“His imagination was filled with labyrinths, tigers, knights, mirrors” – Kommersant FM

Kommersant FM columnist Pyotr Voronkov talks about different aspects of the writer’s life, including his creative life.

Buenos Aires today. And the writer who could not imagine himself without him, Jorge Luis Borges. He wrote about the city like this: “This is the center, the outskirts, the suburb, unnoticed and desired, never mine and never yours.” Even as a child, Borges created his own world from it and populated it with mythological creatures, sometimes being frightened by his own imagination.

The most powerful impression in life is the first visit to my parents’ library. He had to become a writer, fulfill the dream of his blind father – the family did not think differently. He wrote his first story at the age of six. His imagination was filled with labyrinths, tigers, knights, mirrors… Mirrors were a different story: they fascinated him and frightened him at the same time. Then he will say in the words of one of his heroes: “Mirrors and copulation are disgusting, because they multiply the number of people.”

Borges was truly afraid of physical intimacy with a woman. Many literary scholars believe that he remained a virgin all his life, while being extremely amorous. However, there are his letters to friends, where he boasts of his exploits with one lady of low social responsibility. On the other hand, he was a great literary hoaxer, so he should have come up with a couple of trips to the brothel.

He was even married for a short time, but fled to his mother, never sharing the marriage bed with his wife. By the way, it was my mother who arranged this marriage. Doña Leonor Acevedo Suarez was getting old, and her son, like her husband once, was rapidly losing his sight. The doctors couldn’t do anything. She read to her blind husband for 13 years and to her son for another 14. Plus I wrote under his dictation.

Borges seemed to take his failures seriously, but no one could replace his mother. And only after her death, Maria Kodama, who was 40 years younger than him, appeared in the writer’s life. And again, nothing personal – she became his eyes. Together they traveled all over the world and published Borges’s last book, Atlas. His text, her photographs… Interestingly, he was nominated for the Nobel Prize 10 times, and this is perhaps one of the few awards that he never received.