This is my translation of Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky’s remarkable dialogue between a German philosopher and a Russian word, which was first published in 1919. I hope that readers will bring to my attention any errors of translation or annotation that may be found.

Preliminary notes

This translation is made, with permission, from the text of Якоби и «якобы» in Volume I (2001) of the Collected Works of Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, edited by Vadim Perelmuter (Symposium, St. Petersburg).

The letter я, pronounced yah, is here romanized as ja, the j having its German value. Standing alone, usually not capitalized, я/ja is the first-person pronoun, “I.” It is the first letter of the word якобы, jakoby, which means “as if.”[1] Similar in spelling is the German name Jacobi, which becomes Якоби in Russian, and then Jakobi when romanized back. The latter spelling is used here, for the sake of agreement with jakoby. Jacobi /Jakobi is pronounced approximately yah-KOH-be; якобы/jakoby is pronounced approximately YAH-kuh-bi (i as in bill). Where the letter я is singled out in discussion I have written ja, although not consistently, since often “I” has had to be used.

Material in square brackets, whether in the text or in the footnotes, is mine. In the text it usually gives the Russian for an English word or phrase, sometimes in the regular dictionary form (e.g., nominative singular) rather than the form that actually occurs. Footnotes not in brackets are Krzhizhanovsky’s. Persons, etc., not identified by footnotes can readily be found online and elsewhere. “P” refers to Perelmuter’s commentary, which in many cases provides fuller information.

As a rule (admitting some exceptions), Russian words enclosed in quotation marks are here turned into English italics without quotation marks. Thus, for example, in the title of the work «якобы» becomes jakoby. Except in the epigraphs, non-Russian words printed in roman in the original are here italicized. In addition, italics are preserved where the original has them. Punctuation has been modified here and there, but, for example, the expressive comma dash (, —) has been kept.

JAKOBI AND JAKOBY

O, veritas, veritas, quam intime medullae animae suspirabant Tibi.[2]
        S. Aur. Augustinus Confess [sic], VI. 10

. . . veluti schema.[3]
              Kant (On the forms of sensibility)

This took place on the night of 12–13 February, 1811, in Munich.

Hurrying to finish the treatise On Divine Things and Their Revelation,[4] the philosopher Jakobi[5] was working in his study: rustle of paper, scratch of quill.

At the Frauenkirche it had struck four, when the old philosopher, not taking his eyes from his manuscript, reached his left hand out to the volume in morocco with a dull golden gleam of letters along its spine: Critique of Pure Reason. A quotation was needed.

Flabby fingers began rustling the pages. Having found what was needed, the writer moved the manuscript nearer, snuffed the candle with steel tweezers, and began to transcribe: “. . . the ambiguity, or amphiboly, of human reason consists in this, that, dealing only with phenomena, we nevertheless treat them as if [jakoby] . . .”— quickly and steadily gliding, the quill suddenly came up against something elastic that seemed to move. Jakobi felt (with full waking clarity) that the letters had started fidgeting about under the sharp quill, making it rock, as the rippling of a river makes a float rock, and suddenly the freshly written word jakoby, soundlessly wiggling its blue-flecked black letters (“Like a caterpillar,” flashed upon Jakobi), freed itself from the line of writing and began crawling slowly toward the open volume in morocco, leaving on its way a thread-like faintly phosphorescent track.

Yielding to a kind of instinct, Jakobi quickly slammed the book shut and, covering it with his hand, brought his tired, near-sighted eyes close to the strange caterpillar. Jakoby stopped, obviously made uneasy by the obstacle: on the initial letter (or rather, the head) there stood forth, clearly visible, two pairs of comma-shaped feelers, capturing the “ja” as if in quotation marks; and at once the word, arching its bluish-black letters, raised its “ja,” wiggling the quotation marks, in the direction of the attentive clear-blue eyes that strangely lit up the flaccid wrinkled face of the old thinker. Thus two “ja”s — the “ja” in quotation marks and the simple ja— contemplated one another for a minute or so.[6]

Outside the window a cock crowed hoarsely — a second time — a third. From Marienplatz, awakened by the cock-crow, a watchman’s clapper began to knock. “Maybe it isn’t a dream . . .” thought Jakobi and asked:

— What are you? And how did you come to be?

JAKOBY.  I am the sum of all human meanings; a little word that can cover with its letters this whole world of phenomena; the scarcely visible signature of the Creator on the universe of apparitions [призраки].[7] In me you can at last glimpse the eagerly-sought “identity”: the identity of being and name, for in my name is my whole being. Neither Schelling, nor Solger, nor the Dozent Krause[8] — no one will rise to my height: probably it would even be easier for them to reach their own “ja,” of which as far back as the Upanishads it was said “that this is the longest journey for a man.” Are you awaiting a more precise answer? As you wish: my father was Kant; my native land, an obscure footnote, seldom visited by minds, in the Critique of Reason [sic]. In this morocco volume here I grew up among amphibolies — paralogisms and antinomies, — until I outgrew all the words ever spoken or written. A brain, in the torment of having comprehended me, having given me a soul, would take any word, even “world” [мир], and add on jakoby: that was its method. What you have called the “world” in your jakoby systems is only a “jakoby world,” jakoby reflected in your “jakoby-ja.” I am strewn with a thousand pseudonyms, I sound in myriads of sounds, for in me is the noise of all words, the rustle of all books, and the scratch of all quills, splitting their sharp beaks to sing the praises of rising Truth [Истина]. I am the eternal oscillation[9] of the chiming of the alphabet, agitated by the blowing of the world Spirit. Call me “Αλφαβητάριον”[10] in the style of Hölderlin,[11] who got lost in the thicket of my moonlit words, and never found the way back to the simple ones that are colored by the sun and printer’s ink.

JAKOBI.  That you are merely a freak [игра] of the brain, a lucid nightmare, nothing more, is already obvious to me. I know: you are the weariness of my creative fancy [фантазия], a phenomenon [явление] of the brain, drawn as a pattern upon the canvas of its half-asleep cells [клетки].

You, as the scholastics used to say, are Ominum bene fundatum.[12] And I, Jakobi, seem to be imagining a sort of jakoby: a ridiculous, pitiful parody upon a certain old, sad thought of mine. You are the melancholy of a philosopher’s smile, twisted into the disgusting grimace of a jester. Only that.

JAKOBY.   Mr. Jakoby-Jakobi! Your answer is a cage [клетка] in which I have long been keeping you locked up, feeding on words. “Phenomenon of the brain,” you say? But the source of the phenomenon [явление, javlenie] I find in the laziness that is “I” [ja]. Wake up from yourself, at last.

Once upon a time there lived [Жил-был] . . . or not: there lived [жил], because he was not [небыл], a certain [некий] pedant. Teaching from his professorial chair that (as he claimed) some “ja” was “ja,” the pedant did not notice how someone, without making the precious equality rock, had carefully taken out “ja” and put in another [иное]. Let’s be frank: are you really quite sure that your so-called “ja” is not simply an abbreviated judgment: “ja = kak by,” “jakoby” . . . or “kak-by-ja”;[13] that is, I repeat, a schema, possibly even a distortion (according to all the rules of dialectology) of me, jakoby. “Veluti schema” ait magister.[14] Ergo: it is not that I am your dream (as you would have it), but that we are my dream; more precisely, my distortion, arising only as an easily curable “disease of language.” However, I apologize for rudely disturbing your illusion; and let an old verse of Pindar make peace between us [наспомирит]: “Once a shadow had a dream: that dream was called man.”[15] After all I too do not entirely exist, and I willingly respond when called “shadow,” “dream,” “apparition” [призрак] . . .

JAKOBI.  Amusing . . . But all this, most learned of shadows, is not philosophy (not even jakoby-philosophy), but words lost in words; that is, pure philology. Believe me, all this makes little impression on me, a philosopher, and . . . and isn’t it time you returned to your footnote?

JAKOBY.  Not long ago you took from the shelf a little volume of the “Magus of the North”[16] (our book-covers are adjoining), and you probably reread his articles written on behalf of the letter h, which wanted to have its say.

If a letter was heard out, can the “right to speak” [право слова] be taken away from the pure word [слова]?

If you, metaphysicians, whose whole life is pervaded by the pungent dusty smell of moldering books, by the rustling of pages covered with words, if not even you understand me, who will understand me?

If the slender legs of the book-Pseudoscorpionidus[17] run over my five letters, it having ferreted out, in the curve of the leather spine, the coat of dust it needs; if your nearsighted eyes glide over me, searching for a quotation entangled in words, — I have the feeling still: “we.”

We live on this side of the gilt edge of the book, and what happens, and whether anything happens, on the other side of it, beyond the outer curve of the book’s edge, we do not and will not know. Ignoramus et ignorabimus. Pages pressed on me from above. Pages pressed on me from below. And from everywhere — words and letters, letters and words.

When Kant and I were thinking out our “transcendental analytic,” some old half-ruined tower attracted the philosopher’s optical axes. Gradually, contemplation of the tower began to “call forth” other contemplation, became an indispensable ingredient of the critique. The tower as it were took its stand athwart the thinking, having become a third participant in the critique. And do you know what the old tower was named, we don’t know by whom, long before this event? The Leben nichts-ian.[18]

JAKOBI.  I don’t understand, what’s the relation? . . .

JAKOBY.  Wait a bit. The first lines of Descartes’s Discours de la methode (you remember, there it talks about the dead-end streets and dark alleys of the medieval scholastic town and outlines the plan of the new town of Truth [Истина]) were written in winter quarters in Neuburg. Spinoza was unlucky in love: at first he tried to love Miss van-Ende,[19] but was ridiculed. Then he rushed over to the antithesis and gave himself up to the pure intellectual love of the Un-Endlich. But he was . . .

JAKOBI.  Ridiculed by it?

JAKOBY.  Ridiculed by it. Johann Fichte, that born fighter, the Sickingen of Philosophy, who his whole life long never sheathed his sword, — did he know, sitting in a little room of a cheap Königsberg hotel over the first chapter of his treatise, just ripped from his sharp quill and not yet dry, that he himself, together with all his words, written and unwritten, thought and still unthought, was mysteriously titled by the combination of old gothic letters written on the iron sheet above the window of the little room: “Zum Schwert ”?[20]

Oh, the power of memories! When the manuscript of Attempt at a Critique of All Possible Revelation[21] was finally delivered, with the respectful inscription “To the Philosopher,” to the old man of Königsberg, Kant sent back the manuscript unmarked. Only the phrase “To the Philosopher” was crossed out. In vain you too, author of the “revelation of things,” reached your hand out today to the Critique of Reason: it sends you back to yourself, “Philosopher,” crossed out.

Pages pressed on the brain from above; pages pressed on the brain from below; from everywhere words and letters, letters and words . . .

Plato’s thought was not yet taking flight, when its bearer was prophetically named: Plato — πλάτος, that is, Broad.[22] And you know . . . In the north will be born a thinker: his whole life will be a bursting out of narrow channels: of parties — of the people — of a creed. He will die in the village of Uzkoe.[23]

I am not a chaotic sound, oh no, I am an exact measure of sound, and in me, as in the Diamond Writing of Trismegistus,[24] there is not one letter that is not alive and shimmering. We words do not sound without purpose. Remember: already the Hellenes, in vague theories about the φύσει and νέσει[25] of language, could in no way distinguish and separate sound from sense. I am the void in which the atoms of Democritus move, the voracious μὴ ὄν of Platos [sic, plural] that engulfed the trembling of the Idea. Not without reason did the subtle mind of the Talmudist try to construct being [бытие] out of the twenty-two letters of the ancient alphabet. And the Hindu rischi [26] who devised a fifth element (ether), as it were a fifth letter of being [бытие], only so as to lodge in it the pure eternal and indivisible word Sphota.[27] Ethereal Sphota, breaking its delicate wings on the air and dying in earthly words, jakoby-existents — and jakoby-nonexistents[28] [якобы-сущие. . .якобы-несущие], that escaped “no” and did not reach “yes,”— O God, yes, all of “your people,” even archprosaic Hobbes, who one day was illuminated by me and said that homo animal rationale, quia orationale,[29] all of your people faithfully served me with their quills (some from a wing of perished Sphota?). You say that you need the philosophy of truth [истина], not its philology? Right? Then listen: the word “philology” means “love of Logos”; that is, a religion (and besides, the only one possible within the limits of the human heart), the religion of the Word of words, the reverence of derivative sounds for their ancient Old Root. For example, all the categories of Aristotle are just a renaming, unneeded by anyone, of the parts of speech, a making of logic out of sound, as he himself admitted, and furthermore . . .

JAKOBI.  You’re doing a great deal of talking (then again, your whole being lies in that). But what follows from this?

JAKOBY.  From this it follows that in general nothing follows from anything, never and from nowhere, that no following exists, but there is an eternal standing [стояние], above which only a flock [стая] of buzzing words circles; that the world is a long, tedious inventory of things long lost, perished: the things have perished, but the names still are sounding — and that’s all. A stamp of decay imprinted on impressions.[30] Do you really not notice the smell of putrefaction? That’s truth, dead and rotting, decomposing into Multitude.

JAKOBI.  But words do conceal something, don’t they? You, a word, cannot peek behind yourself. But . . . is something hidden under names? . . .

JAKOBY. Nothing. Non-being [небытие], skillfully pretending to be “being” [бытие], is a talkative naught [нуль] (you just called me loquacious); “not-flowerets”[31] embroidered on an empty field: on them a spectral compound-flowering can be seen in plenty, but just try and reach out your hand to them — and it will pluck “nothing.”[32]

JAKOBI.  Now here I’m beginning to recognize you: you that so strongly fear specters, you yourself are a specter from olden times. The dead, heretical Flatus vocis, damned in the councils.[33] I know an exorcism by which you are dispelled. Listen: however much of spectrality — so much also of being.

JAKOBY.  Not an exorcism, but a profound abracadabra, and furthermore, I fear that [как бы] you, the conjurer, will yourself be dispelled by your own conjuration. Let’s argue. In the word “бытие” [bytie = “being”] I admit without objection its first part — the syllable “бы” [by], that special subjunctivity or “hypothetical probability”[34] (to speak in the style of the second Academy[35]) that always peers out of all your prosyllogisms. The sum of all doubts in being (which fully agrees with Descartes’s criterion) is in fact the only being available to you: it might properly be called “Great Бы [By].” But the dexterity of metaphysics, of that, according to Damascene,[36] “wisdom of wisdoms and cunning of cunnings,” lies in the quick furtive substitution of the ace “Бытие” for the two “бы.” Diderot used to call you metaphysicians “birds that feed on fog”:[37] the mentally-comprehended being of yours is indeed a formula of fog, produced from fog, the verges of something vague in its very concept. Cloudiness disclouded.[38] Incidentally, while we’re having a nice talk here, you should be aware that Mr. Hegel, a man not unknown to you, sitting in his state-supplied apartment in Heidelberg, is writing to himself: “Being, an indeterminate spontaneity, is actually nothing and neither more nor less than nothing.”[39] Of course, I’m ready to put myself in your place: without the word “being” a philosopher can no more be anything than a theologian without the word “God.” Without this thing made of letters, there’s no writing a book, nor delivering a lecture: there’s trouble. Your fantastical [причудливый] caste of metaphysicians is a priesthood of five-sound “being”[40] that regulates the world’s ethical rite and logical ritual. But did it ever enter your head that this is a Godless rite? And that logic and ethics are a net that has caught emptiness?

JAKOBI. Hm . . . And what would you say about “cogito ergo sum”?

JAKOBY.  In the first place, I’m suspicious of the ergo. One has to leave sum and cross by the shaky little bridge ergo over to cogito. But how do you suddenly come to be on both sides of ergo? Sextus Empiricus, in an exposition of the fourth path of Pyrrho, teaches us that we should not be on one side of a contradiction (μέρος τῆς διαφωνίας[41]). Oh, Sextus knew what all this is called. In the second place, — the sacred formula of Cartesius, transposed into simple common sense, signifies: “I doubt everything, except that I doubt.” Thus being, presented to man by this formula, consists entirely in the “state of doubt.” Punctum.[42] Incidentally, when Cartesius, sitting motionless by the smoldering coals of his fireplace, was thinking: “Cogito — ergo — sum,” a pretty Dutch serving-maid (I know this for certain) stuck her nose in the door and thought too: “The chevalier is silent all the time, and thinking — thinking . . . as if there were no one at all in the room.” And you know, what if at that time there really had been no one in the room! The maidservant probably would have been frightened . . . Well, and you?

JAKOBI.  How flat that is.

JAKOBY.  Mystic most amiable! When a cherub has said something transcendently foolish, in the vast throng of seraphim they whisper, covering their mouths with their wings: “How three-dimensional that is . . .”

JAKOBI.  Enough of farce! Through all your giggling and jumble of contradictions I see one thing clearly: you want to convince me of your existence [бытие], in preparation for the next move: the moment I acknowledge you, I will be forced to renounce myself, crossing out in myself not only “philosopher,” but also . . . You deny me, deny Logos, Being itself, but in the name of what? This whole tangle of intertwined maxims, leaps of logic, playing with words,[43] is just evasion, trying to avoid answering. The question that was once posed to the suffering Logos I repeat to you, a miserable mot: out with your answer or out of my dream, begone: Quid est veritas?[43a]

JAKOBY.  You want the impossible: playing with words is not “playing with words” . . . But to the matter at hand. I, the mot, will answer letter for letter in the same way as “Logos” answered: vir qui adest.[43b] This answer is prepared in the following way: the letters of the question — q, u, i, d, and so on — are taken and rearranged in another order (for the sake of variety). The work is done: believers revere; philosophers interpret. So it is in everything. Boring.

JAKOBI.  Be quiet. Probably . . . I’m ready to acknowledge you, but only as a certain nezhit’ [44] curled into my life, something living the borrowed, reflected life of a parasite adherent to the brain.

Yes, I always felt in myself, in the very center of the thought-whirl,[45] a sort of little dead cell [клеточка], a corpse, wrapped in living tissue that was vibrating with pain.

As long ago as my youth, when from behind mountains of piled-up books I first caught sight of the radiance of the Aurora of the great Böhme,[46] or on that memorable evening in July when a trembling, hidden in Kant’s book on the Only Possible Argument for God,[47] made the book fall from my hands, and my heart expanded, striving to embrace the whole of being [всебытие], there, in my very heart’s heart, something gave a yawn and said, as just now: “Boring.” That was your doing. And you remember our Tübingen meditations over the dissertation on “how the concept of being can be thinkable”:[48] it was you that slipped this thought in under my quill: if the world was created out of nothing, then, consequently, it is a paraphrase of nothing. But my quill, with the help of God, shook the tenacious wood-louse right off. And Hölderlin! Now I know: it was you that robbed his brilliant rhythms of meaning and dipped his quill in chaos. O God! And the pure friendship Schelling and I had: by the triviality of words, by jumbles of blind phrases, were severed our thoughts that were so alike, so necessary to one another . . . in this world of dimwits! You break everything down into letters. And would you like to stick your stinger into yourself, to be yourself broken down into letters?

JAKOBY.  As you wish: I consist of words knitted together without complications — “ja” and “kaby” (o becomes а in unaccented syllables[49]); I manifest, usually, in the form kaby “ja,” [50] as a vague troubled dream, a Leibnizian “inquietude poussante” about my genuine, warm, solitary “ja.” Take a look: an invisible puff of wind makes the not-flowers sway, — and letters touching letters incline, and yet incline toward some meaning . . .

JAKOBI. Aha . . . So then you are, as it were, a postulate about “ja”? A demand for realization? Wait — that’s very similar to Fichte’s theory of the formation of the “ja” . . .

JAKOBY.  Perhaps . . . But Fichte, in the language you and I are speaking right now, means sosna [сосна = “pine”[51]], — and what he thinks up precisely when so-sna [со‑сна = “half-asleep”] he vainly treats as reality. His doctrine of science,[52] which has concealed its roots in the unconscious and abandoned the ramified “jakoby ja” to a problematic God, shakes off book-metaphysical dreams from its branches, and in incomplete words dreams of Höh + ель [“Hegel”[53]]. Gloss: in the treatise on Civitas solis the name Hoh (höh) designates, as Campanella himself puts it, “a metaphysical being [существо] consisting of the head of the government of ideas.”[54] The rest is clear. What I need is the “ja” of the world, not the small “ja” that appeared to half-asleep dreaming [со-сна и во-сне, so-sna and vo-sne] “Fichte,” but the capital world‑“JA” written in Hegel’s bold hand, though, alas, fatally crammed into a small, barely visible human brevier.[55]

JAKOBI.  Strange. Not until now did I notice that we have actually been conversing the whole time in some language alien to me: it’s unlike my language when I’m awake . . . So all this is a dream, a nightmare!

JAKOBY.  Not entirely. After all, if you have lived all your sixty-seven years without noticing that you were living in an alien world that was shuffling tattered pages of alien books into your brain (what you people call original thinking), — then is it any wonder that you didn’t notice the card slipped to you just now by a dextrous player. Yes, we are speaking (believe, don’t believe — as you like) in the language of future philosophy. I assumed that with a seeker of truth it was most polite to speak in precisely the language of truth. This language, it must be admitted, is no better than others, but after all, even the manger in which the Bethlehem infant was laid was quite ordinary — a dirty manger of plain wood, an ordinary container for fodder of domestic cattle. Have faith (I apologize for five seconds of prophetic fervor[56]): “Faith will burst forth from the north [с севера, s severa] and tongues will begin to utter: this faith [се вера, se vera]”![57]

JAKOBI.  It’s with a laughable feeling of tenderness[58] that I’m thinking of you now, unhappy little nezhit’. And you too are melancholy over something truly similar. You too are knocking against contradictions, so you are a little bit alive. It even seems to me that you want to be freed from yourself, to shed the scales of letters, to perish in soundlessness and in death find another.

JAKOBY.  Yes, the day will come and we will break up into shabby old letters, rendered meaningless . . . “The almond-tree will shed its blossoms”[59] — Ἀλφαβητάριον will lose its fading letters and, as it is falling down, rustling whisper: “How good!”[60]

JAKOBI.  And this life, with all the tedium of its categories and the hopelessness of postulates?!

JAKOBY.  Inquire of the Greek dictionary. It will say that we know only the secondary sense of the word “κατηγορεῖν,” but its underlying original meaning is: accuse, convict. Thus by means of our twelve categories we are accusing life of phenomenality, that is, of not responding, deaf to our postulates. Man, that strange double being [существо], by means of the categories takes revenge for the outrage upon the postulates.

First look at the four bloodstained nails of Golgotha, and then at the seventy-sixth page of the Critique of Reason: there you will see a schema — a vertical line: crosswise around are printed four words:

Quality                        Relation

Quantity                      Modality

(After a silence.) Thus do they deal with the Word for the world of words.

(A pause. Outside the window — scarlet-gray dawn. Third cocks.)

JAKOBI.  I did not doubt, Lord! You see.

JAKOBY.  There is something fatal in your systems, philosophers. Thought, freed from the professor’s dress-coat uniform of, say, a Protestant university solidly constructed on absolute-monarchical ground, having drawn a gigantic, fantastic [фантастический] curve, hooking it to distant stars and frightening on the way seraphic hosts of angels, via its out-flying arc will without fail end up in the same professorial uniform, hanging in the wardrobe in the state-supplied apartment at the same Protestant university of the same absolute-monarchical government. Metaphysical cup-and-ball.[61]

JAKOBI.  It’s getting light. For you it’s time to go into the book, for me — to go to church, for early mass. Suum cuique.[62]

And you know, August Schlegel once told me about a certain ancient Vedic root: bhū, it seems. Three meanings are hidden in the old root: prayer — growth — God. Thus in our prayers, as in a rude manger, is laid the Infant. And we foster Him with tenderness and faith. Words that have left noisy vain life for the calm of prayer are not subject to you, Jakoby.

JAKOBY.  The words of your prayers are condemned to go eternally around the circulus vitiosuses of the rosary. On a carousel you won’t get far. It’s all sophisms of the heart. But for me it’s time. From the sun dull-scarlet blood has begun to drip. It’s time for me to go back into my obscure wise book.

But at parting, in exchange for your old “bhū,” accept this, another old word — ἴνδαλμα. Rummage all the folios, unroll all the ancient scrolls, — only in two places, in Heraclitus the Obscure and in Simon the Satirist,[63] will you find it inscribed.[64] The meaning of the word? Some experts say that “ ἰνδαλμοί” signifies “essences” [сущности]; other experts maintain that “ ἰνδαλμοί” signifies “specters” [призраки].

(Bells from the Frauenkirche.)

Goodbye. Write your words — move your heart round about the rosary’s agate pebbles beneath the silvery music of the bells.

For you I foretell: Truth you will not behold, — and when you finish writing, you will be thrown away, like an old used-up quill!

JAKOBI.  So be it. In the same way, the stem of a flower must grow in the direction opposite to the force of the earth’s gravity. And if I do not reach Truth, let me die with my face turned toward the side of Truth. And finally, I, Friedrich Jakobi, do accept Jakoby, but sub reservatione Jakobea.[65]

[1] [For the meaning “as if,” the expression как бы, kak by, is more common than якобы; яко is an old form of как.]

[2] [The full quotation, “O veritas, veritas, quam intime etiam tum medullae animi mei suspirabant tibi” (“O truth, truth, how deeply, even then, the marrow of my soul was sighing with longing for you”), is from Augustine, Confessions, Book III, §6 (10). Here “6” is the section number as in the editions of J. J. O’Donnell (New York, 1992) and the Loeb Classical Library, “10” as in the “Maurist” edition, Paris, 1679–1700. P repeats the erroneous reference to Book VI.]

[3] [The phrase is from the following sentence of Kant’s Inaugural Dissertation(1770), De Mundi Sensibilis atque Intelligibilis Forma et Principiis (On the Form and Principles of the Sensible and the Intelligible World): “Spatium non est aliquid obiectivi et realis, nec substantia, nec accidens, nec relatio; sed subiectivum et ideale et e natura mentis stabili lege proficiscens veluti schema omnia omnino externe sensa sibi coordinandi.” (Akademie edition, vol. 2, p. 403.) (“Space is not something objective and real, neither a substance, nor an accident, nor a relation; but subjective and ideal and originating from the nature of the mind by a stable law, as it were a schema [veluti schema], that orders according to itself all things of all kinds sensed externally.”) A schema, Greek σχῆμα, is an outline or scheme.]

[4] [Von den göttlichen Dingen und ihrer Offenbarung (1811).]

[5] Friedrich Jakobi (1743–1819). One of the most notable critics of Spinoza and Kant. Spinoza’s pantheism he reduced to atheism; Kant’s critical idealism, to pure phenomenalism. In controversy with Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, against “godless reason” Jakobi put forward faith and inner feeling. Around him were grouped mystically inclined kinds of thinking (his sphere of influence was from the 1780s to the 1830s).

[6] [Bear in mind that ja standing alone is the pronoun “I.”]

[7] [призрак, like specter from a root signifying sight, will later be translated by that word. There is a play on “visible . . . apparitions,” зримая . . . призраков.]

[8] Karl Krause is a curious phenomenon [явление] of the romanticism of the time in metaphysics. From 1804 to 1824 he wanders over Europe and the East with the aim of “gathering material for a thorough grounding of the system of identity.”

[9] [колыхание, cf. колебать, translated “make . . . rock” in the prologue about Jakobi’s quill.]

[10] [“Alphabetkin”]

[11] Fr. Hölderlin, author of “Hyperion,” a poet-madman, who combined his creative activity with the thought of the metaphysicians of the time (Schelling and Hegel). Prof. Windelband wittily observes that “when Hölderlin gone mad could no longer write verses, verses continued of themselves to be written in him” (Preludes).

[12] [“Ominum”, gen. pl. of omen, must be erroneous (possibly a faulty back-formation from nom. pl. omina). Read Omen bene fundatum, “a well-founded omen,” cf. phenomenon bene fundatum (Leibniz).]

[13] [Here ja = kak by translates я — какбы, the dash representing the copula “is,” which is often omitted in Russian. Thus in pronunciation the phrase is ja kak by, similar to jakoby. It means “I is as-if” (see n. 1), and kak-by-ja means “as-if-I.”]

[14] [“ ’As if a schema,’ says the teacher.” See the second epigraph. But here veluti schema is probably intended to mean “as-if is a schema,” “is” again being understood.]

[15] [σκιᾶς ὄναρ / ἄνθροπος, “A dream of a shadow / [is] man”: Pythian 8.95–96. “A shadow had a dream” is тени сон привиделся, “to a shadow a dream appeared”; the noun привидение that corresponds to “appear,” like призрак above (n. 6) and in the next sentence, means an apparition or specter.]

[16] “Magus of the North”: one of the numerous pseudonyms of the philosopher Hamann, who actually did also write “on behalf of the letter h.” An eccentric thinker, he dreamed of a “critique of pure language.”

[17] The “book scorpion,” of the order of pseudoscorpioniduses, is 3 mm in size. No eyes at all; runs quickly both with head forward, and in the reverse direction. Lives in dust, herbaria, and books, feeds on the dust of dried-out insects. (Excerpt from Brockhaus and Efron Encyc. Dict.)

[18] The fact is confirmed by Kant’s biography. The testimony of Jakoby as it were deciphers the unintelligible symbol of the falling tower, engraved on the reverse side of the medal presented by subscription to Im. Kant by the Berliners in the 1790s. [“Leben nichts-ian,” i.e. “the Leben nichts tower.” According to P, Kant lived at one time in the quarter of Königsberg called Löbenicht; if the name is transliterated into Russian and then back into German, the ö becomes e.]

[19] [The daughter of his teacher van den Enden.]

[20] The hotel in which Fichte was staying at the time of his sojourn in Königsberg, “Under the Sword” (Z Schwert), was located in 1791 not far from the bank of the Pregel, and had been founded long before the year ’91.

[21] [“Possible” is absent from the actual title, Versuch einer Kritik aller Offenbarung (1792).]

[22] [πλάτος= “breadth,” πλατύς= “broad.”]

[23] In the village of Uzkoe [Narrow] Vl. Solovyov died on 31 July 1900.

[24] [Is this his Emerald Tablet, Tabula Smaragdina? P calls attention to the Buddhist Diamond Sutra.]

[25] [νέσει is apparently a misprint for θέσει: “the nature and institution of language.”]

[26] [rishi = a holy seer or sage, especially one of the Seven Sages; here the adj. “Hindu” (“more precisely, Indian,” says P) shows that “rischi” is plural.]

[27] [The bearer of meaning of a word or sentence, that from which the meaning bursts forth.]

[28] [Or “bearers.”]

[29] [This is known as a quotation from Hobbes; its source?]

[30] [Печатьтления . . . впечатлениях, a “polylectic homophone” noted in Karen Link Rosenflanz, Hunter of Themes (Peter Lang, New York, 2005), p. 40.]

[31] [нетовые цветики.]

[32] [In a 1902 article Vasily Rozanov argues against a certain Mr. Infolio (a pseudonym?), who denies that the Russian people have their own original ideas: Г. Инфолио говорит, что я получил «сколастическое образование, широко ширяю сизым орлом по поднебесью, сею в облаках умозрительную репу и вышиваю по нетовой земле пустыми цветами». “Mr. Infolio says that I received ‘a scholastic education, I widen out widely like the blue-gray eagle in the heavens, I sow in the clouds a speculative turnip and embroider empty flowers on not-earth.’ ”]

[33] [The philosopher and theologian Roscelin claimed that universals are merely words, “the voice’s breath.”]

[34] [The enclitic particle бы, originally a conditional form of the verb быть = “to be,” is used in conditional and subjunctive constructions.]

[35] [Of the 3rd c. BCE skeptic Arcesilaus.]

[36] [John Damascene, Syrian monk and priest, 7th–8th c.]

[37] [In Mémoires pour Catherine II Diderot refers to “cette sorte d’oiseaux qui s’engraissent dans le brouillard et qu’on appelle métaphysiciens.”]

[38] [Разоблаченная облачность, cf. Blavatsky’s Разоблаченная Изида = Isis Unveiled, 1877.]

[39] Wissenschaft d. Logik I Ap. 73. The first chapter of the Logic was actually written by Hegel in February 1812.

[40] [The word бытие has five letters.]

[41] [“a part of the disagreement”]

[42] [“Period.”]

[43] [Or “games with words,” игры словами.]

[43a] [“What is truth?”]

[43b] [“the man who is present”]

[44] [нежить: in Russian folklore, a fantastical being or spirit, more or less human-like, hostile to man.]

[45] [мыслеворот, cf. водоворот (“water-whirl”) = “whirlpool.”]

[46] [Jakob Böhme.]

[47] [Der einzig mögliche Beweisgrund zu einer Demonstration des Daseins Gottes (The Only Possible Argument for a Demonstration of the Existence of God) (1763)]

[48] [Perhaps “how there can be a thinkable concept of being.”]

[49] [In pronunciation, that is.]

[50] [кабы, kaby = “if” in the conditional mood — hypothetical or unreal. In Old Russian it could mean “as if.” Thus like kak-by-ja at n. 13 above, kaby ya can mean “as-if I.”]

[51] [The tree; but actually Fichte = “spruce.”]

[52] [наукоучение, presumably = Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre.]

[53] [The first element suggests German Höhe = “height” and hoch/hohe = “high, tall.” The second is ель, el’ = “spruce.” In Russian transliteration German h becomes г, which is Russian g, and ö becomes е. Thus Höh + ель becomes Гегель, Gegel’, which is the Russian spelling of “Hegel.”]

[54] [Tommaso Campanella, Civitas solis (The City of the Sun): “The great ruler among them is a priest whom they call by the name Hoh, though we should call him Metaphysic. He is head over all, in temporal and spiritual matters. . . . But beyond everything else it is necessary that Hoh should understand metaphysics and theology . . . ” (anonymous Gutenberg translation)]

[55] Around this time (see Wis. d. Logik) Hegel, not naming but clearly pointing to Fichte, was writing that what was expressed by his predecessor as if (“яковы”) in a dream, by him, Hegel, would be brought out into reality [явь].

[56] [пафос, pafos, also = “pathos.”]

[57] [P brackets the last sentence (from “Have faith”), noting that it is absent from the typewritten copy of the original and appears only in the magazine publication.]

[58] [Or perhaps “tenderness near to laughter.”]

[59] [Cf. Eccles. 12.5.]

[60] “Das ist gut”: the last words of the dying Kant. Uttered 12 Feb. 1804.

[61] [биль-боке < Fr. bilboquet.]

[62] [“To each his own.”]

[63] [An error for “Timon” σιλλο-γράφος: Timon of Phlius, writer of Σίλλοι, Silloi, satirical poems.]

[64] [There are two rare words, ἴνδαλμα and ἰνδαλμός, both meaning “an appearance.” The plural ἰνδαλμοί of the latter is the title of a work by Timon. No word containing ινδαλ occurs in Heraclitus. The verb ἰνδάλλομαι = “appear (like), seem (like)” is used by Homer, Aristophanes, and Plato, among others.]

[65] Sub Reservatio[ne] Jakobea: “if it please God” (the so-called “oath of Jacob”). [Or “God willing.” Instead of Jakobea, the usual form would be Jacobaea. See German Wikipedia, art. “Conditio Jacobaea.”]