot help being, because only
in
them will genuine reality be embodied; and I recognize this voice as
the voice of my genuine self. I live like a foreigner who has become as–
similated to a country not his own; I am liked by the natives and I like
them in turn, I eagerly labor for their welfare, I suffer their sufferings
and rejoice in their joys, but I know that I am a foreigner, and in
secret I regret the fields of my homeland, its different seasons, the odor
of its flowers and the speech of its women.
Where is my homeland? I shall not see it, I shall die in a foreign
land. And sometimes I so passionately long for it! Then I do not need
railroads and international politics; the disputes concerning philos–
ophical systems and the quarrels among my friends about the transcend–
ent and immanent God seem empty to me, empty and impeding my
view, like dust raised on a road. But just as this stranger in a foreign
land sometimes recognizes, with emotion, his homeland
in
the odor of a
flower or the hue of a sunset, so I even here feel the beauty and fresh–
ness of the promised world. I feel
it in
the fields and in the woods,
in
the
song of the birds and
in
the peasant following his plow, in the eyes of
children and sometimes in their words, in the divinely kind smiles of
women, in the sympathy of man for man, in sincere and unvenal sim–
plicity, in an occasional word that glows or an unexpected line of
poetry which pierces the darkness like a flash of lightning, and in many,
many other things-especially in suffering. All these will be there too, all
these are the flowers of homeland, crushed here by a dank, coarse and
insipid vegetation.
You, my friend, are in your native land; your heart is where your
house is, your sky is above this earth. Your spirit is not split, and this in–
tegrity fascinates me because, whatever its origin, it, too, is a flower of
that land, our common land of the future. And that is why I think that
in the house of our Father one dwelling is prepared for you and me,
although here, on earth, we sit stubbornly each in our own corner,
arguing about culture.
M.G.
(Translated from the Russian by Norbert Guterman)
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