Wet snow slithered intermittently over Tverskoy Boulevard, settling on the trees and empty benches. The letters that Nutfulla Shakenov was writing in his notebook were widely spaced, as if he were bewildered. The professor of aesthetics was lecturing on the eternal unity of life and art. Sometimes the snow seemed to settle on his sentences, giving them a melancholic and meandering cast. He was explaining that art goes hand in hand with life from the moment of birth, when the infant is greeted with song, until death, when funeral music accompanies a man’s last journey to the grave. Drowsy with the heat rising from the radiators, I gazed at the passers-by as they hurried, wrapped up in themselves, along Tverskoy Boulevard and speculated that sometimes art is bound up with the icy snow sweeping people on to Gorky Street, the Garden Ring or the Arbat. It made them put their heads down, hunch their shoulders, and pick tiny grains of ice from their eyelids. ‘Art does not abandon us even after death,’ the lecturer droned on.
What do You think about Twilight Of The Eastern Gods?
