The highway of the world

Saint Petersburg, March 30, 2015

After seeing a few graffiti in and around Corpusnaya street, we came across this at number 32 Pionerskaya. Artur was happy. We had met just a few days earlier when he was in his car waiting for something to happen. I tapped on his window and asked where I could see graffiti in the city. I don’t know, but we’ll see them, he said. Since then we’ve been inseparable, talking the whole time.

Standing in front of this biker, Artur has an unreality check, saying if it was up to him he’d hit the road and travel around the world constantly, moving forward, always forward, and he wouldn’t stop until he had been to every corner of the planet. It’s not that I’m tired of living in my country, as Yesenin says, no, what I want is for my dream to come true. I want to live in my country, going around the world. Do you understand?

Back at the hotel, in the car, Artur has a reality check, saying he’s happy, that without reality there can be no desire, so why go around and around the world until you’re dizzy when your own country makes you dizzy already. Doesn’t Spain make you dizzy? Artur asks me as we part at the entrance to my hotel.[1]

José Félix Valdivieso. Director of Communications. IE Business School, http://www.ie.edu/

[1] Hitting the road and living life to the full seems to have been what poet Sergei Yesenin (1895-1925) sought when he entered into wedlock for the third time, marrying the famous American dancer Isadora Duncan, who was a good bit older than him, and who he followed around the world’s stages until, after less than two years’ matrimony, divorced her to return for the last time to Saint Petersburg, where he committed suicide in the Hotel Angleterre, where it is said he wrote his last poem with his own blood because there was no ink in the hotel… English and Russian versions of his poem “I’m tired of living in my country” can be found on http://bit.ly/1PyXHyt.

More about Artur in “Live” (Impuls PLUS Magazine, Nº4, 2015).