Venus in Furs Read online

  “You taught me what love is. Your cheerful divine service made me forget two thousand years.”

  “And how incomparably faithful I was to you!”

  “Well, as for being faithful—”

  “Ungrateful wretch!”

  “I won’t reproach you. You may be a godly woman, but you’re a woman all the same, and when it comes to love you are as cruel as any woman.”

  “What you call ‘cruel,’” the Goddess of Love vividly retorted, “is precisely the element of sensuality and cheerful love—which is a woman’s nature. She must give herself to whatever or whomever she loves and must love anything that pleases her.”

  “Is there any greater cruelty for the lover than the beloved woman’s infidelity?”

  “Ah,” she countered, “we are faithful as long as we love, but you men demand that women be faithful without love and give ourselves without joy. Who is the cruel one here? The woman or the man? On the whole, you northerners take love too earnestly, too seriously. You talk about duties, when all that should count is pleasure.”

  “Yes, Madam, but then we have very respectable and virtuous emotions and lasting relationships.”

  “And yet,” Madam broke in, “that eternally restless, eternally unquenched desire for naked paganism, that love that is the supreme joy, that is divine serenity itself—those things are useless for you moderns, you children of reflection. That sort of love wreaks havoc on you. As soon as you wish to be natural you become common. To you Nature seems hostile, you have turned us laughing Greek deities into demons and me into a devil. All you can do is exorcise me and curse me or else sacrifice yourselves, slaughter yourselves in bacchanalian madness at my altar. And if any of you ever has the courage to kiss my red lips, he then goes on a pilgrimage to Rome, barefoot and in a penitent’s shirt, and expects flowers to blossom from his withered staff,1 while roses, violets, and myrtles sprout constantly under my feet—but their fragrance doesn’t agree with you. So just stay in your northern fog and Christian incense. Let us pagans rest under the rubble, under the lava. Do not dig us up. Pompeii, our villas, our baths, our temples were not built for you people! You need no gods! We freeze in your world!” The beautiful marble lady coughed and drew the dark sable pelts more snugly around her shoulders.

  “Thank you for the lesson in classical civilization,” I replied. “But you cannot deny that in your serene and sunny world man and woman are natural-born enemies as much as in our foggy world. You cannot deny that love lasts for only a brief moment, uniting two beings as a single being that is capable of only one thought, one sensation, one will—only to drive these two persons even further apart. And then—you know this better than I—the person who doesn’t know how to subjugate will all too quickly feel the other’s foot on the nape of his neck—”

  “And as a rule it is the man who feels the woman’s foot,” cried Madam Venus with exuberant scorn, “which you, in turn, know better than I.”

  “Of course, and that is precisely why I have no illusions.”

  “You mean you are now my slave without illusions, so that I can trample you ruthlessly!”

  “Madam!”

  “Don’t you know me by now? Yes, I am cruel—since you take so much pleasure in that word—and am I not entitled to be cruel? Man desires, woman is desired. That is woman’s entire but decisive advantage. Nature has put man at woman’s mercy through his passion, and woman is misguided if she fails to make him her subject, her slave, no, her toy and ultimately fails to laugh and betray him.”

  “Your principles, dear Madam—” I indignantly broke in.

  “—Are based on thousands of years of experience,” she sarcastically retorted, her white fingers playing in the dark fur. “The more devoted the woman is, the more quickly the man sobers up and becomes domineering. But the crueler and more faithless she is, the more she mistreats him, indeed the more wantonly she plays with him, the less pity she shows him, the more she arouses the man’s lascivious yearning to be loved and worshiped by the woman. It’s always been like that in all times, from Helen and Delilah to Catherine the Great and Lola Montez.”

  “I cannot deny,” I said, “that nothing excites a man more than the sight of a beautiful, voluptuous, and cruel female despot who capriciously changes her favorites, reckless and rollicking—”

  “And wears a fur to boot!” cried the Goddess.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m familiar with your predilection.”

  “But you know,” I broke in, “you’ve grown very coquettish since last we met.”

  “How so, if I may ask?”

  “In that nothing brings out your white body more splendidly that those dark furs, and you—”

  The Goddess laughed.

  “You’re dreaming,” she exclaimed, “wake up!” And her marble hand grabbed my arm. “Wake up!” her voice rang firmly.

  I laboriously opened my eyes.

  I saw the hand that was shaking me, but this hand was suddenly as brown as bronze, and the voice was the heavy whiskey voice of my Cossack, who was standing before me at his full height of almost six feet.

  “C’mon, get up,” the valiant man went on, “it’s a cryin’ shame.”

  “And why a shame?”

  “A shame to fall asleep fully dressed, and while readin’ a book at that!” He snuffed the guttered candles and picked up the volume that had slipped from my hand. “A book by—” He opened it: “By Hegel.2 C’mon! It’s high time we drove over to Herr Severin—he’s expectin’ us for tea.”

  “A strange dream,” said Severin when I was done. He propped his arms on his knees, his face on his finely and delicately veined hands, and was lost in thought.

  I knew that he would sit motionless for a long time, scarcely breathing, and such was the case. But for me there was nothing peculiar about his behavior: having been close friends with him for almost three years now, I was accustomed to all his eccentricities. And eccentric he was—there is no denying it—though he was far from being the dangerous fool that he was regarded as not just by his neighbors but throughout the district of Kolomea. I found his personality not only interesting but (and that was why many people also considered me a bit crazy) extremely likable.

  For a Galician3 nobleman and landowner and for a man of his age (he was barely over thirty), he displayed a conspicuous sobriety, a certain earnestness, even pedantry. He lived according to a minutely implemented, half-philosophical, half-practical system, virtually by the clock, and not only that, but also by the thermometer, barometer, aerometer, hydrometer, by Hippocrates, Hufeland, Plato, Kant, Knigge, and Lord Chesterfield. Yet at times he suffered vehement fits of passion and acted as if he were about to smash his head through the wall. At such moments everyone preferred to keep out of his way.

  As if making up for his silence, the flames in the fireplace sang, the big and venerable samovar sang, and the grandfather chair sang as I rocked to and fro, smoking my cigar; and the cricket in the old wall sang too, and my eyes swept over the outlandish implements, the animal skeletons, the stuffed birds, the globes, the plaster casts that had accumulated in Severin’s room. My eyes then happened to linger on a painting that I had seen often enough; yet today, in the red glow of the fire, it had an indescribable impact on me.

  It was a large oil painting in the intense colors and robust manner of the Belgian school; its subject was odd enough. A beautiful woman, with a sunny smile on her fine face, with rich, classically knotted hair covered with white powder like a soft frost: naked in a dark fur, she reclined on a sofa, leaning on her left arm, her right hand playing with a whip, her bare foot casually propped on the man, who lay before her like a slave, like a dog. And this man, who revealed salient but well-shaped features infused with brooding melancholy and devoted passion, this man, who peered up at her with the burning, enraptured eyes of a martyr, this man, who served as a footstool for her feet—this man was Severin, but beardless and apparently ten years younger.

  “Venus
in Furs! “I cried, pointing to the picture. “That was how I saw her in my dreams.”

  “So did I,” said Severin, “except that I dreamed my dream with open eyes.”

  “How?”

  “Oh! It’s a foolish story.”

  “The painting obviously inspired my dream,” I went on. “Do please tell me, however, in what way it played a role in your life and, as I can imagine, perhaps a very crucial role. I look forward to the details.”

  “Just view its counterpart,” my bizarre friend retorted without heeding my words.

  The counterpart was an excellent copy of Titian’s renowned Venus with Mirror in the Dresden Gallery.

  “Well, what are you driving at?”

  Severin stood up and pointed at the fur in which Titian had ensconced his Goddess of Love.

  “This too is Venus in Furs,” he said with a fine smile. “I don’t think the old Venetian had any ulterior motive. He simply did a portrait of some aristocratic Messalina and was courteous enough to let Cupid hold the mirror in which she examines her majestic charms with cold satisfaction—though his task seems more like a chore to him. This is a work of painted flattery. Later on, some ‘connoisseur’ of the rococo dubbed the lady Venus, and the female despot’s fur, in which Titian’s beautiful model is wrapped probably more out of fear of sniffles than out of chastity, has become a symbol of the tyranny and cruelty intrinsic to a woman and her beauty.

  “But enough. The painting, as it now looks, seems like the most piquant satire on our love. Venus, who, in the abstract north, in the icy Christian world, has to slip into a large, heavy fur to avoid catching cold.”

  Severin laughed and lit another cigarette.

  Just then the door opened and a pretty, buxom blonde with smart, friendly eyes and in a black silk robe entered, bringing us cold meat and eggs for our tea. Severin took one of the eggs and broke it open with a knife. “Haven’t I told you I want them soft-boiled?” he cried with a vehemence that made the young woman tremble.

  “But dear Sevtshu—” she said anxiously.

  “Don’t call me Sevtshu!” he yelled. “You must obey, obey, do you understand,” and he yanked down the knout that was hanging on a nail next to his weapons.

  The pretty woman fearfully bolted from the room like a doe.

  “Just you wait, I’ll get you yet!” he hollered after her.

  “But Severin,” I said, putting my hand on his arm, “how can you treat that pretty young thing like this?”

  “Now just look at her,” he replied, winking humorously. “If I had flattered her, she would have thrown a noose around my neck. But this way, because I rear her with the knout, she adores me.”

  “Oh, come on!”

  “You come on! That’s how you have to train women.”

  “Live like a pasha in your harem for all I care, but don’t feed me any theories—”

  “Why not?” he cried briskly. “Nowhere is Goethe’s dictum, ‘You must be hammer or anvil,’ more relevant than in the relationship between man and woman. And Madam Venus even admitted that to you in your dream. Woman’s power lies in Man’s passion, and she knows how to make use of it if man isn’t careful. His only choice is to be woman’s tyrant or slave. The instant he gives in, he already has his head in a yoke and he will feel the whip.”

  “Strange maxims!”

  “No maxims, just experience,” he retorted with a nod. “I was seriously whipped, I’m cured. Would you like to read about it?”

  He rose and, going to a massive desk, produced a small manuscript, which he placed before me on the table.

  “You’ve asked about that painting. I’ve owed you an explanation for a long time. Here—read!”

  Severin sat down by the fireplace with his back toward me and seemed to be dreaming with open eyes. The room was silent again, and again the flames in the fireplace sang, as did the samovar, and the cricket in the old wall, and I opened the manuscript and read:

  “Confessions of a Suprasensual Man.” The epigraph in the margin was a variation of Mephistopheles’ well-known verses from Faust:

  You suprasensual sensual suitor,

  A woman leads you by the nose!

  I turned over the title page and read: “The following text is compiled from my journal of that period since the past can never be depicted without bias; in this way, everything has its fresh colors, the colors of the present.”

  Gogol, the Russian Molière says—indeed where? Well, somewhere—that the true comic muse is the one with tears running down under her laughing mask.

  A wonderful statement!

  So I feel rather odd while writing this. The air seems filled with an arousing scent of flowers, numbing my mind and making my head ache. The smoke in the fireplace curls and masses into figures: small, gray-bearded goblins, who point mockingly at me, while chubby-cheeked cupids ride on the arms of my chair and on my lap. And I can’t help smiling, indeed laughing raucously as I record my adventures; and yet I am writing not with mundane ink but with the red blood that drips from my heart; for all its long-healed wounds have reopened, and my heart stings and suffers, and now and then a tear falls on the paper.

  The days were crawling by lethargically in the small Carpathian resort. One saw nobody and was seen by nobody. It was boring enough to pen an idyll. I had sufficient leisure to come up with a whole gallery of paintings, to furnish a theater with an entire season of new plays, to supply a dozen virtuosi with concertos, trios, and duets. But—what am I saying?—ultimately I did nothing much more than stretch the canvas, straighten out the pages, line the music sheets, for I was—Ah! No false modesty, my friend Severin. Lie to others; but you no longer quite manage to lie to yourself. Well, I was nothing more than a dilettante: a dilettante in painting, in poetry, in music, and in a few more of the so-called unprofitable arts, which nowadays, however, assure their masters the income of a cabinet minister, nay, a minor potentate. And above all, I was a dilettante in life.

  Until then, I had lived as I had painted and versified—that is, I never got far beyond priming a canvas, beyond penning an outline, a first act, a first stanza. There are simply people who start all sorts of things and yet never finish any of them. And that was the kind of person I was.

  But what am I nattering for?!

  Let me get to the point:

  I lay in my window and found the nest I was despairing in so infinitely poetic: how lovely the view of the blue wall of lofty mountains enveloped in the golden haze of the sun and crisscrossed by torrents winding like silver ribbons. And how clear and blue the sky, into which the snowy peaks towered; and how green and fresh the wooded slopes, the meadows, where tiny herds were grazing, down to the yellow of the billows of grain where the harvesters stood and bent and rose again.

  The house I was staying in was located in a kind of park or forest or wilderness—whatever one wishes to call it—and was very isolated.

  No one lived here except for myself, a widow from Lwów, and the proprietress Madam Tartakowska, a little old lady who kept growing older and littler by the day, plus an old dog with one lame foot, and a young cat that always played with a ball of yarn—and the yarn belonged, I assumed, to the beautiful widow.

  She was, I heard, truly beautiful, the widow, and still very young, at most twenty-four, and very rich. She lived one flight up while I lived on the ground floor. She always kept her green blinds drawn and had a balcony completely overgrown with green vines. I, however, had my dear, cozy, honeysuckle gazebo, where I read and wrote and painted and sang like a bird in the branches. I could look up at the balcony. Sometimes I really did look up, and then from time to time a white gown up there shimmered through the dense, green net.

  Actually I had very little interest in the beautiful woman up there, since I was in love with another—indeed, very unhappily in love, far more unhappily than Sir Toggenburg or the chevalier in Manon Lescaut,4 for my beloved was made of stone.

  In the garden, in the small wilderness, there was a charming little
meadow, where a couple of tame deer grazed peacefully. And in that meadow there was a stone statue of Venus. The original, I believe, is in Florence. This Venus was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen.

  Now that didn’t mean very much, of course, for I had seen few beautiful women, indeed few women at all, and in regard to love I was a mere dilettante who never got beyond the priming, beyond the first act.

  But why speak in superlatives—as if something that is beautiful could be surpassed?

  Enough: this Venus was beautiful, and I loved her as passionately, as morbidly and profoundly, as insanely as a man can love only a woman who responds to his love with an eternally consistent, eternally calm stone smile. Yes, I literally worshiped her.

  Often, when the sun brooded in the woods, I would lie reading under the leafy canopy of a young beech; often I visited my cold, cruel beloved at night too, kneeling before her, pressing my face into the cold stones under her feet, and praying to her.

  There is no describing the way the moon, now waxing, rose and floated through the trees and dipped the meadow in a silvery glow, and the Goddess then stood as if transfigured and seemed to bathe in the soft moonlight.

  Once, while returning from my worship, I was walking along a garden path leading to the house when I abruptly saw—separated from me only by the green gallery of trees—a female figure, white as stone, shining in the moonlight. I felt as if the beautiful marble woman had taken pity on me and had come alive and followed me. But then I was seized with a nameless fear, my heart was ready to burst, and instead of—

  Well, I was a dilettante after all. I bogged down as usual in the second verse. No! Quite the contrary! I didn’t bog down. I ran as fast as I could run.

  What luck! A Jew who dealt in photographs somehow contrived to get me the portrait of my beloved: this small work on paper was a reproduction of Titian’s Venus with Mirror. What a woman! I wanted to write a poem. No! I took the picture and wrote on it: Venus in Furs.

  You freeze while arousing flames. Just wrap yourself in your despotic fur; whom does it suit if not you, cruel Goddess of Beauty and Love?!