Farewell, my friend, farewell: poem by Esenin

Farewell, my friend, farewell.
Dear friend, you're in my heart.
The predetermined parting
Promises reunion ahead.

Farewell, my friend, without handshake or word,
Don't grieve and knit your brow -- 
In life death's nothing new,
But life's, of course, no greater novelty.
                                                  Sergei Esenin
                                                   1925

Esenin, sometimes spelled Yesenin, dead and mourned.

More Chekhov, more on books

This paragraph from a Chekhov short story describes something of how I read. The first and last sentences sound particularly familiar. Are these the last years of my confinement? What am I confined in? Life and consciousness and failure. Could books save me? (With the passage's final image, I was reminded of Ishmael clinging to Queequeg's coffin.) Ultimately, they destroy the prisoner in the story. Books, and his years of solitude, turn him into a cynic, a misanthrope, a Timon. Is Chekhov saying that if you knew humanity only through its books, you would want to avoid it in real life? Is he saying that that conclusion would be accurate? And if so, is he blaming humanity for this outcome, or just writers of books, like himself?


During the last years of his confinement the prisoner read an extraordinary amount, quite haphazard. Now he would apply himself to the natural sciences, then he would read Byron or Shakespeare. Notes used to come from him in which he asked to be sent at the same time a book on chemistry, a textbook of medicine, a novel, and some treatise on philosophy or theology. He read as though he were swimming in the sea among broken pieces of wreckage, and in his desire to save his life was eagerly grasping one piece after another.
                                                                                                         
                                                                                                           -Anton Chekhov
                                                                                                            "The Bet"

Prose passage from Osip Mandelstam

The Russian Osip Mandelstam, vindictively exiled by Stalin for the second and final time in 1938, died in a Siberian transit camp, reportedly out of his mind. He is known for his poetry, but wrote great, rich, dense, evocative essays and stories about Russian life in St. Petersburg and elsewhere. These two paragraphs (translated by Clarence Brown) are a perfect example. ("Scellé" means sealed. I don't know the "Song of Malbourk," although I have been to the amazing Malbork Castle, in Poland, and it is sometimes spelled "Malbourk.")

From "Riots and Governesses:"

It is my opinion that the little songs, models of penmanship, anthologies, and conjugations had ended by driving all these French and Swiss women themselves into an infantile state. At the center of their worldview, distorted by anthologies, stood the figure of the great emperor Napoleon and the War of 1812; after that came Joan of Arc (one Swiss girl, however, turned out to be a Calvinist), and no matter how often I tried, curious as I was, to learn something from them about France, I learned nothing at all, save that it was beautiful. The French governesses placed great value upon the art of speaking fast and abundantly and the Swiss upon the learning of little songs, among which the chief favorite was the "Song of Malbourk." These poor girls were completely imbued with the cult of great men -- Hugo, Lamartine, Napoleon, and Molière. On Sundays they had permission to go to mass. They were not allowed to have acquaintances.
                Somewhere in the Ile de France: grape barrels, white roads, poplars -- and a winegrower has set out with his daughters to go to their grandmother in Rouen. On his return he is to find everything "scellé," the presses and vats under an official seal. The manager had tried to conceal from the excise tax collectors a few pails of new wine. They had caught him in the act. The family is ruined. Enormous fine. And, as a result, the stern laws of France make me the present of a governess.