absence in Russia impoverished all classes, including Russia's radical intelligentsia of the new century, to which he himself belonged:
Russia was too far away'… from the sunlit zone of European ideology… We have been shaken by history into a severe environment and scattered thinly over a vast plain.' And there, isolated from the very people it wanted to liberate, the intelligentsia'. found itself in a terrible moral tension, in concentrated asceticism.' Psychologically its members could maintain their strength only by a 'fanaticism of ideas, ruthless self-limitation and self-demarcation, distrust and suspicion and vigilant watching over their own purity…'
Some twenty years later Trotsky's freedom from such paranoia and puritanism prepared his downfall, as did his Viennese sense of the uses and pleasures of style: felicities that earned him the anger of a ruder rival in the Kremlin; because of them he fell all the more easily victim to the superior 'distrust and suspicion and vigilant watching' of the nonWestern Stalin.
This same Stalin was shipped in the spring of 1913 to one of the world's most un-Austrian regions-Siberia. After his stay in Vienna, and as if by way of a bizarre postscript to the Viennese carnival, he had been arrested wearing a woman's clothes, on February 23, in St. Petersburg. That evening the legally published Pravda held in the Russian capital a musical benefit which some 'illegals' attended. When the police raided the show, one of them tried to escape in an actress's coat and wig. The police ripped away the disguise and identified the pockmarked insurrectionist. Before long Stalin was exiled to the village of Turkhansk in the Arctic Circle. For more than three years he lived in just the log cabin-its crevices stuffed with moss-where Trotsky, from his Austrian vantage point, had seen Russian backwardness linger for ten centuries.
***
Meanwhile Trotsky basked in 'the sun-lit zone'-in the sumptuousness of the Viennese spring. Accompanied by his art-minded wife Natalya, he visited the great classic collections of the Kunsthistorisches Museum. But he did not neglect newer painters shown at the Sezession building or the avantgarde galleries scandalizing civic virtue with Kokoschka and Schiele. All these he included in the cultural chronicles he contributed along with his political reportage to Kievskaya Mysl (Kievan Thought), to the Berlin Vorwarts and Le Peuple in Brussels.
In Vienna he developed more fully his sensitivity to new esthetic directions. And with his smooth German (his children had already mastered Viennese dialect), his gift for pamphleteering not only with the pen but with the tongue, he savored the intellectual voltage of the coffeehouse, where repartee flashed from spoonful to spoonful of whipped cream.
Years later, from the perspective of a revolutionary leader, he would sniff at the smug, overly patriotic mocha-Marxists of Vienna and their weak-kneed reformism. Yet while in the city he remained a zestful partaker of the Viennese scene and of the cakes, cigars, conversation of its cafe life. Even the Socialist intellectuals with whose chauvinist ways he disagreed impressed him: 'They were well-educated people, and their knowledge of various subjects was superior to mine. I listened to them with intense and, one might almost say, respectful interest in the Cafe Central.'
To the Central Trotsky brought some fellow Russians, not least A. A. Joffe, chief contributor to his Vienna Pravda (later to be the Soviet Ambassador to Germany). It was at the Central that Trotsky wanted Joffe to chat and sip away the nervous tension that plagued his friend. It was here that Trotsky introduced Joffe to Alfred Adler. It was through this introduction that Joffe became Adler's patient. And it was Joffe's experience with Adlerian therapy that acquainted Trotsky (as he states in his autobiography) 'with the problems of psychoanalysis, which fascinated me.'
In 1913 the chief problem of psychoanalysis, and therefore of its founder, continued to be its own internal rifts. The one between Sigmund Freud and Alfred Adler kept Freud away from Adler's Cafe Central, and therefore Trotsky (himself predestined to become one of the century's great schismatics) never met Freud.
Yet the two had a good deal in common. Both Trotsky and Freud were full-blooded subverters of burgher pieties, both liked to play chess, and both relaxed by reading novels not in their mother tongue (Freud's English, as against Trotsky's French). Trotsky's love-hate relationship with Russia matched Freud's with Austria. Furthermore, the Trotsky of the year 1913 was no less than Freud an autocrat in command of an embattled sect, one that did not hesitate to lacerate its own allies. For example, Trotsky's Vienna Pravda often attacked the Pravda of St. Petersburg for its 'disruptive 'egocentral- ism,' ' which undercut all original and independent Socialist initiatives.
At the same time Freud started a purge within his own movement. Two years earlier he had gotten rid of Alfred Adler, until then one of his principal disciples among psychiatrists; Adler and his coterie had become un- Freudian by tracing neuroses not to sexual maladjustment but to general inferiority feelings. Now in 1914, a Swiss group of psychoanalysts led by Dr. Carl Jung was straying toward heresy; they no longer viewed the libido as Freud's erotically centered concept; to them it was the vehicle of a more multi-faceted psychic energy. In other words, they were undermining an article of faith.
On occasion the master of the Berggasse seemed capable of tolerating dissent. But this patience was a stratagem. His instinct was to show no mercy to antagonists in his fold-a trait he openly discussed. Only someone seeing so deeply into others could, when he wished, unmask himself so well. 'I am by temperament nothing but a conquistador,' he wrote to a friend, '… with all the inquisitiveness, daring and tenacity of such a man.' And with just such a man's ruthlessness he referred to Adler as 'a loathesome individual… that Jew-boy out of a Viennese backwater.' This was contempt as stinging as any in Trotsky's polemics. Trotsky would have understood why Freud never patronized the Jew Boy's favorite establishment, the Cafe Central.
In 1913 Freud had his own favorite coffee house, the Cafe Landtmann, a fifteen-minute walk from his house. Though close to the University, it was of an upper bourgeois, not of a literary persuasion. The Landtmann featured softer upholstery, cleaner spittoons, more financial journals and fewer avant-garde magazines than the Central: a pleasant place for Freud, who had come to accept, almost with a gloat, his insulation from the city's mainstream intellectuals.
He visited the Landtmann most often on Wednesday nights, after the weekly meeting of his Psycho-Analytical Society (from which Alfred Adler had been forced to resign two years earlier in 1911). Here he would pick a table at the cafe's Ringstrasse terrace overlooking the Gothic tracery of City Hall and the Renaissance loggias of the Court Theater; he would order einen kleinen Braunen, light a cigar, exchange Jewish jokes with favorite followers, and exhale smoke rings into the mellowness of the evening air. In May of 1913 they were leisured hedonist's smoke rings: He had just finished Totem and Taboo. 'When my work is over,' he had confessed in a letter, 'I live like a pleasure-loving philistine.'
He took care to add that these pleasures were limited and that he was 'vegetating harmlessly.' However, his character was too robust, the Viennese ambiance too seductive, and the doctor's own view of human nature too libidinal to keep meaneyed observers from speculating. Just a few months earlier, in 1912, the American psychiatrist Moses Allen Starr had gone beyond speculation in remarks to the New York Academy of Medicine's Section on Neurology. 'Vienna is not a particularly moral city,' Dr. Starr had said, 'and working side by side with Freud… I learned that he enjoyed Viennese life thoroughly. Freud is not a man who lives on a particularly high plane. He is not self-repressed. He is not an ascetic. I think his scientific theory is largely the result of his environment and the peculiar life he leads.'
Later, faced with this charge, Freud would sigh a rather Freudian sigh: 'If it were only true!' Jung insisted it was true on the basis of, to him, unmistakable clues. While still friendly (Jung told an interviewer) the two doctors had often analyzed each other's dreams, and Freud's had exhibited evidence of his carnal relationship with Minna Bernays, his wife's younger, very attractive sister, who lived with the Freuds in their Berggasse apartment. 'If Freud had tried to understand consciously the triangle,' Jung said, 'he would have been much better off.'
Of course that statement was made after Jung had broken with his mentor. And of course the picture of Freud as a Viennese libertine fits the polemic of an enemy, not authenticated fact. It is a picture that conflicts with Freud's digs at his city for combining the frivolous with the narrow-minded. But during the spring of 1913 all this didn't keep him from tasting the joys of the season with Viennese gusto.
Every Sunday, every holiday, Freud acted like any of the capital's countless hiking enthusiasts. His children were ordered to 'get ready for the meadows!' This meant getting into the dirndls and gallused shorts of peasant lasses and lads. He himself threw on leather knickers, a green jacket, a loden cape, and a Tyrolean hat with chamois brush. Off they went all together, to the Vienna Woods or beyond-off on one of the mushroom hunts he delighted in leading. The zest he showed on such occasion was-to borrow from his self-descriptionalmost conquistadorial. He had an indomitable thirst for booty. It was always Papa Freud himself (his son Martin would recall) who spotted the prize specimen. 'He would run to it and fling his hat over it before giving a piercing signal on
