The portraits that follow are from a large number of photographs recently recovered from sealed archives in Moscow, some—rumor has it—from a cache in the bottom of an elevator shaft. Five of those that follow, Akhmatova, Chekhov (with dog), Nabokov, Pasternak (with book), and Tolstoy (on horseback) are from a volume entitled The Russian Century, published early last year by Random House. Seven photographs from that research, which were not incorporated in The Russian Century, are published here for the first time: Bulgakov, Bunin , Eisenstein (in a group with Pasternak and Mayakovski), Gorki, Mayakovski, Nabokov (with mother and sister), Tolstoy (with Chekhov), and Yesenin. The photographs of Andreyev, Babel, and Kharms were supplied by the writers who did the texts on them. The photograph of Dostoyevsky is from the Bettmann archives. Writers who were thought to have an especial affinity with particular Russian authors were asked to provide the accompanying texts. We are immensely in their debt for their cooperation.

In June 1990 I found myself in Romania again: in Constanta. Another television assignment. A survey conducted by the French Antenne Deux gave me a chance to show off my knowledge of my native land. We went around asking women how they had gotten by in the years of the dictatorship. 

One of our neighbors is the famous couturier Azzedine Alaïa, the minuscule “architect of the body” as he’s often called because he creates his garments directly on his models, whereas someone like Christian LaCroix dashes off a sketch which he tosses at a trained team of seamstresses who interpret and realize even his most far-fetched inspirations. Alaïa works sometimes late into the night, his mouth full of pins, as he drapes and pulls and turns and twists and dances around the dais like Pygmalion dressing an already transformed and fully alive Galatea.

The life of the Russian avant-garde author Daniil Kharms (1905-1942) was every bit as absurd, as abrupt and as symbolically charged as one of his stories. The son of a populist-radical writer with religious leanings, he began a promising career as a poet in the freewheeling artistic scene of late-twenties Leningrad; he knew the great avant-garde artists Malevich, Tatlin, and Filonov, the formalist critic Viktor Shklovsky and the famous children’s authors Evgenii Shvartz and Samuil Marshak. 

You feel a gradual welling up of pleasure, or boredom, or melancholy. Whatever the emotion, it’s more abundant than you ever dreamed. You can no more contain it than your hands can cup a lake. And so you surrender and suck the air.

Yukio Mishima was born Kimitake Hiraoka on January 14, 1925 in uptown Tokyo. His father was the deputy director of the Bureau of Fisheries in the Agriculture Ministry; his mother, from a family of educators and Confucian scholars, was herself well-versed in literature. The family lived in a well-to-do neighborhood in a rented two-floor house with a houseboy and six maids, an unusual extravagance. But for the first twelve years Mishima lived downstairs with his grandmother in her sickroom, leaving the room only with her permission.

Now I am thinking about jumping from the Golden Gate Bridge, and about other places where people have jumped to their deaths for many years. I think I should find out more about this, for I have an idea that there is some son of collection of spirit strength or power or love in them that says no, or yes, or now.

Before Asya and I were married, we decided to keep a daily record of our lives. Of course we won’t keep it up. I do need a notebook journal record of some sort, and this may be it. Asya is like nothing I ever anticipated or even hoped for. She’s priceless.