『我が生涯 第1巻』

The only bright spot that winter came on Palm Sunday 1849, when we performed Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. The orchestra had pulled out all the stops to make it our best performance yet, and the public responded with real enthusiasm. Michael Bakunin, hiding from the Austrian police, had attended the public rehearsal, and after it ended he walked straight up to me in the orchestra pit, loud enough for everyone to hear: if every piece of music ever written were lost in the coming worldwide conflagration, we had to pledge to save this symphony, even at the risk of our lives. We had become friends in the months prior, introduced by Röckel after the latter had embraced republicanism. Bakunin had fled to Dresden to escape Austrian persecution for his role in the 1848 Prague uprisings and the preceding Slav Congress, and I had first met him at Röckel’s modest home, immediately struck by his towering, primal presence. He was a Russian noble who had renounced his family’s fortune and status, once giving away his last two francs to a beggar on a Paris boulevard because he hated being tied to material cares. He had studied Hegel so thoroughly he had bested the philosopher’s most famous disciples at their own dialectic, wandered Europe preaching communism, and believed the Russian peasantry, uncorrupted by civilization, would rise up to burn down the entire old world order. He cared nothing for idle intellectual chatter, only for men of reckless action, and would argue for hours in Socratic style for the total annihilation of all existing civilization, insisting that even the most enlightened European thinkers would agree all modern misery stemmed from the institutions he wanted destroyed. He baffled me: he was tender enough to shield my sore eyes from harsh light for an hour when we first met, and loved the snippets of Der fliegende Holländer I played for him, calling them “stupendously fine,” but he wanted me to rewrite my planned Jesus of Nazareth tragedy so the chorus spent the whole opera yelling for Christ’s execution. He ate his meat by the handful instead of cutting it into bread, drank brandy by the gulp, and scoffed at moderation, saying the only real pleasure worth a man’s time was love. I swung between horrified repulsion and fierce attraction to him, taking long walks with him through the countryside around Dresden, unable to sway him from his single-minded focus on destruction when I tried to talk to him about my artistic vision for a remade society.