Venus in Furs
and condenses into figures, small gray-bearded kokolds that mockingly
point their finger at me. Chubby-cheeked cupids ride on the arms of my
chair and on my knees. I have to smile involuntarily, even laugh aloud,
as I am writing down my adventures. Yet I am not writing with ordinary
ink, but with red blood that drips from my heart. All its wounds long
scarred over have opened and it throbs and hurts, and now and then a
tear falls on the paper.
The days creep along sluggishly in the little Carpathian health-resort.
You see no one, and no one sees you. It is boring enough to write
idyls. I would have leisure here to supply a whole gallery of
paintings, furnish a theater with new pieces for an entire season, a
dozen virtuosos with concertos, trios, and duos, but—what am I
saying—the upshot of it all is that I don’t do much more than to
stretch the canvas, smooth the bow, line the scores. For I am—no false
modesty, Friend Severin; you can lie to others, but you don’t quite
succeed any longer in lying to yourself—I am nothing but a dilettante,
a dilettante in painting, in poetry, in music, and several other of the
so-called unprofitable arts, which, however, at present secure for
their masters the income of a cabinet minister, or even that of a minor
potentate. Above all else I am a dilettante in life.
Up to the present I have lived as I have painted and written poetry. I
never got far beyond the preparation, the plan, the first act, the
first stanza. There are people like that who begin everything, and
never finish anything. I am such a one.
But what am I saying?
To the business in hand.
I lie in my window, and the miserable little town, which fills me with
despondency, really seems infinitely full of poetry. How wonderful the
outlook upon the blue wall of high mountains interwoven with golden
sunlight; mountain-torrents weave through them like ribbons of silver!
How clear and blue the heavens into which snowcapped crags project; how
green and fresh the forested slopes; the meadows on which small herds
graze, down to the yellow billows of grain where reapers stand and bend
over and rise up again.
The house in which I live stands in a sort of park, or forest, or
wilderness, whatever one wants to call it, and is very solitary.
Its sole inhabitants are myself, a widow from Lemberg, and Madame
Tartakovska, who runs the house, a little old woman, who grows older
and smaller each day. There are also an old dog that limps on one leg,
and a young cat that continually plays with a ball of yarn. This ball
of yarn, I believe, belongs to the widow.
She is said to be really beautiful, this widow, still very young,
twenty-four at the most, and very rich. She dwells in the first story,
and I on the ground floor. She always keeps the green blinds drawn, and
has a balcony entirely overgrown with green climbing-plants. I for my
part down below have a comfortable, intimate arbor of honeysuckle, in
which I read and write and paint and sing like a bird among the twigs.
I can look up on the balcony. Sometimes I actually do so, and then from
time to time a white gown gleams between the dense green network.
Really the beautiful woman up there doesn’t interest me very much, for
I am in love with someone else, and terribly unhappy at that; far more
unhappy than the Knight of Toggenburg or the Chevalier in Manon
l’Escault, because the object of my adoration is of stone.
In the garden, in the tiny wilderness, there is a graceful little
meadow on which a couple of deer graze peacefully. On this meadow is a
stone statue of Venus, the original of which, I believe, is in
Florence. This Venus is the most beautiful woman I have ever seen in
all my life.
That, however, does not signify much, for I have seen few beautiful
women, or rather few women at all. In love too, I am a dilettante who
never got beyond the preparation, the first act.
But why talk in superlatives, as if something that is beautiful could
be surpassed?
It is sufficient to say that this Venus is beautiful. I love her
passionately with a morbid intensity; madly as one can only love a
woman who never responds to our love with anything but an eternally
uniform, eternally calm, stony smile. I literally adore her.
I often lie reading under the leafy covering of a young birch when the
sun broods over the forest. Often I visit that cold, cruel mistress of
mine by night and lie on my knees before her, with the face pressed
against the cold pedestal on which her feet rest, and my prayers go up
to her.
The rising moon, which just now is waning, produces an indescribable
effect. It seems to hover among the trees and submerges the meadow in
its gleam of silver. The goddess stands as if transfigured, and seems
to bathe in the soft moonlight.
Once when I was returning from my devotions by one of the walks leading
to the house, I suddenly saw a woman’s figure, white as stone, under
the illumination of the moon and separated from me merely by a screen
of trees. It seemed as if the beautiful woman of marble had taken pity
on me, become alive, and followed me. I was seized by a nameless fear,
my heart threatened to burst, and instead—
Well, I am a dilettante. As always, I broke down at the second stanza;
rather, on the contrary, I did not break down, but ran away as fast as
my legs would carry me.
* * * * *
What an accident! Through a Jew, dealing in photographs I secured a
picture of my ideal. It is a small reproduction of Titian’s “Venus with
the Mirror.” What a woman! I want to write a poem, but instead, I take
the reproduction, and write on it: _Venus in Furs_.
You are cold, while you yourself fan flames. By all means wrap yourself
in your despotic furs, there is no one to whom they are more
appropriate, cruel goddess of love and of beauty!—After a while I add a
few verses from Goethe, which I recently found in his paralipomena to
_Faust_.
TO AMOR
“The pair of wings a fiction are,
The arrows, they are naught but claws,
The wreath conceals the little horns,
For without any doubt he is
Like all the gods of ancient Greece
Only a devil in disguise.”
Then I put the picture before me on my table, supporting it with a
book, and looked at it.
I was enraptured and at the same time filled with a strange fear by the
cold coquetry with which this magnificent woman draped her charms in
her furs of dark sable; by the severity and hardness which lay in this
cold marble-like face. Again I took my pen in hand, and wrote the
following words:
“To love, to be loved, what happiness! And yet how the glamour of this
pales in comparison with the tormenting bliss of worshipping a woman
who makes a plaything out of us, of being the slave of a beautiful
tyrant who treads us pitilessly underfoot. Even Samson, the hero, the
giant, again put himself into the hands of Delilah, even after she had
betrayed him, and again she betrayed him, and the Philistines bound him
and put out his eyes which until the very end he kept fixed, drunken
with rage and love, upon the beautiful betrayer.”
I was breakfasting in my honey-suckle arbor, and reading in the Book of
Judith. I envied the hero Holofernes because of the regal woman who cut
off his head with a sword, and because of his beautiful sanguinary end.
“The almighty Lord hath struck him, and hath delivered him into the
hands of a woman.”
This sentence strangely impressed me.
How ungallant these Jews are, I thought. And their God might choose
more becoming expressions when he speaks of the fair sex.
“The almighty Lord hath struck him, and hath delivered him into the
hands of a woman,” I repeated to myself. What shall I do, so that He
may punish me?
Heaven preserve us! Here comes the housekeeper, who has again
diminished somewhat in size overnight. And up there among the green
twinings and garlandings the white gown gleams again. Is it Venus, or
the widow?
This time it happens to be the widow, for Madame Tartakovska makes a
courtesy, and asks me in her name for something to read. I run to my
room, and gather together a couple of volumes.
Later I remember that my picture of Venus is in one of them, and now it
and my effusions are in the hands of the white woman up there together.
What will she say?
I hear her laugh.
Is she laughing at me?
It is full moon. It is already peering over the tops of the low
hemlocks that fringe the park. A silvery exhalation fills the terrace,
the groups of trees, all the landscape, as far as the eye can reach; in
the distance it gradually fades away, like trembling waters.
I cannot resist. I feel a strange urge and call within me. I put on my
clothes again and go out into the garden.
Some power draws me toward the meadow, toward her, who is my divinity
and my beloved.
The night is cool. I feel a slight chill. The atmosphere is heavy with
the odor of flowers and of the forest. It intoxicates.
What solemnity! What music round about! A nightingale sobs. The stars
quiver very faintly in the pale-blue glamour. The meadow seems smooth,
like a mirror, like a covering of ice on a pond.
The statue of Venus stands out august and luminous.
But—what has happened? From the marble shoulders of the goddess a large
dark fur flows down to her heels. I stand dumbfounded and stare at her
in amazement; again an indescribable fear seizes hold of me and I take
flight.
I hasten my steps, and notice that I have missed the main path. As I am
about to turn aside into one of the green walks I see Venus sitting
before me on a stone bench, not the beautiful woman of marble, but the
goddess of love herself with warm blood and throbbing pulses. She has
actually come to life for me, like the statue that began to breathe for
her creator. Indeed, the miracle is only half completed. Her white hair
seems still to be of stone, and her white gown shimmers like moonlight,
or is it satin? From her shoulders the dark fur flows. But her lips are
already reddening and her cheeks begin to take color. Two diabolical
green rays out of her eyes fall upon me, and now she laughs.
Her laughter is very mysterious, very—I don’t know. It cannot be
described, it takes my breath away. I flee further, and after every few
steps I have to pause to take breath. The mocking laughter pursues me
through the dark leafy paths, across light open spaces, through the
thicket where only single moonbeams can pierce. I can no longer find my
way, I wander about utterly confused, with cold drops of perspiration
on the forehead.
Finally I stand still, and engage in a short monologue.
It runs—well—one is either very polite to one’s self or very rude.
I say to myself:
“Donkey!”
This word exercises a remarkable effect, like a magic formula, which
sets me free and makes me master of myself.
I am perfectly quiet in a moment.
With considerable pleasure I repeat: “Donkey!”
Now everything is perfectly clear and distinct before my eyes again.
There is the fountain, there the alley of box-wood, there the house
which I am slowly approaching.
Yet—suddenly the appearance is here again. Behind the green screen
through which the moonlight gleams so that it seems embroidered with
silver, I again see the white figure, the woman of stone whom I adore,
whom I fear and flee.
With a couple of leaps I am within the house and catch my breath and
reflect.
What am I really, a little dilettante or a great big donkey?
A sultry morning, the atmosphere is dead, heavily laden with odors, yet
stimulating. Again I am sitting in my honey-suckle arbor, reading in
the Odyssey about the beautiful witch who transformed her admirers into
beasts. A wonderful picture of antique love.
There is a soft rustling in the twigs and blades and the pages of my