You arrived with startling and terrible news, having decided to inform me of it immediately, audaciously, and forthrightly, banking on my staunch inner resolve, yet showing both pity and compassion for me all the same:
‘I’m afraid you’ll find what I have to say rather distressing. Sergei Nikolaevich will be arriving in a few days’ time.’
You were mistaken somewhat in your estimation of my fortitude—first, I had to deceive myself, placate myself with the contrivances that Sergei N. would be staying only for a short while, that I should simply have to endure these few weeks, that I am patient, am used to and capable of waiting, that I shall see out his brief visit, and that it shall all be quite tolerable. You see, I never in fact doubted that Sergei N. would wind up in Paris sooner or later. After his much vaunted contract in America, he is free to go wherever he pleases during the months when he is not filming—every city outside of Russia lies open to him, and outside of Russia he has only you. Neither can he have forgotten that ‘princely’ gift of his, the one presented to you on the eve of your departure from Berlin: with this, with his interminable goodliness, with this easy life—the one that he has, essentially, bestowed on you—he has, in the finest sense of the word, bound you to him for ever, and, however noble, altruistic and generous he may be, he shall one day (again, in the finest sense of the word) want to see his beneficence incarnate, and to ‘reap the fruits’ of it quietly, discreetly, deservedly. Perhaps he is the only thing that stands between us. Which is by no means to say that I am troubled by Sergei N.’s lavishing of such favour on you—indeed, I accustomed myself to this fact long ago—and I am well aware that you are not dependent on him in perpetuity—no, he came to your aid once, and, ever since, you have needed neither him (although, granted, only because of him) nor anybody else for that matter, but if, now and then, I permit myself to entertain what may be termed ‘wild fantasies’—to wit, those of the vast sums of money that I shall make some day, of repaying your ‘debt’ to Sergei Nikolaevich, of buying you out of bondage, of redeeming you, of all those untold miraculous consequences that such an impossible redemption would entail—it simply means that all this has touched me deeply, that it haunts me still, that I alone have acclimatised myself to the impossibility of a favourable outcome. You, with your constant willingness to be moved (for all that you may deny it), with your innate and ever-present sense of gratitude, cannot but consider yourself beholden to Sergei N., and you even seem honour-bound at times to punctuate your gratitude to him, practically bowing and scraping, for all that you must find it a burden to be obliged to someone for ever—as would any strong, innately self-reliant individual, let alone one who cares nothing for her benefactor, who, despite herself, casts about for some trifle ‘to spoil everything’, to invalidate, insultingly and unjustly, everything that he has done for you. It often strikes me that my advantage over Sergei N.—or one of them, at any rate—is that you are in no way beholden to me, that I have done nothing for you in any material sense. Queer, that: it is the very reason that you are so good to me (comparatively speaking), whereas I am left with the rambling, irrepressible need to make some grand gesture, to help you in some significant way, to be touched by my own rendering of this assistance and to revel in it. How plain it is to see that no matter how well you know, no matter how impeccably you recall all the ‘rules of thumb’, you cannot always apply them to yourself, and so, taking yourself as the exception that allegedly proves the rule, you end up trying to convince yourself that human perfection is possible. Hence do I, in my desire to make you happy, forget the entire, almost inevitable incongruity between the naïve expectations of the benefactor who smugly relishes the anticipated ‘selfless devotion’, and the customary resentment of the person whom he has helped and whom he has alienated with none other than these very expectations. But then, so readily do we try to prove our own impartiality by anybody else’s example, that we are prepared to apply even the most ruthless rules of thumb to it: thus, when you speak about Sergei N., I do not trust your ‘official’ gratitude (which is so unlike you) or indeed those empty stock phrases you use, as you did today—‘Whatever should I do without him?’ ‘What a fine specimen of a man he is!’ ‘He uplifted me not only materially, but also spiritually.’ You are wise enough and shrewd enough to imagine my indignation at such flagrantly insincere praise and enthusiasm, albeit ‘official’—after all, in your perfectly lovely hours and days you never think to mention Sergei N., but then no sooner do you weary of me than you automatically slip him into the conversation, and if ever—although this happens less and less frequently these days—you and I should quarrel openly and not care to make amends, then you (again automatically, hastening to contrast me with this other source of support) will begin to talk about Sergei N., not out of any sense of obligation to him, but with a sudden shudder of exaltation, with a hint of heartfelt and even loving tenderness.
It feels strange to think about Sergei N.’s new gestalt, how irrevocably my sweet, psychological submission to him, my imaginary union with him in both rivalry and friendship, have been displaced. After all, unaware and unattainable, he once acted as my guide on account of his ability to achieve whatever he set out to do—with you, in art, in life. Now he has lost every advantage he once had over me (save perhaps one: money)—he has without question ‘sold out’, albeit partly for your sake, and has, as it were, diminished himself of necessity (I write as I find, with a simple and merciless candour, and I will not embellish anything, nor shall I make excuses owing to any chivalrous sentiment felt towards a rival or a foe), yet the most vital, and for me the most conclusive, change is that it is I (and not he) who am with you, that it is I who read his dreary missives, that he is the one who has long stopped trying, stopped making the effort, that it is with you that he has been a failure, pathetic, and weak. I dare say that we shall each of us find within ourselves, if we are lucky, a kind of self-assurance, 18 a victoriousness, a ‘swinishness’, a certain disdain for the luckless and the vanquished, and perhaps this oblivious sense of indifference that I now feel for Sergei N., the one that has taken hold of me gradually, can be explained not only by his absence, but also by his long lack of success with you. All the same, had he been closer to you than I, I should have remembered him quite differently, and then his ex-romantic, ex-adversarial significance would have been cast in an altogether different light.
We find it easier and less painful somehow when our happy rival is a decent sort, a man of quality, for otherwise our jealousy will be compounded by a sense of injustice, nagging thoughts of poor decisions, and the dismay that a woman who once seemed incomparably worthy to us could have been so wrong and chosen so unwisely. If, on the other hand, the unhappy rival is indeed a decent sort, as I now find with Sergei N., and there can be no question of disdainfully, ‘swinishly’ disregarding him, then a certain dissatisfaction with oneself can manifest, a nagging discontent, a conviction that this opponent could have played his hand better, along with a pernicious, unrelenting, wanton sense of antagonism towards him. Meanwhile, it is with you—because I love you so rapturously and, moreover, because in this love I love you even more than I love myself—that I have this immense, exigent need for my own unique, inimitable, sublime sense of decency, and the first sign of such exigency in me is a stoic contempt for my own comfort and needs: I can go without food and sleep, rise at any hour, leave right in the middle of lunch, make do without money, entertainment, even friends. I have this ‘fanatical’ notion—much like a zealot, a patriot, a revolutionary—to make unto you a sacrifice of anything you desire, to steel 19 myself unsparingly, and, as I ‘cultivate’ this notion, Sergei N. forever stands in my way, somehow full of reproof: after all, the circumstances are such that I have made no sacrifice, that I, as it were, exaggerate and ‘get off lightly’, whereas he is backed up by something essential and important, something that cheapens my future sacrifice, my sense of decency, all my petty, ascetic victories over myself, just as those countless acts of gallantry and deaths on the front lines cheapen the labour of those who, for whatever reason, find themselves held up in the rear. More importantly, his ‘ministrations’ and mine are much too alike in every respect: just imagine how tedious it must be when somebody smiles every bit as radiantly and encouragingly at the woman you love, brings her books or sends her flowers, listens to her with every ounce of understanding that you do—how much more tedious and unbearable it must be, then, when this fatally fatuous coincidence of trivia is caused by the kinship of those feelings themselves, by the commonality of their goal, their basic principle, their spiritual disposition, by everything that renders one love and the next—little more than odd, senseless emotions—twins (one of nature’s immortal jokes—a rarer one, true, but on the receiving end of which I nevertheless find myself). It may well be harder on us and more onerous if the intentions and actions of a rival are somehow baser than our own (and any other intention will surely seem baser to us), if the rival seems ‘predatory’, ‘egotistical’, a man incapable of sacrifice—how easy it is then to give free rein to injury, resentment, jealousy, the yearning for justice, which fortifies us so; it is easy and natural then to struggle, and, in so doing, we accept our defeat and these cruellest torments without losing our sense of dignity, still hoping all the while for a reversal of fortune or an end to 20 them. But if a rival sets his sights on the same thing as I do, and if the woman for whom we are fighting reveals in us, not without some private ridicule, a uniformity in both our aspirations and means, then it is as if the object of my affections and even my whole—admittedly, unavoidably circumstantial—sense of enamourment has been stolen away from me, as if nothing of myself remains in love, and I cannot fathom why she should prefer me, when I myself cannot endorse such unmerited favour. Where Sergei N. and I are concerned, this grievous indistinguishability of the two relationships, of the two separate sets of emotions, developed long ago, and the only thing that has saved me is his continued absence, the fact that I have not seen the two of you together with my own eyes, that I have, until now, thought about him so rarely, so disparagingly and unrealistically, and if from time to time I ever did think of him, and if I ever then inadvertently compared myself to him, I would feel ashamed of my good fortune, of your rapturous estimation of my decency, that same decency which, touched and grateful, you return to me in kind. But now, inevitably, the illusion that my devoted, self-sacrificing sentiments are unique needs must be shattered: I shall see Sergei N. by your side, and he will be the mirror image of me, and then no cowardly, reassuring thoughts will help me—that it is only temporary, for a week, for a month or two: do not believe such false, cheering thoughts, my dear—the dark hours, the dearth of good ones, our sorrow at their passing, our pain, none of these will ever end or disappear, and their countless vestiges (as well as those of parting, happiness, intimacy, nights of ecstasy, unconditional goodwill and mutual understanding) are essentially what makes us who we are, and we should surely—for the sake of 21 our human dignity—strive for victory, and, in victory, for redemptive generosity. And so, perfectly conscious of all the fatal irreparability of Sergei N.’s visit, of all my dejection at the prospect of his arrival here for a brief spell, I immediately set about pinning my much too compliant hopes on this meagre and flimsy ‘brief spell’, yet out of pride, out of courage (or rather, aping you in both pride and courage, attempting to take exactly what you would consider to be the most dignified course of action), I set aside my natural impatience to question you about Sergei N., changed the topic of conversation to my pre-arranged meeting with Shura and Rita in some café—but then, somehow weakened by fear, with a sense of finality and that inevitable empty indifference that precedes the end, trying in vain not to betray myself with the tremor in my voice, with the pointedness, the non-sequitur of my momentarily delayed question, I asked timidly and feebly (and at the same time in mock jest):
‘Tell me, Lyolya, votre ami, will he be staying in Paris for long?’
‘For quite some time, I’m afraid…’
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From Happiness by Yuri Felsen, translated by Bryan Karetnyk. Used with permission of the publisher, Prototype Publishing. Translation Copyright © 2026 by Bryan Karetnyk.
