TURGENEV RUSSIAN SOUL

 

In 1840 Russia suffered a winter so harsh that even the oaks dried up. Many forests died, the Volga froze, game was exhausted, and in the villages the muzhiks perished from cold or starvation. Prayers were organized and the churches of the villages were from boat to boat with the people kneeling in front of the icons and the priests pleading for divine intercession.

  I have reopened a book by one of my favorite Russian writers Ivan Turgenev “narrations of a hunter”.

I always use to insert a date at the bottom of the page of the books that transported me to the paradises of the imagination (I was an inveterate reader since I was a child... the hookah was my travel companion throughout my vigils because without the smoke of my pipe I would not have been able to withstand the rattle of this literature train that makes us travel around the world without moving from one place) puts a date on January 3, 1993.

  So thirty years passed. Throughout these six decades the world has changed a lot but I continue clinging to my dreams warming up the chair in the small room of my chiscón hauling books coming and going to the stalls on Cuesta Moyano accumulating wisdom and pain as the man already said Wise Solomon that knowing brings sorrows.

Much better to surrender to the nephelism of the clouds of not knowing a recipe to be happy. Poor me, I smoke, I read, and I don't practice the nephalism of teetotalers because throughout my days I drank a few bottles.

  Nephelism is being in the clouds and nephalism is abstaining from wine and women. I do not practice those vices. I read and suffer.

  I like the Russians especially the Russians, I row against the current and with such wickers I don't make a career out of myself because political incorrectness is not recommended in these times.

  However, here that this journalist was right. Russia is winning the war and my Russophilia defeats the Russophobes who don't have their shirts close to their bodies.

  I think it was an English author who said that Russia imprints character, subjugates, and something like that happened to me many years ago. That is why when rereading Turgenev I have rediscovered the Russian soul.

  That mysterious country where nature, Shirokaia priroda, is unique. I navigate its rivers, enter the isbas and talk to the peasants. In the distance a flock of woodcocks flies up, I look up and contemplate how a retinue of alfaneques rule the firmament that suspected the corpse of the wasteland.

I hear the song of the Russian nightingale (solovei) again and rise to the occasion a bit.

The ringing of a bell is heard. In the distant village they play vespers.

When I was twenty I went to Paris one of the first books I bought was "Premier Amour" reading Turgenev made me want to be a writer and I have followed this vocation which for me is like a sacrament the Russians made me a knight-errant of the word I obtained the touch of rods in the acolada of London and Paris. I suffered from hunger and shortages, but Franco was generous with me and I became a journalist and correspondent. I have reached the high peaks of journalism, two correspondents in London and New York.

I wrote twelve novels and twenty poems, five essays and hundreds of articles and chronicles. I have achieved my dream, I thank God even though I am an unknown author and ignored by the great Jewish layman from whom Torquemada returned to our homeland, but I laugh at the inquisitors.

  My articles on the net are a cut of the sleeve to the new censors of freedom and democracy. It was never so difficult or so tearful in Spain to write. Never have geniuses and writers been so disdained. Spain crucifies her prophets.

Under her yoke this is a perpetual moaning of teeth.

  They have brought with them the instruments of psychological torture, they do not want to put on the purple tunic of the insane and gird our temples with a crown of thorns, as soon as they reached the title of crucifixors, they are neither more nor less the new deicides.

  Against these minions of information, Russian writers who breathe serenity, forgiveness and humanism constitute a true bulwark.

 

Sunday, December 18, 2022