Konrad and Alexandra (pdf) - Rolf Gross

wiped out by the power of Gauguin.
She turned to the other van Gogh, a touchingly bare, blue room with a bed and a rickety
red chair. Marti had mentioned that van Gogh had become deranged and had spent his last
years in an insane asylum in Arles. He died in that bare, blue room.
Insanity?
Could insanity be a possibility in her life? Could her vibrant spontaneity turn into
madness? Dizziness overcame her. She sat down on a chair and closed her eyes. Gauguin’s
pink seemed to flood the room. With an effort she concentrated all her energy on the kicking
child in her belly. And then she knew that her female body and her eyes, yes, her eyes, would
protect her from going insane.
She gave herself a push and got up.
She found sweet, blond Nina, tears running down her cheeks, standing alone before a
small painting to which none of the others had paid any attention.
A conventional landscape, a villa in a park of willows, and a lake or river in the
foreground. It could have been in Russia. And then she discovered the signature of the painter:
Wassily Kandinsky, 1899. It was the first Kandinsky Alexandra saw.
Alexandra thought of her friend Katharina in Fiesole and guessed intuitively why Nina
was crying.
Nina tried to collect herself and confessed that Kandinsky had been her first lover tfour
years ago, before he had deserted her and eloped to Munich. She had to wait fifteen years
until he returned, driven by war and history back to his native land. Eventually the fifty-year-old
Kandinsky married her. Nina became his last companion.
Just before New Year a long letter from Deda arrived full of ominous messages,
lamentations, and misgivings.
Uncle Ilia was in trouble again. The Russian viceroy had ordered him out of Georgia
before the New Year, because the Russians expected a large demonstration for Georgian
independence that night. He had been told to spend the season in one of the Russian resorts
in the Crimea—where he could be better supervised and could cause no trouble. Ilia, of
course, was indignant. A long article in his defense in Iveria had caused additional tension. It
had cost Olga all her persuasion to take her upset husband to Sevastopol by boat.
When their steamer left Batumi, a demonstration in Ilia’s favor had taken place that had
been dispersed by the Russian militia. Ilia left with mixed feelings, because the demonstration
had for the first time been heavily infiltrated by the dubious members of the new Georgian
Socialist Party. A certain Soso Djugashvili, their main agitator, was a shady character with
whom Ilia would prefer not to be identified.
Deda was frightened by the ominous clouds on the horizon of the coming century.
Persephone had, in a lengthy trance, issued a terrible forecast of what the next century would
bring: war, fire, murder, the death of thousands of innocent people.
"Oh, well," said Konrad when Alexandra read him the letter, "Der Untergang des
Abendlandes, the decline of the Occident has been a favorite subject of the pessimist school of
German Kulturphilosophie for several years, we don’t need a mystic clairvoyant to bring this
subject to our attention. The historians of philosophy cannot agree whether this is the fin de
ciecle or the dawn of civilization."
Alexandra, who had been pursued by similar visions since their arrival in St. Petersburg,
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