With every line I write, I try to embrace you; with every letter that I draw, I try to hold you tight. I've got no other life than yours; no other eyes and hands than your eyes and hands; and no other words than your name. The greater part of my life is already over, and I've lived it badly; I want to be worthy of the remaining part.

I was taught that one must love art, freedom and truth and that they will reciprocate. I was also told that one must love his native country, at least a little, with open eyes and not standing on his knees, yet, if this proves impossible, it's nothing tragic: Russia will remain an eternal bride-to-be. Yet this was false: the marriage was fully consummated. Russia's not a bride but an unloved wife. A complex of vexation, attachment and duty, the impossibility to part and insurmountable boredom has developed over the years. There's nowhere to run, you've got a guilty conscience, yet she inspires disgust. Life's practically over, and there's nothing you can change. All you can do is fill your glass with vodka and while away the hours until nightfall. The onerous feeling of duty and the absence of love is floating over the fields of our native country. This is the reason for our throes of creation.

This is how I explain the letters of the Hussar colonel: he yearned for Catholicism for the simple reason that he yearned for love, which he had never known. This is a fairly simple interpretation of the letters of a retired soldier, yet what can be more banal than a Hussar yearning for love? He yearned for Catholicism, where religious feeling is embodied by the Virgin; he yearned for it as one longs for spiritual health when he's faced with the impossibility of fusing the pictures surrounding and flashing past him into a single image. He longed for the powerful feeling that would merge the world, the sky, flesh and passion into one. It was spiritual longing that made him cry out in his letters: can there be more than one civilisation? He knew perfectly well that Chinese and Greek civilisation were different; what he wanted to say was: can there be more than one love? What is human wholeness if not the unity of passion and the good? If eidos becomes manifest in the human soul, how can passion and faith be incompatible? Does not the Christian principle of a heterogeneous yet inseparable entity refer to the same thing? He longed for that love which Dante knew, and he yearned for Catholicism, which could give him such love. He knew that a miracle would then happen: the images of the Lady, the Virgin and Faith would join and become one. However, the miracle was slow to appear, he lacked the strength and began to cry out in despair; the Hussar colonel, whom people had declared mad, was really going out of his mind. It seems to me that the main subject of the letters is the definition of love through history. It's true, they don't say it in so many words, yet what we've written is enough to show that Love is the measure of History. Where Love is absent, History also doesn't exist. Nevertheless, no one can put love into the heart of another person, and a Catholic catechism won't help. And from the despair into which he sunk in the "loveless land" (as it was called by someone who had come to know love all too well), the Hussar cursed this place and said that it lacked history. However, he was the one who didn't have a history. He didn't have it for the simple reason that history appears only when love's present.

It's not history that our country lacks, but something much more important. Russia does not know any love stories. What union of souls is worthy of note? Tolstoi and Sofia Andreyevna? Blok and Mendeleyeva? Pushkin and Goncharova? Esenin and his girls? Was something ever written in Russian about love? Hold on a moment ? yes, there was: it's only in Russia that people know what real love's like ? love which makes one shout, love from which one dies, love like the one that Mayakovsky knew. Except that instead of Lilia Brik, one should speak of the Revolution, for Mayakovsky loved it as one loves a woman and, continuing a great tradition, joined the worldly and the heavenly. The lines that he wrote shortly before his death, "the love bark ran on the rocks of everyday life," are addressed to the Revolution. As this love was not requited, Mayakovsky went out, slammed the door and shot himself, and this was the only recorded love tragedy that our country ever knew. How could he possibly not see the Revolution's plebeian nature from the start? The same perspicacious question has been asked about Dulcinea, yet, as soon as the bachelor Samson Carrasco opened Alonso Kijano's eyes, the chivalric tale came to an end, and life along with it. The same thing happened here: as soon as Mayakovsky fell in love, history began. When love's absent, Russia, our homely lady, also lacks history. No one else ever loved her like that, although many people sung her praises, and even more despised her. Why love her, a fat, homely lady? Nevertheless, you keep thinking when looking at her: if we loved her more, she'd become more beautiful. Yet she remains the same.

This land is less fitting for love than others, yet beggars can't be choosers. I'll write about a love that will remain for ever, even after the memory of these days has faded and sand has covered my city and the streets which I walked down on my way to you. I will try to make your lilting step and upright gait leave an indelible mark on flaccid Russia and crooked Moscow. Russian roguery and European hypocrisy, happiness which turns out to be unattainable and the fact that one's sick of putting up with lies yet no one needs truth ? all of this together has become our history and your and my love. And there isn't any other. I've got no other beliefs except for love, and, if I have to speak about politics or art, I speak about you and want my words to be as lucid as your face, my feelings to be as distinct as your profile and my way to be as straight as your bearing.

I spent the first half of my life searching for History. I believed that my native wastelands and steppes are making my life flat and laminate the future into a thin pancake and that Russia, an unhistorical space, can't keep up with the progress of the world spirit and spreads out like a dirty puddle. I kept looking for that land, that gathering point, in which History is concentrated today. Where should one be now? Where must one look? I stared at the horizon and couldn't find such a place, and I kept thinking that it's somewhere around the corner. This vain languor and suffering stopped as soon as I realised that History is where you are and that there is no other. When I realised this, I gathered my forces for my unique task.

No, the task is not to fight a tyrant: that's not enough for me. Not to fight Russia nor to defend Russia: that's not enough for me. Not to stand up for democracy or my native country or the West: that's not enough for me. Not to defend civilisation against barbarity: that's not enough for me. It's to be for you ? against any order of things. Against what they call History. Who am I to know what History in itself is like? History is mine and no one else's.

History is here and today, in this sluggish and dirty country with flat landscapes. If you look with your steady gaze at this wasteland, it means that History is on this wasteland today. If I hold your hand today, it means that History is this moment. One's often struck by Hegel's identification of the world spirit with Napoleon mounted on a horse, yet I don't find this comparison apt ? neither for Napoleon nor for the world spirit. I like to think that the world spirit (the spirit of history, if you prefer) is embodied in a woman. One can, of course, personify history by a corpulent officer, yet it's more harmonic to represent it in the form of a beautiful woman. Let others imagine that the movement of the world spirit is like the crunching of boots; for me, it's your lilting gait.

Something keeps coming to mind. I remember how I called a woman who was leaving, and she turned around. She was going away, hurt, and she turned around without stopping or slowing down and looked at me. It was night-time, yet she walked under a street lamp and a band of light passed over her face. She was going so fast that the light seemed to strike her like a whip. She always walked very fast, and, when I once asked her why, she answered that a slow pace tired her. She always walked holding her back straight and her head high. When she turned around to look at me, I saw her strained neck and the sharp contours of her face, yet her next step took her out of the light. She was so harmonious that she always moved with her entire body: when she walked, it seemed as if every one of her traits took part. She had short, dark hair and widely spaced dark-brown eyes, and I've never seen a woman more beautiful. It was you. The fear haunts me that I'll never see this face again, that you'll walk out from under the street lamp and won't turn to look at me again.

I've always thought that I'm a non-believer, and I was proud of it. I spent a lot of time in the company of people who professed history as their religion, and this substitute suited me. I liked people who issued a challenge to the order of things, who viewed it differently than God. History as religion and understanding as faith. It's curious that none of these people could be proud of their own lives, which always made the impression of something flaccid and not very attractive. I don't mean to say that if they had been believers, they would have had visions. Yet their lives, which were dedicated to reason and knowledge, were unreasonable and not very instructive. None of these people, who put knowledge above faith and the intellect above love, ever evoked my compassion. Today I've come to think that the fabric of knowledge concerning the world is woven in order to make all heterogeneous things come together, without losing their specificity, in one image. A religious person would say that such an image is life-giving. I'd only like to make clear that I'm not referring to an eidos but to that powerful creative feeling that we call love. This feeling seems to be intrinsically bound up with the notion of harmony, and what I said above about harmony fully applies here. I've written so much only to say one thing: the way you walked and turned your head made it clear to me how the world is structured. Jacob fought with a stranger and tore a tendon in his leg before he understood what this encounter was all about. I wasn't the first slow-witted person to look at the traits of someone I met and not understand who he was. If someone believes that God is history, then I affirm that the beam of light passed over the face of history: it was history that walked so quickly over the Moscow wasteland, and a brown scarf was around its neck.

I'm also comparing history and love in the destruction that they cause. Without love, life is even and serene (I wouldn't say "harmonious," for I don't identify serenity and harmony), yet, as soon as love appears, everything becomes perturbed. It's no wonder that Greeks considered love to be disorder and a kind of illness. Why did short hair and painted eyelashes make my life unbearable? Why does the ringing and grinding of history make life hell? She came to me, and, on a small, creaking sofa, history began. It began with her wet shoes, which she bent down to untie, and her cotton brick-red sweater, which she pulled off. She was lying next to me in the darkness, and I didn't know that something was about to begin that would not bring any good to anyone, that disorder and discord were about to begin and that they were impossible to avoid, for this is happiness, this is what harmony is all about.

Yes, I assert that harmony belongs to love and history and therefore there is neither grace nor peace in this notion. Is that really so? If it were possible to make life meaningful without history and love, if harmony were not a strange necessity, how happy would I be without this painful happiness! How I would have liked to be simply, unpretentiously happy! Why, o Lord, couldn't you make this possible? Why is it when I think about love and history, I recall a cup of cold black tea on the window-sill and a broken poplar tree on the street below? After all, there is neither good nor beauty in either one of them. Why is it that when I hear someone speak of happiness, I see a brick-red sweater with a stretched neck? Why did it leave me gasping for breath? Why don't I see any good and worthy people around me? Why? Could it be that people that are simple, understandable and easy don't exist? I shout: untie me, let me go! And I take it back immediately: don't! don't let me go! don't go away!

She seemed like a soldier to me: she came to get undressed and to lie under me with her legs spread out. She was lying naked, yet she was collected and detached like a soldier, and, as a result, I felt myself to be a soldier, too. She and I were in a place where danger was real. That's no exaggeration on my part, for a place of love and history is truly dangerous. And when I entered her slender body, it was like a blow. What I've got in mind are not the Ovidian love battles nor the Boccaccian skirmishes behind the canopy but something that's not at all poetic: a blow that enters the flesh and wounds a person. She was lying under me with her legs spread apart wide, and her eyes were wide open, too, and there was no poetry in them ? only patience and willpower, like in a soldier's eyes.

We were lying under a red blanket, and she said, "would you like me to go?" Yes, she was thinking about it already at that moment: she knew it ahead of time. In fact, everything was decided long before she came to see me. She made it look as if it was up to me to determine whether she would stay or leave, and I was proud and conceited enough to believe her. Up to me, eh? As if love or history could be subordinated to someone's will! Love and history can stir up will-power in their participants, but just try and subordinate these events themselves! Lovers and generals believe that they shape the course of history and that their zeal is a prerequisite of change. Nonsense! History is made not with the help of zeal but of selflessness. However, I couldn't formulate or even conceive of such ideas at the time.

I was looking at her, at that of spot of darkness that was her in the dark room, whose window looked onto a wasteland. Everything that I said then, or later, was of no importance; my perversity made me put a lot of meaning into my words, yet they expressed only my confusion. What I had in mind, or so it turned out later, was simple: when you become a part of history, you can abandon it only by leaving your life behind.

When I woke up, I didn't realise at first where I was (this frequently happens to me as a result of moving and staying in hotels). It was a grey morning, and I was lying in bed and looking at the grey rectangular window. I had the impression that I was seeing such a window for the first time, although it was my window. I couldn't recall in whose house I was or in what city or country. It was still dark in the room, and I didn't recognise it. I kept lying in bed, slowly getting used to the unfamiliar place, and then I got up and drew the curtains. Outside, the weather was like it always is in Russia today except for summer ? slush and mud. You could see a poplar tree with crow nests, a rubbish heap in which two women were digging, a broken merry-go-round and a poster which said, "Do you want to live like in Europe? Vote for the right-wing party." You can find poplars, rubbish heaps and women digging in them in any country, yet such posters exist only in Russia. What a stupid thing to write, I thought. What does it mean? What Europe are they talking about? Why would voting for the right-wingers make things like in Europe? What would result if you were to vote for the left-wingers? Asia? Could the right-wingers change the climate? Plant plantains along Okhotnyi Row? Breed oysters in the Moscow River? I looked at the poster and recalled the leader of the right-wing party: a fidgety dwarf with an early bald patch and a voluptuous, drooling mouth. He said that we've got only one way out: to take the West as our model and to become a civilised country. The alternative is labour camps and Siberia. We've got to make progress at any cost. Even if the population doesn't understand us now, they'll thank us later. I looked at the poster and thought that people in Russia were, just like lovers, part of a hopeless history and were doomed just as much as them. They are liable to be deceived by a drooling dwarf or by anyone else, for that matter. They're lost. The fact that I was destined to love you here and nowhere else, in this doomed flat place and this confounded wasteland, was no accident. It was done on purpose so that I'd understand what love is all about.

I repeat, many think that history is a chain of events or objects, or, in other words, a set of bodies (for example, a love story or affair shows bodies graphically). Yet, history is incorporeal; it takes our body away from us and dissolves it in itself. History is a caustic medium which destroys nature. You once told me that love is like a golden veil, and this is true, too: it's indeed that, and there's no contradiction. Love is like Leonardo da Vinci's depiction of St John the Baptist. All glimmering, as if under a golden veil, and raising his finger like a tempter, he lures man into history ? a history that does not promise to be good yet is nevertheless unique.

Believe me, my words are not meant as a rebuke. History is not good, not good at all, yet unique! Love is not appealing yet infinitely radiant! History, just like love, has one exceptional quality: it's always pure. This is the case despite the fact that people try to sully both of them. It's perhaps the most important characteristic of history and love. Yet it is precisely the purity of love, just like the purity of history, that people, especially educated people, are prone to doubt.

We always assume that sincerity is invariably connected with something bad, that one hides only shameful feelings. He who exhibits them is considered bold or sincere. It's easier to believe in the sincerity of Henry Miller than Lev Tolstoi: the imagination refuses to admit the existence of chastity that isn't hypocritical. And people who know life are right to doubt: they judge from experience. This worldly, or, if you prefer, historical, experience is stronger than history itself ? for the same reason that the bachelor Samson Carrasco is stronger than Don Quixote and that the experience of love is stronger than love. There are many reasons why I'm ashamed to call myself an artist today. One of them lies in the fact that contemporary art is the triumph of petty bourgeois morality and the decline of chivalry.

Yet there are other reasons. All my life, I wanted to be free and progressive; all my life, I kept repeating "forward!" Now, I'm ashamed of my life. If one were to go forward all the time, how could he protect those who need help and who remain behind?

I wanted to be as reliable as a cup of hot, strong tea. Yet I didn't know how; I only said that I wanted to but couldn't. I've never had any other goal, yet I didn't have the courage to stand firm. Forgive me for these empty years. I'll never forgive myself, however. I'll yet become worthy of you. Give me the strength, o Lord, to defend this place, and give me the strength to defend this history, for there's no other place for my love and there'll never be another history.