Read an Excerpt

'Scriabin was still very young then," Ifraimov continued, "but everything about him - his countenance, his demeanor - was erotic through and through: his fine, languorous features, the sensual dimple on his chin, his intoxicated gaze, and that same languor and voluptuousness in the way he moved, the way he touched the instrument; Balmont rightly said of him that he kissed sounds with his fingers. His fingers really did move smoothly and tenderly, as if taking their time, even lingering, so as to draw out the pleasure. He caressed every key, only for the piano to give birth to spasmodic, convulsive rhythms, to sounds that were broken and twisted, and you began to understand that this was not merely a caress, but slow, refined torture, and that only by tormenting himself and the instrument did music exist for him. "When he was alone with de Staa-l for the first time, he was very tense, as though unsure whether she would understand him, accept him; for a long time he held back, playing for time, but then he began talking with a terrible conviction with which she too was instantly infected. She was like Mother Eve, he told her; her passive feminine principle was waiting - still merely waiting - to be given form, and it was hindering him. She found herself inwardly agreeing: she really was cold, uptight. That was when he took her by the hand and told her to relax, and she understood, feeling her body obey his voice and soften, no longer resisting him. " ' Every animal, insect, and blade of grass,' he would say to her, 'bears the countenance of our spiritual movements. They are created by the same caresses with which man caresses woman; so it has been since the days of Adam. It was not God but Adam who, caressing Eve, begat and named with his caresses all that surrounds man in this world.'" ' Here are birds,' he would tell her, barely touching her nipple with his lips or his tongue, 'they are winged caresses. Here are twisting, serpentine caresses - they are caresses wandering at large,' said he, the tips of his fingers sliding up from her little feet, up and up, and then along the very edge, so that she was filled with fear for him; he circled the entrance, the dip which led inside her, then carried on up over the stomach, between the breasts, wrapping his fingers around one, then the other, as if framing them, before straightening up once more over the hollow of the clavicle and up the neck to the earlobe and hair. "Then he would start mauling her,..'