Dedalus Book of Russian Decadence

by Lodge, Kirsten; Rosen, Margo Shohl; Dashevsky, Grigory

  I have always considered—and continue to believe—that sleep is as legitimate a state as waking. What is reality? It is our impressions, our feelings, our desires, nothing more. All of this is present in sleep as well. Sleep fills the soul just as much as reality does, it agitates us just as much, or makes us happy or sad. Deeds done by us in dreams leave just as deep an impression on our spiritual being as those done in a waking state. In the end, the only substantial difference between reality and dreams is that for each individual person his dream-life is his own and apart, while reality is the same for everybody, or at least is considered to be the same … From which we can conclude that for each particular person dreams are a second reality. Which of the two realities is preferred—dreams or waking life—depends on one’s inclination.

  Since childhood I have liked dreams better than reality. Not only did I not think time spent sleeping wasted, but quite the contrary—I always begrudged the time waking life took away from sleeping. But of course in sleep I always sought life, that is to say, dreams. Even as a boy I considered a night without dreams a severe deprivation. If I happened to wake up without remembering my dream I felt miserable. I would rack my brain all day, at home and in school, until I found a fragment of the forgotten images in some dark recess of memory, and then suddenly my renewed efforts would bring forth that recent dream life in all its vividness. Greedily I would delve into that resurrected world and recall to memory all its tiniest details. By training my memory in this way, I became skilled enough never to forget a single one of my dreams. I always waited eagerly for night and sleep as for a rendezvous with a lover.

  I especially loved nightmares for the astoundingly strong impressions they made. I developed in myself an ability to provoke them artificially. All I had to do was fall asleep with my head positioned lower than my body, and almost instantly the nightmare would clutch me in its sweetly agonising claws. I would wake up from an inexpressible torpor, gasping, but hardly had I taken a breath of fresh air before I rushed to fall back in, into the black pit, into the quaking and horror. Monstrous faces appeared all around from the murk, and monkey-like devils went to war against each other, suddenly falling upon me with horrible cries, knocking me down and smothering me; my temples throbbed, it was painful and terrifying, but so unspeakable that I was happy.

  But even more I loved, from early on, those states in sleep when you know you are sleeping. It was then, too, that I grasped what great freedom of spirit these states yield. These I could not summon at will. While dreaming, I would feel something like an electric shock and immediately find that the world was now in my power. I would walk along the roads of dreams, their castles and valleys, wherever I wanted. By exerting my will I was able to see myself in whatever situation I liked, and could bring into my sleep-state anyone I had ever fantasised about. In my earliest childhood I used these moments to play jokes on people, indulging in all kinds of pranks. But with the passing years I went on to other, more esoteric joys: I raped women, committed murder and became a torturer. And only then did I realise that ecstasy and rapture are more than empty words.

  The years passed and the days of being a student and a subordinate were now over. I was on my own, with no family, and with means enough that I was not obliged to work in order to secure my right to breathe. I now had the chance to give myself over completely to my happiness. I spent the better part of the day in sleep and somnolence. I used various narcotics: not for the pleasures they promised, but in order to make my sleep longer and deeper. Experience and habit allowed me to revel in the most unfettered of freedoms, a freedom man dares only to dream of. Gradually my night-time consciousness in these dreams became similar in strength and clarity to my waking consciousness and, perhaps, even began to supersede it. I was able both to live inside my reveries and to contemplate that life from without. It was as if I observed my spirit committing this or that act in my dream, and I had control over it while at the same time I experienced everything it felt with a full measure of passion.

  I created for myself the best possible environment for my dreaming. It was an expansive hall somewhere deep underground, lit by the red flame of two enormous furnaces. The walls, apparently, were of iron; the floor, of stone. It had all the usual instruments of torture: a rack, a stake, spiked chairs, contrivances for stretching muscles and for disembowelment, knives, tongs, lashes, saws, red-hot pokers and rakes. Whenever good fortune gave me my freedom, I almost always headed straight off for my secret hideaway. By channelling the intensified energy of my desire, I brought whomever I wanted into this underground refuge, sometimes people I knew, but more often those born in my imagination, usually adolescent girls and boys, pregnant women, or children. I indulged myself with them like the most powerful despot on earth.

  With the passage of time I grew to have favourite types of victims. I knew them by name. Some enticed me with the beauty of their bodies, others by the courage with which they bore the greatest of tortures, the contempt they had for all my sophisticated devices; and yet a third group lured me, on the contrary, by their very weakness, their lack of will, their moans and vain pleas. Sometimes—indeed, quite often, I would compel victims I had already tortured to death to be resurrected so that I could take pleasure yet again in their excruciating demise. At first I was alone as both torturer and witness. Then I created for myself a band of disfigured dwarves for helpers. Their number grew according to my desire. They would hand me the instruments of torture, and they carried out my orders, guffawing and grimacing. In their midst I celebrated my orgies of blood and fire, shouts and curses.

  No doubt I would have remained bizarre, solitary and happy. But the few friends I had, judging that I was ill and close to going mad, decided to save me. Almost by force they compelled me to go out, to attend theatre performances and to socialise. I suspect that they purposely set about presenting a certain girl to me in the most attractive possible light, and she later became my wife. But in fact, a man could hardly be found who would not consider her worthy of worship. All feminine and human charms united in this one woman whom I came to love, whom I so often called my own and whom I will never cease to mourn every day for the rest of my life. And to her they depicted me as an unfortunate wretch, a miserable man who needed saving. She was curious at first, and quickly became most fully and selflessly devoted.

  For a long time I couldn’t even entertain the thought of marriage. No matter how powerful this feeling that for the first time in my life enslaved my soul, still I was horrified at the idea of losing my solitude, the solitude that permitted me to indulge freely in my dreams. Nonetheless, the proper life to which I was being constrained gradually obscured my consciousness. I sincerely believed that it was possible for my soul to undergo some sort of transformation, that it could disavow its secret, inadmissible truth. On my wedding day my friends congratulated me as if I had emerged from the grave into daylight. After our honeymoon my wife and I got settled in our new, bright and happy home. I convinced myself that I was interested in world events and the local news; I read the newspapers and kept up my friendships. I relearnt how to keep awake during the day. At night, after the frenzied caresses of two lovers, the sleep that came to me was usually dead and flat, without distant horizons, without visions. In my brief moment of blindness I was ready to rejoice in my recovery, my resurrection from madness into normal daily life.

  But of course the desire for other raptures never—oh, never!—completely died away inside. It was only muted by all too palpable reality. And in the honeymoon days of the first month of marriage, somewhere in the secret recesses of my soul I felt an unquenchable thirst for impressions that were more dazzling, and more devastating.

  With the passing of each new week this thirst tormented me more and more importunately. And along with it another importunate desire began to grow, one I was hesitant to acknowledge even to myself: the desire to bring her, my wife, whom I loved, to my night-time feast and to see her face distorted from the tortures inflicted on her bod
y. I struggled, for a long time I struggled, trying to maintain my sobriety. I would try to convince myself, using all the arguments reason could produce, but I myself did not believe them. I sought diversions and did not let myself remain alone, but in vain—the temptation was inside me and there was no escape.

  And finally I gave in. I pretended I had undertaken a substantial project on the history of religion. I put wide couches in my library and began to shut myself up there for the night. Somewhat later I began to spend whole days there as well. I kept my secret from my wife every way I could; I shuddered to think she might penetrate the secret I guarded so jealously. She was as dear to me as she had been before. Her caresses delighted me no less than in the first days of our life together. But I was drawn by a more powerful passion. I couldn’t explain my behaviour to her. I even preferred her to think that I had ceased to love her and was avoiding relations with her. And in fact she did think so, and became downcast and weary. I saw how pale and weak she was getting—that sorrow would soon take her to the grave. But if, giving in to impulse, I uttered some banalities about love, she would revive, though only momentarily: she was unable to believe me, because my words and my deeds seemed so contradictory.

  But although I now spent almost entire days and nights in sleep, as I had before, giving myself over to my dreams even more wholeheartedly than I had prior to my marriage, I had somehow lost my former ability to find my full freedom. For entire weeks I remained on my couches, waking up only to fortify myself a little with wine or bouillon, or to take another dose of sedatives, but the longed-for moment never came. I would experience the sweet torments of a nightmare, its magnificence and mercilessness, I could recollect and string together rows of various dreams, some quite logical and terrifying precisely because of that triumphant logic, some wildly incomprehensible, ravishing and splendid in the madness of their combinations—but my consciousness remained clouded by a sort of pall. I didn’t possess the power to control my dreams; I was compelled to hear and observe what was being conveyed to me from somewhere outside, by someone else.

  I resorted to every method and means I knew: I deliberately cut off my circulation, I tried hypnotising myself, I used morphine and hashish and every other sleep-inducing drug, but they yielded only their own particular charms. After the agitation provoked by the demon of India poppy, the sweetest exhaustion would set in, the feeble rocking of a sleepy ship on a boundless ocean constantly generating new visions from its waves…but those images would not obey my adjurations. Awake again, I would recall with fury the long series of pictures that had unfolded before me, tempting and alluring, but prompted not by my caprice and disappearing not by my will. I would become exhausted from rage and desire, but I remained impotent.

  As I recall, more than six months passed between the time I first resolved to return to the interrupted rapture of my visions and the day when my most cherished happiness was restored to me. In my sleep I suddenly felt that electric shock I knew so well and immediately found that I was again free—that I was asleep, but I had the power to control my dream; I could do whatever I might desire, and it would all remain just a dream! A wave of untold rapture flooded my soul. I couldn’t resist the old temptation: my first step was to look for my wife right away. But I didn’t wish for my underground hideaway. I preferred to be in the environment to which she had grown accustomed and which she herself had arranged. This was a more exquisite pleasure. And just at that moment, in the alternate consciousness of dreams, I saw myself standing at the doors of my library.

  “Let’s go,” I said to the spectre of myself. “Let’s go, she is sleeping now, and take along a slender dagger, the one with the carved ivory handle.”

  Obeying, I set off on the familiar way through unlit rooms. It seemed to me that I was not walking, moving my legs, but flying, as always happens in dreams. As I went through one room I saw through the windows the roofs of the city and I thought, “All this is in my power.” The night was moonless, but the sky glittered with stars. My dwarves eagerly started to crawl out from under the sofas, but I made the sign for them to disappear. I silently pushed the door ajar. The icon lamp lit the room well enough. I stepped over to the bed where my wife was sleeping. She seemed so helpless lying there, so small and thin; her hair, plaited for the night in two braids, hung over the bed. Next to the pillow lay a handkerchief: she had been crying as she went to bed, and had cried herself to sleep again waiting for me. A kind of sorrowful feeling clutched my heart. In that moment I was ready to believe in compassion. A fleeting desire to fall upon my knees before her bed and kiss her chilled legs came over me. But just then I reminded myself that this was all a dream.

  An astonishingly strange feeling came over me. I could, finally, realise my secret fantasy, do everything I wanted with this woman. And all of it would remain known only to me alone. And in reality I could cover her with ecstatic caresses, comfort her, love and pamper her… Bent down over my wife’s body, I squeezed her throat with my strong hand, so she couldn’t cry out. She woke up immediately, opened her eyes and thrashed about with all her might under my hand. But I had her pressed tightly to the bed. She flailed all around, trying to push me away, trying to get some words out, looking at me with panic-stricken eyes. For some moments I looked into the dark blue depths of those eyes, and I was filled with untold excitement. Then suddenly I stabbed this woman in the side with my dagger, underneath the blanket.

  I saw her whole body shudder; she reached out, still unable to scream, but her eyes filled with tears of pain and despair, and tears ran down her cheeks. And warmish, sticky blood dripped down the hand that held the dagger. I stabbed her slowly at first, then I tore off the blanket and stabbed her naked body as she fitfully tried to cover herself, to stand, to crawl. Oh, how sweet and horrible to cut up the supple curves of her body, and to completely entwine it—her beautiful, tender, beloved body—with scarlet ribbons of wounds and blood! Finally, seizing my wife by the head, I plunged the dagger into her neck, through it, behind her carotid artery, then gathered up all my strength and cut her throat. Blood gurgled up as the dying woman attempted to breathe; her hand vaguely grasped or brushed at something. And then she remained motionless.

  Then such a staggering despair enveloped my soul that I urgently struggled to wake up that instant, and I couldn’t. I exerted all my willpower, expecting that the walls of the bedroom would suddenly disintegrate, recede and melt away, that I would see myself on my couch in the library. But the nightmare didn’t pass. My wife’s body, bloody and disfigured, lay before me on the bed, covered in blood. And people with candles were already crowding the doorway, people who, hearing the sounds of a struggle, had rushed over, and their faces were distorted with horror. They didn’t say a word, but all of them looked at me, and I saw them.

  It was then that I realised that what had happened this time had not been a dream.

  For me alone my living dream

  Will raise a marvellous kingdom,

  Where ecstasy and suffering

  Miraculously will mingle.

  I’ll adorn my court

  with unclad beauty

  And I’ll sate my gaze

  With pages’ nudity.

  The radiant beauty

  Of naked girls

  And my own nude body

  Will fill my world.

  There will be dancing,

  Laughter and wine,

  And my bedroom door

  Will be open wide.

  And when I get tired

  Of dancing and fun,

  I’ll order the clumsy

  To be tied up,

  And I will command

  The handsome pages

  And trembling girls

  Be ruthlessly flayed.

  Sweeter than music

  Will be their cries—

  Piercing, resonant,

  Discordant and wild.

  Then, immersing myself

  In voluptuous pain,

  I’ll order that I
/>   Should be brutally flayed.

  The relentless pain

  Will delight and thrill

  In the merging of cruel

  And unbridled wills.

  Fyodor Sologub, 1895

  The Slave

  I am a slave, and I was the humble slave

  Of the most beautiful queen of all.

  Before her dark and fiery gaze

  I would wordlessly fall to the floor.

  I would kiss the traces of her sandals

  On the moist morning sand.

  When the queen went down to the river,

  I was intoxicated by fantasy.

  And once from the dust I lifted my gaze,

  Passionate and pining,

  And it slipped up to the beauty’s face,

  And briefly burned her eyes…

  She winced with rage:

  Torture the defiler of the sacred!

  And she left, as slave girls,

  Encircling her, sang praises.

  And that very night I was chained

  Like a dog to the bed of the queen.

  And I trembled all over, enchanted,

  Awaiting unknown dreams.

  As a priestess enters a temple,

  She came into the chamber,

  So beautiful and sinless,

  That it made my eyes ache.

  And her vestments dropped,

  Down to the fabric on her bosom…

  And in terror I closed my eyes…

  But a voice whispered: Look!

  And a youth slipped towards the bed.

  Submissively, she waited…

  The wicks in the lamps hissed,

  And silence and darkness flooded the chamber.