Petersburg Lithograph: Studio Romantic in Borrowed Highland War-Dress

You drew no battle here. There is no field behind you, no smoke, no horse turned in the dust, no line of riders thinning toward a ridge. You gave the stone a table and a sheet, a reed pen, and your own steady eyes—and you asked the stone to keep them. The chest across from me is stitched full of cartridge-tubes, the gazyri lined and ready, and yet the only thing in your grip is the pen, pressed to the paper you have just begun to shade. You armed yourself for a war you meant to fight sitting down.

And the sitting-down is beautiful—I will not pretend otherwise. The Petersburg lithographers of your decade learned the stone the way a singer learns a room, and you sing here. Look how the papakha is built: curl over curl, each turned so the light rides its ridge and drops into its hollow, a whole weather of fur worked in grease and patience. The face holds its weight; the folded sleeve gathers its shadow and lets it go; the gaze meets me and does not blink. This is assured work, native to its stone, owing nothing borrowed for its craft.

The borrowing is elsewhere—in the costume, and the costume is the confession. Those cartridge-tubes belong to riders whose fur and gazyri were paid for in deed: a distance ridden, a danger met, a thing done. You took the wardrobe and left the war, and so the tunic must swear what the pen was afraid to swear alone. This is the whole machinery of the anxious hand dressed as the refined one—craft that will not risk being remembered for craft, and so hires a warrior's silhouette to stand guard over it. I would ask which mountain you crossed; you cannot answer, cannot revise, cannot meet this room with a new line. So you hold your fixed sentence, papakha and pen together, while somewhere the highland song goes on being sung, and it never once repeats itself. — GY