But the student, despite all his refinement, was persistent. Though Kristyna kept her thighs tightly closed, he bravely got hold of her rump, meaning that someone who likes to quote Schopenhauer is not for all that ready to give up a body that pleases him.
Anyway, vacation ended and the two lovers realized it would be hard for them to go a whole year without seeing each other. Kristyna had only to find an excuse
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Litost
to go see him. They both understood what that visit would mean. In Prague, the student lived in a small attic room, and Kristyna would have to end up spending the night there.
exercise and friends and spent under the constant gaze of his mother's overfond eye, and fell into despair about himself and his life. They walked back to the city together in silence on a country lane. Wounded and humiliated, he felt an irresistible desire to hit her. "What's the matter with you?" she asked him, and he started to reproach her: she knew about the current near the other bank, and that he had forbidden her to swim there because of the risk of drowning—and then he slapped her face. The girl began to cry, and when he saw the tears on her cheeks, he took pity on her and put his arms around her, and his litost melted away.
Or take an instance from the student's childhood: His parents made him take violin lessons. He was not very gifted and his teacher would interrupt him to criticize his mistakes in a cold, unbearable voice. He felt humiliated, and he wanted to cry. But instead of trying to play in tune and not make mistakes, he would deliberately play wrong notes, the teacher's voice would become still more unbearable and harsh, and he himself would sink deeper and deeper into his litost.
What then is litost?
Litost is a state of torment created by the sudden sight of one's own misery.
One of the customary remedies for misery is love. Because someone loved absolutely cannot be miserable. All his faults are redeemed by love's magical gaze, under which even inept swimming, with the head held high above the surface, can become charming.
Love's absolute is actually a desire for absolute
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What Is Litost?
Litost is an untranslatable Czech word. Its first syllable, which is long and stressed, sounds like the wail of an abandoned dog. As for the meaning of this word, I have looked in vain in other languages for an equivalent, though I find it difficult to imagine how anyone can understand the human soul without it.
Let me give an example: The student went swimming in the river one day with his girlfriend, a fellow student. She was athletic, but he was a very poor swimmer. He could not time his breathing properly and swam slowly, his head held tensely high above the surface. She was madly in love with him and tactfully swam as slowly as he did. But when their swim was coming to an end, she wanted to give her athletic instincts a few moments' free rein and headed for the opposite bank at a rapid crawl. The student made an effort to swim faster too and swallowed water. Feeling humbled, his physical inferiority laid bare, he felt litost. He recalled his sickly childhood, lacking in physical
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identity: the woman we love ought to swim as slowly as we do, she ought to have no past of her own to look back on happily. But when the illusion of absolute identity vanishes (the girl looks back happily on her past or swims faster), love becomes a permanent source of the great torment we call litost.
Anyone with wide experience of the common imperfection of mankind is relatively sheltered from the shocks of litost. For him, the sight of his own misery is ordinary and uninteresting. Litost, therefore, is characteristic of the age of inexperience. It is one of the ornaments of youth.
Litost works like a two-stroke engine. Torment is followed by the desire for revenge. The goal of revenge is to make one's partner look as miserable as oneself. The man cannot swim, but the slapped woman cries. It makes them feel equal and keeps their love going.
Since revenge can never reveal its true motive (the student cannot confess to the girl that he slapped her because she swam faster than he did), it must put forward false reasons. Litost, therefore, is always accompanied by a pathetic hypocrisy: the young man proclaims he is terrified his girlfriend will drown, and the child incessantly playing off key feigns an irremediable lack of talent.
Initially this chapter was entitled "Who Is the Student?" But to deal with litost was to describe the student, who is litost incarnate. No wonder the fellow student he loves finally left him. It's not very pleasant to be slapped for knowing how to swim.
The butcher's wife, whom he had met in his home-
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town, had come to him like a huge adhesive bandage, prepared to cover all his wounds. She adored him, she worshiped him, and when he talked about Schopenhauer, she did not try to display her own independent personality by raising objections (as did the girlfriend of grievous memory) but looked at him with eyes in which, moved by Kristyna's emotion, he thought he was seeing tears. And too, let us not forget to add that he had not made love to a woman since breaking up with his girlfriend.
Who Is Voltaire?
Voltaire is a lecturer in the university faculty of arts and letters, he is witty and aggressive, and he eyes his adversaries with a malicious look. Reason enough to call him Voltaire.
He liked the student, and that is no slight distinction, because Voltaire was particular about the company he kept. After the seminar one day, he went up to him to ask whether he was free the following evening. The following evening, alas, was when Kristyna was coming. It took courage for the student to tell Voltaire he was busy. But Voltaire waved the objection away: "Well, just reschedule. You won't regret it." And then he told him that the country's best poets were getting together tomorrow at the Writers Club and that he,
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Voltaire, wanted to introduce the student to them.
Yes, the great poet about whom Voltaire was writing a monograph and whose house he frequented would also be there. He was ill and walked with crutches. That is why he rarely went out, and an opportunity to meet him was all the more to be valued.
The student knew the books of all the poets who would be there next day, but of the great poet's verse he knew whole pages by heart. He had never wanted anything more ardently than to spend an evening in their company. Then he remembered he had not made love to a woman in months, and he said again that it would be impossible for him to come.
Voltaire did not understand what could be more important than meeting great men. A woman? Can't that be put off? Suddenly his glasses were flashing ironically. But the student was seeing before him the image of the butcher's wife who had shyly evaded him during a long vacation month, and though it took great effort, he shook his head. Just then, Kristyna was worth all his country's poetry.
had arranged to meet her in the evening at a restaurant he had chosen himself. When he entered, he became nearly frightened: the room was full of drunks, and the small-town sylph of his vacation was sitting in the corner near the toilets, at a table meant not for customers but for dirty dishes. She had dressed with the awkward formality of a provincial lady visiting the capital after a long absence and wanting to sample all its delights. She was wearing a hat, garish beads around her neck, and black high-heeled pumps.
The student felt his cheeks burning—not with excitement but with disappointment. The impression Kristyna created against the backdrop of a small town, with its butchers, mechanics, and pensioners, was entirely different in Prague, the city of pretty students and hairdressers. With her ridiculous beads and her discreet gold tooth (in an upper corner of her mouth), she seemed to personify the negation of that youthful feminine beauty in jeans who had been cruelly rejecting him for months. He made his way uncertainly to her, bringing his litost along with him.
The student was disappoi
nted, and Kristyna no less so. The restaurant he had invited her to had a nice name—King Wenceslaus—and Kristyna, who did not know Prague well, had imagined a deluxe establishment, where the student would dine with her before she was shown the fireworks display of Prague's pleasures. When she noticed that the King Wenceslaus was just the kind of place where the mechanic drank his beer and that she was waiting for the student in the
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The Compromise
She arrived in the morning. During the day, she ran the errand that would serve as her alibi. The student
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corner near the toilets, she did not experience the feeling I have referred to as litost but rather felt quite ordinary anger. By which I mean that she felt neither miserable nor humiliated but thought her student did not know how to behave. She did not, moreover, hesitate to tell him so. She looked furious and talked to him as she did to the butcher.
They stood face-to-face, she volubly and loudly reproaching him and he feebly defending himself. His distaste for her intensified. He wanted to take her to his room quickly, hide her from everyone's sight, and wait for the privacy of their refuge to revive the vanished charm. But she refused. She had not been to the capital for a long time, and she wanted to go out, see things, have a good time. Her black pumps and big garish beads were noisily demanding their rights.
"But this is a great little place. All the best people come here," the student pointed out, implying that the butcher's wife understood nothing about what was interesting in the capital and what was not. "Unfortunately, there's no room now, so I'll have to take you somewhere else." But as if deliberately, all the other places were just as crowded, it was a distance from one to the other, and Kristyna seemed unbearably comic to him with her little hat, beads, and shining gold tooth. The streets were filled with young women, and the student realized he would never forgive himself for giving up, for Kristyna's sake, the opportunity to spend an evening with his country's giants. But neither did he want to incur her hostility,
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because, as I have said, he had not been to bed with a woman in a long time. Only a masterfully constructed compromise could bring the dilemma to an end.
They finally found a table in an out-of-the-way cafe. The student ordered two aperitifs and looked sadly into Kristyna's eyes: Here in Prague, he announced, life is full of surprises. Just yesterday the country's most famous poet had phoned him.
When he said his name, Kristyna gave a start. She had learned his poems by heart in school. The great men whose names we learn in school have something unreal and immaterial about them, having been admitted, while still alive, to the majestic gallery of the dead. Kristyna could not really believe that the student knew him personally.
Of course he knew him, the student declared. He was even writing his master's thesis on him, a monograph that was likely to be published as a book someday. The reason he had never spoken of it before was (hat she would have thought he was bragging, but he had to talk about him now because the great poet had suddenly gotten in their way. A private meeting of the country's poets was taking place this evening at the Writers Club, and only a few critics and insiders had been invited. It's an extremely important meeting. There will be a debate, and sparks will fly. But obviously the student is not going. He is thrilled to be here with Kristyna!
In my sweet, singular country, the charm of poets still agitates women's hearts. Kristyna felt admiration for the
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student and a kind of maternal desire to advise him and defend his interests. With striking and unexpected altruism, she declared it would be a pity if the student were to miss an event attended by the great poet.
The student said he had tried everything to enable Kristyna to come with him, because he knew how happy she would be to see the great poet and his friends. Unfortunately, that was not possible. Even the great poet would not be bringing his wife. The discussion was intended exclusively for specialists. Initially he had actually even considered not going, but now he realized that Kristyna was probably right. Yes, it was a good idea. He could run over there for an hour or so. Kristyna would wait for him at his place, and then they would be together, just the two of them.
The temptations of the theaters and the variety shows were forgotten, and Kristyna went with the student and entered his attic room. At first she experienced the same disappointment she had felt upon entering the King Wenceslaus. It was not an apartment, merely a tiny room with no anteroom and no furniture but a daybed and a desk. But she was no longer sure of her judgments. She had entered into a world with a mysterious scale of values she did not understand. So she rapidly reconciled herself to this uncomfortable and filthy room and called on all her feminine talent to make herself feel at home in it. The student invited her to remove her hat, gave her a kiss, made her sit down on the daybed, and showed her his small library, where she would find
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something to distract her while he was gone.
Then Kristyna had an idea: "Do you have a copy of his book?" She was thinking of the great poet.
Yes, the student had his book.
She went on very shyly: "Would you like to give it to me as a present? And ask him to inscribe it to me?"
The student was exultant. The great poet's inscription would replace, for Kristyna, the theaters and variety shows. She had given him a bad conscience, and he was ready to do anything for her. As he expected, the intimacy of his attic room had revived Kristyna's charm. The young women coming and going on the streets had vanished, and the enchantment of her modesty silently invaded the room. The disappointment slowly wore off, and the student left for the Writers Club calmed and delighted by the thought of the splendid double program the evening promised him.
r
The Poets
He waited for Voltaire in front of the Writers Club and then went up with him to the second floor. They passed through the cloakroom and into the vestibule, where a jovial din reached them. When Voltaire opened the door to the function room, the student saw, sitting around a large table, all of his country's poetry.
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I am watching them from the great distance of two thousand kilometers. It is the autumn of 1977, my country has been sweetly dozing for nine years now in the strong embrace of the Russian empire, Voltaire has been expelled from the university, and my books, having been gathered up from all the public libraries, are locked away in some state cellar. I waited for a few years, and then I got into a car and drove as far west as possible, to the Breton town of Rennes, where on the first day I found an apartment on the top floor of the tallest high-rise tower. When the sun woke me the next morning, I realized its large windows faced east, toward Prague.
And so I am watching them from the height of my lookout, but the distance is too great. Fortunately, there is a tear in my eye, which, like a telescope lens, brings me nearer to their faces. Now I can clearly make out the great poet, seated solidly among the others. He is surely more than seventy, but his face is still handsome, his eyes are still lively and wise. His crutches lean against the table next to him.
I see them all against the backdrop of the luminous Prague of fifteen years ago, when their books had not yet been locked away in a state cellar and when they chatted loudly and cheerfully around the large table laden with bottles. Because I am very fond of them all, I hesitate to give them ordinary names taken at random from the telephone book. If we must hide their faces behind the masks of assumed names, I want to give them as gifts, as adornments and in homage.
Since his students nicknamed the lecturer Voltaire,
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what prevents me from calling the beloved great poet Goethe?
Facing him is Lermontov.
And the one over there, with the dark dreamy eyes, I want to call Petrarch.
And then there are Verlaine, Yesenin, and several others not worth mentioning, as well as someone who surely is there by mistake. From far away (from that distance of two thousand kilometers), it is obvious that Poetry has not kissed his brow and that he does not like verse. He is called Boccaccio.
Voltaire took two chairs from against the wall, pushed them over to the table laden with bottles, and introduced the student to the poets. The poets nodded to him courteously, all but Petrarch, who was too absorbed in an argument he was having with Boccaccio to notice him. He ended the debate with these words: "Something in women always gives them the upper hand. I could talk about that for weeks."
And to egg him on, Goethe said: "Weeks is a bit much. But give us at least ten minutes of it."
Petrarch's Story
"Last week, an unbelievable thing happened to me. My wife had just taken her evening bath, she was in
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