Lev Navrozov
Friday, Sept. 5, 2003

When we came to New York from Moscow via Rome, an American whom we had met in Rome wanted to introduce me to the artistic/intellectual circles of New York. Thus he took me to a home where poets congregated.

The hostess, a poet, was a tall blonde who would have been attractive had she not been so anemic, as if after a long illness or a loss of someone near and dear. Eerily, all her guests, also poets, looked as anemic, exhausted and despondent as she.

The only exception among those present was the hostess's daughter, a charming girl of 7 or so with light golden hair, and I mentally translated into English and recited a line of Russian poetry: "Your daughter, lovelier than the loveliest Spring."

As for the adults, they all seemed to be attending a funeral, and I wondered why. True, poets were no longer noticed the way Byron and Walt Whitman had been. They were eclipsed by baseball players, movie stars and television anchors.

Accordingly, they were poor, for few would pay 100 times more for a paperback book of poetry than for a Conan Doyle detective novel, as was the case in Russia at the beginning of the past century.

But is this a sufficient reason for despair? I described to them the destiny of a Russian genius of poetry named Osip Mandelstam, to show them that theirs was not the worst predicament.

He was published and admired until the 1930s, when the Soviet publications stopped publishing him. In 1934 he wrote a poem representing Stalin as a savage criminal in the midst of his criminal gang. But the times were still so lenient that initially he was merely exiled by Stalin to a provincial city. Waiting for the worst, he and his wife lived there in abject poverty, but still he created poetry, even out of their destitution.

In the luxurious poverty we live, in the grand dearth
Amid the treasures of evening bliss and morning calm.

Then, to put the grief of the New York poets into global perspective, I said that possibly not for long were they destined to suffer – the Soviet rulers were developing post-nuclear superweapons to annihilate the United States.

The hostess's daughter, "lovelier than the loveliest Spring," was all agog: "Mom, is this true?"

Her mother mumbled something noncommittal, but the girl took it for the affirmative.

"THAT will serve THEM right!" she intoned in triumph.

I was stunned. THEM included her, her mother and everyone present. Next day I called the acquaintance of mine who had introduced me to the poets. "Why are you all so anemic?" I asked him.

"None of us has money. Money is the lifeblood. We ARE anemic. We have no lifeblood. We are dead. We are living corpses."

The easiest way to acquire the lifeblood seems to many to be by gambling.

As my wife was riding on an express bus to her work (editorship at McGraw-Hill), her fellow traveler also happened to be an editor – for a major magazine – and the two editors predictably struck up a conversation.

The magazine editor was a divorcee and had no children. Her husband and she had parted because their modes of life were incompatible. What was her mode of life? Every Saturday morning, she went off to Atlantic City on a (free!) bus provided by the casino. On Sunday evening she returned to go to work on Monday, to make money, if necessary, for her next weekend fling in search of the lifeblood.

Mathematically, it is clear that a gambler may win (or lose) a large sum of money if he or she can stop gambling after a win or a loss. But if he or she gambles on, no matter what win or loss, the gambler loses the money – the gambler thus covers the casino's expenses and ensures its profit. So the magazine editor gave her money away to the casino for years.

Though the Declaration of Independence proclaimed the pursuit of happiness one of man's inalienable rights, gambling, as well as narcotics, prostitution, pornography amd even alcohol were banned during certain periods of U.S. history. The tacit explanation is that man's will cannot cope with certain vices – they are stronger than man's will and man acts against or outside his will.

Several years ago, the stores of New York were allowed to sell lottery tickets – gambling outside the Atlantic City casinos. Indeed, our middle-class neighborhood has turned into one vast casino. At every store I hear the rattle of the lottery machines issuing the tickets, and it seems that this is the main item of trade in New York.

Middle-class men and women, perhaps even car- and home-owners, buy their lottery tickets as they do their groceries or medicines, and then go to work to recoup the net loss – for statistically, constant gambling leads to a net loss.

In 1974, an acquaintance of mine came from Soviet Russia and received a full professorship (in physics) at a prestigious U.S. university. He was happily married and had children. But one day he appeared on Wall Street with a computer allegedly able to predict stock prices. We laughed. Imagine a Wall Street pro believing in such a hoax.

Yet the yearning for the lifeblood is such that a Wall Street firm gave him $100,000 to test his miracle machine on the Stock Exchange. He coolly won $300,000 for them. Science! Computerization of stock price predictions! Enough of guesswork! They gave him $1 million, which he lost along with all the money of his own, gained from his university salary of many years.

But now he was a gambler beyond redemption. He was now aware of nothing except the lifeblood he craved to acquire. His wife left him, but he barely noticed. He is still on Wall Street, gambling with the help of his machine, by finding ever new believers.

For many, stock trading is just gambling. Indeed, because of insider trading, which no laws can completely eradicate, a stock gambler has a greater risk to lose that same lifeblood he or she is after than a buyer of lottery tickets at an ordinary store.

Ironically, the American Puritans, who largely determined the moral atmosphere in the United States until the mid-20th century, were dead against playing cards or other games for money but seemed to accept "playing" on a stock exchange, though the same word, "playing," is used in many languages to denote both kinds of "playing," and a "player" means both a casino gambler and a stock exchange speculator.

The link to my book online is www.levnavrozov.com. My e-mail is navlev@cloud9.net. You can also request our webmaster@levnavrozov.com to send you by e-mail my outline of my book.

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