Camera Eye

by BLAKE BUTLER

In the family’s handheld camcorder lens, the father began to find an eye — staring straight back on into him from the eyepiece, so that he could no longer see what was being filmed. The eye had a gold iris same as the father’s, a deep black pupil in endless hole, and yet the eye was no reflection, as when the father blinked the eye did not. This was a camera the father had used to record so many of the major events that made up his family’s life. He had recorded his son’s breech birth, cut from the mother’s body, and those early growing days and nights. Over time, on film, the child’s skin begins to lengthen slightly from one cassette and on. Most of these moments, very likely, the child would not in later years remember, without the presence of the tapes to play and replay through machines. And yet now, with the child more grown than ever, making each day new moments the father might preserve, there was the eye there staring at him, looking straight back into him, on and on. The father tried to tried to shake or wipe the image from the glass — standing cursing when first the eye appeared under a white sun watching his child run on a field of dying grass — and yet he soon found himself transfixed. The eye seemed to know a thing that he did not, a thing held in its watching. And yet the father continued to use the camera. He could not bring himself to ask the mother or the child to look into the lens and verify if indeed there were an eye encased inside there, staring at him. He found he thought about the eye at night, thought about it watching him in sleep. He sometimes felt the eye there in his head. The family’s tapes became unfocused, off-centered — as at the child’s fourth birthday the family had filmed, instead, unknowing then, straight on into the wall — an endless pure white shot of nothing while in the background the children sang — until in the late days, with the last tapes, the tapes that would be found buried in a small black box underneath the parents’ bed after the house burned, the son and mother’s found locked inside a tiny closet, blackened, all the hair scorched from their heads, the father found stark naked, cut up, runny, on the roof — the final weeks of films, those unrelentingly recorded hours, framed nothing there at all of name, aiming only ever at some section of the sky, or at a length of wall or some faceless color, hazy, fuzzing, while the uncentered action went on therein off screen, sounds of whining, aiming, eating, wanting, laughing, all underneath the panes of light, while behind the lens, the filming father spoke, using an old version of his native language, often choking, instructions from the eye.

Blake Butler is a writer living in Atlanta. He is the editor of HTMLGIANT and Lamination Colony. He twitters here. You can find more of his writing here. You can purchase Anatomy Courses, his collaboration with Sean Kilpatrick, here.

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Home From Home

by RACHEL SYKES

There is a small tavern in the city of Veliky Novgorod known as “Sinbad’s Cave.” The sign above the front door swings low from two brass hooks, spelling its name in faded, gold Cyrillic. Its doorway opens onto a pitch-black staircase, warm with the smell of cucumbers and damp - inside the walls are crowded with fishing nets, plastic crabs, murky portholes and an orange tree. Although the walls are unmistakably cave-like and drip in the manner of their namesake, they are made only of the dankest plastic.

Sinbad’s is neither a cave, nor even partially underground. It sells discount perogis and high percentage beer by ambiantly manufactured cave-light. Locally, it’s infamous for providing its clientele with lighting so low that you can’t tell the colour or form of the bar food. As a drinking experience, this means that it probably rates lower than consuming a can of gin and tonic in a snow drift. But for seven months, Sinbad’s was the high point of many of my days. From work, it was a last point of contact before I picked up a kilo of dates from the elderly woman on the corner of Main Street and returned to my tiny bed, two streets further, to listen to my host brother sing “Material Girl” through the walls.

Seven years after the fact, I get told off for talking about Russia. This must be to do with what I returned as. A mass of hair grown to two feet in length, wooden beads around my wrist and neck, a Discman full of ripped CDs of Russian ska, I had Novgorod written across my body and was not afraid to force it into the eye line of others. In the months after I left, all my thoughts turned towards it, my entire body feeling like its reboot might need several years to take hold. For my even more luckless friends, it was the break-up I never got over. I would lie on student futons and talk obliquely about my “soul” and the “Russian winter” spent in Sinbad’s Cave, until the memories of this place, which I had seized in a moment but crafted only in retrospect, were formed out of the desire to make myself an other.

I remained in daily contact with a friend I had met there. It became strange how, more often than not, we did not recall the excitement of our time together. We didn’t mention the adventures around a city where everyone noted our privilege, the drug dealers who wanted to date us, the strange trips to the middle of Russian nowhere. It was the mundanity that we wanted back. The elaborate and immensely boring routine which we had carved for ourselves in what had seemed like a parody of the western world. This, to us, was what became remarkable.

My friend was a seventeen year-old Australian girl, shipped with me to Novgorod by a ramshackle teaching organisation and instructed to teach the English we quite obviously misunderstood. We met on our first day as teachers and fell quickly into friendship, the two of us very much in love with our dissimilarities. As teenagers, we were still shaping ourselves out of the shadows of others. We loved each other, for the cold winter in which we both turned eighteen, because being so very different made us ambitious for ourselves. We were friends because we were obsessed with our hormones.

“It’s spring,” she would say, scanning the men as we crossed the melting snow towards Sinbad’s. “All the animals are mating.”

I looked at her and would often nod very sagely, pretending to be neither British nor sexually awkward. I wasn’t quite sure that what she was saying applied to me, but I did know that I wanted her to think it did.

The city wall in Veliky Novgorod

So for seven months we sat together in Sinbad’s, or in a better lit café called only “GRILL” that sold chicken covered in cat hair. On bad days, we ate the chicken. But on good days, we drank vodka with a glass of peach juice, listing one hundred Australian terms for vomit and conjugating Russian on the side. On one of these good days, whilst constructing a manifesto on oral sex, my friend began a list of what she was seeking in The One. Bullet by bullet, we wrote each point painstakingly in English then translated into Russian, in the back of my teaching book, a bright notepad whose cover dramatically recreated the bedtime routine of a family of Russian mice.

“A former drug addict,” she said with the pen poised at her mouth. “That’s obvious. Also, a drug dealer swagger, a B.O. problem, and a disgusting amount of back hair. And I mean, disgusting.”

The only thing I knew with that degree of certainty was that I wanted to go at least twenty-four hours without falling over on the ice. As it was, I couldn’t imagine myself an ideal. I could barely conceive of anything to settle for.

As a reality that I was more comfortable with, we described our friends at home in exquisite detail. Eventually, there were no parts of our lives that the other did not understand. We could give a full description of every best friend we’d claimed since kindergarten, every boy we’d brushed the hand of, every pop song that made us feel mind-numbingly understood, as only good pop songs could do. We might never have left home; we made sure every part of it followed us to that cat-lined café.

Slowly, together, we wrote intricate profiles of our fellow teaching assistants. Pages and pages in length, it seemed as though missing any detail of their fledgling personalities would mean that their memory escaped us forever. We denied them the privilege in which we luxuriated, defining their personalities with damning solidity. Tearing off every sticker from every bottle of beer we drank, making blood brother promises to spend our lives meeting in countries halfway between our antipodean homes until the ultimate goal might be achieved: a tour of the Eastern bloc in our twilight years.

There was no doubt that this was the point to which our future would always return. And we had to remember every part of it for when we eventually came back, together, fifty years in the future.

Church of the Saviour on Blood, St. Petersburg

One of our Russian friends, Yulia, wanted to follow us back home. Yulia was infamous amongst our friends for her love of aerobics. Her infamy spread for one simple reason; when she introduced herself to strangers she began by saying: “I love to shape my body.” Repeated explanations of her body’s morphic qualities meant that we referred to her only as “Shaping” for six months. She claimed not to care. When we suggested she should visit us in either Anglo pole of the world, she would respond with a sigh: “Quite frankly, girls, this is the only reason I am being friends with you.”

Shaping had a game she liked to play. In the middle of crowded bars, she would tear us each a square of her plain white notepad and distribute pieces between us. “Close your eyes,” she would say, “close them tightly.” Then, placing a pen in our hands, she would ask us to draw a room with no windows or doors, the colour of a brilliant white. “This,” she would whisper in our ears, “this is what heaven will be like.”

As a party trick, it wasn’t a lot of fun. But if we didn’t play along, she would go off to her shaping class in a puff of anger, upsetting chairs and beer cans as she left. The game would last for about fifteen minutes and by the time we surfaced out of our trance, all we could see were white lights and phobias of death. Shaping told us that the aim was to find the most important thing in our lives, to focus our energies on what we cared for the most. She claimed her white room had to be some form of gymnasium.

In the back of one of our notebooks, my Australian friend wrote to me: “Here’s to a lifetime of meeting half-way between us, until the time we enter a white room with no windows and no doors.”

Months after we left Russia for the final time, we struggled to see ourselves in our notebooks. By the end of our short time there, I had fallen in and out of love enough times to feel, firstly, less British, and secondly, changed in a deeply fundamental but ultimately inexplicable sense that no-one at home would ever be able to understand. Outwardly I might look the same: same skirts, same woolly hats, same discount t-shirts with “MAKE TEA. NOT WAR” written across them in inoffensive pastels. But still, my world had expanded, unfathomably. If I was sure of anything, I was 99% sure of this.

The full terror of that remaining 1% was enough to ensure that my friend and I wrote to each other every day. Back in Australia, she felt like she was waking up from a seven-month hangover. I had half-heartedly started at university. Bulbous packages, some actually shaped like kangaroos, turned up at my halls of residence, spilling coasters of every Australian city over my textbooks. I sent back ill-formed letters, attempting to delicately balance first-year philosophy with explicit sexual content. I interpreted, revisited, cut and paste sacred parts of my diaries and scrap books, adding photos, CDs, and, unbeatably, excerpts from the five tapes of the dictaphone I had religiously carried. I had recorded impulsively and without discrimination, leaving me with tape upon tape of appalling in-jokes, accordion music, and depressing speeches from our superiors, whose job of teaching English expanded far beyond our seven month holiday in Veliky Novgorod.

In October, the month I started university, I got an email with the following writ large in the subject box. “ELENA SERGEIVNA,” it read, “IS NOT HAVING AN ASSISTANT THIS YEAR.”

St. Sofia's cathedral, Novgorod

Starting universities on opposite ends of the planet, we were running at everyday life with all the gravitas of an astronaut returning from space. About my year abroad I was casual and always cool in conversation. We had lived through a Russian winter, I would say, what can the north of England do to me? I was in danger of becoming one of the people that university guides warn you about. Empty bottles of vodka lined my tiny room, Soviet matchbooks lit the cigarettes of strangers, and a miniature accordion sat on my kitchen table. Sometimes, as if struggling for affectation, I still carried the Dictaphone.

In October, two months out of our English teacher guise, my friend told me that our role as teaching assistant no longer existed.

Elena Sergeivna was an English teacher who had married young to a man in the Russian militia. She taught the humanities pathway in our school in Novgorod, where the high achievers of the top year, we were told, would develop a fine grasp of English in order to become an economist in either New York, or Leicester.

“We expected poets,” we complained, “We get economists.”

As Elena Sergeivna repeatedly told us, teachers in Russia earnt as much as doctors. But doctors earned the least in the country. The teachers who did the most work still needed second jobs and would frequently ask us if we knew of anyone who needed a cleaner. Elena had finally decided to get pregnant. Now in her early thirties she would loop the following phrase: “I am only here until pregnancy.” We mourned the fact that a woman both so young and so unmotherly could soon be with child. She had assumed that two fully grown women would not need looking after; we, in turn, gave her no pity.

After we left Novgorod, we never heard from Elena again. But three months later, word somehow reached Australia that our former jobs had been done away with.

“We’re obviously not good enough,” my friend suggested, before rattling off an anecdote about the time we ate two litres of soup, ordered in a Chinese restaurant because we knew neither the relevant Chinese, nor the relevant Russian.

In England, I continued to tease and provoke relationships with my ex-teachers in ways that extended their every relevance to my world. I made sure if I had to leave Russia that most of the Russia I knew would come with me. It was inconceivable that I could be anything but the weirdest personality that my closest Australian friend had helped to cultivate through seven months in Sinbad’s Cave.

When I went on dates, I would say I was passionate about dried fruit and pickled cabbage. “As long as the dried fruit has been stored in two metres of snow,” I would add glibly. “I like ska-punk. And I like to pluck my eyebrows.”

I was nineteen years old. And Elena Sergeivna never had an assistant again.

Rachel Sykes is a contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Nottingham. This is her first appearance in these pages. She tumbls here.

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Testament

by VINCENT SAN GUERE

Three of them, wrapped in a small covert and shivering from the cold. I yearned to find those hidden ones.

I am the last of the Vespuccis. There were siblings at one time, but they all perished in the war. One day I woke up and all my brothers and sisters were dead, and all I could feel was this unexpected sense of relief, that what I always knew would happen had finally occurred.

Diamonds, pearls and rubies. That is what I thought of, seeing their glittering heads emerge from the shower, shiny and new. Of the three, one took water and food almost immediately. The other two, what I now I believe are the males, would not trust me. I persuaded and tried to make my case but they stared at me through little eyes.

You have to socialize them. I read this in some jaundiced anthropological survey of bad habits when it comes to autochthons. To speak to them in anything other than a directive fashion is ultimately beneficial to neither of you.

My cat's name is Daniel Vespucci. He's a birman with the dark face typical of the variety and white otherwise. He has massive radiant ears, and his excretions are absolutely disgusting.

I spoke formally to the girl, since she seemed to be adapting the best, possibly because of different maturity cycle. The males eventually had to be sedated, and I had to argue to several concerned parties that they should be salvaged at all. They were, and gave themselves over much more readily than the girl.

Ha ha! Not in that fashion. They all three smelled worse than Daniel Vespucci, honestly. (I never chose a middle name for the beast; it seemed overly presumptuous.) The boys spoke some pidgin, made great use of their hands. The girl learned more quickly at first. As I said, I spoke formally to her.

I said, "Maybe you know who put you here."

"Yes," she gasped.

"Tell me then," I said (this was not the first time I had uttered these words), "and spare no guilty party."

"I see, I see," she murmured, her face whiter than Daniel Vespucci's tail. I spoke of various personality types. I told her that to decide to obey was a very charged decision. She should think it over and get back to me if she did not accept completely.

In her cabin I found a little diary. It gave me a start, and I thought I was prepared for it. She had some kind of pre-rescue relationship with one of the boys; he considered it incest but she did not.

I fed her exclusively: carrots, lettuce, a nutritious grey paste. Initially on a whim, I served her artificial protein, frozen on sticks. She loved those skewers. I gathered women had not been permitted meat in her last biome.

The boys would not eat the sticks unless cajoled, and they hid other food. After some heady research I presented them both with Daniel Vespucci's so-called offspring - to nurture, not to digest. They had taken to the cat more than the girl did, and they loved those little kittens, I'm telling you.

The two kittens could be distinguished primarily by their coloration. The darker of the two was far wilder, and enjoyed jumping on the girl's bed, tearing pages out of her diary and eating them like delicacies. I came upon her some days after the males had received their pets, pen to paper, her awkward digits gripping the implement like a staff. When I asked her what she was doing, she said, "I'm telling that kitten to stay away."

Much, much later, she asked if I ever thought of keeping a diary. I told her I had not.

All three of them, after making a kind of bizarre offering to what they perceived I enjoyed, told me they desired to assume my last name. Wasn't I their father?

I explained that really, they did not belong to anyone. If they wished to take my name, then they certainly could. I would not object.

Vincent San Guere is a writer living in Vancouver. Testament is an excerpt from his novel-in-progress.

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My Only Advice

In every relationship, romantic or otherwise, one of the two people feels slightly closer to the other, if only by a matter of degrees. So it was with Gustave Flaubert and his hypochrondriac, flaky friend Ivan Turgenev. These two barnacles met when Flaubert was 40 and Turgenev was three years older. From the tenor of their conversations, which Flaubert seemed to treasure above all else, we can deduce that their spirits remained substantially youthful. Flaubert's self-professed love of literature was so all-encompassing it almost crowded out other parts of himself; Turgenev shared his friend's basic interest but saw the underlying reality for what it was. (Turgenev called his friend, "the only man in existence really devoted to literature.")

Turgenev would visit Flaubert at his retreat in Croisset in the summer, or in Paris during the winter season. Many of the hours they passed together consisted of Flaubert reading his novels or plays aloud, a difficult task even for one of his most central admirers. The written correspondence between the two in the 1860s leaves the mortal plane behind; it can be classified as the first bubbles of modernity to enter the universe.

March 1863

My dear Turgenev,

Your letter was most kind and you are too modest. For I have just read your latest book. I found your essential qualities in it, and more intense, more rarified than ever.

What I admire above all is the distinguished quality of your art — a wonderful thing. You manage to ring true yet avoid banality, to be sentimental without morbidity, and comic without being at all low. Without looking for high drama, you achieve it none the less by the sheer professionalism of your tragic effects. You seem very casual, but you have great skill, 'the skin of the fox combined with that of the lion', as Montaigne said.

Elena's is a fine story. I like this character, as well as Shubin and all the others. While reading you one says to oneself 'I've experienced that'. Thus I believe that page 51 will be felt with greater intensity by no one than by me. What a psychologist! But I'd need many lines to express all my thoughts on that.

As for your First Love, I understand it all the better for its being the story of one of my closest friends. All old romantics (and I who slept with a dagger under my pillow am one) should be grateful to you for this little story that has so much to say about their youth! What a real live girl Zinochka is.

The creation of women is one of your strong points. They are both ideal and real. They have the attraction of saintliness. But what dominates this work, indeed the whole collection, is the two lines: "I had no bad feelings towards my father. On the contrary he had, so to speak, increased in stature in my eyes." That strikes me as being startlingly profound. Will people pick it up? I don't know. But for me, it is sublime.

Yes, dear colleague, I hope that our relationship will not stand still, and that our mutual sympathy will tum into friendship.

In the meantime, one thousand handshakes from your

Gustave Flaubert

April 1863

My dear colleague,

I don't need, I hope, to tell you how much pleasure your second letter gave me — and more than pleasure! If I didn't reply straightaway, it was because I had to extricate myself from a host of disagreeable little matters that made me ill-humoured and lazy at the same time. These miseries continue, but my conscience will not permit me to delay any longer. I have been counting, and still do, on your indulgence — and above all I want to thank you and shake you by the hand.

I am very glad to have your approval and you should be convinced of it: I well know that an artist and man of goodwill such as yourself reads a host of things between the lines of a book, for which he generously appreciates the author's effort: but it doesn't make any difference. Praise coming from you is worth gold — and I pocket it with pride and gratitude.

Shall we not see each other during the summer? An hour of good, frank conversation is worth a hundred letters. I'm leaving Paris in a week's time to go and settle in Baden. Will you not come there? There are trees there such as I've seen nowhere else — and right on the tops of the mountains. The atmosphere is young and vigorous and it's poetic and gracious at the same time. It does a power of good to your eyes and to your soul. When you sit at the foot of one of these giants, it seems as if you take in some of its sap - and it's good and beneficial. Really, come to Baden, even if it were only for a few days. You will take away with you some wonderful colours for your palette.

Before I leave, you will receive a book by me which has just been published. I am cramming you full — but you are partly to blame.

A thousand friendly greetings, keep well, work well, and come to Baden.

Yours

I. Turgenev

Turgenev,

Cram me full then, dear colleague! I await your book impatiently and I shall read it with delight, I am sure.

I also have had a number of little aggravations just lately. The affinity between us is complete, you see.

I don't think I shall be able to go to Baden, because I shall have several obligations that will disturb my routine this summer. When will you be back? And send me your address.

I shall spend the whole of June or the whole of August in Paris. In any case, we shall see each other next winter.

A thousand very long and very vigorous handshakes from your

Gustave Flaubert

May 1868

My dear friend,

I'm very grateful to you for thinking of writing to me. Your letter gave me much pleasure — for it re-established relations between us and because it showed that you liked my book.

These days every single artist has something of the critic in him.

The artist is very great in you — and you know how much I love and admire it; but I also have a high opinion of the critic and I am very happy to have his approval. I well know that your friendship for me counts for something in all this: but I have the feeling that a master has stood in front of my picture, has looked at it and has nodded his head with an air of satisfaction. Well, I'll say again that this has given me great pleasure.

I was very sorry not to have seen you in Paris — I only stayed there three days, and I regret even more that you are not coming to Baden this year. Your novel has you in harness — that's good — I await it with the greatest impatience — but could you not take a few days rest, to the profit of your friends here? Since the first time I saw you (you know, in a sort of inn on the other bank of the Seine) I have felt a great liking for you — there are few men, particularly French men, with whom I feel so relaxed and at ease and yet at the same time so stimulated. It seems to me that I could talk to you for weeks on end, but then we are a pair of moles burrowing away in the same direction.

All this means that I should be very glad to see you. I'm leaving for Russia in a fortnight's time, but I shan't stay there long, and I shall be back by the end of July — and I shall go to Paris to see my daughter who will probably have made me a grandfather by then. I shall be game enough to come and chase after you even at home — if you are there. Or will you come to Paris? But I must see you.

In the meantime I wish you good fortune. The living, human truth that you pursue indefatigably can only be captured on good days. You have had some - you will have more — and many of them.

Keep well; I also embrace you — and with true friendship.

I. Turgenev

July 1868

My dear Turgenev,

This is simply to remind you of your promise. You were supposed to be in Paris at the end of July or the beginning of August. As for me, I am here, and I await you.

So as to avoid your making unnecessary arrangements, here is my programme: from 30 July (next Thursday) until August I shall be at Saint-Gratien at the Princess Mathilde's. Then I shall return to Paris for two days. I shall then spend another two days at Dieppe at one of my nieces. Then I shall return to Croisset, to get on with my book.

We must spend a few good hours together.

I embrace you wishing you cooler weather than we're having in Paris, and I remain yours

G. Flaubert

August 1868

My dear friend,

I have waited until now to reply to your kind little note, because Iwas still hoping to be able to announce my arrival; but my devilish gout is obstinately refusing to leave me, and I cannot yet contemplate any kind of long journey. It's annoying — but what can I do about it? I shall come as soon as I can; and in the meantime I embrace you and beg you to present my respects to your mother, whom I shall be very happy to meet.

Work hard in the meantime.

I. Turgenev

November 1868

My dear friend,

The cheese has just arrived; I shall take it to Baden with me, and with every mouthful we shall think of Croisset and of the delightful day I spent there. Decidedly I feel that there is a real affinity between the two of us.

If all of your novel is as good as the extracts you read to me, you will have written a masterpiece, I'm telling you.

I don't know if you've read the book I'm sending you; in any case, put it on one of the shelves of your library. 

Present my respects to your mother — and let me embrace you.

Your

I. Turgenev

P. S. My address is: Carlsruhe, poste restante. It would be very kind if you were to send me a photograph of yourself. Here is one of me that looks very forbidding.

P.P.S. Find another title. Sentimental Education is wrong.

January 1869

But I must have news of you, my dear friend. Let's see now — in two words: where are you — and how is the novel going? I am writing to you at Croisset, and perhaps you are in Paris, sniffing out what's new.

In any case, I don't think you'll stay there long.

I have not yet thanked you for the photograph, which makes you look very military and well groomed — but it's you all right — and it's always good to look at it. Why don't you have some good ones taken?

I have often thought of Croisset, and I think to myself that it's a nest to fledge songbirds in. As for me, I have done almost nothing. I have embarked on a task that I find repugnant and I am floundering about sadly in it. There's no going back, but when it's finished, I shall give a great sigh of relief! It's a sort of anthology of literary reminiscences that I promised my publisher; I have never worked in that field and it's not at all amusing. Oh! Two hours of being Sainte-Beuve! I'd like to know if he enjoys it very much.

My best greetings to your honourable mother, who seems to me the best possible of mamas one could imagine, and a good vigorous handshake to you.

Your

I. Turgenev

P. S. I am here for the whole winter because my friends the Viardotl are here. It's not very gay, Carlsruhe, but it's better than its reputation. I shall come to Paris towards the end of March.

My dear friend,

Yes, people have certainly been unfair to you, but this is the time to brace yourself and hurl a masterpiece at the reading public. Your Anthony could be such a projectile. Don't tarry too long over it, that's my refrain. Don't forget that people judge you according to the standards that you yourself have established, and you're bearing the weight of your past. You have energy; el hombre debe ser feroz as the Spanish proverb says — and artists especially. Even if your book has only gripped a dozen people of any worth — then that is enough. You understand I'm saying all this not to console you, but to spur you on.

I have been here for about ten days — and my sole preoccupation is keeping warm. The houses are badly built here, and the iron stoves are useless. You'll see a very little thing by me in the March edition of the Revue des 2 Mondes. It's nothing very much. I'm working on something more 'solid', that is, I'm getting ready to work.

I shall go to Paris before returning to Russia; that will be towards the end of April. I shall stay a good ten days — we shall see each other often.

If you see Mme Sand, give her my regards. Greetings to Du Camp and the Husson family.

I embrace you and wish you courage! You are Flaubert after all.

Your I.T.

April 1870

I was very sorry to hear in your last letter that we shan't see each other this summer, my dear friend. I had counted on a good chance to let myself go with you, before your departure for Russia. But how difficult everything in this life is!

The great sadness I've had this winter has been the death of my closest friend after Bouilhet, a good lad called Jules Duplan who was devoted to me. These two deaths, coming one on top of the other, have overwhelmed me. Add to that the pitiful state of two other friends (not such close friends, it's true, but none the less they were part of my immediate circle). I'm referring to Feydeau's paralysis and the madness of Jules de Goncourt. The loss of Sainte-Beuve, money worries, my novel's lack of success etc., etc. even down to my manservant's rheumatism (the one who looks like Lassouche), everything, as you can see, has conspired to aggravate me. And to do so to no mean extent.

I can easily say that the only good thing to happen to me for a long time was your last visit, which was too short. Why do we live so far away from one another? You are (I think) the only man I enjoy talking to. I can't see that anybody else bothers about art and poetry! The plebiscite, socialism, the International and other such garbage are cluttering up everybody's brains.

I fear I shan't be able to accept your invitation this summer. Here's why. In four or five days' time I shall return to Croisset, where I'm going to write the preface to the volume of Bouilhet's verse straightaway. It will take me two or three months — after which, I shall tackle St Anthony which will be interrupted in October by the rehearsals for Aisse. They will rob me of a good two months. So between now and next New Year I shall have barely six weeks to devote to the good hermit. I would like to spend not more than two years on that fellow. So you see how pressed for time I am. I must get on with that work, as quickly as possible, as I'm already starting to feel I've had enough of it. I have consumed too many books, one on top of the other — but it was in order to make myself numb to my personal sorrows.

Send me your news when you're at home in Russia — and think of me often, because I often think of you, and I embrace you, ex imo

G. Flaubert

My mother was, as they say, very touched by your kind regards.

"Tic Tac Tic" - Elli et Jacno (mp3)

"Bien Plus Fort" - Elli et Jacno (mp3)