98
PARTISAN REVIEW
you at the lecture. Of course you do not remember her; no doubt
you did not even see her. And if you had happened to notice her, you
would have thought she was one of those women who come to public
lectures pretending they want to learn something- so that they may
depart for the next world with their earthly obligations fulfilled and
say at the end of the road that they did not live their lives in
darkness - but who in fact come only to forget for a moment their
own loneliness, filled as it is with thoughts of death, or simply to see
another human being.
Despite the solitude I live in, sir, I do not plague others with
my memories, which are peopled, like a huge graveyard, by the
dead; I do not frequent lectures, nor do I write letters to strangers
and occupy my time waiting for replies . Yet God is my witness-as
now you shall be, too-that I have written a great many letters in my
life. And nearly all of them were addressed to one and the same per–
son : Mendel Osipovich .
You, a connoisseur of his work (it is not my intention to point
out your biographical inaccuracies), have no need of lengthy ex–
planations; you will easily find your bearings.
In the poem with the puzzling title "Stellar Cannibalism"
(Vol. I, p. 42), the "meeting of two stars , two beings," is by no means
the "product of a close collaboration between preconscious and sub–
conscious activity," as Miss Nina Roth-Swanson would have it; it is
a poetic transposition of the electric shock that ran through Mendel
Osipovich's soul the moment our eyes met in the offices of
Russkie
Zapiski
(he had dropped in "accidentally and fatally") in Paris on a
gloomy November day in 1922. Likewise, M.O. did not, as the
aforementioned lady claims, "hymn his frustrations" in the emigre
poems ; he had always been what he himself called, though perhaps
not without a tinge of irony, a "poet of circumstance."
I was twenty-three at the time . ... But I do not matter, I do
not matter in the least. Let us return to Mendel Osipovich. In the
poem "Revelation," from the same cycle, the "cannibal stars" are
neither "subconscious fears connected with the poet's origins and
with exile" nor "the transposition of a nightmare ," and least of
all
"totems"; they are the simple fusion of two images . On the day we
met , Mendel Osipovich happened to have read an article in a
popular-science magazine about stellar cannibalism, the phenome–
non of double ,
extremely close
stars (whence the line "Stars that touch
foreheads and chins") which swallow each other in clouds of mist
