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What?
SAVVA (lightly)
Inescapable human stupidity.
I don’t know.
I do. Here you see only a small fragment of life, but if you could see and hear all of it—When I first read their newspapers, I laughed and thought it was a joke. I thought they were published in some asylum for the insane. But I found it was no joke. It was really serious, Lipa, really serious. And then my head began to ache with an intolerable pain. (He presses his hand to his forehead)
Your head began to ache?
Yes. It’s a peculiar pain. You don’t know what it is like. Few people know what it is. And the pain continued until I resolved—
What?
To annihilate everything.
What are you saying?
Yes, yes, everything. All that’s old.
LIPA (in amazement)
And man?
Man is to remain, of course. What is in his way is the stupidity that, piling up for thousands of years, has grown into a mountain. The modern sages want to build on this mountain, but that, of course, will lead to nothing but making the mountain still higher. It is the mountain itself that must be removed. It must be levelled to its foundation, down to the bare earth. Do you understand?
No, I don’t understand you. You talk so strangely.
Annihilate everything! The old houses, the old cities, the old literature, the old art. Do you know what art is?
Yes, of course I know—pictures, statues. I went to the Tretyakov art gallery.
That’s it—the Tretyakov, and other galleries that are bigger still. There are some good things in them, but it will be still better to have the old stuff out of the way. All the old dress must go. Man must be stripped bare and left naked on a naked earth! Then he will build up a new life. The earth must be denuded, Lipa; it must be stripped of its hideous old rags. It deserves to be arrayed in a king’s mantle; but what have they done with it? They have dressed it in coarse fustian, in convict clothes. They’ve built cities, the idiots!
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