Less Than One: Selected Essays

A white night is a night when the sun leaves the sky for barely a couple of hours - a phenomenon quite familiar in the northern latitudes. It's the most magic time in the city when you can write or read without a lamp at two o'clock in the morning, and when the buildings, deprived of shadows and their roofs rimmed with gold, look like a set of fragile china. It's so quiet around that you can almost hear the clink of a spoon falling in Finland. The transparent pink tint of the sky is so light that the pale-blue watercolor of the river almost fails to reflect it. And the bridges are drawn up as though the islands of the delta have unclasped their hands and slowly begun to drift, turning in the mainstream, toward the Baltic. On such nights, it's hard to fall asleep, because it is too light and because any dream will be inferior to reality. Where a man doesn't cast a shadow, like water.

As for the degree of despair over the loss ot a loved one, which is expressed in our readiness to swap places with him, the a priori impossibility of the realization of such a wish is in itself comforting enough, for it serves as a certain emotional limit that spares the imagination further responsibility. Whereas the quality of vision responsible for perceiving "homeland" as "one of the stars" testifies not only to the ability of "Novogodnee's" author to switch the places of subtrahends but also to the ability of her imagination to abandon her hero and to look at even him from afar. For it is not so much Rilke who "sees" his homeland of yesterday as one of the stars, as it is the author of the poem who "sees" Rilke "seeing" all of this. And the question naturally arises : \Vhat is the author's own location and how does she happen to be there?

"In which, without you, I'll moan myself empty" is followed by Homeland-now already from one of The stars . . . This is astounding. For it's one thing to take a look at oneself from a distance; ultimately, she was engaged in this in one way or another all her life. To look at yourself through the eyes of Rilke is something else. But in this too, we must suppose, she engaged rather frequently, if we take into account her attitude toward Rilke. To look at herself through the eyes of the deceased Rilke's soul wandering in space, and moreover to see not herself but the world abandoned by him-is something that requires a spiritual optic capability which we don't know that anyone has. A reader is not prepared for such a tum of events.