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218
SÖNYA KOVALÉVSKY
mood really was, despite all outward show of
cheerfulness. Her friends have told me how much happier
and full of the love of life she was during that
Christmas—more so than ever before. She regretted that
during her real youth she had neglected youth’s
pleasures, and she now wanted to avenge herself, and began
to take lessons in dancing and skating. She did not
wish to expose her first awkward attempts at skating,
so one of her friends and admirers arranged a private
skating-ground for her in the garden of one of the
Berlin villas. Her lessons in dancing were also taken
in a similarly private fashion, with two admirers as
cavaliers.
She rushed from one entertainment to another, and
was much feted—an experience she always enjoyed.
But this happy mood was short-lived. A month
later it had been chased away by the news of her
sister’s illness, and by a love-affair, which, as usual
with her, took no happy turn. It caused her supreme
bliss, and also the melancholy which ensued.
She writes on December 27, 1884:
I feel in very low spirits. I have had very bad news from my
sister. Her illness makes terrible progress, and now it is her
sight which is affected. She can neither read nor write. This
is caused by the faulty action of her heart, which gives rise to
temporary stagnations of the blood and paralysis. I tremble at
the thought of the loss which awaits me in the near future.
How sad life is after all! and how dull it is to go on living! It
is my birthday,1 and I am thirty-one to-day, and I may perhaps
have as many years still to live! How beautiful it is in operas
and dramas ! As soon as any one has found out that life is not
worth living, some one or something comes on the scene and
helps to make the passage to the other world easy. Reality is
in this detail inferior to fiction. One speaks so much of the
perfection of the organisms so fully developed by living creatures
1 This is a fiction,for it was neither her birthday, nor was she
the age mentioned. (See Introduction.)
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