From "Letters to Ukraine"

II

This is the capital. It is way too crowdedand not green enough for plants or botanists.This city is so like a ship (or a shipwreck?)and not much of an arc, more like the Titanic.

There isn't air enough for these crowds.As everywhere most are fools or losers.Everyone turned away from the gates of heavenhas the right to ashes and a place in an urn.

I must have written that I wear overalls.I have also learned the word "bespeaking,"learned to drink kvas, gauge the alma populi,and grow purplish blue from constant drinking.

I've learned to play cards, drink chyfeer(tea essence) and play rock until morning, sip rubbing alcohol, judge hangovers, brushthe tops of my shoes on the bottoms of curtains,

and keep my soul in an ill-treated body,distinguish by taste local cigarette factories,¹learned to swear by god, and reach for nothing,spit at the ceiling like decadent royalty.

I've learned to view trees as occasions for lynching,a convenience embodied in every seed.I am closer than ever to knowing the people.Please. Show this letter to all in Ukraine.

III

About the girls. They are not so much youthfulas shrewd—they could outscrew Casanova.²Junio is when they come into bloom—or June, I'm sorry, I'm forgetting Ukrainian.Their public behavior is often vulgar,they cling to guys like boulevard-walkers.True, they dress nicely, with a certain élan—those clothes were chic in Europe last autumn.About their beauty. The sensibilitiesof temptation. On average they are familiarwith a dozen tricks, all of which, I must say, we regard at home as quite inadequate.You will see for yourself—we'll go when you visiton a tour of brothels and similar places.Only you must first master English or Yiddish—locals aren't worth to them more than a penny.

Ukrainian girls are more southern, picturesque.Their nails and eyelashes are equally fiery.They are all cherry-eyed,³ all pure and virtuous—even whores are honest at selling and buying.I can't say I had wilted completely without them,I drive them through my dreams like a shepherd . . .Their wrists are bruised with the marks of yasyr,⁴only soldiers and Tatars want them in marriage.⁵

VII

There's another way out—to go into sciencelike a prophet to the masses. Go shuffle booksand if you don't have a bitch at hand,that is, a girl that has got you hooked,

and if your spiritual axis is hardened,and your magic root is full of ability,there is a chance for a flow of discovery,observations, impressions, and a mutability

of your thoughts from stupid to wise.Everything depends on your concentration.This enslavement to knowledge, like manna from the skies,must be taken without the least reservation.

For example, I learned what poems are.They are not wounds of words with humid aromas,not the rhythms of dreams, as some would have it,nor the field of battle with the Unicorn,⁶

but the prayers to Someone, Whom you do not trustand that's why the words must be honest, but boring.Poems are gifts you bring to the godswho have long ago despised such offerings.

I have also learned that one must in timerecognize the devil, his crooked grimace.For contacts with him they'll break your ribsbut you cannot hide from him anywhere here.

VIII

I am revelling here like a constant hard-on,in the culture of womanly sighs and sobs.It's like being without a tux in a roomoccupied by a throng of luxurious snobs,

emigrés from down there, from Little Russia,⁷a place remembered here mostly from jokes.They're treated commonly like aboriginesof the Barents Land, that is—like idiots.⁸

But even among them there are weighty personaswho advance with wit and proper manners:Feofan Prokopovich...