“I am a dreamer. I know so little of real life that I just can’t help re-living such moments as these in my dreams, for such moments are something I have very rarely experienced. I am going to dream about you the whole night, the whole week, the whole year. I feel I know you so well that I couldn’t have known you better if we’d been friends for twenty years. You won’t fail me, will you? Only two minutes, and you’ve made me happy forever. Yes, happy. Who knows, perhaps you’ve reconciled me with myself, resolved all my doubts.

When I woke up it seemed to me that some snatch of a tune I had known for a long time, I had heard somewhere before but had forgotten, a melody of great sweetness, was coming back to me now. It seemed to me that it had been trying to emerge from my soul all my life, and only now-

If and when you fall in love, may you be happy with her. I don’t need to wish her anything, for she’ll be happy with you. May your sky always be clear, may your dear smile always be bright and happy, and may you be for ever blessed for that moment of bliss and happiness which you gave to another lonely and grateful heart. Isn’t such a moment sufficient for the whole of one’s life?”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, White Nights

Photo is from the movie Le notti bianche…
Le Notti Bianche is a 1957 Italian film directed by Italian neorealist Luchino Visconti. The movie takes its title and basic plot from Fyodor Dostoevsky’s 1848 short story, White Nights.

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Alexander Rodchenko
Levels
1929
Vintage print on Silver gelatin paper
Collection Museum Moscow House of Photography / Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow
© A. Rodchenko – W. Stepanova Archive
© Museum Moscow House of Photography

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“If we look closely, most things in this world are the results of imagination.”

Maria Konstantinowna Bashkirtseff (1858-1884)

The Umbrella
1883
State Russian Museum (St. Petersburg, Russian Federation)

Young Woman with Lilacs

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“One of the most widespread superstitions is that every man has his own special, definite qualities; that a man is kind, cruel, wise, stupid, energetic, apathetic, etc.
Men are not like that . . . Men are like rivers; the water is the same in each, and alike in all; but every river is narrow here, is more rapid there, here slower, there broader, now clear, now cold, now dull, now warm. It is the same with men. Every man carries in himself the germs of every human quality and sometimes one manifests itself, sometimes another, and the man often becomes unlike himself—while still remaining the same man.”
― Leo Tolstoy

Only known color photograph of the writer, taken at his Yasnaya Polyana estate in 1908 by Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky

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You will hear thunder and remember me,
And think: she wanted storms. The rim
Of the sky will be the colour of hard crimson,
And your heart, as it was then, will be on fire.”
― Anna Akhmatova, The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova

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Ivan Kramskoy
Portrait of the Philosopher Vladimir Solovyov, 1885

“The meaning and worth of love, as a feeling, is that it really forces us, with all our being, to acknowledge for ANOTHER the same absolute central significance which, because of the power of our egoism, we are conscious of only in our own selves. Love is important not as one of our feelings, but as the transfer of all our interest in life from ourselves to another, as the shifting of the very centre of our personal life. This is characteristic of every kind of love, but predominantly of sexual love; it is distinguished from other kinds of love by greater intensity, by a more engrossing character, and by the possibility of a more complete overall reciprocity. Only this love can lead to the real and indissoluble union of two lives into one; only of it do the words of Holy Writ say: ‘They shall be one flesh,’ i.e., shall become one real being.”
― Vladimir S. Solovyov, The Meaning of Love

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“God, but life is loneliness, despite all the opiates, despite the shrill tinsel gaiety of “parties” with no purpose, despite the false grinning faces we all wear. And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter – they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long. Yes, there is joy, fulfillment and companionship – but the loneliness of the soul in its appalling self-consciousness is horrible and overpowering.”

― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

Loneliness
Viktor Elpidiforovich Borisov-Musatov – 1905

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Grigory Gluckmann, (Russia, 1898-1973)
The Dressing Room

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Forgive me, that I manage badly,
Manage badly but live gloriously,
That I leave traces of myself in my songs,
That I appeared to you in waking dreams.”
― Anna Akhmatova, The Complete Poems

Anna Akhmatova. Slepnevo.1914

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IN THE EVENING  BY ANNA AKHMATOVA

The garden rang with music
Of inexpressible despair.
A dish of oysters spread on ice
Smelled like the ocean, fresh and sharp.

He told me: “I’m a faithful friend!”-
And lightly touched my dress.
How different from embraces
The touch of those two hands.

That’s how one strokes a cat or bird
Or looks at slender lady riders…
Just laughter in his quiet eyes,
Beneath his light gold lashes.

And the despondent voices of the violins
Sing out beyond the hanging smoke:
“Give blessings to heaven above
At last you’re alone with your beloved.”

March 1913

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