English Translations of Jorge Luis Borges’ ‘Funes the Memorious’

The impetus for Jorge Luis Borges attaining widespread international recognition came when, in May 1961, at 61 years of age, he was awarded the first Prix International alongside Samuel Beckett. The Prix International was an international award for literary merit, established by six publishing houses – Seix Barral of Barcelona, Gallimard of Paris, Einaudi of Turin, Grove Press of New York, Weidenfeld & Nicolson of London, and Rowohlt of Germany – and convening in 1961 at the Hotel Formentor in Majorca. With members from six committees gathered to reach a decision, a tie transpired between Borges and Beckett, as the French, Spanish and Italian members pushed for Borges, and the American, British and German members insisted instead on Beckett. Henry Miller was briefly offered as a compromise candidate, and a seventh, Scandinavian committee was proposed as a means of settling the dispute; but in the end all parties resolved to split the award equally between the two men they had initially considered.

Receiving this international publisher’s prize jointly with with Beckett brought Borges to the attention of the Anglophone world. He embarked on a series of lectures in the United States and then on into Europe. Then in 1962 two English translations of his works appeared. A handful of his poems had been translated into English as early as 1942; and several of his stories had already emerged in various journals, beginning with ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’, translated by Anthony Boucher for the August 1948 issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Yet the translations of 1962 were the first collections of Borges’ fiction to be published in English.

So Labyrinths was published in 1962 by New Directions, edited and with translations by Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby. It brought together a number of Borges’ stories – drawn mostly from his Ficciones (1944) and El Aleph (1949) – along with several of his essays and parables. In the same year, Ficciones – a fuller translation of Borges’ collection – was published by Grove Press. Edited and introduced by Anthony Kerrigan, it contained translations by Kerrigan alongside Anthony Bonner, Alastair Reed, Helen Temple, and Ruthven Todd. It would be published in the United Kingdom in the same year, and under the same title, by Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

It may be wondered why Borges did not himself translate his works into English. He grew up bilingual in Spanish and English, learning to read via his English grandmother, and developing in his father’s library – a library he would later call the ‘chief event’ of his life – a lifelong passion for English literature. More, some of his earliest literary endeavours were in the realm of translation. He translated Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Happy Prince’ into Spanish when he was aged just nine. Moving from Buenos Aires, between 1914 and 1921 Borges’ family lived first in Zurich, then in Spain, and Borges became fluent in both French and German. Towards the end of his time in Europe, he completed translations of German expressionist poetry. Then in January 1925, back in Buenos Aires, Borges published a translation of the last page of Ulysses – the first translation of James Joyce into Spanish. At the same time, Borges developed a notion of translation as a creative undertaking, which could involve rethinking, reworking, and even improving texts rather than simply reformulating them into a different language.

Borges continued translating works into Spanish on into the 1960s. At the end of that decade, he did in fact turn his attention towards the English translations of his own texts. In November 1968, Norman Thomas di Giovanni flew to Buenos Aires to meet with Borges. Di Giovanni had recently signed two deals with publishers in the United States to translate new selections of Borges’ work. With the publisher Seymour Lawrence, under the Delacorte Press imprint, he would publish an anthology of Borges’ poetry. And with E. P. Dutton, he would publish translations of all of Borges’ fiction for which the publisher could secure the rights. In practise, this meant starting with El libro de los seres imaginarios, published in Spanish the previous year.

As Borges and Di Giovanni became close, the two began collaborating on the translations. Selected Poems was completed first, in February 1969: the translated poems would appear across issues of the New Yorker before being published in book form in 1972. The translation of El libro de los seres imaginarios was completed in May, and published by E. P. Dutton, as The Book of Imaginary Beings, towards the end of the year. It was followed in 1970 by the collection The Aleph and Other Stories, which was itself quickly followed by Brodie’s Report. By early 1972, however, Borges had grown tired of translating and weary of the pressures of working to tight deadlines, and he curtailed his relationship with Di Giovanni. Di Giovanni would continue to work on translations of Borges for E. P. Dutton throughout the 1970s. He translated a further eight volumes in all, including A Universal History of Infamy in 1972 and The Book of Sand in 1975.  Yet he would never obtain the rights to translate and publish any of the stories from Ficciones.

Penguin had acquired the rights to publish Labyrinths in the United Kingdom in 1970. It continues to publish that book today, as part of the Penguin Classics imprint; while New Directions continues to publish Labyrinths in the United States. In 1986, Penguin bought E. P. Dutton. After Borges’ death in June 1986, Borges’ widow, María Kodama, began to renegotiate his literary rights; and a new series of translations, to be undertaken by Andrew Hurley, were ultimately commissioned by Penguin to replace the Di Giovanni editions. Collected Fictions – first published in hardback under the Allen Lane imprint in January – was published as a paperback by Penguin in September 1999. Fictions and The Aleph came a year later. And they were followed a year after that by Brodie’s Report, The Book of Sand and Shakespeare’s Memory, and A Universal History of Iniquity – this last, which modifies Di Giovanni’s 1972 title, actually a translation of Borges’ earliest collection of fiction, which he wrote and published in 1935, and was reluctant to see translated.

————

The short story ‘Funes el memorioso’ first appeared in the Argentine daily newspaper La Nación in June 1942. In 1941, Borges had published El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan, a short story collection which would, in 1944, become the first part of Ficciones. Thus when Ficciones was published, ‘Funes el memorioso’ was one of the stories comprising its second part. The headings of the two parts have been translated by Andrew Hurley as ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ and ‘Artifices’.

‘Funes el memorioso’ is the story of an Ireneo Funes. From Fray Bentos, living in Buenos Aires, and already possessing an acute sensibility, he suffers a horse-riding accident as a youth which leaves him hopelessly paralysed. Unable to walk, confined to his home, he finds his sensibility and his memory have become absolute. In Labyrinths, the story was translated by James E. Irby under the title ‘Funes the Memorious’. My favourite passage from the story, in the Irby translation, reads as follows:

——–

He told me that in 1886 he had invented an original system of numbering and that in a very few days he had gone beyond the twenty-four-thousand mark. He had not written it down, since anything he thought of once would never be lost to him. His first stimulus was, I think, his discomfort at the fact that the famous thirty-three gauchos of Uruguayan history should require two signs and two words, in place of a single word and a single sign. He then applied this absurd principle to the other numbers. In place of seven thousand thirteen, he would say (for example) Máximo Pérez; in place of seven thousand fourteen, The Railroad; other numbers were Luis Melián Lafinur, Olimar, sulphur, the reins, the whale, the gas, the cauldron, Napoleon, Agustín de Vedia. In place of five hundred, he would say nine. Each word had a particular sign, a kind of mark; the last in the series were very complicated…I tried to explain to him that his rhapsody of incoherent terms was precisely the opposite of a system of numbers. I told him that saying 365 meant saying three hundreds, six tens, five ones, an analysis which is not found in the “numbers” The Negro Timoteo or meat blanket. Funes did not understand me or refused to understand me.

——–

Andrew Hurley’s translation – found in Penguin’s Collected Fictions and Fictions – instead opts for the title ‘Funes, His Memory’. Hurley explains his rationale in a note to the text: ‘memorioso’ is a commonly used, colloquial word in Spanish, which he argues is not encapsulated by the obscure English translation ‘memorious’. Hurley’s translation of the same passage reads:

——–

He told me that in 1886 he had invented a numbering system original with himself, and that within a very few days he had passed the twenty-four-thousand mark. He had not written it down, since anything he thought, even once, remained ineradicably with him. His original motivation, I think, was his irritation that the thirty-three Uruguayan patriots should require two figures and three words rather than a single figure, a single word. He then applied this mad principle to the other numers. Instead of seven thousand thirteen (7013), he would say, for instance, “Máximo Pérez”; instead of seven thousand fourteen (7014), “the railroad”; other numbers were “Luis Melián Lafinur,” “Olimar,” “sulfur,” “clubs,” “the whale,” “gas,” ” a stewpot,” “Napoleon,” “Agustín de Vedia.” Instead of five hundred (500), he said “nine.” Every word had a particular figure attached to it, a sort of marker; the later ones were extremely complicated…I tried to explain to Funes that his rhapsody of unconnected words was exactly the opposite of a number system. I told him that when one said “365” one said “three hundreds, six tens, and five ones,” a breakdown impossible with the “numbers” Nigger Timoteo or a ponchoful of meat. Funes either could not or would not understand me.

——–

The translation of ‘Funes el memorioso’ by James E. Irby is the first that I read, and it remains my favourite. It possesses a rhythm and a humour which, in my opinion, other English translations of the story do not match. The translations by Irby and Hurley of the passage above may be closely compared. Their differing constructions of the second line of the passage suggest differently the mind and the methods of Funes. Divided into four parts via the use of three commas, Hurley’s sentence seems indicative of a more convoluted logic, and displays a momentary narrowing down upon thought before it progresses to memory. Irby’s sentence suggests the accumulation of memories and the distension of time. Irby’s depiction of Funes’ ‘discomfort’ at ‘the famous thirty-three gauchos’ is funnier and better demonstrates Borges’ frequent use of colloquialisms than Hurley’s depiction of Funes’ ‘irritation’ at ‘the thirty-three Uruguayan patriots’.

Irby’s ‘absurd principle’ captures, more than Hurley’s ‘mad principle’, a sense of Funes’ obstinacy; and there is a stronger cadence to Irby’s sequence of names, with their repetition of the definite article. Hurley’s use of punctuation and italicisation appears misguided. It is unclear to me why he gives Funes’ names in quotation marks up until the final two, ‘Nigger Timoteo‘ and ‘ponchoful of meat‘, which he italicises. The quotation marks are clunkier; the late use of italics draws ‘system‘, also italicised, into the sphere of the final two names; and the repeated use of quotation marks in other contexts (‘”365″‘, ‘”three hundreds, six tens, and five ones,”‘) blurs distinctions. More, the brackets containing numerical figures – apparently suggesting or opposing a certain rigour to Funes’ proceedings – seem ultimately superfluous, and obstruct the flow of the text. In the same vein, Hurley adds an asterisk to the text after ‘thirty-three Uruguayan patriots’, indicating a note at the back of both editions which explains who these patriots are. Hurley states that they ‘were a band of determined patriots under the leadership of Juan Antonio Lavalleja who crossed the River Plate from Buenos Aires to Montevideo in order to “liberate”‘ Uruguay from Spain. This is hardly essential knowledge for the reading of Borges’ story, and the presence of the asterisk seems only to disrupt the reader from the heady logic of Funes’ nominalism.

The pattern of Irby’s ‘I tried to explain to him that his rhapsody of incoherent terms was precisely the opposite of a system of numbers’ beautifully brings a stop to Funes’ logic. This sentence marks the turn of the paragraph. Its purpose is diminished by Hurley’s italicisation of ‘system‘, which closes the sentence on an inflection which is less decisive; but regardless, ‘rhapsody of incoherent terms’ is a peerless formulation, rendered poorer by Hurley’s choice of ‘rhapsody of unconnected words’. Finally, while the penultimate sentence is amusing no matter how it is rendered, both the setup and the final selection of words appear stronger in Irby. Hurley’s ‘a ponchoful of meat‘ is laudable, but there is something especially funny in the curt and insensible ‘meat blanket‘.

————

Anthony Kerrigan’s translation from the 1962 Grove Press Ficciones is the third readily available translation of Borges’ story into English. In fact, it was Kerrigan who first translated ‘Funes el memorioso’ into English: his translation, with the title ‘Funes, The Memorious’, appeared in the second issue of the short lived Avon Book of Modern Writing in 1954. The issue included new fiction, poetry and essays by writers including Elizabeth Hardwick, Hermann Hesse, Mary McCarthy, Alberto Moravia, and Delmore Schwartz. After Ficciones, Kerrigan went on to translate for Grove Press, in 1967 with Alastair Reed, Borges’ A Personal Anthology. Kerrigan translates the above passage:

——–

The voice of Funes, out of the darkness, continued. He told me that toward 1886 he had devised a new system of enumeration and that in a very few days he had gone beyond twenty-four thousand. He had not written it down, for what he once meditated would not be erased. The first stimulus to his work, I believe, had been his discontent with the fact that “thirty-three Uruguayans” required two symbols and three words, rather than a single word and a single symbol. Later he applied his extravagant principle to the other numbers. In place of seven thousand thirteen, he would say (for example) Máximo Perez; in place of seven thousand fourteen, The Train; other numbers were Luis Melián Lafinur, Olimar, Brimstone, Clubs, The Whale, Gas, The Cauldron, Napoleon, Agustín de Vedia. In lieu of five hundred, he would say nine. Each word had a particular sign, a species of mark; the last were very complicated…I attempted to explain that this rhapsody of unconnected terms was precisely the contrary of a system of enumeration. I said that to say three hundred and sixty-five was to say three hundreds, six tens, five units: an analysis which does not exist in such numbers as The Negro Timoteo or The Flesh Blanket. Funes did not understand me, or did not wish to understand me.

——–

Finally, in the original Spanish, Borges’ text reads:

——–

Me dijo que hacia 1886 había discurrido un sistema original de numeración y que en muy pocos días había rebasado el veinticuatro mil. No lo había escrito, porque lo pensado una sola vez ya no podía borrársele. Su primer estímulo, creo, fue el desagrado de que los treinta y tres orientales requirieran dos signos y tres palabras, en lugar de una sola palabra y un solo signo. Aplicó luego ese disparatado principio a los otros números. En lugar de siete mil trece, decía (por ejemplo) Máximo Pérez; en lugar de siete mil catorce, El Ferrocarril; otros números eran Luis Melián Lafinur, Olimar, azufre, los bastos, la ballena, gas, la caldera, Napoleón, Agustín vedia. En lugar de quinientos, decía nueve. Cada palabra tenía un signo particular, una especie marca; las últimas muy complicadas…Yo traté explicarle que esa rapsodia de voces inconexas era precisamente lo contrario sistema numeración. Le dije decir 365 tres centenas, seis decenas, cinco unidades; análisis no existe en los “números” El Negro Timoteo o manta de carne. Funes no me entendió o no quiso entenderme.

—————————

The original 1944 edition of Jorge Luis Borges’ Ficciones, published by Editorial Sur

The 1962 edition of Labyrinths, edited and with translations by Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby, published by New Directions

The first edition of Borges’ Collected Fictions in English, published by Allen Lane – a Penguin imprint – in January 1999

Penguin’s paperback version of Collected Fictions, published September 1999

The Avon Book of Modern Writing, issue number 2, 1954, which contained the first English translation of Borges’ story ‘Funes el memorioso’

The English translation of Ficciones, edited by Anthony Kerrigan, published by Grove Press in 1962

The UK edition of Ficciones, published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson the same year

—————————

Borges, J. L. Ficciones ed. Kerrigan, A. (Grove Press, 1994)

Borges, J. L. Fictions trans. Hurley, A. (Penguin, 2000)

Borges, J. L. Labyrinths eds. Yates, D. A. & Irby, J. E. (Penguin, 2000)

Williamson, E. Borges: A Life (Viking, 2004)

PDF files containing the full story translated, in turn, by Irby, Hurley, and Kerrigan: FunesIrby, FunesHurley, FunesKerrigan

A Brief History of Ukraine

With the situation in Crimea apparently resolved, at least for the time being, attention is turning to other sites in Ukraine and beyond. The withdrawal of Ukrainian forces at the beginning of this week – after Russian troops seized the Belbek airbase and Feodosia naval base – marked the interim Ukrainian government’s tacit acceptance that Crimea has been lost. Russian military action in the region following the Crimean referendum on 16 March has been efficient – threatening rather than violent, utilising unidentified pro-Russian groups to storm bases, backed up by official military personnel – as a lack of explicit direction from Kiev has left Ukrainian troops seemingly little more than caretakers, waiting for Crimea to pass into Russian hands. Six of the eleven senior Ukrainian officers held by Russia following these takeovers have now been released. Meanwhile, following the assent of the Crimean parliament, the city council of Sevastopol, and Vladimir Putin, both the Federation Council and the State Duma have ratified Crimea’s integration into the Russian Federation. Two Crimean senators are scheduled to join Russia’s Federation Council from 16 April.

Across the West, the international community continues to decry Russia’s intervention in Crimea, and will not accept the legitimacy of Crimea’s separation from Ukraine. A symbolic vote in the UN on Thursday saw 100 countries affirm that the Crimean referendum took place illegally; 11 countries disagreed, while 58 abstained. The US, Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy and Japan have opted to temporarily suspend Russia from the G8 group of nations, and will continue to meet without Russia, reverting to the G7. Russia has described this as ‘no great tragedy’; while other commentators, including former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, have dismissed this and other sanctions as ineffective, stressing that the G8 has been superseded as an economic forum by the G20, which incorporates emerging economies and still includes Russia.

There is a certain pragmatism in all parties accepting the current state of affairs in Crimea. Putin has achieved a show of force, asserting his position back home and emboldening nationalist sentiment, while bolstering Russia’s military authority across the Crimean peninsula. As things stand, Ukraine has maintained the territorial integrity of its mainland, and the ability to move towards presidential elections and constitutional reform come May. The sanctions imposed by the EU, the US and Canada will continue to be decried as weak, especially by those on the right of politics; but they went perhaps further than expected in targeting some prominent Russian officials and businessmen. Both Ukraine and the West must really content themselves with their mutual sympathies, and with Russia’s loss of international sway, given the impracticality of attempting to keep Crimea as part of Ukraine. While Ukraine’s interim Prime Minister, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, has stressed that the country’s financial position remains perilous, the International Monetary Fund has promised it $18 billion in loans – which, for good or ill, will provide the IMF and its backers with significant influence over the country’s future economic development. The US Congress has guaranteed a $1 billion loan of its own, plus $150 million in direct aid. It is the Crimeans themselves who have arguably lost the most, in so far as they have been forced to choose between Russia on the one hand and Ukraine and the EU on the other; but the choice they have made seems clear, and it enables them to retain their crucial economic and close cultural ties with Russia.

Still, what spoke for the Russians restraining their ambitions, and embarking on a lesser show of force in order to secure only military access to Crimea – while leaving the region perhaps with greater autonomy from Ukraine, but still politically part of the country – was that it would have maintained Russia’s influence over Ukraine, ideologically and electorally. Russia will not settle gladly for an antagonistic Ukraine: it values its economic role in the country; their shared cultural bonds; and Russia has always protected itself in terms of land, seeking to maintain buffer regions between its capital and the outposts of its supposed enemies. But Putin perhaps presumes that by manipulating tensions in eastern Ukraine when it suits, and owing to Ukraine’s financial dependence on Russia, especially when it comes to gas, Ukraine can scarcely afford to sever their relationship completely.

It is to Ukraine’s east that attention has now turned. Ukraine and the West allege that Russia is poised to launch an invasion into eastern Ukraine, which has seen a wave of demonstrations since the ousting of President Yanukovych towards the end of last month. The region has a significant ethnic Russian populace, and its economy is reliant on Russian trade. A history of separatist feeling in the east extends back to the foundations of the Ukrainian state. Russia has carried out military exercises on the Ukrainian border, but the extent of its interest in eastern Ukraine is hard to gauge amid inevitable claim and counterclaim. Russia asserts that it has no desire to divide Ukraine, and argues that violence in the east has been incited by far-right Ukrainian nationalists and by American defence contractors. Ukraine and the US suggest instead that Russian soldiers have infiltrated the east, that pro-Russian protesters are being transported across the border into Ukraine, and that Russia is amassing its military with intent. NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Europe, Philip Breedlove, has raised additional concerns that Russian forces could sweep through southern Ukraine into neighbouring Transdniestria, which broke away from Moldova in 1990 as the Soviet Union began to fall, but has never been given international recognition. The half-million population of Transdniestria is evenly split between Moldovans, Russians, and Ukrainians. Russia has continued, since Moldovan independence in 1992, to maintain a contested military presence of 1,200 troops in the region. Fears over Russian incursions into the Baltic states appear at this point unfounded, and would be impeded by their memberships of the EU and NATO.

————

Following my history of Crimea – which summarised the course of the region until its absorption into the Russian Empire in the 1700s; from which I looked at events in Crimea in more depth, through the eyes of Pushkin, Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Nabokov – what proceeds is a brief but involved history of Ukraine. It begins in the early middle ages, with Kievan Rus as a loose federation of the East Slavic peoples. Taking a paragraph from my earlier piece:

Kievan Rus flourished from about 882 – when Prince Oleg moved the capital of the Rus from Novgorod to Kiev – until the 13th century, when the Mongol Empire invaded and destroyed their major cities. While Russia gradually threw off the ‘Mongol-Tatar Yoke’, and began to emerge round the city of Moscow as a powerful independent state, Kiev and much of what is now northern and central Ukraine came under Polish-Lithuanian control. The Russo-Polish War of 1654-1667 ended in a truce, but one which forced the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth to relinquish Kiev and the lands east of the Dnieper River (plus Smolensk further north) to the Tsardom of Russia. These lands continued to rule themselves with some autonomy for the next hundred years, the period of the Cossack Hetmanate; but this autonomy was successively diminished during the reign of Catherine the Great (1762-1796), and the region came to be fully incorporated into the Russian Empire. Russia often considers the union between Kiev and Moscow to extend back to the beginnings of the the Russo-Polish War in 1654.

The partitioning of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the late 1700s added to the Russian Empire the lands west of the Dnieper. Together, the lands won from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth between 1654 and the end the 18th century would come to comprise much of modern mainland Ukraine. With the span and diversity within the enlarged Russian Empire, the concept of an All-Russian nation was promulgated as an attempt to unify its collected peoples under one state. The concept recognised the differences between the peoples of modern-day Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus, but endeavoured to subsume them, positioning them as deviations which obscured a fundamental cultural and historical unity.

Nevertheless, within the Russian Empire the people spread east and west of the Dnieper came to be called Little Russians, while the region was referred to as Little Russia (‘Малороссия’, Malorossiya). These labels were readily embraced by those wealthy members of the populace who quickly rose to positions of prominence within the Empire. However, the larger population identified instead as Ruthenian – a historical term for the East Slavic people who lived in an area between modern west-Ukraine and Poland, broadly equivalent with the geographic territory of Galicia. This larger population of the region maintained a common language discrete from Russian: while both were rooted in Old East Slavic, which had been established during the period of Kievan Rus, the language they spoke had developed differently, owing to internal forces and to the influence of Polish-Lithuanian rule.

Fearful that nationalist sentiment would emerge among their ‘Little Russians’, in the early 1800s the Russian Empire banned the use of the regional language and enforced Russian as the language of political administration and education. Nationalist sentiment still arose, notably in Kiev, where in the middle of the 1840s it grew around the Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius. This secretive nationalist political society had as one of its party the poet Taras Shevchenko. Born on 9 March 1814 in Moryntsi, a couple of hundred kilometres south of Kiev, Shevchenko moved to Saint Petersburg in 1831, and towards the end of the decade enrolled there in the Academy of Arts. Painting landscapes, portraits and rural idylls, he began writing poetry in the language of his homeland. His first collection, Kobzar, was published in 1840.

Shevchenko visited the regions of ‘Little Russia’ on several occasions in the following years; then in 1847, he was arrested, preliminarily owing to his connection with the Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius. As an artist rather than an activist, he was set to escape severe punishment, until Emperor Nicholas I uncovered one of his poems which mocked both the Emperor and his wife. Shevchenko was imprisoned in Petersburg, then exiled to Orsk near the Ural Mountains, where he would spend the next decade. After a further two years in Nizhniy Novgorod, in May 1859 he was finally allowed to return to Kiev; but this respite proved short lived, for in July he was arrested again, remaining in Petersburg until his death on 10 March 1861. Buried initially in Petersburg, his remains were transported by his friends to a hill on the banks of the Dnieper River, near Kaniv.

Shevchenko is esteemed today as Ukraine’s national poet; the anniversary of his birth celebrated several weeks ago was the occasion of marked clashes between opposing groups in Crimea and eastern Ukraine. His poetry is considered foundational in the development of Ukrainian literature, and influential too in the emergence of the modern Ukrainian tongue. As he wrote in the regional language, and expressed nationalist views in a number of his works, to call Shevchenko a Ukrainian poet seems entirely warranted. In the case of Nikolai Gogol – the most famous of writers born on Ukrainian soil – attempted recastings of him as a Ukrainian writer remain controversial, open to the charge of anachronism. Gogol was born on 31 March 1809 in Sorochyntsi, on the left-bank of the Dnieper, and grew up in a family that spoke both Russian and the regional language. He moved to Saint Petersburg in 1828, then travelled abroad in 1836, spending most of the next twelve years in Rome. After returning to the Russian Empire in 1848, via a curtailed pilgrimage to Jerusalem,  he died in Moscow on 4 March 1852.

Gogol drew for his earliest stories from Ukrainian settings, customs, folklore, and theatre. His first collections of short stories – Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka, published in two volumes in 1831 and 1832, and Mirgorod, published in 1835 – are set with fondness in the rural ‘Little Russia’ of his youth. Working on these in Petersburg, Gogol would write home for points of detail on which to elaborate his fiction. He maintained until his final years friendships with scholars of Ukrainian language and history, who shared friendships also with Shevchenko. At the same time, Gogol wrote solely in Russian. His mature stories are set predominantly in Petersburg. According to Gogol, several of them took their plot from ideas given to the author by Pushkin. The loosely political sentiments which may be derived from Gogol’s letters and his notoriously peculiar Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends, published in 1847, speak towards a vaguely pan-Slavic spiritual identity, conceived as Russian, rather than to any nationalist movement. He would write:

‘We Little Russians and Great Russians need a common poetry, a calm, strong and everlasting poetry of truth, goodness and beauty. The Little and the Great Russian are the souls of twins who complement each other, who are closely related and equally strong. It is impossible to prefer one of them at the cost of the other.’

Gogol’s art was adopted so wholly into the great body of Russian literature which followed, from Dostoevsky to Bely to Nabokov – three of his most perceptive interpreters – that disengaging him from this mainstream of Russian letters proves difficult, and would appear to bear relatively little fruit. On the other hand a full understanding of his art must contemplate its distinctly Ukrainian beginnings. Whatever, unlike Shevchenko, Gogol today is not regarded in any way a symbol of Ukrainian statehood.

While national sentiment began to grow on the banks of the Dnieper, it was not until the late 1800s that the concept of a ‘Ukrainian’ people – and of the word ‘Ukraine’ as the proper name for the region – began to appear. This marked a rejection of the diminutive ‘Little Russian’ and of the historical term ‘Ruthenian’, considered insufficient to represent the sense and the aims of the emerging nationalist movement. The word ‘ukraina’ had been used from the 1500s to essentially mean ‘borderland’: derived from the Proto-Slavic ‘krajь’, meaning border or edge, the term had referred to the frontiers of the Kingdom of Poland in and around Kiev. It was used informally to denote the region during the rule of the Cossack Hetmanate. By the 1840s, the Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius were calling the people of the region ‘Ukrainians’ – though the appellation was never adopted by Shevchenko, who used ‘Little Russian’ even in his nationalist texts. By the turn of the century, the usage ‘Ukrainian’ was entrenched among nationalists, and referred to themselves as a distinct ethnic group. The usage would only become standard beyond the banks of the Dnieper over the next two decades.

Politically, Ukraine’s existence as an independent state can be traced back to 1917 and the February Revolution which effectively marked the end of the Russian Empire. Within days of the Provisional Government under Alexander Kerensky forming in Saint Petersburg (then called Petrograd), the nationalist movement in Kiev consolidated and established a central council, called the Tsentralna Rada. The Tsentralna Rada issued an early declaration calling on ‘the Ukrainian people’ to support Kerensky’s Provisional Government. It then elected the prominent nationalist academic Mykhailo Hrushevskyi as its head, and formed a parliament of 150 which effectively began administering Ukrainian affairs. Towards the end of June, after back-and-forth with Kerensky, the Rada issued its ‘First Universal’, declaring Ukrainian autonomy as part of the Russian Republic. A Ukrainian government was formed, called the General Secretariat and comprising nine ministers, and it was recognised by Kerensky.

Disagreements between the Provisional Government in Petrograd and the Tsentralna Rada regarding the degree of autonomy the General Secretariat should possess were rendered irrelevant following the October Revolution, which saw the Bolsheviks seize power in Petrograd. Initially maintaining relations with the Bolsheviks, in November the Rada, via another ‘Universal’ decree, proclaimed the Ukrainian People’s Republic. The extent of the autonomous state’s jurisdiction was also defined: it would govern over the majority of the regions which comprise modern Ukraine, including the Kharkiv region, but not including Crimea. As relationships with the Bolsheviks broke down, and with the Bolsheviks setting up base in Kharkiv, in late January 1918 the Tsentralna Rada issued its ‘Fourth Universal’, declaring the full independence of the Ukrainian People’s Republic.

The Bolsheviks had continued to press within the newly emerged state. Regions within the Ukrainian People’s Republic were encouraged to break away, and to establish their own Soviet republics. Lacking a strong military capacity, the Ukrainian People’s Republic sought foreign aid, turning to the Russian Empire’s opponents in the ongoing First World War, the Central Powers of Germany and Austria-Hungary. The first treaty of Brest-Litovsk, signed by the Ukrainian People’s Republic and the Central Powers on 9 February, in theory secured Ukrainian sovereignty, but in practise made the Republic a German protectorate. Amidst Ukrainian resentment, on 29 April a German-backed coup saw the Tsentralna Rada dismissed and a former Russian General, Pavlo Skoropadskyi, installed as the state’s new ruler.

Skoropadskyi styled himself Hetman of Ukraine. Where under Hrushevskyi’s leadership the Tsentralna Rada had been broadly socialist, the new Hetmanate was conservative. When it too fell following the defeat of the Central Powers in World War I in November, a socialist Directorate was formed to govern; but within a month, fighting broke out as the Republic became fully embroiled in the Russian Civil War. At the same time, Austria’s defeat saw its province of Galicia become divided between the claims of Ukrainians and Poles. Ukrainians in the region proclaimed the West Ukrainian People’s Republic days before the restoration of the Polish state on 11 November 1918. On 22 January 1919, a Unification Act was signed between the West Ukrainian People’s Republic and the Ukrainian People’s Republic in Kiev. The Polish-Ukrainian War over Galicia lasted until July, and ended in a Polish victory.

Meanwhile Ukraine saw battle between the Soviet Red Army and the anti-Bolshevik White Army, and authority in Kiev fluctuated back and forth between the Ukrainian People’s Republic and the Bolsheviks. By the spring of 1920, the Ukrainian People’s Republic was again in desperate need of foreign intervention, and now allied with Poland, whose forces over the coming months repelled the Bolshevik advance. A decisive Polish victory at the Battle of Warsaw in August forced Soviet Russia to sue for peace. The drawing to a close of Polish-Soviet hostilities, allied to General Wrangel’s defeat in Crimea – the last bastion of the White Army – in November, effectively ended the Russian Civil War. The Treaty of Riga – signed between Poland and Soviet Russia on 18 March 1921 – ensured for Poland Galicia and a significant area of western Ukraine; while Soviet Russia established control over the central and eastern Ukrainian mainland. Poland’s victory in the Polish-Soviet War was crucial in the development of 20th century Europe: beyond securing the status of Poland, it is perceived as halting Soviet ambitions towards ‘international revolution’, the spreading of communist revolution by force. The Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic – Soviet Ukraine – was confirmed, and inaugurated as part of the Soviet Union on 30 December 1922.

Power in the Soviet Union was centralised by Stalin in Moscow, and nationalist sentiment in the Soviet Republics was suppressed. The Holodomor of 1932-33 saw from 2 million to as many as 7 million Ukrainians die of starvation, owing to famine. It remains contentious whether the famine was a product of negligent economic policy, in the period of rapid Soviet industrialization and forced collectivisation; or whether it was in fact deliberately engineered, thereby constituting a genocide of the Ukrainian people. At the close of World War II, the Soviet Union would retain those Polish regions adjoining Soviet Ukraine which it had annexed during the war. It thus regained all of the western territories which Ukraine had lost by the Treaty of Riga in 1921: including, most controversially, Lviv, the old capital of Galicia. Ukraine would gain its independence following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, in a process depicted in my most recent post.

————

While the above deals with western Ukraine and the formation of the Ukrainian state, it is necessary to consider in more detail the major cities of eastern Ukraine. Many of the major cites of today’s south-eastern Ukraine once comprised the Yekaterinoslav Governorate, established in the Russian Empire in 1802, and continuing in its administration through until 1925. The Yekaterinoslav Governorate included Yekaterinoslav – a city on the Dnieper which was renamed Dnipropetrovsk in 1926, and became closed to foreigners, serving as a centre of the Soviet arms and space industries – and extended east to the cities of Luhansk, Mariupol, and what would become Donetsk. Briefly, the Yekaterinoslav Governorate even took in Rostov-on-Don, deep into modern-day Russia; though the port of Taganrog remained outside the Governorate, with special city status and its own Governor. Taganrog and Rostov-on-Don would both become part of the Don Host Oblast in 1887, the precursor to today’s Rostov Oblast.

Donetsk traces its history to 1869, when a small settlement built up around a metal works developed by the Welsh industrialist, John Hughes. The settlement took the name ‘Hughesovka’, rendered Yuzovka, and grew rapidly as the metal works became one of the most productive in the Russian Empire. In 1917, Yuzovka was given the status of a city. During the Russian Civil War, it became part of the Donetsk-Krivoy Rog Soviet Republic. This was one of the self-proclaimed republics encouraged into fruition by the Bolsheviks: it sought to break from the fledgling Ukrainiain People’s Republic, and comprised the cities and towns of the Donets Basin, the cities of Yekaterinoslav and Luhansk, parts of the Kherson Governorate and the Don Host Oblast and, momentarily, also Kharkiv. Kharkiv then Luhansk served as the short-lived breakaway republic’s capital: established in early February 1918, it went unrecognised and collapsed the following month with the second treaty of Brest-Litovsk. This second treaty, signed between Soviet Russia and the Central Powers on 3 March, removed Soviet Russia from World War I, with the Central Powers ensuring that the Bolsheviks recognised the Ukrainian People’s Republic, by the time effectively a German protectorate.

As part of Soviet Ukraine, Yuzovka was renamed Stalin in 1924, then Stalino in 1928. In 1920, the Donetsk Governorate had been formed, taking from the Yekaterinoslav Governorate administrative control over the Donets Basin. In 1932 – following the transitional ‘okruha’ system of administration, which saw Soviet Ukraine’s Governorates subdivided into smaller districts – the Donetsk Governorate became the Donetsk Oblast. As the population of Stalino and of the wider region quickly grew – with the city building new tram lines, theatres and opera houses, and installing a water system in 1931 followed by a sewage system two years later – in 1938 the oblast was split into two, with the creation of the Stalino Oblast and the Voroshilovgrad Oblast. The Nazi occupation during World War II devastated the city’s development, and it was forced to rebuild. In 1961, Stalino became Donetsk.

Luhansk too traces its foundation to a British industrialist, growing out of a metal works established by Charles Gascoigne in 1795. Luhansk achieved city-status in 1882. It was renamed Voroshilovgrad in 1935, and became the centre of the oblast created in 1938. After suffering Nazi occupation during the war and rebuilding, the city was retitled Luhansk in 1958; Voroshilovgrad was restored as its name in 1970; and Luhansk reemerged again in 1990. Both Donetsk and Luhansk remain today important centres of industry, particularly in coal and steel.

Kharkiv in the north east has a longer past. The Cossack uprising which prefaced the Russo-Polish War of 1654-1667, and the civil war which continued until the ascension of Ivan Mazepa as Cossack Hetman in 1687, caused many to flee from the banks of the Dnieper. Settlers had formed what would become the city of Kharkiv by 1656. Voivodes were appointed by Moscow to govern the new settlement, and soon a fortress had been built to secure it from quarrelsome neighbours. The settlement grew into a city as part of the Russian Empire, establishing the University of Kharkiv in 1804 (the second oldest in Ukraine, after the University of Lviv), and acquiring running water in 1870.  Throughout the 1800s it became an important centre of nationalist sentiment outside Kiev: a nationalist society was formed, and the city saw published the first newspaper in the Ukrainian language. The prominent nationalist Mykola Mikhnovsky gave a speech in Kharkiv in 1900 – during celebrations commemorating the anniversary of Taras Shevchenko – which would be published as the pamphlet ‘Independent Ukraine’. Mikhnovsky was the first to propound the idea of independent Ukrainian statehood, and was one of the founders of the Revolutionary Ukrainian party and the radical Ukrainian People’s party, which would propel the nationalist cause in the first decade of the 1900s.

After the Bolsheviks had used Kharkiv as their base of power during the Ukrainian War of Independence from 1917, and after its brief role as part of the Donetsk-Krivoy Rog Soviet Republic, Kharkiv served as the capital of Soviet Ukraine following its establishment, until the capital was transferred to Kiev at the end of 1934. The Kharkiv Oblast suffered severely during the Holodomor; and it was the site of major battles during World War II, as the city of Kharkiv passed between the Soviets and Nazi occupation. Much of the city was destroyed, and tens of thousands killed; including 30,000 people from the city’s sizeable Jewish minority. As the city was rebuilt, it became a centre of Soviet science and industry.

Today the cities of the east are some of the most populous in Ukraine. Kharkiv is the country’s second most-populous city, with 1.5 million inhabitants. After Odessa and Dnipropetrovsk, with about one million citizens each, Donetsk is fifth, with 960,000. Nearby Makiivka has a population of 360,000, and is merging with Donetsk as the two cities expand, forming a conurbation. Mariupol has a population of just under 500,000, including the largest Greek population in Ukraine, with more than 50,000 Greeks living in the area. 450,000 people live in Luhansk. The Luhansk Oblast is the easternmost oblast in Ukraine, with the Kharkiv Oblast immediately west, the Donetsk Oblast to the south-west, and the Rostov Oblast east, across the border in Russia. Comprising the cities of Donetsk, Mariupol and Makiivka, the Donetsk Oblast is Ukraine’s most populous. Where ethnic Russians make up about 17% of Ukraine’s total population – against 78% ethnic Ukrainians – in the east this overview is skewed: 44% in Kharkiv are ethnic Russian, 50 % ethnic Ukrainian; and in Donetsk, 48% are ethnic Russian, 47% Ukrainian. Again, the east is the industrial heart of Ukraine, and remains heavily dependent on the Russian economy, with which it carries out most of its trade.

While there have been smaller protests in Dnipropetrovsk, in Odessa, and in Mykolayiv (a shipbuilding city in the south), it is Donetsk, Luhansk and Kharkiv which have seen the strongest pro-Russian expression. These cities have seen protests gathering in excess of 10,000 people, as rival pro-Ukrainian and pro-Russian – or pro and anti-interim government, or pro and anti-Ukrainian far-right, or pro and anti-Yanukovych, or pro and anti-Putin – demonstrators have clashed, sometimes violently, amid the waving and hoisting of national and regional flags (the old flag of the Donetsk-Krivoy Rog Soviet Republic has made several appearances). At the beginning of March – compelled in part by the inclusion of members of Svoboda in the interim Ukrainian government, and by the proposed repeal of a law establishing Russian as an official second language – pro-Russian supporters took control of administrative buildings in Kharkiv and Donetsk. ‘People’s Governors’, calling for referendums on union with Russia, were elected in Donetsk and Luhansk. The proclaimed ‘People’s Governor’ of Donetsk, Pavel Gubarev, was arrested on 6 March by Ukraine’s Security Service, the SBU, charged with separatism. On 10 March, Mikhail Dobkin, the pro-Russian former Governor of Kharkiv Oblast and Mayor of Kharkiv, was also arrested by the SBU. The interim Ukrainian government has stated its hope to try such individuals at the International Criminal Court.

These conflicts turned bloody when, on 13 March, a pro-Ukrainian protester was stabbed to death in Donetsk, as rival groups fought on the city’s Lenin Square. On 15 March, two men – reportedly a pro-Russian protester and a passerby – were shot dead in Kharkiv, by a group of Ukrainian nationalists. Since then, and in the aftermath of the Crimean referendum, the situation in the east has calmed. Both Vladimir Putin and Sergei Lavrov, the Russian Foreign Minister, have repeatedly stressed no desire to invade or annex eastern Ukraine. In the speech he gave to both houses of the Federal Assembly last week – full of his own increasingly nationalistic rhetoric as Crimea’s integration with the Russian Federation moved a step closer – Putin asserted ‘we do not need a divided Ukraine’.

————

One of the most important facets of many major revolutions is the degree to which they have centred on capital cities. The French Revolution was spurred when – seeking to uphold the newly formed National Constituent Assembly, and fearful of the gathering foreign mercenaries who might fight to preserve the old regime – the people of Paris rioted and stormed the Bastille.  The Russian revolutions of February and October centred entirely on Petersburg (then Petrograd): the former the result of a series of protests culminating on International Women’s Day; the latter achieved when the Bolsheviks seized an empty Winter Palace, from which proceeded the Russian Civil War. In a related vein, whatever one terms the culmination of events in Ukraine last month – whether they constituted a revolution, an uprising, or a coup – the impetus for the ousting of President Yanukovych was in Kiev. The public feeling and the political machinations displayed there were not acutely representative of the shades of feeling elsewhere in the country.

Given the situation in Kiev – the removal of an elected though significantly disgraced president, the formation of an interim government containing protest leaders and members of a controversial right-wing group, the broad lack of diplomacy, and the local nature of the protests – it could hardly have been objected on moral or democratic grounds if the people and the political instruments of Crimea had called and voted in their own referendum. Many Crimeans may understandably feel themselves entitled to determine their region’s future – and regardless of the Ukrainian constitution, for after all, it was the Ukrainian parliament which unilaterally diminished Crimea’s autonomy in 1995, abolishing the post of President of Crimea and forcing the Crimean parliament to redraw and renegotiate Crimea’s constitution. The overt and intimidating Russian military presence must render the referendum which did take place illegitimate – a vote held under duress can never be acceptable – but it does not render it meaningless, because the will of Crimeans seems clear. Impelled to take a position in grossly unsatisfactory circumstances, the majority of Crimeans prefer to retain close connections with Russia.

The scenario in eastern Ukraine is different, however. It must be remembered that Crimea was – and will remain, in name at least – an autonomous republic, with its own parliament. It already possessed a significant degree of independence from the rest of Ukraine. This sense of distinctness has been enhanced by the continuing presence on Crimea of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, which has been based at Sevastopol since the city’s founding in 1783. There is in fact no history prior to 1991 of the Ukrainian mainland and the Crimean peninsula existing together as one independent state: after the fall of Kievan Rus, the history of mainland Ukraine is one of Polish-Lithuanian control and the Cossack Hetmanate, while the history of Crimea is of the Crimean Khanate and the Ottoman Empire. Crimea only joined the Ukrainian SSR in 1954, transferred by Soviet Russia, and together they would remain tied to the Soviet Union until Ukrainian independence.

Ethnic Russians are in the majority in Crimea today: 59%, compared to 24% ethnic Ukrainians and 12% Crimean Tatars. In the east, where the ethnic balance is more even, there is a sense that economic attachment to Russia does not equate to close cultural attachment: people define themselves based less on narrow ethnic definitions, more in relation to their shared culture and their experiences building their cities together. If referendums were somehow called in the east on the issue of independence from Ukraine or integration with Russia, it is not clear which side would win. The east – bound in its past to the banks of the Dnieper as much as it is to the Russian Empire, and having suffered so much as part of the Soviet Union – has perhaps less cultural resonance for Russians than Crimea; while its loss would be much more costly for Ukraine, inevitably leading to a protracted and militarised engagement were Russia to try their hand.

Once more, any suggestion that Russia will do so amounts, at this stage, to speculation, carrying with it a palpable degree of scaremongering. For its part, Ukraine must look firmly ahead to the presidential elections scheduled for 25 May. These seem set to draw an array of candidates: from the oligarchy, the political elite, and the professional classes, and covering the whole of the political spectrum. Former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko yesterday confirmed her candidacy, which may – along with the prospective candidacies from Svoboda and the militant Pravy Sektor – be cause for lament, as Ukraine needs neither divisive politics nor symbols of the persistent corruption that has been at the government’s head. Other potential candidates include the former boxer and opposition politician Vitali Klitschko, and the ‘Chocolate King’ Petro Poroshenko, an independent businessman who stands as the current favourite in polls despite not yet formally announcing his candidacy. Interim Prime Minister Yatsenyuk – who signed last Friday part of the Association Agreement with the EU whose suspension instigated the Euromaidan protests – could also still stand. Open elections and a real willingness to reform the political structure will guarantee nothing, but still affirm themselves as the best means for securing true Ukrainian independence, and for calming ongoing tensions in the east.

————

And why not give Gogol a final word? His Cossack horror story ‘A Terrible Vengeance’ – translated here by R. Pevear and L. Volokhonsky – contains one of his most famous descriptive passages. It depicts the Dnieper:

‘Master Danilo sits and looks with his left eye at his writing and with his right eye out the window. And from the window the gleam of the distant hills and the Dnieper can be seen. Beyond the Dnieper, mountains show blue. Up above sparkles the now clear night sky. But it is not the distant sky or the blue forest that Master Danilo admires: he gazes at the jutting spit of land on which the old castle blackens. He fancied that light flashed in a narrow window of the castle. But all is quiet. He must have imagined it. Only the muted rush of the Dnieper can be heard below, and on three sides, one after the other, the echo of momentarily awakened waves. The river is not mutinous. He grumbles and murmurs like an old man: nothing pleases him; everything has changed around him; he is quietly at war with the hills, forests, and meadows on his banks, and carries his complaint against them to the Black Sea.’

————————

Further reading:

The standard history of Ukraine in English is Ukraine: A History by Orest Subtelny (University of Toronto Press, 2009). Other acclaimed English-language histories of the country include Paul Robert Magocsi’s History of Ukraine: The Land and Its Peoples (University of Toronto Press, 2010) and Borderland: A Journey Through the History of Ukraine by Anna Reid (Phoenix, 2003). Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (Vintage, 2011) provides a close reading of the devastation of Ukraine during the 1930s and 1940s. The most sustained study of Gogol’s works within a Ukrainian context is Edyta Bojanowska’s Nikolai Gogol: Between Ukrainian and Russian Nationalism (Harvard University Press, 2007).

A selection of news sources:

The BBC profiles Luhansk, from last December: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-25406861

Reuters reports on the death of a protester in Donetsk: http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/03/13/us-ukraine-crisis-donetsk-idUSBREA2C20Z20140313

The International Business Times on the death of two in Kharkiv: http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/two-killed-ukraine-protesters-clash-kharkiv-1440436

A Guardian opinion piece following the deaths in Kharkiv: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/mar/20/ukraine-nationalist-attacks-russia-supporters-kremlin-deaths

Putin signs a bill on the integration of Crimea with the Russian Federation: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-26630062

Reuters on the Ukrainian withdrawal from Crimea: http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/03/24/us-ukraine-crisis-crimea-base-idUSBREA2N09J20140324

NATO commander Philip Breedlove on concerns over Transdniestria: http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/03/23/us-ukraine-crisis-idUSBREA2M09920140323

Former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt comments on the sanctions: http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/helmut-schmidt-verteidigt-in-krim-krise-putins-ukraine-kurs-a-960834.html

Crimea: A Literary Perspective

The situation in Crimea continues to develop agallop. Following events in Kiev, unidentified Russian troops have taken control of Crimea’s airports, public buildings, military installations, and ports. Amid claim and counterclaim – the apparent defection of the chief of the Ukrainian Navy, the claimed defection of thousands of Ukrainian armed forces, and allegations that the human rights of UN envoys and journalists are being abused – and with occasional clashes between opposition groups – notably that which took place on 9 March, as the anniversary of the Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko was commemorated – a referendum has been scheduled which would decide the region’s future.

Initially proposed for May, brought forward by the Crimean parliament and the city council of Sevastopol (one of two cities – along with Kiev – with special status in Ukraine) to 16 March, the referendum will ask the populace of Crimea whether the region should unify with Russia. The referendum has been declared unconstitutional and therefore illegal by the interim Ukrainian government and by governments throughout Europe and in the United States. For a richer exploration of the contexts involved as the sequence of things shifts and continues in Crimea, it is necessary to provide some detail regarding the wider situation in Ukraine.

Amidst a political background of economic uncertainty and reliance on Russian oil, and with growing allegations of governmental corruption, the protest movement in Ukraine began in earnest on the evening of 21 November 2013. Earlier that day, the Ukrainian parliament had rejected a series of measures which called for imprisoned former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko to be allowed medical treatment abroad; and the Ukrainian government, and President Viktor Yanukovych, issued a decree suspending the signing of an Association Agreement with the EU. This agreement, some aspects of which have been under discussion as far back as 1999, would mean closer political and economic integration between Ukraine and the EU. It includes policy on a ‘deep and comprehensive free trade area’, on visa-free movement between Ukraine and the EU (which at the moment extends only one way, with Ukrainian citizens required to possess a visa to visit EU states), and emphasises the ‘European identity’ of Ukraine.

It is worth noting that the agreement which was to be signed represented a certain amount of progress made during Yanukovych’s Presidency. Attempts towards closer integration had largely stalled under the Presidency of Viktor Yuschenko and the twin governments of Tymoshenko. More, in suspending the signing of the agreement, Yanukovych and the government underneath him – headed by Prime Minister Mykola Azarov – were not explicitly rejecting it, and at first they continued to negotiate with the EU. However, the EU had asked Ukraine to sign the Association Agreement during the EU summit in Vilnius, on 28-29 November. That this would not now occur was taken by many pro-European Ukrainians to indicate the implicit rejection of closer EU ties, in favour of a strengthening of bonds with Russia. Russia had previously indicated that the signing of the Association Agreement would negatively impact Russia-Ukraine trade relations.

Thus, on 21 November, utilising social media and encouraged by several opposition politicians, protesters began to gather at Maidan Nezalezhnosti (‘Independence Square’), the central square in the Ukrainian capital of Kiev, and one which has been used for political rallies since Ukrainian independence in 1991. The number of protesters swelled from 2,000 to as many as 100,000 over the course of the next week, with tensions rising as the Vilnius summit drew to a close: Ukraine had attended, and Azarov continued to assert the government’s desire to reach some deal with the EU, but no agreement had been signed.

Throughout the following two weeks, the protests spread to other cities – notably to Lviv, close to the border with Poland – and began calling for the resignation of the President and the government. Public buildings, including the Kiev city hall, were occupied by groups of protesters. What had began relatively peacefully became increasingly confrontational. The police commenced using batons, stun grenades and tear gas, at first to halt those protesters trying to access governmental buildings, then increasingly to break up all large-scale demonstrations. The police for their part would claim that the protesters initiated these escalations by using tear gas and other explosives. The Azarov government survived a vote of no confidence in parliament on 3 December. On 8 December, the third Sunday of the protests, the number of protesters in Kiev reached at least 500,000; but a few days later the police coordinated their efforts to clear protesters from the Maidan.

Then on 17 December, President Yanukovych and President Putin signed a treaty which saw Russia buy $15 billion of Ukrainian debt, and significantly reduce the price it charged Ukraine for natural gas. The treaty also apparently gave the Russian Navy increased access to the Kerch Peninsula in eastern Crimea. Prime Minister Azarov asserted that the deal had saved Ukraine from potential bankruptcy; while suggesting that the Association Agreement with the EU was still being considered, but some way from being signed. EU ministers stated that the treaty with Russia would not prevent the signing of the Association Agreement; still, the treaty was roundly denounced by the Ukrainian opposition.

Despite this – and despite the attack on Tetiana Chornovol, a journalist and prominent leader of the protest campaign, on 25 December – the protests remained relatively peaceful from the middle of December until the middle of January. On 16 January, a series of draconian anti-protest laws were pushed through parliament. These decreed lengthy jail terms for those engaging in ill-defined ‘extremist activity’, and introduced provisions for the censorship of the internet and social media; and quickly became referred to as the ‘dictatorship laws’. In the aftermath to the passing of these laws, the protests and the response of the authorities intensified. Three protesters were killed between 21-22 January, one shot to death by the police; prominent protest leaders Ihor Lutsenko and Yuriy Verbytsky were abducted, the latter soon found dead; and police began using water cannon on protesters despite the freezing temperatures.

On 28 January, Prime Minister Azarov tended his resignation, which was accepted. He flew first to Austria, later moving on to Russia. In early February, meetings between Yanukovych and leaders of the opposition saw some movement towards compromise and constitutional reform. However, the rhetorical confrontation engaged in by both sides continued apace. On 14 February, the 234 protesters arrested since the beginning of the protests were released from custody; and on 16 February, protesters relinquished their occupation of the Kiev city hall. But on 18 February, around 20,000 protesters began to march on the Verkhovna Rada, the Ukrainian parliament; and in the fighting which followed, with both protesters and the police firing automatic weapons and utilising explosive devices, 20 people were killed with more than a thousand injured. A brief truce held on the evening of 19 February, but the following morning the fighting resumed. With reports of police snipers targeting civilians and leaders of the opposition, a further sixty people were killed, the vast majority from the numbers of the protesters. 21 February saw a deal reached between President Yanukovych and opposition leaders, brokered by the Foreign Ministers of Poland, Germany, and France. Yet this deal too did not hold; Yanukovych fled from Kiev; parliament impeached him and formed an interim government; and the situation in the Crimea began to escalate.

Russia – alongside ministers from Yanukovych’s Party of Regions – has consistently alleged that the violence which has marked the protests has been initiated by the protesters. It argues that the protest movement has been infiltrated by or has contained within and enabled far-right nationalists, quick to adopt violent measures. The symbols and signa of nationalists have been apparent during some of the protest’s fiercest clashes; the Right Sector collective have been implicated in some of the protest’s most critical – and bloodiest – battles. In contrast, the protest movement and opposition leaders have squarely blamed a brutal and reactionary police force for the number of injured and dead; arguing that they were ordered by governmental ministers fighting to remain in power whatever the cost. In particular, the Minister for Internal Affairs, Vitaliy Zakharchenko, has been labelled a criminal for supporting the use of deadly force by the Berkut, the special police force governed by his Ministry. Immediately following the deal struck on 21 February, the Ukrainian parliament voted unanimously to suspend Zakharchenko; also voting to restore the amendments made to the Ukrainian constitution in 2004, which sought to weaken the powers of the President. Zakharchenko’s successor, the acting Minister for Internal Affairs Arsen Avakov, has since dissolved the Berkut.

In tune with their allegations regarding the involvement of far-right nationalists, Russia calls the impeachment of Yanukovych and the formation of a new government illegal, an anti-constitutional coup achieved by force. They point to the cabinet positions the interim government – led by interim Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk – has afforded three protest leaders, along with four members of the controversial nationalist party Svoboda. To the protesters and to the politicians of the opposition, this marks instead the success of a popular uprising, and the deposition of a Presidency and a government who had rendered themselves illegitimate. It could certainly be argued that – disregarding any prior instances of corruption – the grotesque actions of the Berkut were sufficient to delegitimise Yanukovych’s regime. The view of the opposition is the view which appears predominant in Western Europe and North America, and it is the view strongly forwarded by the governments of these countries. One of the problems with this view, however – and preventing any clear delineation of right and wrong – is the apparent lack of political process, the apparent absence of diplomacy, which has marked events in Kiev in the aftermath of 21 February.

The deal signed by Yanukovych and opposition leaders and impelled by the Foreign Ministers of Poland, Germany, and France called for a restoration of the 2004 constitution to prefigure further constitutional reform; the formation of a new unity government; amnesty for protesters arrested from 17 February; and presidential elections to be held no later than December. Yet in the twenty-four hours following its agreement, protesters – who condemned the deal – continued to rally and to occupy public buildings across Ukraine. Police officers abandoned the capital, whether recalled from Kiev to face protests in their home cities, fearful of riots, or refusing to uphold Yanukovych’s position any longer. Presidential buildings became unguarded; Yanukovych hurried to Kharkiv, in the north east of the country; and the Euromaidan protesters entered peacefully and unfettered the governmental buildings of the capital. With around 40 Party of Regions MPs leaving their posts or defecting, and with the tenor in the Verkhovna Rada having fundamentally altered, a new coalition was formed and parliament voted to impeach Yanukovych. Disembodied in the east, Yanukovych responded by asserting the legality of his position as Ukraine’s lawfully elected president, and denouncing events in Kiev as a coup.

Russia had already, during the course of the protests, accused Western governments – particularly the United States – of funding the opposition. But the breakdown of diplomacy immediately following the 21 February agreement increased the sense of Western meddling and Western hypocrisy, and made Russian intervention in some form all but inevitable. Russia undoubtedly perceives the hands of the West behind the ultimate ousting of Yanukovych; and considers that attempts to reach a political compromise were abandoned once the EU and the US saw their preferred outcome emerge via extra-political means. If the West portrays itself as upholding the right for Ukrainians to decide how and by whom they are governed, free from the interference of their often repressively violent and overbearing neighbour, then Russia sees the West acting out of self-interest: heralding and supporting the attempts for independence of those who would seek closer ties with it, while decrying those who would associate with alternative areas of power.

The moral case of the West inevitably implicates democracy as the system of government which best establishes and upholds the rights of the human beings who fall under it. To this supposition, democracy itself must be opened out and questioned, both for its fundamental principles and in its historical development. It is debatable whether modern democracy, as practised in the EU and US, truly allows individuals a significant say regarding how they are governed. This covers a range of concerns, from the lack of choice afforded by too-similar politicians, to revolving door policies and the power of lobbying groups, to the bailout of big banks at the expense of taxpayers, to apparently flawed electoral systems, to a perceived democratic deficit in the governance of the EU.

A notable facet of modern democracies appears to be how efficiently they stifle protest – at an ideological level, before it comes to the legal restrictions placed upon the right to protest and excessive policing of those protests which do take place. Protesters in modern democratic societies are routinely cast and outcast as dangerous and extremist regardless of the specificities of their views. Little over a week ago, 1,000 environmental protesters protested peacefully outside the White House in Washington, over the controversial fourth phase of the Keystone oil pipeline project. 400 of these protesters were arrested, their appeals dismissed as constituting ‘an extreme position…well outside the American mainstream’. De Tocqueville warned of the ‘soft despotism’ inherent in the democratic system, and always to be considered and guarded against:

‘Thus, after having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.‘

Nor can the recent history of Russian-Western relations beyond Ukraine and Crimea be dismissed. Russia can justifiably mock US Secretary of State John Kerry’s assertion that ‘You just don’t in the 21st century behave in 19th century fashion by invading another country on completely trumped up pretext’, given the invasion of Iraq – which Kerry voted for – based on alleged but nonexistent weapons of mass destruction. Meanwhile, the West’s analysis of the ongoing conflict in Syria seems increasingly open to debate. One prominent study of rocket trajectories argues that the rockets which delivered sarin gas to Ghouta, near Damascus, last August could not have been fired from within areas controlled by the Syrian government.

Thus Russia’s engagement in Crimea implicates Russian concern over Western influence, Western sleight-of-hand, and a breakdown in diplomacy; it has been encouraged by some of the protest movement’s association with aspects of the far-right; and it reflects Russia’s dislike of Ukraine’s change in political regime, as well as a perception that the Ukrainian political class is disorganised, self-absorbed, backed by various competing oligarchs, and incapable of providing the stability that could be conducive to its purposes as well as to the Ukrainian populace. Reading between the lines, there is a sense that many Ukrainian citizens would welcome close cooperation with both Russia and the EU, for economic and cultural reasons; but the more the situation in the country escalates, the more they are forced to pick sides. One of the reshaped parliament’s least helpful measures was its overturning, on 23 February, of a minority languages law, which allowed Russian to function as an official second language in those regions with a sizeable Russian population.

What Russia desires as the result of its excessively militarised response remains unclear. The annexation of Crimea is presumed, based upon the example set in Georgia, but any serious attempt towards this end would be met with international opposition: there would undoubtedly be sanctions, and a serious deterioration in Russia’s international relationships. Russia would have much to lose by perceived annexation: without the ethnic Russian population of Crimea to balance opinion in the west, and in response to such an outcome, Ukraine could slip decisively, electorally and ideologically, from its powers of influence. Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, founded along with the city of Sevastopol in 1783, is now small and old and in need of modernisation; but access to the Black Sea from Crimea remains a strategic and economic imperative for Russia. In 1997, a partition treaty divided the Black Sea Fleet and effectively formed the Ukrainian Navy; as part of the treaty, Russia was ensured military access to Crimea, and the base of its fleet in Sevastopol, until 2017. In 2010 this agreement was extended until 2042. According to its terms, Russia are allowed to station 25,000 troops on Crimea – more than the 16,000 which Ukraine claims are currently present – but, of course, these troops are not allowed to assert themselves off base and unidentified. It is plausible that Russia is endeavouring to secure primarily its military access to the region. At this point in time, any further excursions appear as unlikely as they would be unwarranted.

More than a swift reaction to recent political events, Russia’s intervention in Crimea must be read from a longer cultural and historical perspective. The broader response from the populace of Crimea to the protests in the west of the country must equally be viewed not merely within their immediate context – portrayed in opposition to the protesters’ successes in Kiev – but with an understanding of the Crimea’s own highly distinct history and culture. The trajectory of the Crimea does not merely parallel or diametrically oppose what is happening elsewhere in Ukraine: it has unique roots and currents.

The short history of Crimea as part of Ukraine began on 19 February 1954, when the Crimean Oblast was transferred from the authority of Soviet Russia to the authority of Soviet Ukraine. The rationale behind this transfer remains a subject of debate: some have considered it essentially a gift, marking the 300th anniversary of Ukraine as part of the Russian Empire; others have stressed the close cultural, economic, and practical links between the region and the Ukrainian mainland. In January 1991, Crimea was upgraded from an Oblast to an Autonomous Republic. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, it remained part of independent Ukraine, with much autonomy and its own parliament. Across 1992 the Crimean parliament agreed to retain unity with Ukraine, but only after securing even greater autonomy from Kiev; in May, the parliament also established a Crimean constitution.

In October 1993, the Crimean parliament established the post of President of Crimea. At the same time, it agreed upon parliamentary representation for Crimea’s Tatars: the Crimean Tatars were given 14 seats in the body of 100, despite their protests that Crimea should not possess a president distinct from the President of Ukraine. After a pro-Russian President of Crimea was voted into power in 1994, in March 1995 the Ukrainian parliament unilaterally abolished the post and scrapped the Crimean constitution. A new constitution was formed and finally ratified by the Ukrainian parliament in 1998; while the treaty of friendship of 1997 regarding the division of the Black Sea Fleet calmed differences between Kiev and Moscow concerning the region.

————

For those who desire a retreat from such densely political frontiers; who would extend their political understanding via other contexts; or else derive pleasure or relaxation through incidental knowledge – what follows is the long history of Crimea, seen through the eyes and down the nibs of some of the great men of Russian letters. It is a political history, a cultural history, and a literary history.

Kievan Rus flourished from about 882 – when Prince Oleg moved the capital of the Rus from Novgorod to Kiev – until the 13th century, when the Mongol Empire invaded and destroyed their major cities. While Russia gradually threw off the ‘Mongol-Tatar Yoke’, and began to emerge round the city of Moscow as a powerful independent state, Kiev and much of what is now northern and central Ukraine came under Polish-Lithuanian control. The Russo-Polish War of 1654-1667 ended in a truce, but one which forced the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth to relinquish Kiev and the lands east of the Dnieper River (plus Smolensk further north) to the Tsardom of Russia. These lands continued to rule themselves with some autonomy for the next hundred years, the period of the Cossack Hetmanate; but this autonomy was successively diminished during the reign of Catherine the Great (1762-1796), and the region came to be fully incorporated into the Russian Empire. Russia often considers the union between Kiev and Moscow to extend back to the beginnings of the the Russo-Polish War in 1654.

The history of Crimea is distinct from the history of Kiev and mainland Ukraine. The region passed through the firm and fragile hands of the Cimmerians, Greeks, Bulgars, and Kievan Rus, among hordes of others, before the 13th century, when it became implicated in the Venetian-Genoese Wars, between the rival Republics of Venice and Genoa. The Republic of Genoa ruled Crimea for two centuries, its rule authorised by the Golden Horde which had fragmented from the Mongol Empire. As the Golden Horde itself began to fragment and dissolve, Tatars who had settled in the region came to power and established the Crimean Khanate in 1441. This Crimean Khanate, ruled by Crimean Tatars, came under Ottoman rule in 1475, but functioned as a protectorate, with significant autonomy from the Ottoman Empire.

The Russo-Turkish War of 1768-1774 resulted in a decisive victory for Russia. It annexed the area of land which is now southern Ukraine; and while the Crimean Khanate became nominally independent, in reality it came under Russian control and was annexed in 1783. Thus by the late 1700s, all of modern Ukraine was part of the Russian Empire. The lands of southern Ukraine and Crimea were referred to as Novorossiya (‘New Russia’), and many of the region’s prominent cities were founded at this time: including Sevastopol in 1783, and Simferopol a year later, both in Crimea; and further north-west, on the mainland overlooking the Black Sea, Odessa in 1794.

Odessa grew rapidly, governed in its early years by the Duc de Richelieu, becoming a free port in 1819, and emerging as a truly multinational and multilingual city: Italian was the lingua franca, spoken alongside Russian and French (Binyon, 154). Pushkin, exiled from Saint Petersburg for writing revolutionary epigrams, spent several months in the Caucasus and Crimea in 1820. He joined the company of General Nikolay Raevksy, famous for his feats on Russia’s behalf during the Napoleonic Wars; and Pushkin formed enduring friendships with Raevsky’s sons and daughters. According to D. S. Mirsky, these months, ‘spent in the company of the Rayévskys…were one of the happiest periods of Pushkin’s life. It was from the Rayévskys also that he got his first knowledge of Byron’ (Mirsky, 81). Then, between exiles, Pushkin would spend a year in Odessa from July 1823 until July 1824. The period was particularly fruitful for his work. He had begun writing Eugene Onegin in May, and completed most of the first three chapters, including Tatyana’s letter, in Odessa. Meanwhile, he published the narrative poem The Fountain of Bakhchisaray; and Odessa also proved the source for a number of his greatest love lyrics. Personal intrigue and the proclamation of atheism in one of Pushkin’s letters was enough for the authorities to force Pushkin’s departure from Odessa; he spent the next two years at Mikhailovskoe, his family estate near Pskov.

The Crimean War (1853-1856) would come to centre upon Sevastopol, after impacting Odessa along with many of the major Russian and Ottoman cities by the Black Sea. The war may be perceived as a culmination of the Russo-Turkish wars of the previous three centuries. Provisionally, it was the result of a series of political intrigues concerning the status of Christianity in Palestine, which was then controlled by the Ottomans. Ever since the fall of the Byzantine Empire, Russia had considered itself the protector of the Eastern Orthodox Christian faith. The see of Moscow had been accepted as an Orthodox patriarchate in 1589; though rather than taking the traditional place of Rome as the first patriarchate, it was listed fifth, behind the patriarchates of Constantinople, Antioch, Alexandria, and Jerusalem. One of the consequences of the Russo-Turkish War of 1768-1774 had been the assertion of Russia’s right to protect all Orthodox Christians under Ottoman rule. Roman Catholic France, during the reign of Napoleon III, sought to alter this state of affairs, and began to negotiate with the Ottoman Empire demanding that it be given power over the Christian peoples and places of Palestine.

After the Ottoman Empire initially upheld the position of Russia, France undertook a show of force, sending the warship Charlemagne to the Black Sea. Cowed by the superior naval capacity of the French, the Ottomans ceded to their demands, allowing France and the Roman Catholic Church authority over Christianity in Palestine, and reverting to Latin an inscription at the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, symbolically placing it under French control. Attempts towards a diplomatic resolution made little progress, and the Russian Empire responded by sending soldiers through Moldavia and Wallachia (regions of modern-day Moldova and Romania), and to the Caucasus, which it was in the long process of annexing. (Lermontov was twice exiled as an officer to the Caucasus, and depicted the region in his novel A Hero of Our Time, published in 1840, in the middle of the Caucasian War). With both the Russians and the Ottomans also building their fleets in the Black Sea, this first phase of the Crimean War reached a climax with the Battle of Sinop. Sinop, historically called Sinope, was itself the birthplace of important writers, philosophers and theologians: Diogenes of Sinope is noted as the founder of philosophical Cynicism, and his witticisms, bold manners, and frequent quarrels with Plato are amusingly recounted in Diogenes Laertius’s Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers; Aquila of Sinope completed a translation of the Old Testament into Greek, the influence of which was recognised ans assured when Origen included it as part of his Hexapla: and Marcion of Sinope was ultimately declared a heretic for his rejection of the God of the Old Testament, but his writings encouraged the formation of the New Testament biblical canon. The battle which took place in the waters of Sinop in November 1853 saw Russian warships attack an anchored Ottoman patrol force, and come away with a significant victory.

This forced the hand of the French and the British, both of whom desired to prevent the expansion of the Russian Empire into the weakening Ottoman state. In March 1854, both declared war on the Russian Empire. By September, the focus of the war had turned to Crimea, and the allied forces of the French, British and Ottomans laid siege to Sevastopol, Crimea’s largest city and home to the Russian Empire’s Black Sea Fleet. Battles were fought in nearby towns and ports, and Sevastopol was repeatedly bombarded by the allies; despite the death of the Russian Emperor Nicholas I in March 1855, the Siege of Sevastopol persisted throughout the year, until the Russian forces withdrew the following September.

The fall of Sevastopol meant Russian defeat in the Crimean War. The Treaty of Paris, signed in March 1856, saw the Russian Empire return land to the Ottoman Empire, and relinquish all claims to the Danubian Principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia, which became independent. France won authority over the Christian peoples of the Holy Land. Crimea – which had been devastated, and seen the departure of much of its population – was restored to Russian control, but the Black Sea was declared a neutral territory, diminishing the Russian Empire as a military force. The failed war effort had also hurt the Empire economically, and the practical and psychological ramifications had far-reaching consequences: they encouraged the Alexander reforms of the 1860s, where Alexander II – Nicholas I’s son and successor – emancipated the serfs, and later reformed the Russian judiciary and military; and they impelled the sale of Alaska to the United States in 1867, with Russia struggling for funds and fearing they may lose the region without recompense in future military engagement.

Tolstoy had travelled to the Caucasus in 1851, and was motivated to sign up for the Russian army, serving in the same artillery regiment as his brother Nikolay. For two and a half years he participated in the Caucasian War; he was based in modern-day Chechnya. It was during this period that he began in earnest his artistic career: he completed, and saw published in The Contemporary, his first novel Childhood; wrote and published his second novel Boyhood; and in between published his first short story, ‘The Raid’, a realistic portrayal drawing upon his experiences in the region. In 1853, he attempted to resign from the army, but as an officer, his resignation was refused owing to the onset of the Crimean War.

So Tolstoy became an active participant in the Crimean War, serving in Bucharest from March 1854, then in November travelling to Odessa, then on to Sevastopol, where he was to be based for the next year. He began work on Youth, the final novel in his autobiographical trilogy; and wrote three reports on the war, ‘Sevastopol in December’, ‘Sevastopol in May’, and ‘Sevastopol in August’. ‘Sevastopol in December’ was published in June in The Contemporary. While his first two novels had resulted in literary acclaim, this first piece of war reportage brought Tolstoy a wider reputation across Russia. ‘Sevastopol in May’, a harsher, bleaker, and anti-militaristic depiction of the war, was butchered by the censor. The three texts would be published as the Sevastopol Sketches after the war had ended; together, they comprise Tolstoy’s claim to being the first modern war correspondent (an accolade often bestowed upon William Howard Russell, who covered the Crimean War for The Times). The Siege of Sevastopol would provide another first within the realm of Russian art and letters: Defence of Sevastopol was the Russian Empire’s first feature film, premiering at the Livadia Palace in Crimea in October 1911. The Livadia Palace near Yalta, a summer estate of the Russian Emperors from the 1860s, rebuilt by Nicholas II, would host the Yalta Conference towards the close of World War II.

Numerous biographers depict Tolstoy’s year in Sevastopol as decisive for his personal and artistic development. Both Henri Troyat and Rosamund Bartlett cite a diary entry he made in March:

‘Yesterday a conversation about divinity and faith led me to a great and stupendous idea, the realisation of which I feel capable of devoting my whole life to. This idea is the foundation of a new religion corresponding to the development of mankind – the religion of Christ, but purged of dogma and mystery, a practical religion, not promising future bliss but providing bliss on earth. I realise that to bring this idea to fruition will take generations of people working consciously towards this goal. One generation will bequeath this idea to the next, and one day fanaticism or reason will implement it. Working consciously to unite people with religion is the foundation of the idea which I hope will occupy me.‘

Bartlett comments that, ‘In a sense all of Tolstoy’s future career is here, as he was always a religious writer, concerned with seeking the truth. In his early works this concern was implicit, but it became increasingly explicit as he evolved as an artist’. Troyat writes, ‘The whole of Tolstoy’s future doctrine is summed up in these few lines scribbled in his notebook: refusal to submit to Church dogma, return to early Christianity based on the Gospels, simultaneous search for physical well-being and moral-perfection…The time was undoubtedly not yet ripe for a full spiritual flowering. But a slow process of fermentation had begun, deep within this unquiet soul, a subterranean and painful preparation for apostolate…in the state of perpetual mental upheaval which he lived, one idea remained constant: write’.

Tolstoy’s perspective on ‘the religion of Christ, but purged of dogma and mystery’ reverberates in the works of Dostoevsky, particularly in the Grand Inquisitor passage from The Brothers Karamozov. Tolstoy’s religious and ethical views, his Christian anarchism, his pacifism, and his focus on man’s relationship with the land, would also profoundly influence foreign thinkers, including Wittgenstein and James Joyce. Still, other historians view the decisive impact of Sevastopol upon Tolstoy in material rather than spiritual-artistic terms.

Tolstoy remained at this point in his life a fervent gambler and womaniser. Orlando Figes recounts, ‘In 1855 Tolstoy lost his favourite house in a game of cards. For two days and nights he played shtoss with his fellow officers in the Crimea, losing all the time, until at last he confessed to his diary ‘the loss of everything – the Yasnaya Polyana house. I think there’s no point writing – I’m so disgusted with myself that I’d like to forget about my existence’. Much of Tolstoy’s life can be explained by that game of cards. This, after all, was no ordinary house, but the place where he was born, the home where he had spent his first nine years, and the sacred legacy of his beloved mother which had been passed down to him’. Tolstoy returned to Yasnaya Polyana towards the end of May 1856, after several months in Saint Petersburg and Moscow. With the family house sold and dismantled to pay his debts, he lived in one of the remaining wings and, ‘as if to atone for his sordid game of cards, he set about the task of restoring the estate to a model farm’. Tolstoy would continue at Yasnaya Polyana for the remainder of his life, leaving just over a week before his death in the stationmaster’s house at Astapovo; he was buried at Yasnaya Polyana, amid thousands of mourners, in a treasured spot of the woods by his home.

The Crimean War had also seen the allied forces lay siege to Taganrog, a port city on the Sea of Azov, in the Rostov region of Russia which borders modern Ukraine.  Taganrog withstood the siege by British and French forces between June and August 1855, though it suffered significant damage; consequently, the city was exempted from taxes in 1857. In 1860, Chekhov was born in Taganrog. When he was diagnosed with tuberculosis in 1897, he was required to seek warmer climes than those of Moscow or Melikhovo, the estate twenty miles south of Moscow where he had lived since 1892. So at the end of August 1899, Chekhov sold Melikhovo and moved to Yalta, where he had built a villa. East of Sevastopol and overlooking the Black Sea, since the Crimean War Yalta had emerged as the most popular resort within the Russian Empire. Chekhov was not overly fond of Yalta, which he called a ‘hot Siberia…there is nothing here to interest me’; and he bemoaned the tendency of Russian doctors to proscribe time in Crimea for anyone suffering the slightest cough. He would have preferred to return to Taganrog, but the city did not have an adequate water supply. Still, Chekhov lived in Yalta until June 1904 when, his health deteriorating, he travelled to the spa town of Badenweiler in Germany, dying there the following month.

In Yalta – aside from receiving visitors, and spending some time with Tolstoy, who stayed at nearby Gaspra between 1901 and 1902 – Chekhov wrote his two final plays, Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard. Both were written for the Moscow Art Theatre, who produced them under the direction of Constantin Stanislavski. Chekhov wrote the part of Masha in Three Sisters specifically for Olga Knipper, a leading actress with whom Chekhov had corresponded since she appeared in The Seagull in 1896. The pair would marry in May 1901. Also in Yalta, Chekhov wrote some of his greatest short stories, including ‘In the Ravine’ and ‘The Lady with the Little Dog’. The latter begins in Yalta: a middle-aged man and a young woman, both married but visiting alone, meet there and become lovers. They return to their different lives, but eventually begin meeting secretly in Moscow. They talk to each other, they feel that they are in love, and the story ends:

‘And it seemed as though in a little while the solution would be found, and then a new and glorious life would begin; and it was clear to both of them that the end was still far off, and that what was to be most complicated and difficult for them was only just beginning.‘

Nabokov described Chekhov’s story: ‘All the traditional rules of story telling have been broken in this wonderful short story of twenty pages or so. There is no problem, no regular climax, no point at the end. And it is one of the greatest stories ever written’.

Nabokov’s father would be a key figure during the next tumultuous period in Crimea’s history, as the Russian Empire succumbed to revolution and civil war. The February Revolution of 1917, centred on Saint Petersburg – which had been rechristened Petrograd during World War I, an attempt to remove all vestiges of German from the name – and in fact emerging out of protests to mark International Women’s Day, resulted in the abdication of Nicholas II, who had lost popular, political, and military support. He named the Grand Duke Michael, his brother, as his successor, but the political situation was not conducive for any succession, and Michael declined to accept until the formation of an elected Constituent Assembly, which could approve his role. It was Nabokov’s father, Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov, who wrote Michael’s abdication letter; and in the Provisional Government which formed under Alexander Kerensky in the absence of a ruler, Vladimir Dmitrievich served as secretary.

Kerensky’s government was progressive, but struggled to assert a new political structure. It made numerous missteps of its own; angered the populace by refusing to withdraw from the war; and suffered fierce opposition, from the Petrograd Soviet within the capital, and from the Bolsheviks further afield. It fell in the October Revolution of 1917 which saw the Bolsheviks seize power. Vladimir Dmitrievich would later write an important memoir of this period, entitled The Provisional Government. More immediately, Nabokov’s family were forced to hurry from Petersburg, and they moved to Crimea. Nabokov’s biographer, Brian Boyd, summarises the political climate:

‘Three main political currents swirled around the Crimea late in 1917: the Socialist Revolutionary influence dominant in the countryside and in the local zemstvos; the nationalism of the Tatars, one-third of the population, who during the power vacuum of 1917 had set up their own parliament to administer Tatar affairs; and the anarchism of the sailors and soldiers in the port cities, especially Sebastapol, headquarters of the Black Sea fleet. While most of the unruly sailors at Sebastapol felt themselves full of revolutionary spirit, they had little inclination to Bolshevism until heavily armed Baltic sailors were dispatched from Petrograd late in the year. A takeover of the Sebastapol Soviet in December gave Bolsheviks power in the city and set in motion the first of the region’s massacres (more than a hundred officers killed). Elsewhere the Crimea was calm, with Tatar military detachments holding the area around Simferopol.‘

It was these Tatars, making up around a third of the population in late 1917, and setting up their own government – the Crimean People’s Republic, which lasted for only one month between December 1917 and January 1918, but may be considered an attempt to form the first secular Muslim state  – who would be forcibly deported from the region during World War II. The Soviet Union under Stalin accused the Crimean Tatars of collaborating with the Nazis, and the population of 200,000 were deported, the vast majority to the Uzbek SSR. It is thought that 46% of these people died during deportation. The Tatars only began returning to Crimea during the 1980s; today, they comprise around 250,000 of the region’s population of just over two million.

Staying at Gaspra, the Nabokov family initially sought to stay out of current affairs, Vladimir Dmitrievich’s political past making him vulnerable to arrest or worse. As the Russian Civil War progressed and the Bolsheviks endeavoured to assert themselves in Crimea, World War I continued, German troops advanced and, in late April 1918, occupied the region. This was a welcome relief for much of the populace, a respite from the tension and potential bloodshed of the Bolsheviks clashing with their opponents. Crimea became a relative stronghold of the opposition, and authority in the region would pass between the Bolsheviks and their opponents over the next few years.

When the Germans withdrew from Crimea and the puppet government they had installed fell in November 1918, the Crimean Regional Government formed under Solomon Krym. This Crimean Regional Government was opposed to the Bolsheviks, but was not closely allied to the White Army, drawing its members from both socialists and non-socialists, and concerned with the specifics of the local situation. Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov became the government’s minister of justice, and served until April 1919 when, weakened by its differences with the White Army, the Bolsheviks again seized power. Nabokov’s family were again forced to depart, and they eventually made their way, through Greece, to England, where Nabokov would study at Cambridge. Crimea would become the site of the last stand of the White Army: the defeat of the White Army, under the command of General Wrangel, in November 1920 effectively marked the end of the Russian Civil War. The Crimean Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic was formed a year later, and converted to the Crimean Oblast, fully part of Soviet Russia, in 1945. Nabokov’s father Vladimir Dmitrievich died in Berlin in March 1922, shot in the process of defending one of his liberal political rivals from far-right gunmen.

————————

For the political overview of this piece, I have used a variety of news sources – including Reuters, the BBC, The Guardian, The New York Times, Foreign Policy, Slate, and RT; online encyclopedias, notably Wikepedia; and each of the books listed below.

A selection of sources:

The BBC’s timeline of the Ukrainian crisis: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-26248275

A depiction of the role of the far-right in the protest movement: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-26468720

A New York Times piece on the fall of Yanukovych: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/24/world/europe/as-his-fortunes-fell-in-ukraine-a-president-clung-to-illusions.html

RT’s response to the interim Ukrainian government’s cancellation of the minority languages law: http://rt.com/news/minority-language-law-ukraine-035/

‘Facts you may not know about Crimea’: http://rt.com/news/russian-troops-crimea-ukraine-816/

On the arrest of Keystone pipeline protesters in Washington: http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/03/03/us-usa-keystone-protest-idUSBREA210RI20140303

A study suggesting that chemical weapons used in Syria could not have been fired from within areas controlled by the Syrian government: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2014/01/15/214656/new-analysis-of-rocket-used-in.html

An opposing perspective: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/mar/06/sarin-gas-attack-civilians-syria-government-un

Literature:

Rosamund Bartlett Chekhov: Scenes from a Life (Free Press, 2005)

Rosamund Bartlett Tolstoy: A Russian Life (Profile Books, 2010)

T. J. Binyon Pushkin: A Biography (New York: Vintage, 2002)

Brian Boyd Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years (London: Vintage, 1993)

Anton Chekhov Selected Stories of Anton Chekhov (trans. R. Pevear & L. Volokhonsky) (Modern Library, 2000)

R. F. Christian (ed.) Tolstoy’s Diaries (London: Flamingo, 1994)

Norman Davies Europe: A History (Pimlico, 1997)

Orlando Figes Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia (Penguin, 2003)

D. S. Mirsky A History of Russian Literature (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968)

Vladimir Nabokov Lectures on Russian Literature (Harcourt, 1981)

Henri Troyat Tolstoy (Penguin, 1980)

The Scythians and The Rite of Spring: Documents

Here are a selection of documents and sources – videos, images, and text – relating to and referred to in the piece I just published, on the influence of Nicholas Roerich and Asiatic culture on Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring.

____

Mikhail Glinka, Ruslan and Lyudmila (1842) – Overture

____

Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Scheherazade, Op. 35 (1888)

____

Vladimir Soloviev, ‘Pan Mongolism’ (1894)

–

Pan Mongolism! The name is monstrous

Yet it caresses my ear

As if filled with the portent

Of a grand divine fate.

–

While in corrupt Byzantium

The altar of God lay cooling

And holy men, princes, people and king

Renounced the Messiah –

–

Then He invoked from the East

An unknown and alien people,

And beneath the heavy hand of fate

The second Rome bowed down in the dust.

–

We have no desire to learn

From fallen Byzantium’s fate,

And Russia’s flatterers insist:

It is you, you are the third Rome.

–

Let it be so! God has not yet

Emptied his wrathful hand.

A swarm of waking tribes

Prepares for new attacks.

–

From the Altai to Malaysian shores

The leaders of Eastern isles

Have gathered a host of regiments

By China’s defeated walls.

–

Countless as locusts

And as ravenous,

Shielded by an unearthly power

The tribes move north.

–

O Rus’! Forget your former glory:

The two-headed eagle is ravaged,

And your tattered banners passed

Like toys among yellow children.

–

He who neglects love’s legacy,

Will be overcome by trembling fear…

And the third Rome will fall to dust,

Nor will there ever be a fourth.

____

Golden bull figurine, from the Maikop kurgan (excavated 1897)

____

World of Art magazine, 3rd Edition (1901)

____

Nicholas Roerich, Guests from Overseas (1901)

____

Nicholas Roerich, Set Design for Act III of The Polovtsian Dances (1909)

____

Nicholas Roerich, Preliminary Paintings for ‘The Great Sacrifice’ (the working title of The Rite of Spring) (1910)

____

Nicholas Roerich, Costume Designs for The Rite of Spring (1913)

____

Nicholas Roerich, Set Designs for The Rite of Spring (1913)

____

Original Costumes for The Rite of Spring (1913)

____

Igor Stravinsky, The Rite of Spring (1913)

____

Alexander Blok, The Scythians (1918)

–

You are millions. We are hordes and hordes and hordes.

Try and take us on!

Yes, we are Scythians! Yes, we are Asians –

With slanted and greedy eyes!

–

For you, the ages, for us a single hour.

We, like obedient slaves,

Held up a shield between two enemy races –

The Tatars and Europe!

–

For ages and ages your old furnace raged

And drowned out the roar of avalanches,

And Lisbon and Messina’s fall

To you was but a monstrous fairy tale!

 –

For hundreds of years you gazed at the East,

Storing up and melting down our jewels,

And, jeering, you merely counted the days

Until your cannons you could point at us!

–

The time is come. Trouble beats its wings –

And every day our grudges grow,

And the day will come when every trace

Of your Paestums may vanish!

 –

O, old world! While you still survive,

While you still suffer your sweet torture,

Come to a halt, sage as Oedipus,

Before the ancient riddle of the Sphinx!..

–

Russia is a Sphinx. Rejoicing, grieving,

And drenched in black blood,

It gazes, gazes, gazes at you,

With hatred and with love!..

 –

It has been ages since you’ve loved

As our blood still loves!

You have forgotten that there is a love

That can destroy and burn!

 –

We love all- the heat of cold numbers,

The gift of divine visions,

We understand all- sharp Gallic sense

And gloomy Teutonic genius…

 –

We remember all- the hell of Parisian streets,

And Venetian chills,

The distant aroma of lemon groves

And the smoky towers of Cologne…

 –

We love the flesh – its flavor and its color,

And the stifling, mortal scent of flesh…

Is it our fault if your skeleton cracks

In our heavy, tender paws?

 –

When pulling back on the reins

Of playful, high-spirited horses,

It is our custom to break their heavy backs

And tame the stubborn slave girls…

–

Come to us! Leave the horrors of war,

And come to our peaceful embrace!

Before it’s too late – sheathe your old sword,

Comrades! We shall be brothers!

–

But if not – we have nothing to lose,

And we are not above treachery!

For ages and ages you will be cursed

By your sickly, belated offspring!

 –

Throughout the woods and thickets

In front of pretty Europe

We will spread out! We’ll turn to you

With our Asian muzzles.

 –

Come everyone, come to the Urals!

We’re clearing a battlefield there

Between steel machines breathing integrals

And the wild Tatar Horde!

 –

But we are no longer your shield,

Henceforth we’ll not do battle!

As mortal battles rages we’ll watch

With our narrow eyes!

–

We will not lift a finger when the cruel Huns

Rummage the pockets of corpses,

Burn cities, drive cattle into churches,

And roast the meat of our white brothers!..

–

Come to your senses for the last time, old world!

Our barbaric lyre is calling you

One final time, to a joyous brotherly feast

To a brotherly feast of labor and of peace!

____

Vaslav Nijinsky

____

 

Stravinsky and Nijinsky

____

Credit for the two poems goes to From the Ends to the Beginning: A Bilingual Anthology of Russian Verse; a project hosted at: http://max.mmlc.northwestern.edu/~mdenner/Demo/index.html

The Scythians and The Rite of Spring: Stravinsky and Roerich et al.

Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring (in French, Le Sacre du printemps) – the third ballet which Stravinsky composed for Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, after The Firebird (1910) and Petrushka (1911) – was written for the 1913 Paris season, and premiered just over a hundred years ago, on 29 May, in the newly-opened Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. The centenary of this most notorious premiere is the occasion for numerous celebrations: new performances, revivals, and festivals which will extend across the next year. The Théâtre des Champs-Élysées is hosting a range of balletic and orchestral performances, in a programme led by Saint Petersburg’s Mariinsky Ballet. In Moscow, four choreographies of the work have been shown by the Bolshoi Ballet over the last two months; with their performance of Pina Bausch’s interpretation set to travel worldwide. The Barbican and the Southbank Centre in London will feature orchestral performances of Stravinsky’s music. Carolina Performing Arts at Chapel Hill have devoted the next year to various showings of the work.

In Amsterdam, as part of the Holland Festival, the Chinese-born choreographer Shen Wei has produced a new version for Het Nationale Ballet. The Paul Sacher Foundation in Basel – which houses the Stravinsky archive – and Boosey & Hawkes are publishing a three-volume centenary edition comprising essays and an annotated facsimile of the score. In Zurich, David Zinman – who studied under and served as assistant to Pierre Monteux, the conductor of The Rite of Spring premiere – will investigate the musical and literary facets of the Rite with the Tonhalle Orchestra on 8 and 9 June. It is something of this endeavour which this piece will also attempt: an exploration of the cultural currents in Russia, centring on conceptions of the East, which led to the development of The Rite of Spring.

The influence of Asiatic art on Russian art, and in the realm of music in particular, was especially evident from the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Mikhail Glinka, the father of Russian classical music, drew extensively in his compositions from Russian folk music, which he had heard growing up as a child near Smolensk, and which was being annotated and collected from the last decade of the 1700s. Glinka’s Ruslan and Lyudmila (1842), an opera in five acts based on Pushkin’s poem, is considered an example of orientalism in music owing to its use of dissonance, chromaticism, and folk melodies. Following Glinka’s lead, Mily Balakirev began combining folk patterns with the received body of European classical music.

Balakirev utilised syncopated rhythms, while Orlando Figes – in Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia – argues that his key innovation was the introduction into Russian music of the pentatonic scale. The pentatonic scale has five notes per octave, in contrast to the heptatonic scale, which has seven and which characterised much of the European music of the common practice era between 1600 and 1900. While the pentatonic scale has been diversely used, it is a prominent aspect of South-East Asian music, and is a facet of many Chinese and Vietnamese folk songs. Figes asserts that Balakirev derived his use of the pentatonic scale from his transcriptions of Caucasian folk songs; and writes that this innovation gave ‘Russian music its ‘Eastern feel’ so distinct from the music of the West. The pentatonic scale would be used in striking fashion by every Russian composer who followed…from Rimsky-Korsakov to Stravinsky’.

Balakirev was the senior member of the group of composers also comprising Modest Mussorgsky, Alexander Borodin, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, and César Cui – known variously as The Five, The Mighty Handful, and the kuchkists (‘handful’ in Russian being ‘kuchka’, (кучка)). Balakirev’s compositional manner aside, the central philosophical force upon this group was Vladimir Stasov, who as a critic relentlessly forwarded a national school in the Russian arts. Balakirev’s King Lear (1861), Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition (1874), and Rimsky-Korsakov’s Sadko (the name for a tone poem of 1867, and for the opera of 1896) and Scheherazade (1888) were all dedicated to Stasov.

From the early 1860s, Stasov researched and wrote a series of analyses demonstrating the influence of the East ‘manifest in all the fields of Russian culture: in language, clothing, customs, buildings, furniture and items of daily use, in ornaments, in melodies and harmonies, and in all our fairy tales’. His extensive study of the byliny, traditional Russian epic narrative poems, led him to conclude ‘these tales are not set in the Russian land at all but in some hot climate of Asia or the East…There is nothing to suggest the Russian way of life – and what we see instead is the arid Asian steppe’.

While positing the influence of the East was one thing, stating that these traditional Russian songs were in fact not Russian, but had originated entirely elsewhere, drew for Stasov considerable criticism. Any picture of the relationship between Russian and Asiatic art is complex: the developing understanding of this relationship in Russia throughout the 1800s is entwined with so many political and artistic movements and events: the emergence of orientalism after Russia’s annexing of the Crimea in 1783, and while they fought the Caucasian War between 1817 and 1864, which gave Russians a new awareness of and access to the south, and which impelled Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time; the persisting influence of Western Europe, encouraged in literature by the critic Vissarion Belinsky; and the Slavophilism which opposed the predominance of the West, seeking instead the emergence of a truly distinct Russia rooted in its own past. This Slavophilism gained momentum after the Crimean War from 1853-1856, which saw the British and French empires join the Ottomans against Russia. It was inextricably linked with the Orthodox religion; bore the related pochvennichestvo ‘native soil’ movement; and implicated in different ways Nikolai Gogol and Fyodor Dostoevsky.

Such complexities are encapsulated in a piece Dostoevsky wrote for his A Writer’s Dairy – a periodical he wrote and edited, containing polemical essays and occasional short fiction – in 1881. Dostoevsky, an ardent Slavophile for much of the second-half of his life, advocates for the progress of Russia through an engagement with Asia which will, at the same time, renew Russia’s relationship with Europe:

‘It is hard for us to turn away from our window on Europe; but it is a matter of our destiny…When we turn to Asia, with our new view of her, something of the same sort may happen to us as happened to Europe when America was discovered. With our push towards Asia we will have a renewed upsurge of spirit and strength…In Europe we were hangers-on and slaves, while in Asia we shall be the masters. In Europe we were Tatars, while in Asia we can be Europeans.’

All this is the long background to The Rite of Spring. The Symbolists who would achieve a Silver Age of Russian Literature were influenced by a combination of orientalism, folk tales, European literature, their Russian forebears, and some of those philosophers and mystics who were a product of the heightened religious thinking that was so much a part of Slavophilism. The philosopher Vladimir Soloviev – a close friend of Dostoevsky – has been characterised by D. S. Mirsky as ‘the first Russian thinker to divorce mystical and Orthodox Christianity from the doctrines of Slavophilism’, thereby establishing a metaphysics apart from nationalist sentiment. Mirsky depicts Soloviev as leaning towards Rome in matters of theology, and as a Westernising liberal politically. Yet he too was fascinated with the East. An important figure for Andrei Bely – whom Mirsky places alongside Gogol and Soloviev as the three ‘most complex and disconcerting figures in Russian literature’ – and for Alexander Blok, Blok’s The Scythians takes for its epigraph two lines from Soloviev’s 1894 poem ‘Pan-Mongolism’: ‘Pan-Mongolism! What a savage name!/Yet it is music to my ears’.

The Scythians was Blok’s last major poem, completed in 1918, just after The Twelve. Mirsky calls it an eloquent piece of writing, but ‘on an entirely inferior level’ as compared with ‘musical genius’ of The Twelve. Its title references the group of poets of the same name: an offshoot of Russian Symbolism in so far as it consisted of its two leading figures, Bely and Blok, plus the writer Ruzumnik Ivanov-Razumnik.

The Scythians as an ethnographic group were nomadic Iranian-speaking tribes, who inhabited the Eurasian steppes around the Black and Caspian seas from about the eighth century b.c.. Herodotus believed that, after warring with the Massagetae, they left Asia and entered the Crimean Peninsula. In literature, ‘Scythian’ increasingly became a derogatory term to describe savage and uncivilised people. Shakespeare refers to ‘The barbarous Scythian’ in King Lear; while Edmund Spenser sought to declaim the Irish by positing that they and the Scythians shared a common descent.

Alexander Pushkin used the term more warmly in his poetry, writing ‘Now temperance is not appropriate/I want to drink like a savage Scythian’; and in the Russia of the late nineteenth century, it came to be used to infer those qualities of the Russian people which marked them apart from Western Europeans. Abetted by archaeological excavations of Scythian kurgans (burial mounds) on Russian soil, a shared heritage with the Scythians was hypothesised as ‘Scythian’ became a byword for Russia’s historical past, Russian character, Russian otherness, and thereby also for Russia’s future.

Emphasising the conflux of Eastern influences in The Rite of Spring, Orlando Figes argues that Stravinsky’s ballet ought to be viewed particularly as a manifestation of this interest in all things Scythian. The painter Nicholas Roerich had initially trained as an archaeologist. He had worked with the archaeologist and orientalist Nikolay Veselovsky in excavating the Maikop kurgan in Maikop, Southern Russia, in 1897. The Maikop kurgan was dated as far back as the third millenium b.c., and revealed two burials, containing rich artifacts including a bull figurine made of gold. Roerich was an adherent of Stasov, and when he began work on a series of paintings depicting the early Slavs, he sought Stasov’s advice regarding ethnographic details. Stasov advised him that wherever there was a lack of local evidence, it was appropriate to use artistic and cultural details from the East since ‘the ancient East means ancient Russia: the two are indivisible’.

Though the specifics of his background and his orientalism were not entirely fluent with the group’s more worldly outlook, Roerich became an entrenched figure in Diaghilev’s World of Art movement. After designing the sets for The Polovtsian Dances – a ballet excerpted from Borodin’s opera Prince Igor, which featured during the Ballets Russes first season in 1909 – Roerich went on to work with Stravinsky on the concept, setting and costumes for The Rite of Spring.

The idea for The Rite of Spring had emerged by 1910; Petrushka, which premiered a year later, two years before The Rite of Spring‘s own premiere, was the product of a very different core of people. While Diaghilev quickly became the prominent figure in the movement – owing to his bold entrepreneurial personality; his appetite for and ability to synthesise knowledge; and driving the publication of the magazine of the same name from 1899 – the World of Art (‘Mir iskusstva’ (Мир иску́сств)) originally comprised a group of Petersburg students around Alexandre Benois and Léon Bakst. Mirsky describes Benois as ‘the greatest European of modern Russia, the best expression of the Western and Latin spirit. He was also the principal influence in reviving the cult of the northern metropolis and in rediscovering its architectural beauty, so long concealed by generations of artistic barbarity…But he was never blind to Russian art, and in his work…Westernism and Slavophilism were more than ever the two heads of a single-hearted Janus’.

The World of Art embodied these two poles, and was part of the energetic and diverse avant-garde in Russia in the first decade of the 1900s. This avant-garde also included the Symbolists in literature, and Alexander Scriabin in music – an influential composer who experimented with forms of atonal music, and who was much loved by Stravinsky. After Diaghilev’s successes staging Russian opera and music in Paris towards the end of the decade, the Ballets Russes was formed. Bakst produced scenery for the company’s adaptation of Scheherazade in 1910; while Benois designed the sets for many of its earliest productions. He worked especially on Petrushka. Mirsky suggests that not only the set design but the very idea of the ballet ‘belongs to Benois, and once more he revealed in it his great love for his native town of Petersburg in all its aspects, classical and popular’. Both Scheherazade and Petrushka were choreographed by the established dancer and choreographer Michel Fokine.

When it comes to locating the genesis of The Rite of Spring, Lawrence Morton has asserted the probable influence on Stravinsky of Sergey Gorodetsky’s mythological poetry collection Yar. Stravinsky set two of Yar‘s poems to music between 1907 and 1908. He claimed that the idea for the ballet came to him as a vision, of a ‘solemn pagan rite’ in which a girl danced herself to death for the god of spring. Yet Roerich had written in 1909 an essay, entitled ‘Joy in Art’, which depicted ancient Slav spring rituals of human sacrifice. Figes argues the concept for the ballet was originally Roerich’s, and that ‘Stravinsky, who was quite notorious for such distortions, later claimed it as his own’; Thomas F. Kelly, in writing a history of the ballet’s premiere, has argued much the same thing.

Whatever, by May 1910 Stravinsky and Roerich were discussing together their ideas for the ballet. A provisional title, ‘The Great Sacrifice’, was quickly decided upon. Stravinsky spent much of the next year working on Petrushka. Then in July 1911, he visited Roerich at Talishkino, an artist’s colony presided over by the patron Princess Maria Tenisheva, where the scenario for the Rite – ‘a succession of ritual acts’ – was fully plotted out.

Figes considers that the ritual which the ballet explicitly evokes may have been based on Roerich’s archaeological research, during which he had found some evidence of midsummer human sacrifice among the Scythians. The switch from summer to spring was motivated partly by an attempt to link the rite to traditional Slavic gods; and ‘was also based on the findings of folklorists such as Alexander Afanasiev, who had linked these venal cults with sacrificial rituals involving maiden girls’. While Stravinsky composed the ballet, Roerich worked on the sets and costumes, which were rich in ethnographic details: drawing from his archaeological studies, from medieval Russian ornament, and from collections of traditional peasant dress.

The controversy of the ballet’s premiere in Paris is often conceived as Stravinsky’s. He wrote in his autobiography of the mockery of some members of the audience upon hearing the opening bars of his score, which built upon Lithuanian folk songs; and the orchestra were littered with projectiles as they performed. Other critics, however, have forwarded Roerich’s costumes as the ballet’s most shocking aspect. Others still, including the composer Alfredo Casella, felt that it was Vaslav Nijinsky’s choreography which most drew the audience’s ire. Figes writes:

‘the music was barely heard at all in the commotion…Nijinsky had choreographed movements which were ugly and angular. Everything about the dancers’ movements emphasised their weight instead of their lightness, as demanded by the principles of classical ballet. Rejecting all the basic positions, the ritual dancers had their feet turned inwards, elbows clutched to the sides of their body and their palms held flat, like the wooden idols that were so prominent in Roerich’s mythic paintings of Scythian Russia.’

Nijinsky had been a leading dancer for the Ballets Russes since 1909. His first choreographic enterprise came with L’après-midi d’un faune, based on music by Debussy, which premiered in 1912. This debut choreography proved controversial: among mixed responses to the ballet’s premiere, Le Figaro‘s Gaston Calmette wrote, in a dismissive front-page review, ‘We are shown a lecherous faun, whose movements are filthy and bestial in their eroticism, and whose gestures are as crude as they are indecent’. Nijinsky’s second choreographic work, again after Debussy, was Jeux, which premiered just a couple of weeks before The Rite of Spring.

Nijinsky and Diaghilev had become lovers after first meeting in 1908. In the aftermath of Nijinsky marrying Romola de Pulszky in September 1913, while the Ballets Russes – without Diaghilev – toured South America, Diaghilev fired Nijinsky from his company. He reappointed Michel Fokine as his lead choreographer, despite feeling that Fokine had lost his originality. Fokine refused to perform any of Nijinsky’s choreography. A despairing Stravinsky wrote to Benois, ‘The possibility has gone for some time of seeing anything valuable in the field of dance and, still more important, of again seeing this offspring of mine’.

When Fokine returned to Russia upon the onset of World War I, Diaghilev began to negotiate for Nijinsky to return to the Ballets Russes. However, Nijinsky was in Vienna, an enemy Russian citizen under house arrest, and his release was not secured until 1916. In that year, Nijinsky choreographed a new ballet, Till Eulenspiegel, and his dancing was acclaimed; but he was showing increasing signs of the schizophrenia that would rule the rest of his life, and he retired to Switzerland with his wife in 1917. Without Nijinsky to offer guidance, the Ballets Russes were incapable of reviving his choreography for The Rite of Spring. His choreography was considered lost until 1987, when the Joffrey Ballet in Los Angeles performed a reconstruction based on years of painstaking research. Meanwhile, after the 1913 premiere, Stravinsky would continue to revise his score over the next thirty years.

Nicholas Roerich is perhaps best known today for his own paintings, for his spirituality, and for his cultural activism. His interest in Eastern religion and in the Bhagavad Gita flourished through the 1910s, inspired in part by his reading of the poetry of Rabindranath Tagore. Emigrating to London in 1919, then to the United States in 1920, in 1925 Roerich and his family embarked on a five-year expedition across Manchuria and Tibet. He was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize several times; while the Roerich Pact – an inter-American treaty signed in Washington in 1935 – established legally the precedence of cultural heritage over military defence. His art and his life is celebrated by the Nicholas Roerich Museum, which holds more than 200 of his paintings, located on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.

________

Figes, O. Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia (London; Penguin, 2003)

Gibian, G. (ed.) The Portable Nineteenth Century Russian Reader (Penguin, 1993)

Mirsky, D. S. A History of Russian Literature (London; Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968)

Rabindranath Tagore, E. E. Cummings; Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, Björk

Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) was a Bengali polymath, best known as a poet. Born in Calcutta – then part of the Bengal Presidency, and the capital city of British India – Rabindranath was the youngest child of Debendranath Tagore, the first leader of the Brahmo Samaj, a religious and social reform movement prominent in the development of the Bengal Renaissance.

The Brahmo Samaj was a coming together of the Brahmo Sabha, founded in 1828 by Raja Ram Mohan Roy; and Debendranath’s Tattwabodhini Sabha, a related movement which he founded in 1839. Both Ram Mohan Roy and Debendranath Tagore sought to reform Hindu religion, culture and society along humanist lines, based upon a clear conception of the Upanishads, the philosophical texts which comprise the closing texts of the Vedas. When Ram Mohan Roy died in 1833, the Brahmo Sabha declined as a force; and the movement merged with the Tattwabodhini Sabha to become the Brahmo Samaj, under Debendranath, in 1843.

The Bengal Renaissance which Ram Mohan Roy fathered, and to which Debendranath and the Brahmo Samaj were central, essentially entwined the teachings of the Upanishads with the political and cultural influences of the European West. In this it served to shape modern Indian society. Rabindranath – himself often considered a later character of the Bengal Renaissance – was brought up in the conflux of these religious and secular, these spiritual, philosophical, cultural and political rivers.

Many of his seven brothers and four sisters became notable figures in the arts and sciences. Rabindranath eschewed formal schooling in his youth, preferring to learn and to discover in his own way, from the expanse of resources located at the family’s Jorasanko mansion. At sixteen, he published his first collection of poetry under the pseudonym Bhanusimha (‘Sun Lion’). It was well received –  taken as a lost seventeenth century classic – and he would continue to write poetry throughout his life; completed eighty-four short stories, four novellas and eight novels; several pieces for the theatre; over two-thousand musical compositions, many drawing their lyrics from his literary works; and took up painting later on in life, at the age of sixty.

Rabindranath’s artistic reputation across the Indian subcontinent is unsurpassed. Two of his compositions, Jana Gana Mana and Amar Shonar Bangla, serve as the national anthems of India and Bangladesh respectively. In the West, he is best known for his Gitanjali (‘Song Offerings’). This collection of 157 poems was originally published in Bengali on 14 August, 1910. Over the following two years, Rabindranath set about translating fifty of these poems, plus other pieces, into English, into free verse. Travelling to England in the summer of 1912, and staying with the artist William Rothenstein, Rabindranath’s translations were passed about literary circles and led to the publication of the Gitanjali in English in November of the same year. The English Gitanjali were readily and widely acclaimed.

They came accompanied by an introduction by W. B. Yeats. Yeats compares Tagore to St. Francis and William Blake; and writes that the poems ‘have stirred my blood as nothing has for years’, and that,

‘I have carried the manuscript of these translations about with me for days, reading it in railway trains, or on the top of omnibuses and in restaurants, and I have often had to close it lest some stranger would see how much it moved me.’

Yeats met Rabindranath for the first time on 27 June, 1912; the two remained friends until Yeats’ death in 1939. Their friendship has been described as an important influence on both: ‘To Yeats, Tagore represented the wisdom and dignity of the East, and justified the faith that he had placed in the strength and vitality of Asian philosophy. For Tagore, Yeats was a vibrant symbol of the creative energy of the West’.

Owing much to the reception of the English Gitanjali, Tagore was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913 – becoming the first non-European to receive the award. He was knighted by George V in 1915, but repudiated the honour after the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in 1919. Rabindranath’s poetry would go on to be translated across Europe, notably by André Gide into French (Gide and Tagore met in Paris in 1921, and shared correspondence in 1930), and by Anna Akhmatova into Russian.

A number of Rabindranath Tagore’s poems as translated in the Gitanjali share similarities with some of the works of E. E. Cummings: both poets made use of free verse forms, a gently rhythmic syntax, and formal and archaic phrases and pronouns. A point of comparison and an additional point of connection may be found through the music of Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy (the pseudonym of Will Oldham) and Björk.

In 2000, Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy collaborated on an EP with Marquis de Tren – a name used by the Australian musician and artist Mick Turner. The EP, Get on Jolly, includes a song entitled ‘2/15’, whose lyrics are drawn from the second and fifteenth songs of Tagore’s translated Gitanjali. Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy performed ‘2/15’ live during a 2003 performance in Coney Island (as part of a festival at which Björk also appeared); the performance segued into ‘New Partner’ from Viva Last Blues, and was captured on video by the filmmaker Lance Bangs.

———

Gitanjali 2

———

When thou commandest me to sing it seems that my heart would break with pride; and I look to thy face, and tears come to my eyes.

All that is harsh and dissonant in my life melts into one sweet harmony – and my adoration spreads wings like a glad bird on its flight across the sea.

I know thou takest pleasure in my singing. I know that only as a singer I come before thy presence.

I touch by the edge of the far-spreading wing of my song thy feet which I could never aspire to reach.

Drunk with the joy of singing I forget myself and call thee friend who art my lord.

———

Gitanjali 15

———

I am here to sing thee songs. In this hall of thine I have a corner seat.

In thy world I have no work to do; my useless life can only break out in tunes without a purpose.

When the hour strikes for thy silent worship at the dark temple of midnight, command me, my master, to stand before thee to sing.

When in the morning air the golden harp is tuned, honour me, commanding my presence.

———

Bonnie Prince Billy – ‘2/15’ / ‘New Partner’

———

———

Björk has adapted three poems by E. E. Cummings to music. Questioned by Interview Magazine in 2004, at the time of Medúlla, Björk considered her relationship with Cummings, whose poetry she first became familiar with five years previously. She recalls immediately wanting to sing his words; evokes his poetry as ‘euphoric, but humble at the same time’; and notes that ‘It goes so well in the mouth!’.

Björk’s first adaptation of Cummings came in 2001, on Vespertine. The album includes the song ‘Sun in My Mouth’, with lyrics from Cummings’ 1923 poem, ‘I Will Wade Out’. ‘Hidden Place’ was Vespertine‘s first single; ‘Mother Heroic’, featuring an excerpt from Cummings’ ‘Belgium’, appeared on the second of the singles’ two discs. Then on Medúlla, her subsequent solo album, released in 2004, the tenth song, ‘Sonnets/Unrealities XI’, is an adaptation of Cummings’ poem of the same name.

———

‘I Will Wade Out’ (1923)

———

i will wade out

till my thighs are steeped in burning flowers

I will take the sun in my mouth

and leap into the ripe air

Alive

with closed eyes

to dash against darkness

in the sleeping curves of my body

Shall enter fingers of smooth mastery

with chasteness of sea-girls

Will i complete the mystery

of my flesh

I will rise

After a thousand years

lipping

flowers

And set my teeth in the silver of the moon

———

‘Belgium’ (1916)

———

Oh thou that liftest up thy hands in prayer,

Robed in the sudden ruin of glad homes,

And trampled fields which from green dreaming woke

To bring forth ruin and fruit of death,

Thou pitiful, we turn our hearts to thee.

–

Oh thou that mournest thy heroic dead

Fallen in youth and promise gloriously,

In the deep meadows of their motherland

Turning the silver blossoms into gold,

The valor of thy children comfort thee.

–

Oh thou that bowest thy ecstatic face,

Thy perfect sorrows are the world’s to keep!

Wherefore unto thy knees come we with prayer,

Mother heroic, mother glorious,

Beholding in thy eyes immortal tears.

———

‘Sonnets/Unrealities XI’ (1917)

———

It may not always be so; and I say

That if your lips, which I have loved, should touch

Another’s, and your dear strong fingers clutch

His heart, as mine in time not far away;

If on another’s face your sweet hair lay

In such a silence as I know, or such

Great writhing words as, uttering overmuch,

Stand helplessly before the spirit at bay;

–

If this should be, I say if this should be —

You of my heart, send me a little word;

That I may go to him, and take his hands,

Saying, Accept all happiness from me.

Then I shall turn my face, and hear one bird

Sing terribly afar in the lost lands.

———

Björk – ‘Sun in My Mouth’

———

———

Björk – ‘Mother Heroic’

———

———

Björk – ‘Sonnets/Unrealities XI’

———

———

Björk and Oldham have worked together on several occasions and are linked in a number of ways. Valgeir Sigurðsson, who produced both Vespertine and Medúlla, also produced Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy’s 2006 album, The Letting Go. A year later, Oldham covered ‘I’ve Seen It All’ – from the soundtrack to Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark – on Ask Forgiveness, an EP comprising a collection of covers. More closely, Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy toured with Björk in 2003. With Björk working around the same period on the soundtrack to her partner Matthew Barney’s Drawing Restraint 9, Oldham sang on the first track, ‘Gratitude’: a setting to music of a letter from a Japanese fisherman to American General Douglas MacArthur.

———

‘Gratitude’, from Drawing Restraint 9

———

________

Björk’s interview with Interview Magazine, 2004: http://www.bjork.fr/Interview-Magazine-2004

Cummings, E.E. Complete Poems, 1904-1962 (Liveright, 1994)

Hurwitz, H. M. ‘Yeats and Tagore’ Comparative Literature, Vol. 16, No. 1, Winter (1964) pp. 55-64

Tagore, R. Gitanjali (1912) (A full flash version of which may be accessed here)

Tagore, R. Selected Letters of Rabindranath Tagore eds. Dutta, K. & Robinson, A. (Cambridge University Press, 1997)

Bookshops in York

I am spending this week in York: the city in which I lived from the age of two until the age of nineteen; then returning, after four years in Sweden, for three years before moving to Amsterdam last October. York’s city centre is compact but plentiful, with a good variety of shops, an abundance of places to eat and drink, and a solid group of cultural venues: though York Art Gallery, traditionally insufficient, is currently undergoing an £8 million redevelopment – set to increase the gallery space by 60%, furnishing it with its own garden, and due to be completed by spring 2015 – there are a handful of contemporary art galleries, notably at Bar Lane Studios and According to McGee; the central cinema, City Screen, shows a consistent selection of foreign and classic films; the city boasts the National Centre for Early Music; and there are regular jazz performances, and comedy evenings at the city’s two theatres and at the City Screen basement.

One of the things York most excels in is books, for there are a profundity of second-hand bookstores across the city. These have stood and have even flourished – or at least slightly increased in number – following the demise of Borders in 2009 (which, however, has left the city short of magazines and international newspapers), and whilst WH Smith continues to excise and limit its range. I know these second-hand and antiquarian bookstores well, and thought I’d depict them here for the sake of specific planning, or else general knowledge and broad or vague interest.

Entering the centre through Micklegate Bar, one will ineluctably spend some period of time on Micklegate itself. The street has been popularly known for the ‘Micklegate Run’, a figurative term suggesting the profusion of bars along its course, and the traversing of the street at night by inebriated revellers. Micklegate used to possess two wonderful music shops, devoted to new and second-hand classical, jazz and world music; these departed years ago, along with the much-missed Track Records in the very centre; still, York retains a quantity of independent stores selling secondhand CDs and, more so, LPs. Passing beyond Bar Lane Studios at the top of the street, the first good bookstore arrived at is Ken Spelman, arguably the best in the city. It sells books of all sorts over two floors, with a particularly strong collection of books about literature, and in art, architecture and design; a wide selection of travel writing; and rare books and manuscripts. Ken Spelman is also increasingly showing the drawings and etchings of contemporary artists throughout its shop, and is selling their prints and photographs. Those books you buy will typically – provided their size renders this possible – be wrapped in heavy green paper.

The first of two Oxfam bookshops is located just a few doors further down Micklegate. This Oxfam has solid selections of literature, including foreign language literature and poetry; of history and politics; and it stands out as it specialises in classical music LPs, bearing by far the most extensive and accomplished accumulation of these in the city. There are also popular music LPs, books on music, and DVDs. Continuing on down Micklegate, over the bridge crossing the River Ouse, and Waterstones, on High Ousegate, is the outstanding chain bookstore in the centre (there is also a Blackwell’s out at the University of York campus). Alas, this post is not to discuss the demise and persistence of chain bookstores across the United Kingdom.

And so on to Fossgate, on which street there are three offerings to the world in bookstore form. Fossgate Books, the furthest down the street, has a superb collection of books containing and concerning literature, and on poetry, art and architecture. Up narrow stairs, there is rare and antiquarian literature, and strong sections on philosophy, film, food, and languages. Lucius Books, a few shops up, is dedicated to rare books, first editions and manuscripts; with an inclination towards illustrated books, crime, fantasy and science-fiction. Across the road, the Barbican Bookshop is a Christian book store, with large holdings of books about York and Yorkshire, wildlife, aviation, the railways, and upstairs nineteenth century literature, poetry and Greek Classics.

Across from Fossgate, along Colliergate there is an Arthritis Research UK bookshop, with a good choice of books on two floors at good prices. St Pauls Bookshop on Kings Square hosts, in its book section downstairs, not only a wide range of religious books, but a significant collection of books in theology and philosophy. The second Oxfam store focusing on books is down Low Petergate, with a ranging selection including much contemporary fiction and classic literature. The Minster Gate Bookshop, at 8 Minster Gates – a short street which then opens out onto the south façade of York Minster, usually the Minster’s entryway (though not while restoration works are ongoing) – possesses all manner of books across five floors. The basement contains literature and assorted books on art, travel and culture at reduced prices; the ground floor boasts maps, lithographs and prints in addition to antiquarian and oversized books; the first floor has a fantastic array of art, architecture, design and religion; and the next two floors are home to books featuring history, literary biography and criticism, foreign literature, and the Classics.

Books For Amnesty on Goodramgate offers an interesting choice of books in a variety of subjects, including a few rare items. The Red House Antique Centre has, on its upper floor, an antiquarian collection, as well as maps and prints. Finally, Janette Ray towards the top of Bootham bears rare and out of print books in architecture, art, urban planning, and garden design.

A Top Three for Books Alone:

• Ken Spelman – 70 Micklegate, York.
• The Minster Gate Bookshop – 8 Minster Gates, York.
• Fossgate Books – 36 Fossgate, York.

Four Purchases Memorable at This Moment:

• Two Soviet Studies on Frege (translated and edited by Ignatio Angelelli) – bought at Fossgate Books.
• Romance of the Three Kingdoms, by Luo Guanzhong (two-volume boxed set) – procured at Ken Spelman.
• King, Queen, Knave, by Vladimir Nabokov (second UK edition, published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson) – discovered at the Red House Antique Centre.
• Pages from the Goncourt Journals (hardcover, edited and translated by Robert Baldick) – via Ken Spelman once again.

‘Daily Bread’ – A Short Story

Daily Bread

It was already now several weeks after Easter. The Ascension had taken place, feast days had come and gone, and the time for fasting was so much a thing of the past that Thomas had well settled back into his regular mealtime habit. In the developing day the relevant hour had arrived; and time for Thomas had fallen precisely on those moments which he usually reserved for lunch – typically enjoyed between a little after twelve, and around half-past-one – this latter time, in accord with his generous nature, being only the limit by which lunch was to be served, not a deadline at which the meal was to be removed and discarded. Thomas liked to savour his meals, to revel in them, so that even lunch could last well past a single hour. Still, no matter how long he took, it could well be considered that Thomas had lunch rather early, taking into account the fact – surely risible to the working men – that only several hours earlier, at ten, would Thomas rise to greet a veritable feast of a breakfast.

Yes, this man ate well – he liked his food. And then with lunch eaten Thomas sat quite satisfied, his arms all but fastened around his sizeable belly; his fingers entwined as if trying to catch his stomach and pull it back in. Thomas was not a religious man – but let’s say he was: well then, even if he had fasted the whole of Lent, fasted like a Saint, like a Catherine of Siena, for an example, Thomas ate so profusely that he would already have grown back that gut which served to separate him from the average fellow. Simply put, he didn’t half like his food! He was fully cognisant of the fact, and remained through it all verily content.

As Thomas maintained his stomach, and leant back in his chair – a big thing with plush green cushions, two sturdy walnut arms, and a blue florid pattern on the back and seat; which remained permanently in the kitchen in spite of the contradiction of its heft with the kitchen’s compact size, and was pulled in and out from under the small oak table – he also tapped his feet, each in turn, upon the kitchen floor. And since all things in this world are interconnected; considering that man is positioned as steward of nature and, despite nature’s overwhelming power, can still affect things in his own determined way; this tapping on the floor had one particular repercussion. Underneath Thomas’s house, the plodding of his feet caused the soil there to alter, to break apart and fertilise, and from the resulting void there appeared a man – not a dwarf, nor was it an elf, nor did he wear a red cap and wink out at you like a gnome: this was a fully formed human being. He emerged from the earth in a seated position, saw his new surroundings with sharp darting eyes, then scurried out and into the open using his fingers to wade and scrabble through the earth.

Thomas of course knew none of this; could, of course, have barely even imagined; and happened to be just in the process of shutting his eyelids. His stamping had subsided, and his feet had planted apart; his two heels rose and fell as one, his calves tensed then relaxed; as he pushed himself blissfully, rocking in sequence, backwards and then forth. Oh, but if Thomas had known, if there had been any sort of clue, then he wouldn’t have rested his eyes, and he may even have withheld his meal that day, saving it for later. Certainly, and in retrospect it goes without saying, he would never have gone and done this: gone to open the door when, moments later, his eyebrows lifted upon hearing a knock.

Yet Thomas did not know. And so – raising both brows and then lids, placing hands upon knees and staring quite plainly before him for a few seconds – he lifted himself up with a sigh, padded out of his kitchen, along the corridor, and to the front door. Unhesitant he opened it, and there presented before him was a man – no doubt a man, but since coming from the dank earth under the house into the full breadth of the daylight sun, inversely he seemed to have grown a little smaller, narrower, and somewhat haggard. But then perhaps he was neither small nor haggard; perhaps he was precisely as when we first met him, and simply appeared enfeebled in the presence of Thomas’s size and girth. Or then again, maybe he looked haggard all right, but this was just a put on, played as a game, a demonstration, done for a show.

For he was all bent over, his hands squashing together in front of him and his head bowed, and Thomas could not make out whether he was muttering things, or whether he was not. Thomas tried working it out, greeted him warmly, ‘Oh, well hello there!’, ‘Then how are you today?’, ‘What’s up with you, my old mate?’, but received no response. Instead, as if by way of gesture, the man slowly raised his head to reveal pupils the likes of which I don’t know what; had Thomas questioning to himself where the irises had got to or what subtle colour they were; and then he strained his gums to draw his mouth out and into an O shape, before clasping it at once shut as if attempting to catch something inside. This was not a pleasant sight, and for Thomas, face to face with it all, it took on connotations which were quite horrific. He looked askance at that which was in front of him, frowned, took an expression which combined grief and pity, then turned in horror as it scampered past him, through his legs and into his home.

Once in his home, the fellow made straight for the kitchen, where he proceeded to cause a furore. He ran about Thomas’s table; with hands that seemed to grow by the second, first in the palms, then twice as much in each of the fingers, he groped and slapped at the kitchen tops; he ran pell-mell into Thomas’s chair, not quite sending it over, but shoving it right out of place, all skew, pointing in an unspecified direction. Even when Thomas had entered the room, come in and positioned himself at the foot of the table, this creature did not stop at its head, did not acknowledge Thomas or glance broadly his way. He simply continued to scamper, seemed to be doing some sort of dance, performing a ritual or casting a type of spell, and Thomas stared on for an instant, then shook and went after him, in the end having come to the conclusion that he wanted it out was all – he just wanted it out.

But whatever it was, it was hard to catch. Thomas tried, but would continually close in on his enemy only to feel his forearms crash against each other, having failed to clasp or smother that which they sought – that which they sought having an apparent knack for avoiding his clutches, managing to as if disappear, as it were, at just those precise points. Several times, Thomas even overextended himself to such a degree that he would tumble to the floor face first, hitting his chin or his nose, which was opposed to his everyday good nature. On other occasions in his life, under different circumstances, Thomas may well have stayed down after such falls – despite his broad stature and otherwise manly attributes, he was wont, at such times, to play something of the ridiculous man – often, falling upon his face, he would not get up for a long time, but would cover his head, roll round, whimper and rub his ailments whilst saying, ‘ah-owwwh’, in some reaction which he intuited would make people sympathise with him rather than laugh, or would at least stop them from actively poking fun. However, the laughter would come twice as loud in private, behind his back, and some people would even roll their eyes at him, tut under their breaths, and say that it shouldn’t be done.

The time came for departure and, with Thomas once more on the floor, the creature – his work apparently done – crawled over Thomas’s back, down the corridor, and out again into the open; where, after a few hurried steps, he soon calmed down and was soon barely even jogging, ambling as he moved through adjacent fields and away. Yet to Thomas, who was now standing erect in the doorway, straining to watch his visitor off into the distance, it seemed as if the man was more crazed with each step – he perceived him still running frantically, waving his arms with their huge hands above him in the air, kicking out his legs, galloping off, a maniac ever-increasing in strength. Possibly the heat of the sun distorted Thomas’s vision, and in the refracted light the man appeared more alive than he was; potentially this funny fellow – who was, after all, quite awkwardly built; who had, as we have seen, rather ungainly and surprisingly mobile joints and limbs – was suffering at that moment from spasms of the musculature, with his shoulders also popping in and out of place. Whatever was the case, we shall never know – perhaps the former is more likely, for there came a point when, having traversed several fields, the man all but disappeared, as if swallowed whole by the sun. Certainly across all his remaining days, Thomas was not to see the creature again: though occasionally finding himself outside, and with nothing in the vicinity, yet perceiving a steady distension in space, still no such encounter was once more to be felt.

At this time, however, Thomas could not have cared less, would not have wanted a repeat of any such incident; and was in fact neither contemplating nor caring about much of anything at all. He moved in a daze, back into his house, absent-mindedly leaving open the front door so that sunlight filled the structure, glistening across his floorboards, accompanied by an occasional rustling gust of wind. Moving back down the corridor, Thomas wavered, felt out with his hands so as to maintain his balance, so as not to fall; but it was no use; everything seemed changed; the walls of his house were not the walls of his home any more; and the support they could offer was not enough.

He flickered between two feelings and modes; the predominant finding him empty-headed and confused, looking about readily but blankly, lacking conviction and heart; which sensation only infrequently departed, to be replaced by its near opposite, a heavy-settedness which suggested, in its immobility, something desperate, and placed a tint of sorrow into his eyes. Thomas came to prefer this latter sensation, found it easier to bear, and it would gradually usurp the former in the regularity of its occurrence. Gladly, through force of habit, Thomas still found his way back into the kitchen and, finding his old chair in its usual resting place, was able to tumble into it at once.

Sleep is often said to be a great healer. In the midsts of a bout of deep melancholy, as one sits staring and pining into the night, one is often told reassuringly that they will feel better, after a good night’s sleep. Indeed, in the opinion of man, it seems only time is better prescribed for the curing of anguish. And, it is true, as Thomas drifted, in his chair, off to sleep, he felt washed over by a vague sense of ease; which perhaps came only with the knowledge that through sleep time also would be lost, the possible sufferings of the next few hours happily escaped and forgotten. For though Thomas slumbered a long time, right through to the following day – a day in appearance much like the one before – upon waking all sense of ease was lost, or was rather nowhere to be found – he experienced an immediate emptiness and disorientation as though struck on the head with a mallet in the seconds before rising, as if someone had been awaiting him, and this had been planned all night long.

Unable to remain seated in such a state, Thomas stood in the same second and began to pace the room. And it was only then, after circling the space three times, tapping at the wood on top of his chair and gazing out the window intently for a few long moments, that Thomas realised, in some distress, that he had not eaten now for some time. Indeed, since yesterday’s lunch, lost in the ensuing events, both dinner and supper had passed; and also, really, looking at the clock and determining things practically, now had this morning’s breakfast. But the devil with breakfast, Thomas thought. He was in such a way so that even his beloved, his food, could not exert an absolute control over him. Besides which, he had been especially looking forward to yesterday’s dinner, for which he had bought, seasoned and otherwise prepared a delicious – his favourite – cut of veal. Now it was not yesterday any more, but today in its place; dinnertime with veal could not commence; things could not be made good; and it seemed to Thomas as though everything concerning him was coming to an end.

How terrible for such to be the case! Thomas felt without a hope; but groping for some right path – and overcoming the progression of yesterday, the loss of three meals, and an utter lack of the veal he had so craved – still inclined towards sustaining his stomach with just a little bit of food, if insufficient to satisfy it completely. He made haste for what is the staple of all diets – for the bread basket, one which Thomas had even spent a sizeable sum of money on – it was a large, shining silver tin, a quarter circle the outline of its shape, with two flat sides, and the curved end acting as a sort of flap – utilising the wooden handle protruding from its front, you were to pull the flap up to reveal the bread. This tin almost filled at least half of the space on Thomas’s kitchen top – it had cakes in it and buns too – but at the centre lay a lovely crusty wholemeal loaf, and it was this loaf which Thomas now sought.

Quick of mind but casual of gesture, for Thomas was feeling lethargic; and more was perhaps even underestimating this loaf, treating it as a make-do, no substitute for a lost veal (he even muttered once under his breath about how bread was really a good accompaniment for meat, went well on the side and served to fill one up, but was not at all a meal in itself); Thomas at last reached the tin. He was about to raise its flap – he rose one arm intent upon doing so – but saw there was no plate – he had to get a plate out first, something to lay the bread upon. So he reached down into the cupboard below, took hold of a plate, and placed it in the middle of his kitchen table.

He went once more to the bread basket – this time was decisive, there was no holding back. However, though Thomas’s hand gripped the wooden handle well and true, whilst he still possessed the strength to tug and pull at it, it would not give, and the flap remained stoutly shut. At first, Thomas could make no sense of it; did not know just how it could have become jammed in such a way; and tore at the handle with all his strength. He then felt he was perhaps not using the whole of his strength; that he had strength in reserve, but could not use it because he was not concentrating hard enough, could not concentrate; and in any case, his hands kept slipping from the handle. So he towelled his hands dry, floured them hoping to soak up thereby any remnant moisture, and went at it again, but the bread basket would not budge. In the midst of his endeavour, before Thomas had quite given up, an inner flash came to him and told him what was what – that yesterday’s creature must have been up this, this must have been his aim; and how was Thomas, an ordinary man, to fight against a power such as this? He backed away from the bread tin, struggled for breath, and began to motion about the room repeating, ‘My daily bread! My daily bread!’, continuing as if in a trance for a time to come.

Hours passed. Thomas’s hunger grew, but he did not feel it any more: the problem was not his hunger, but the very lack of bread. It is interesting to consider that, in all the time which had been, and in all that which was to follow, Thomas never hit upon, for instance, wandering to the store for some other food; perhaps stopping off at a nice little café on the way; or else simply rolling the flour which still covered his hands into a dough, in order to make something for himself. He thought not of veal any more either, but was concerned only with that which lay stranded in his large, silver bread tin with wooden handle – namely, one crusty wholemeal loaf. And so, something had to be done to retrieve it.

An unforeseen period of time stretched over – Thomas could not bring himself to do that which, however, seemed like the only way forward – to lift up the silver tin, and throw it to the ground, hoping it would break apart and replenish him. It was not at all the tin itself he was worried about – oh no! – such thoughts were well past him – but he worried solely and intently on his wholemeal loaf inside. He knew the loaf was old now, that it must be hard and covered with mould – and yet let it be hard – he could not face the possibility of breaking it! But what else? So Thomas pushed off against his knees and stood up; he took the silver tin in his hands, he cradled it for a few moments, before finally raising it above his head where, weeping, hunched over to the ground, it was at last dropped.

____________

About the story: This is pretty much the first short story I ever wrote and completed, around seven years ago, when I was nineteen or twenty. I recalled it recently and read through it for the first time in a few years, and I thought it was worth publishing here, particularly fitting since we have just had Easter weekend.

The story can be viewed and downloaded as a PDF file, with a frontispiece, here: ‘Daily Bread’

Ignatius Loyola and the Jesuits; and the Jesuits and James Joyce

With the election yesterday evening in Rome of former Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, now Pope Francis I (and as the first, we may do away with the numeral, and declare him simply Pope Francis), there is now but one word sitting upon and emanating breathlessly from the world’s collective lips. The word is ‘Jesuit’, for Pope Francis is not only the first Pope from the Americas, and the first since Pope Gregory III from outside Europe (Gregory III, pope from 731-741, was born in Syria; Francis is from Buenos Aires, Argentina) – he is also the first Jesuit Pope.

The Society of Jesus, commonly known as the Jesuits, are a Catholic religious order founded by Ignatius Loyola. Loyola, born Iñigo Loiolakoa in the Basque Country in 1491, and nourished on heroic literature including The Song of Roland in his youth, became as a young man an ambitious soldier. On May 20, 1521, under Antonio Manrique de Lara, Duke of Náreja and Viceroy of Navarre, defending Pamplona from the French, Loyola was ‘the soul of a fierce fight, standing on the ramparts where the fire of the French guns concentrated. But a stone dislodged by a shot struck his left leg, the rebounding cannonball shattered the right; and Iñigo and Pamplona fell…That was the last time he should draw the sword’. (Thompson, 5)

Undergoing painful surgeries which allowed his bones to heal but left him with a limp, Loyola read during his convalescence De Vita Christi, the Life of Christ, a commentary on the Gospels by Ludolph, a Carthusian monk from Saxony. This work impelled Loyola on the path of religion. The following year, in 1522, he traveled to Manresa, Catalonia; and spent ten months living in a cave by the city as an ascetic. It was during this time that Loyola began practicing and setting down the Spiritual Exercises, a series of prayers, meditations and mental exercises which he completed over the next two years, and which remain the cornerstone of Jesuit training today. Whilst living in this cave, and during two spells in a nearby Dominican convent when his body became exhausted from his privations, Loyola experienced also religious visions. He determined to journey to Jerusalem, where he planned to make his life’s work; arriving there in August 1523, he was not permitted to stay by the Provincial of the city, who perhaps feared Loyola’s zeal would cause problems with coexistent groups.

So Loyola returned to Spain; he began studying religion at the University of Alcalá; then moved to Paris, studying at the Collège de Montaigu where, after seven years, in 1534, he completed a Master of Arts. It was about this time that the Society of Jesus was conceived. On August 15, 1534, Loyola met with six companions from his University – the Spaniards Francis Xavier, Alfonso Salmeron, Diego Lainez, and Nicholas Bobadilla; Peter Favre, French; and Simão Rodriguez, Portuguese – and together they ‘went to the chapel of Notre Dame, near Paris, and each made a vow to go at the time fixed to Jerusalem, and to place ourselves when we returned in the hands of the Pope; and to leave, after a certain interval, our kinsfolk and our nets, and keep nothing but the money necessary for our journey’. (Thompson, 48)

In fact, Loyola never would make a return to Jerusalem. At the end of the decade, Loyola and his companions determined to apply to become an Order of the Church. On May 3, 1539, they passed among themselves a series of resolutions, the first vowing absolute obedience to the Pope, then,

‘(2) To teach the Commandments to children or any one else. (3) To take a fixed time – an hour more or less – to teach the Commandments and catechism in an orderly way. (4) To give forty days in the year for this work. (5) That all candidates should go through the ‘Spiritual Exercises’ and the other tests of the Society. That last resolution is memorable, because here we have the simple germ whence evolve the elaborate tests, without parallel for searching strictness, of the modern Jesuits.’ (Thompson, 78)

On June 12, the group determined that Loyola would be the first Superior of what he termed ‘The Company of Jesus’. The Papal Bull issued by Pope Paul III on September 27, 1540, ‘Regimini militantis ecclesia’, approved the group as an Order of the Church, and Latinised their name to ‘Societas Jesu’; it contained the ‘Formula of the Institute’, a paragraph written by Loyola establishing their foundational principles. Loyola would continue to work on the Society’s formal constitutions until a few years prior to his death. Originally intending to convert Muslims to the Catholic faith, the Jesuits became a prominent force in the Counter-Reformation through the 1540s and 1550s. Loyola died in 1556. He was beatified by Pope Paul V on July 27, 1609; and then canonised by Pope Gregory XV on March 12, 1622.

The term Jesuit was first applied to the group negatively, with the sense that they associated themselves too closely, and therefore conceitedly, with the name of Christ: it gradually became accepted within the order. Evangelisation was the fundamental endeavour of the order from the time of Loyola, and the Society undertook extensive missionary work throughout Asia, India and the Americas over the subsequent centuries. The conception of the Society today is rooted in its continuing missionary efforts across the world; and in its reputation for intellectual, theological, and educational rigour. The current Superior General is Adolfo Nicolás, a Spanish priest who also, coincidentally, studied at the University of Alcalá. The Society forms the largest single order of priests in the Catholic Church; and runs schools, colleges and universities in six continents around the world.

The passages quoted above are taken from Francis Thompson’s St Ignatius Loyola. Thompson (1859-1907) was a talented poet, who published three collections of poetry, but led a somewhat dissipated life, beset by illness, financial hardship, and addiction to opium. His most renowned poem remains ‘The Hounds of Heaven’. Another noted writer with a connection to the Jesuits was Frederick Copleston (1907-1994): a Jesuit priest, Copleston wrote A History of Philosophy in nine volumes between 1946 and 1980, a work which continues to be published today. The most famous of writers with a strong link to the Jesuits is James Joyce.

Joyce’s deliberate move away from organised religion – a move charted through the figure of Stephen Dedalus in the semi-autobiographical A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – is one of his defining characteristics within the popular consciousness. Yet Joyce never spoke ill of the Jesuit order, and did not take away a wholly negative impression of his Jesuit schooling: first at Clongowes Wood College, from 1888, as a ‘half past six’ year old, to 1891; then at Belvedere College from 1893 until 1898. Joyce had been withdrawn from Clongowes owing to his father’s increasingly dire financial situation; he spent a short period at a Christian Brothers’ school on North Richmond Street in Dublin; but his biographer, Richard Ellmann, writes:

‘James Joyce chose never to remember this interlude with the Christian Brothers in his writings, preferring to have his hero spend the period in two years of reverie…It was Joyce’s one break with Jesuit education, and he shared his father’s view that the Jesuits were the gentlemen of Catholic education, and the Christian Brothers (‘Paddy Stink and Micky Mud,’ as his father denominated them) its drones.’ (Ellmann, 35)

Happening one day upon Father John Conmee – formerly rector at Clongowes, now prefect of studies at Belvedere; who Joyce would make appear in ‘Wandering Rocks’ – John Joyce managed to convince him to enter James at Belvedere free of charge.

The first reference to Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses comes from the mouth of Buck Mulligan, who calls down the stairs of the Martello Tower at Sandycove, ‘Come up, Kinch! Come up, you fearful jesuit!’. Mulligan characterises him also in ‘Telemachus’ as a ‘jejune jesuit’, a ‘cursed jesuit’, and a ‘gloomy jesuit’. Stephen is displeased but unperturbed; in ‘Scylla and Charybdis’, his stream of consciousness asks ‘Ignatius Loyola, make haste to help me!’ as he begins to delineate his theory concerning Shakespeare and the ghost in Hamlet.

On into his later life, Joyce identified with the Jesuits and held his Jesuit education with some regard. In response to his friend Frank Budgen’s book, James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses (of which Joyce otherwise approved, commending his friend’s capabilities as a writer), Joyce said, ‘You allude to me as a Catholic. Now for the sake of precision and to get the correct contour on me, you ought to allude to me as a Jesuit’. To the sculptor August Suter he remarked that, owing to the Jesuits, ‘I have learnt to arrange things in such a way that they become easy to survey and to judge’.

________

Budgen, F. James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991)

Ellmann, R. James Joyce (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983)

Thompson, F. St Ignatius Loyola (London: Universe Books, 1962)

Pierrot Through the Arts: Deburau, Laforgue, Schoenberg and On

Pierrot, the sad clown, with white face and loose white blouse, expressing slowly and subtly and in the absence of and beyond words, emerged in the nineteenth century from his roots in stock comedies and pantomimes to become the embodiment of a certain artistic type, a specific strain of artistic emotion: sensitive, melancholy and solitary, and at once playful and daring in subverting language and suggesting the fraught but still facile and fluctuating nature of gender.

The character of Pierrot can be traced back to Molière’s Don Juan, or The Feast with the Statue, first performed in February 1660 at the Palais-Royal theatre in Paris, and with Molière playing the role of Sganarelle. Pierrot is the name of a peasant character who appears in the second act of the play, the fiancé of Charlotte. The Palais-Royal theatre had been established by Cardinal Richelieu, in the east wing of the Palais-Royal, in 1637; and by 1662, Molière’s acting troupe was sharing the venue with a troupe of Italian Commedia dell’Arte performers, including Domenicio Biancolelli, famous for his performances in the role of Harlequin. The Italian Commedia dell’Arte flourished throughout the seventeenth century in France, and in fact the character of Molière’s Sganarelle already drew from the Italian comedians. With Molière and Biancolelli’s troupes in such proximity, this interplay and cross-pollination continued, the Commedia dell’Arte incorporating Pierrot into its repertoire and well establishing the figure by the time of the Italians’ expulsion from France, by Royal decree, in 1697.

So Pierrot persisted on in Italy, and then again in France after Italian troupes were permitted to return during the second decade of the following century. Through the 1700s, though the character began to appear in performances in European centres outside of Italy and France, the Pierrot on display often featured in lesser and disparate roles: the basis of the character, his unrequited love for Columbine, who prefers Harlequin, was sometimes lost, and he was frequently portrayed in a purely comic, or even bumbling and foolish manner. It was in the 1800s that Pierrot gained stature, and began his reach into the other arts, developing in literature and painting as an emblem and as a muse.

Jean-Gaspard Deburau, a mime from Kolín, in what is now the Czech Republic but was then Bohemia, was most responsible for this recreation of Pierrot. Born in 1796, he began appearing in Paris at the Théâtre des Funambules some time around 1819, under the stage-name ‘Baptiste’. The Funambules had opened in 1816, on the Boulevard du Temple, otherwise known as the Boulevard du Crime owing to the volume of crime dramas shown nightly in the Boulevard’s numerous theatres – all but one of which, including the Funambles, were demolished during Haussmann’s rebuilding of Paris in the 1860s. The Funambules originally hosted only acrobats and mimes; and Deburau, taking the role of Pierrot as a young man, would continue at the part until his death in 1846. He extended and deepened Pierrot, his restrained and nuanced acting style replacing the tendency towards bold and gesticulating comedy; gaining recognition and increasing fame towards the end of the 1820s, Deburau’s Pierrot would even be compared to the works of Shakespeare when, in 1842, the versatile and distinctly modern man-of-letters Théophile Gautier wrote a fictionalised review entitled, ‘Shakespeare at the Funambules’.

Other mimes would continue to have success playing Pierrot after Deburau’s death. These included his son, Jean Charles, and most notably Paul Legrand. Still, it was Deburau who enshrined Pierrot within French culture, and established the sense of Pierrot as a sensitive and anguished artist. This conception of Pierrot was celebrated, explored and entrenched in 1945 with Marcel Carné’s film, Les Enfants du Paradis, often considered one of the greatest films of all time; which suffered its own anguishes as it was made in occupied France, with damaged sets, short of supplies, with a cast and crew short of food and comprising several Jews who had to work secretely or risk production shutting down; and consisting of a fictionalised story drawing upon real figures from early nineteenth century France. Deburau is portrayed in the film as ‘Baptiste’, a lovelorn mime who achieves success in the Funambules, in a magnificent performance by Jean-Louis Barrault.

Gautier’s piece on Deburau’s Pierrot was but one of the first entwinements of Pierrot with literature. Writers including Flaubert (who, early in his career, wrote an unperformed pantomime entitled Pierrot au sérail), Verlaine and Huysmens incorporated Pierrot into their works. Most extensively, he was the central figure in the poetry of Jules Laforgue. Laforgue – a French Symbolist poet who died in 1887 aged just twenty-seven years old – wrote three of the ‘complaints’ in his first selection of poems, Les Complaintes (1885), in Pierrot’s voice; then devoted his second collection, L’Imitation de Notre Dame de la Lune (1886), entirely to Pierrot and his moonlit world, influenced by Albert Giraud’s poetry cycle published a couple of years previously.

In his book, The Symbolist Movement in Literature, first published in 1899, which served to introduce French Symbolism to an English readership, Arthur Symons devoted a chapter to Laforgue. Symons describes Laforgue’s verse and prose as,

‘alike a kind of travesty, making subtle use of colloquialism, slang, neologism, technical terms, for their allusive, their factitious, their reflected meanings, with which one can play, very seriously. The verse is alert, troubled, swaying, deliberately uncertain, hating rhetoric so piously that it prefers, and finds its piquancy in, the ridiculously obvious…It is an art of the nerves, this art of Laforgue, and it is what all art would tend towards if we followed our nerves on all their journeys.’

and defines Laforgue’s laughter in the following terms:

‘His laughter, which Maeterlinck has defined so admirably as ‘the laughter of the soul’, is the laughter of Pierrot, more than half a sob, and shaken out of him with a deplorable gesture of the thin arms, thrown wide. He is a metaphysical Pierrot, Pierrot Lunaire, and it is of abstract notions, the whole science of the unconscious, that he makes his showman’s patter.’

Laforgue was a great influence upon a young T. S. Eliot. Later in his life, Eliot would write that, ‘Of Jules Laforgue I can say that he was the first to teach me how to speak, to teach me the poetic possibilities of my own idiom of speech’, and, ‘I have written…nothing about Jules Laforgue, to whom I owe more than to any one poet in any language’. In this way the figure of Pierrot maintained a relevance beyond French Romanticism and Symbolism, on into the literature of the Anglophone Modernists. He also appeared in canvases by painters who led their art-form into modernity: in Seurat’s Pierrot with a White Pipe (1883); in Cézanne’s Pierrot and Harlequin (1888); whilst Picasso’s Pierrot and Columbine (1900) was the first of several pieces in which he depicts Pierrot.

Pierrot became a canonised figure within twentieth century classical music with Arnold Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, Op. 21, a setting of twenty-one poems from a German translation of Albert Giraud’s cycle. Schoenberg’s work was premiered in Berlin, on 16 October, 1912, with Albertine Zehme the solo vocalist. Theodor Adorno, theorist, philosopher and musicologist, wrote some of his earliest pieces on Schoenberg; including a 1922 review of a performance of Pierrot Lunaire in Frankfurt, in which Adorno puts it that Schoenberg’s piece characterises ‘the homelessness of our souls’. Musically and aesthetically, Pierrot has exerted his influence too on popular music: Björk, a fervent admirer of Schoenberg, sang Pierrot Lunaire in a one-off performance at the Verbier Festival in 1996; whilst David Bowie, after studying theatre and mime, played a role in the 1967 theatrical production Pierrot in Turquoise, and appeared as Pierrot in the video to his 1980 song, ‘Ashes to Ashes’.

____________

Jean-Louis Barrault in Les Enfants du Paradis

____________

Jules Laforgue – ‘Autre Complaint de Lord Pierrot’ (‘Another Complaint of Lord Pierrot’). In French; then translated into English courtesy of Paul Staniforth and brindin.com

——–

Celle qui doit me mettre au courant de la Femme!

Nous lui dirons d’abord, de mon air le moins froid:

“La somme des angles d’un triangle, chère âme,

Est égale à deux droits.”

–
Et si ce cri lui part: “Dieu de Dieu! que je t’aime!”

– “Dieu reconnaîtra les siens.” Ou piquée au vif:

– “Mes claviers ont du coeur, tu seras mon seul thème.”

Moi: “Tout est relatif.”

–

De tous ses yeux, alors! se sentant trop banale:

“Ah! tu ne m’aimes pas; tant d’autres sont jaloux!”

Et moi, d’un oeil qui vers l’inconscient s’emballe:

“Merci, pas mal; et vous?”

–

– “Jouons au plus fidèle!” – “à quoi bon, ô Nature!

Autant à qui perd gagne!” Alors, autre couplet:

– “Ah! tu te lasseras le premier, j’en suis sûre…”

– “Après vous, s’il vous plaît.”

–

Enfin, si, par un soir, elle meurt dans mes livres,

Douce; feignant de n’en pas croire encor mes yeux,

J’aurai un: “Ah! ça, mais, nous avions De Quoi vivre!

C’était donc sérieux?”

——–

The one who’ll give an update on her sex!

We’ll tell her first in our least frigid air

“The sum of a triangle’s angles makes

exactly two right angles, dear.”

–

And should she peal “O God! how I love you!”,

‘God’ll know his own’ – or, cut to the quick: 

“My heart knows love’s keys; I’ll play but of you!”, 

then I: ‘All’s relativistic.’

–

Then, with all eyes, feeling too commonplace 

“You don’t love me whom men crave with each muscle?” 

And I, with an eye on Unconsciousness, 

‘Oh, not so bad, ta, and yousel’?’

–

“Let’s vie in fidelity!” – ‘Might as well play

(Nature!) loser wins.’ And after those, these: 

“Oh, you’ll tire of me first, you’ll go away…” 

‘Oh no: ladies first, if you please.’

–

Last, if one night she die in my ‘Divan’, 

soft … with fake disbelief in my closet 

I’ll go ‘Well, now, we’d something to live on –

it was serious then, was it?’

____________

Pierrot with a White Pipe, by Seurat

____________

Pierrot and Harlequin, by Cézanne

____________

Pierrot and Columbine, by Picasso

____________

Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, Op. 21

____________

David Bowie as Pierrot

____________

Raine, C. T. S. Eliot (Oxford University Press, 2006)

Symons, A. The Symbolist Movement In Literature (Dutton & Company, 1919)

Wiggerhaus, R. The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance (MIT Press, 1995)