Sofia kovalevskaya too much happiness

 



                TOO MUCH HAPPINESS

           A Chamber Drama in Two Parts for Two Actors




CHARACTERS


SHE — Sofia Kovalevskaya, aged 21 in Part One and 41 in Part Two.

HE — Karl Weierstrass, Professor at the University of Berlin in Part One; a doctor in Stockholm in Part Two.



SETTING

A single, minimalist space. A large oak table piled with manuscripts and books, two chairs, and a blackboard on an easel. At the back, a wide couch covered with a blanket and a tall window with heavy curtains. On the table: a Russian copper kettle, tea glasses, and a small dish of cherry preserves.
PART ONE. BERLIN (1871–1874)




Scene 1. Morning. Tea and Closed Doors



Half-light. The heavy curtains are drawn. HE sits at the table in an old-fashioned frock coat and thin-rimmed spectacles, intently leafing through a notebook covered in tiny handwriting. SHE stands by the window, her back straight, her eyes shining with feverish intensity. A wall clock ticks.

HE (without looking up) — You have stolen these solutions, Frau Kovalevskaya.

SHE (startled, then straightening) — Professor Weierstrass… I did not come to Berlin to be insulted.

HE (removing his spectacles and looking at her over the lenses) — The problems in Abelian integrals I gave you a week ago are being tackled by my best doctoral students. Men with university degrees. They struggle with them for months. You brought me your notebook after four days. And here… (He taps the page with his finger.) …here is a method unknown in Berlin. Who helped you?

SHE (approaching the table and placing her hands on its edge) — My first teacher remained at our estate in Polibino, in the Pskov Governorate. When I was eleven, the house was being renovated. There wasn’t enough wallpaper for my nursery. So the walls were covered with lithographed lecture notes by Academician Ostrogradsky. On differential and integral calculus.

HE (narrowing his eyes) — That sounds like a Russian fairy tale.

SHE — I fell asleep and woke up looking at those strange symbols. Integrals, limits, differentials. I did not understand what they meant, but I could hear a secret music in them. A higher harmony absent from the dull world of generals’ daughters. Later, I found a physics textbook in my father’s library. And I derived the trigonometric formulas myself to understand how light moves. No one stood behind me, Professor. No one but the walls of my room.

A pause. HE looks at her for a long moment, then slowly pours tea into two glasses and slides the little dish of preserves towards her.

HE — The Senate of the University of Berlin rejected my petition again yesterday. The law forbids women from entering lecture halls. Even as auditors.

SHE (bitterly) — Europe, which we in Russia imagined to be a temple of freedom, is no better than our patriarchal swamp. The doors here are simply made of oak, and the locks are heavier.

HE — Drink your tea before it gets cold. And make sure the curtain is firmly drawn. If the university authorities discover that I am giving private lessons to a Russian nihilist, I shall have to explain myself to the Minister of Education.

SHE (smiling for the first time in the scene, then sitting at the table) — You said “nihilist” as though it were the name of a deadly disease.

HE — And is it not? You Russian girls cut off your braids, flee your fathers’ homes, reject God, family, and state… For the sake of what?

SHE — For the right to think! My father, General Korvin-Krukovsky, threatened to lock me away in the country until I married some local nobleman. To escape, I entered into a fictitious marriage. Vladimir Kovalevsky and I married so that we could obtain passports and go abroad to study. We gave each other our word: no property, no family cage. Only freedom and science!

HE (shaking his head, a warm trace of amusement in his eyes) — Do you think you have discovered America, my child? Twenty-five centuries ago, in Croton, at Pythagoras’s school, his daughter Damo and her pupils studied numbers and the movement of the spheres alongside men. They hid their scrolls from prying eyes, too. The world changes slowly. You try to outwit life with formulas, but life always sends you the bill.



Scene 2. Daytime. Lunch and the Shadow of Dostoevsky




The light grows brighter, but the curtains remain closed. A year has passed. A soup tureen and bread sit on the table, while handwritten pages are mixed among the plates. SHE eats quickly, simultaneously drawing something on the tablecloth with the tip of her spoon. HE watches her with fatherly affection and concern.

HE — You have been up all night again. You have dark circles under your eyes. Mathematics cannot be stormed like a fortress.

SHE — I have no time, Karl Theodor! Men can afford to take their time. They have professorships, academies, and a peaceful old age ahead of them. I have to prove my right to exist with every line I write. If I stop, they will send me straight back to the drawing room to do embroidery.

HE — You reason like your famous compatriot. I recently read Crime and Punishment in German translation. A terrifying book. That Russian thirst to go right to the edge of the abyss…

SHE (putting down her spoon; her expression changes instantly) — Fyodor Mikhailovich… I knew him as a child. He used to visit our home in St Petersburg. He was in love with my elder sister, Anyuta. And he… he gave me music lessons.

HE (surprised) — Dostoevsky taught you to play the piano?

SHE — He would sit beside me, take my hands, and say, “Sonia, your soul could contain the whole world, but you will destroy it with your pride.” We argued until we were hoarse! I tried to prove to him that reason and science would free humanity from poverty and fear. He would look at me with those feverish, piercing eyes and whisper, “Reason without love and humility will dry out your heart, Sonia. You will become a machine for calculating other people’s tears, but you yourself will forget how to cry.”

HE (quietly) — He was right about one thing. When you immerse yourself in your equations on the rotation of rigid bodies, you stop breathing. It is as though you leave your own body.

SHE (rising, walking to the blackboard, and taking a piece of chalk) — But is that not the highest bliss? When everything disappears — hunger, cold, humiliation, loneliness… Only pure thought remains! Yesterday I received a letter from my husband. Vladimir is in Vienna. He has got himself entangled in some commercial schemes again. He has debts, fits of hysteria, and demands that I come and save him… (She snaps the chalk between her fingers.) Our fictitious union is turning into a real cross, Karl Theodor. He cannot live without me, yet he suffocates when he is beside me.

HE (approaching her and carefully taking her chalk-stained hand) — Then leave. Put the functions aside for a while. A woman cannot be nothing but reason.

SHE (looking at him in despair) — If I leave now, I shall betray myself. And I shall betray you.




Scene 3. Late Evening. The Blood of Paris




Evening half-light. A kerosene lamp burns on the table. SHE sits on the couch, wrapped in a blanket. HE sits opposite her, without his frock coat, wearing only a waistcoat. The formal distance between them has vanished; only a deep spiritual closeness remains.

HE — You know, when you first knocked on my door three years ago, I thought, “Another bored young lady looking for fashionable entertainment.” But now… (He smiles sadly.) …now I understand that all my discoveries in the theory of functions may have been nothing more than preparation for meeting you. You are my best friend, Sonia. And the most gifted mathematician I have ever known.

SHE (quietly) — Please don’t say that. Those words frighten me.

HE — Why?

SHE — Because I remember Paris. The spring of 1871.

HE (frowning) — You have never told me exactly what happened there. I know only that you abandoned your studies and went to the besieged city.

SHE (staring into the distance; her voice grows hollow) — My sister Anyuta was there. Her husband, Victor Jaclard, was one of the leaders of the Paris Commune. When the Versailles troops stormed the city, executions began right in the streets. Vladimir and I made our way into Paris on foot, along the railway sleepers, under fire.

HE — Madness…

SHE — No. It was blood. We bandaged wounded Communards in a damp cellar. Boys who had been singing on the barricades only the day before died in my arms. My dress was soaked in other people’s blood and the acrid smell of gunpowder. Then Victor was arrested. He was to be shot without a trial. Anyuta and I ran from one headquarters to another, pleading, bribing, threatening… We got him out of prison an hour before his execution.

HE (deeply shaken) — And after that… after all that, you came back here and wrote a dissertation on partial differential equations?

SHE (turning towards him, tears shining in her eyes) — Do you understand now, Karl Theodor? I am not a cold calculating machine. I cannot live by halves — neither love nor thought. But the world demands that I choose: either to be a living woman who loves, or to be a scientist. And I cannot give up either.

HE (rising, approaching her, and laying a hand on her head as a father might) — Do not be afraid, Sonia. Soon the University of G;ttingen will award you a doctorate. Without examinations, on the strength of your work. You have broken through those oak doors. You have won.

SHE (closing her eyes and pressing her cheek against his hand) — Victory… Then why am I so cold, my teacher?
TRANSITION

The light goes out abruptly. In total darkness, the ominous, icy howl of the northern wind rises, accompanied by the dull ticking of a pendulum. Seventeen years pass.

In a shaft of cold blue light, we witness a transformation. HE removes the professor’s spectacles, unbuttons his waistcoat, puts on a white doctor’s coat, and picks up a medical bag. His posture changes: the patriarch’s heavy, imposing dignity disappears, replaced by the restrained, weary concern of a Stockholm doctor. SHE lies down on the couch, now transformed into a bed, and covers herself with a heavy blanket. On the table, the kettle has been replaced by medicine bottles, a sealed packet containing a manuscript, and a pen.
PART TWO. STOCKHOLM (FEBRUARY 1891)




Scene 4. The First Visit. The Icy Road




A modest, austere room in Stockholm. A cold winter’s day. A blizzard howls outside the window. SHE lies in bed, wrapped in a blanket and shivering slightly, though her eyes still gleam with their familiar irony. HE, the doctor, puts his stethoscope into his medical bag and looks at her sternly.

HE — Acute bronchitis, Frau Kovalevskaya. And there is a risk of pleurisy. Bed rest, hot drinks, and no university lectures for at least two weeks. How on earth did you manage to catch such a chill?

SHE (with a faint smile) — In an open carriage, Doctor. During a change of transport on my way back from France.

HE (in disbelief) — A professor at Stockholm University travels across Europe in winter in an open carriage? In Baltic rain and wind?

SHE — I had run out of small change, Doctor. I was literally a few kronor short of hiring a closed carriage. I thought, “Nonsense, I am Russian. I am used to the cold.” And I sat for three hours in the freezing wind. (She coughs and presses a handkerchief to her lips.) Absurd, isn’t it? Two years ago, in Paris, the French Academy of Sciences awarded me the Bordin Prize for my work on the rotation of a rigid body about a fixed point. The academicians were so impressed with the solution that they increased the prize from three thousand to five thousand francs! All Paris applauded me. Formal evening dress, diamonds, speeches celebrating the triumph of the female intellect… And two years later, I did not have three kronor for a closed carriage.

HE (with genuine sympathy) — You are a great woman, Professor. All of Sweden and all of Europe are proud of you.

SHE (quietly, looking out of the window) — And in Russia, they would not even give me a professorship, Doctor. They said, “We have enough mathematicians without women.” And my husband, Vladimir… He took his own life eight years ago. He could not bear the collapse of his business, his debts, my fame… I was left alone with my daughter. With the Academy’s gold medal — and not a single kindred soul beside me. The world applauded my formulas, Doctor, but no one could warm a woman frozen to the bone.

HE (softening) — Rest, Professor. I will come back in two days. And please, do not go near your desk.

The light dims, marking the passage of two days. The sound of the blizzard grows louder outside the window.




Scene 5. The Second Visit. A Letter to Berlin




Two days later. Dusk. A single lamp illuminates the room. SHE lies motionless, breathing heavily and wheezing, her face flushed with fever. HE, the doctor, sits beside the bed and holds her wrist. Then he slowly lets her hand fall; his eyes reveal a doctor’s helplessness in the face of the inevitable.

HE (quietly) — The pleurisy has developed into severe pneumonia. I will stay with you, Professor.

SHE (opening her eyes; her voice is hoarse and broken, but her gaze remains clear) — Doctor… you are a good man. Do not lie to me. I am a mathematician; I know how to calculate probabilities. (With difficulty, she indicates the table with her eyes.) There… on the table… there is a sealed packet.

HE (rising and picking up a thick envelope covered in formulas) — Is this your new work?

SHE — Yes. On the motion of fluids… I did not manage to finish the final page. Promise me… when it is all over… you will send this packet to Berlin. To Professor Karl Weierstrass. To him alone. He will understand how to complete the equation.

HE (clutching the envelope in his hands) — I swear to you, Professor Kovalevskaya. I will send it first thing tomorrow morning.

SHE (suddenly studying his face; in her fever, for a moment she sees Weierstrass) — You told me then, in Berlin, over tea… Do you remember, Karl Theodor? About the Pythagoreans… (Her voice becomes soft, almost transparent.) In Croton… two and a half thousand years ago… Pythagoras’s daughter, too, sat over her scrolls in a cold hut. Nothing has changed, my teacher. Nothing at all. Only the scrolls have become white paper, and the warm Greek sea has turned into Baltic ice…

HE (kneeling beside the bed and taking her hand, repeating exactly the gesture Weierstrass made in Part One) — I am here, Sonia. I will deliver everything.

SHE (looking at him with an illuminated, blissful expression, recognising her teacher) — How wonderful that you have come… The wallpaper in my nursery… it has almost worn away, but I can still see every line. Everything fits, Karl Theodor. The equation has been solved without a remainder. (She exhales softly.) Too much happiness…

Her hand slips gently from the doctor’s grasp. The wind outside the window falls silent. A complete, solemn stillness descends. HE slowly rises and looks at her peaceful face. Then he walks to the table and presses the packet containing the manuscript, addressed to Berlin, against his chest.

The light fades slowly.



                CURTAIN





 T.D.