Letters from Mexico to Maxim Strauch and Ilya Trauberg

I was very pleased to receive your letter. It was really marvelous to read that someone takes some interest in me, aside from their interest in Mexico. I am not at all accustomed to that. If my doppelg5inger is, deep within his soul, an old, sentimental Jew, then he's in for even harsher treatment than a second V. V. [Mayakovsky]. You see, I don't even have anyone to cry to on the telephone. Not only here where the country doesn't run on telephones... You and Pera2 are perhaps the only ones who know that I'm quite without armor-I don't mean in the sense of a battleship. There is a kind of lizard here [the armadillo], a cross between a common lizard and a turtle, out of which they make elegant little baskets by sticking the tail into the neck, degutting it, and lining the inside with scarlet or sky-blue silk. Sometimes they use them to make mandolins, which moan piteously. My very tender doppelgainger bleeds continually and his armor has to be constantly mended and tightened to keep it from completely ... falling apart. Not as Pudovkin would tighten his-I don't discipline mine. And not in V. V.'s style either-I don't keep mine in check. The vigor of our so-called creativity lies in the dialectical fusion of blood and iron !!! This becomes monstrous only when there is a break in the creative process, and during moments of rest. Oh, if one could only produce without rest! But I also have a third self. Actually, I

Art · Art history · Epistemology · Ilya · Maxim · Academic and Historical Perspectives in Psychology · Borges, Kipling, and Jewish Identity · Philosophy · Psychology Research and Bibliometrics

• In the borders of being

  Adriana Novoa•Atlantic Studies•2010

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