Milena Jesenska

Letters to Willi Schlamm, 1938 You accused me several times for being less nice to you. From more than one of your words I take that you believe I am less nice because I am "disappointed". Shall I be "awfully open " again? You assume that I love you, that I was trying to win your love, and when I realized that you don't love me, I became "less nice". One of those assumptions is true: I really do love you very much. I don't completely understand it myself - I only know that I love you very much- but the premise of this love was the fact that you don't love me. And this you don't know. If I had thought it possible that you would love me as well, I would have run away to the far end of the earth.  Whether you can make sense of this does not matter - but it is true: I only needed your friendship. Anything more would have been less. This was the only way I could easefully come to you, feel infinitely happy around you. It was this, your frien...

Providence (20. Jan. 1920,  Milena Jesenska, Narodni Listy) It is now quite some time ago that I saw, down by the river, a drowned man, already bloated, with black limp hair and green fingernails, people crowded around him, shouting, walking, swimming rafts and dismay, that in connection with suicide is always a bit embarrassing and preposterous.  Another time I saw from the riverside a man who jumped off a bridge into the water, went down like a stone, came up again, screamed, and then went down completely; for a short time the traffic, several trams, a lorry,  stopped because of him, then he vanished from the world. In a little street in Vienna I once saw a murderer on the run, he was shot with a revolver, fell, propped himself up with an arm on the cobbled stone, bent several times in pain and then just lay there, the pale face turned directly at my window, it was such an unbelievably vacuous, ordinary face, that I could not believe I saw the face of a murderer w...

The case of Georg Kaiser (Tribuna, 3. Maerz, 1921) For several months Berlin was busy with a sensational trial whose echo could be heard well into foreign countries. Georg Kaiser, a young German dramatist of exceptional ability and expressive power, who was not only successfully played by Max Reinhardt, but also by other leading European theaters, had been arrested. The accusation was: theft. After a trial that went on for several days, Georg Kaiser was sentenced to one year of prison and his plays disappeared from the stages, as if they had been swallowed by the earth. The public trial painstakingly exposed the details of the case: Georg Kaiser, who for years had been suffering from hunger with his wife and three children, got by chance a villa from a friend in which he was allowed to life during the absence of the owner. The substantial royalties which Kaiser’s plays generated were suddenly not enough. The expenses of the last months summed up to tens of thousands. Persian carpe...

Letters of great people (Tribuna, 15. august 1920) For now I put the question whether one may publish the letters of great people aside, because it is of no significance. It is less about whether we have or have not  the right to look into the private life of great people, it is first and foremost about what value intimate messages and remarks can have for us. Only then will I answer the other, secondary question. Often one can hear the phrase: being personally acquainted with an artist is dangerous, for one gets disappointed easily. Someone who can inspire other people with his music, poems, paintings, certainly must be a strange person and surely has absurd peculiarities, he is either greedy like a hamster, timid like a hare, crude like a rafter, dirty and unshaven, almost grimy, wears a nightcap and loves his parrot fervently. The same man who has such a passionate relationship with eternity, truth, and action, should wear a nightcap? Yes, my dear Miss, artists do not a...

Direct Train Prague - Vienna (Narodni Listi, 5. Feb 1925) We are standing on the platform of the Wilson station and are waiting for the express train, the direct train Berlin - Vienna via Prague, me and my enemies. Everyone is an enemy, and we are scanning each other with angry eyes. We are enemies because we all want to find a seat. We are a band of robbers raiding an innocent train as soon as it comes closer. The lady with the ungainly hat is not one of us, she has just a little wooden suitcase and obviously a third class ticket. Similarly the gentleman who paces up and down because his only luggage is a briefcase and he will go only as far as Tabor. In contrast, the lady in the fur coat who has several suitcases, covered in stickers from Venice, Brussels, and Paris, is doubtless an enemy. She will definitively go via Vienna. Big suitcases, little suitcases, tiny suitcases, and a blue veil covering her face, you see on first glance that she is an experienced traveller. She will...

It is not good to look forward to something 22. August 1926, Nadroni Listy Did you ever notice that we seem to do nothing else but spend our lives in expectation and that we cannot live without looking forward to something? In winter we are looking forward to spring, and we imagine the beauty of warm evenings and the splendor of the summer sun at the waterside. In summer we make plans for a skip trip, imagine with secret joy a warm stove, a floor lamp and a beloved book, think of winter wonders in the snow and the charm of a grey, clouded sky. We are looking forward to a dress we will get, a concert we will attend, a city we will visit, and a reunion that is lying ahead of us. When I was a little girl I was wildly looking forward to - “life”. I expected that suddenly, unexpectedly, abruptly life would begin. A curtain would open and life would come. Nothing came and many things came, but not the right things, somehow it was not life, I did not even realize that I was not a little...

Two letters Narodni Listy, 13. Feb 1925 Dear Friend! You ask me a question that has no answer.  How could I, who is neither familiar with your relationship to your wife nor that to your lover, advise you whether you should get a divorce and marry a second time or whether you should stay with your wife? What does it help that I know you inside out, as you write, that I also know Helena, your wife, and Sonia, your love? Even though if I know your situation in each and every detail, even though I tell myself that there are no outer obstacles to a divorce, that you and your wife are both financially independent, have no children, that you have no common material ties, like a store or career - what does it mean and what does it signify? Nothing. No one can advise or help you with this innermost decision, it is a secret of feelings, nerves, heart, soul that you cannot explain to anyone, and if you tried: one can only understand another as far as the own experience goes. Therefor...

The devil at the hearth ( Milena Jesenska, 18. Jan 1923, Narodni Listy) Why all, or almost all, of today’s marriages are unhappy (as if marriages had been happier in the old times), is a fashionable question and the topic of -to be taken seriously- a whole section of literature and -not to be taken seriously- each Five o’clock chat. Any question in the world is suited for social idle talk as well as for philosophical discourse, and questions that, in a manner of speaking, lie on the street are also being picked up by us journalists. This particular question however puzzles me every time; of course I could answer why today’s marriages are unhappy -what question could a journalist not answer? But I ask myself time and again: Why should they be happy? That is where it begins. Two people - two small, lonely human beings, exposed to the entire hopelessness, dismay and forlornness of life, two children of men on the gigantic earth, that is so unbelievably,  unbearably and scarin...

Youth (Milena Jesenska, 23. Nov. 1922,  Narodni Listy) I don’t know where the idea that youth is the only happy time in life came from and why it is so widely believed. Maybe it is because people forget so easily and the past is always pretty, because on one hand we have the horrors of our uncertain end ahead of us, and on the other hand we have youth which, once lived, is always ours, it increases our inner richness, and man in his misery clings to everything he can call his own, as if without possessions he was more exposed to mortality. I clearly remember the hour when in the first, real, painful youth, I ceased being young. Nothing weird and nothing special had happened, it was just an evening in the blue-grey dawn at the window of a two storey apartment house, looking at an ordinary, weary, bleak street, and the trams were going right, going left, needlessly rushing and infinitely comical. I was neither happy nor unhappy, I felt ordinarily, normally sad, just like ever...