Venus in Furs | Page 6

only one choice: to be the tyrant over or the slave
of woman. As soon as he gives in, his neck is under the yoke, and the lash will soon fall
upon him."
"Strange maxims!"
"Not maxims, but experiences," he replied, nodding his head, "I have actually felt the
lash. I am cured. Do you care to know how?"
He rose, and got a small manuscript from his massive desk, and put it in front of me.
"You have already asked about the picture. I have long owed you an explanation.
Here--read!"
Severin sat down by the chimney with his back toward me, and seemed to dream with
open eyes. Silence had fallen again, and again the fire sang in the chimney, and the

samovar and the cricket in the old walls. I opened the manuscript and read:
CONFESSIONS OF A SUPERSENSUAL MAN.
The margin of the manuscript bore as motto a variation of the well- known lines from
Faust:
"Thou supersensual sensual woer A woman leads you by the nose."
--MEPHISTOPHELES.
I turned the title-page and read: "What follows has been compiled from my diary of that
period, because it is impossible ever frankly to write of one's past, but in this way
everything retains its fresh colors, the colors of the present."
Gogol, the Russian Moliere, says--where? well, somewhere--"the real comic muse is the
one under whose laughing mask tears roll down."
A wonderful saying.
So I have a very curious feeling as I am writing all this down. The atmosphere seems
filled with a stimulating fragrance of flowers, which overcomes me and gives me a
headache. The smoke of the fireplace curls 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