27.01.1917. Petrograd.
Dear Friend!
My first duty is to send you my blessing. Be diligent, honor the parents and mentors who lead us to the knowledge of the good, and work diligently on your "aesthetic topology", in which you, I hope, after my sudden disappearance, made great progress.
I can't hide what I miss most about Peter is you. Of course, you would have been under the wheels of my "wooden bicycle", on which I am flying with unheard-of speed in an unknown direction.
My cute stool, the story isn't so hard to tell on paper. It essentially consists of four words, quite exhaustive of my condition: "I am as happy as ever". Dixie - and my soul became somehow calmer.
It remains to tell you in order what happened to me in St. Petersburg. I'll start by saying that Lisa met me at the station and took me to the Kaufman family, about which she wrote to me many times. People are cute, cute, although the hostess is able to talk to half a death. The older brothers are in positions, their room surrenders, and I've been on full board for four days now.
That's right, brother. Well, now we'll talk about my prudence stumbling on the right place. First, Lisa. As you know, she has always been good - not without reason, Your Stoic Majesty admitted to me that in her presence the soil is somehow disappearing from under your august feet. But before that it was something like Pushkin's:
She rests ashamedly
In the beauty of his solemn celebration.
And now her beauty has become confident and, so to speak, knowing the price. Secondly, again - Lisa. The fact is that she has changed internally. She has the right to dispose of herself, that is, she seems to have earned herself, if I may say so. In particular, I was convinced that I was sadly wrong to say to her, and even lowly, that she gave up mathematics. She is, of course, a born artist, a man of art, not of science.
Again, it's not just that she is au courant[3] of everything that happens in painting. On the move, without letting me come to my senses, she brought down all the theories, arguments, fights and almost a stabbing that goes between hostile directions. So much has been said in exhibitions, in museums, in the house of the Gorins, where she lives, that you would be afraid with your poor health for digestion. But jokes aside. When she went head-to-head into painting, she began to paint in such a way that even my naked eyes could see how far she had come in a year.
She showed me her work in the presence of the entire Gorins family living in a luxurious two-storey apartment, where I, born on the banks of the fast-growing Kazanka, would seem to feel like an orphan from Kazan. But, imagine, I didn't feel it! And even entered into a dispute with Dmitry Gorin, a semi-professor and a Byzantine scholar. This is a highly learned, reddish personality, with an interesting pallor, with a dazzling collar of a starchy shirt and a somewhat languid look, more characteristic of the female sex. They talked about Byzantium. Since I was barely hearth in this subject, there was nothing left to say, how to declare that there was no Byzantine art and could not be, because the whole spiritual life was entangled with devilish intrigues and imbued with the promises of hellish torment. "Where could art come from? - I asked, gladly noticing that my highly learned conversation partner was staring at me with amazement. - If in this blessed Byzantium of yours a woman was looked at as a vessel of temptation and a tool of demons? Where does art come from without women?
Lisa laughed, and the argument ended with a great lunch, at which I, incidentally, made sure that she feels like a royalty in this European, St. Petersburg, professor's house. This also seemed unexpected to me. I've never seen her like this before.
O my life! All this I write to you for a reason. Do you have any doubt about the reason mentioned in the first lines of this letter?
Now read and try to believe your eyes. Lisa goes to Samara to visit her father, who is wounded and lying there in the hospital. I persuaded her to stay in Kazan for a few days so that I could introduce her to her mother, her sisters, her brother, in a word, mine. Nothing has been decided yet, of course, although my mother knows about our relationship and recently asked me where the skinny lady who was suspected of consumption was. I replied that she was healthy now, after six months in Yalta.
I know you will say that it is impossible to imagine Lisa in our home, with her sincerity and straightforwardness, Lisa, who in her own way is practical, does not waste time and at the same time is capable of surprises that may seem more than strange not only in our family, but in Kazan in general. I agree! Almost impossible. But I've spent my whole life turning this "almost" into something quite definite - here's a new opportunity for you to prove that many years of experience has not been lost in vain.
As for my "business trip", I can only tell you, my friend Nikolasha, that we are innocent girls compared to what the Lapunov pets did in St. Petersburg. But about it at a meeting.
Your K.
To be continued...