Literary references

The business of comparing national literatures across languages and time is definitely tricky. Take the English 19^th century prose from Jane Austen through Dickens, the Brontë sisters, Trollope, George Eliot, Hardy, to Joseph Conrad. By any yardstick it would be recognized as an exceptional constellation of talent. How exceptional? Maybe not so exceptional when one brings in the Russians. The 19^th century Russian novelists and short story writers, that is. What we have there is a fully comparable embarrass des riches: Pushkin (yea, “Eugene Onegin” is a novel) Lermontov (“A Hero of Our Time”), Gogol, Herzen, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Chekov.

It may not come as a complete surprise to the reader of this blog that I love 19^th century Russian literature (I love the English 19^th century too). In fact, the alert reader of “The Estate of Wormwood and Honey” might notice that the book pays specific homage in a number of instances to these 19^th century Russian writers by making references to the various themes that were important either in their lives or in their books.

I challenge you to engage in some harmless literary detective work. Your object is to match a theme in the book to at least one 19^th century Russian writer from among those listed above. Some connections are fairly obvious, others might not be. Correct answers will be provided in future posts.

Themes/references in “The Estate of Wormwood and Honey”:

1.     Battle of Borodino (Chapter XXX)

2.     Inanities of provincial courtship (Chapter XXXII)

3.     Libraries (Chapter XXXII)

4.     Provincial officialdom (Chapter V)

5.     Close bonds with old servants (Chapter X)

6.     Siberian penal settlements (Chapter XXVIII)

7.     Losing one’s prized possessions to gambling (Chapter XXVI)

8.     Cruelty to and abuse of one’s own family members (Chapters XXII, XXIII, and XXVIII)

9.     Elderly decorated officials and their pretty young wives Chapter (Chapter V)

10. Obrok vs. barshchina (modalities of settling serfdom obligations) (Chapter VIII)

11. German relatives (Chapters X, XIX, and XXIII)

12. Natural sons (Chapter XVII and many others)

Where is Europe?

Is this a silly question?  It certainly seems silly.  Of course, we all know where Europe is.  But do we really?

To know where Europe is one has to know where its borders are.  And what are Europe’s borders?  Well, it’s all water, isn’t it?  The Artic Ocean, the Atlantic Ocean, the Mediterranean Sea, the Black Sea, The Caspian…But what about the islands?  Is Greenland part of Europe?,  Well it’s part of Denmark, isn’t it, even if it is closer to the Western Hemisphere.  And what about Malta in the Mediterranean?  For centuries, it was considered a part of Africa but now it is a member of the EU.  And what about Cyprus?  Its closest neighbors are Turkey and Syria but it is considered part of Europe even if it is to the east of Anatolia which isn’t.  (Not such a long time ago, Milan Kundera complained that Prague was considered to be in Eastern Europe while Vienna was in Central Europe—an absurdity if one actually looks at the map.)

Things get really complicated when we go to Russia.  The Greeks and the Romans thought that the border between Europe and Asia was the river Don. More recently, the Ural mountains were considered to be the boundary between Europe and Asia, between European Russia and Siberia.  How about the Caucasus?  The geographers apply the notion of the watershed and rule that Georgia and Azerbaijan have small parts that are in Europe and Armenia (tough luck) s all in Asia.  And we haven’t even talked about Kazakhstan…

These are the judgments of maps and professional cartographers.  What about ordinary people?  When Russian noblemen in XIX century (such as those that populate “The Estate of Wormwood and Honey”) talked about visiting Berlin or Paris or Vienna, they talked about “going to Europe.”  And when Peter the Great, established St. Petersburg on the Baltic and moved Russia’s capital there, it was widely understood that “Pétersbourg est la fenêtre, par laquelle la Russie regarde en Europe.” (as quoted by Pushkin in “The Bronze Horseman.”)

Conventions used for the boundary between Europe and Asia during the 18th and 19th centuries. The red line shows the modern convention, in use since ca. 1850.

  Europe

  Asia

  historically placed in either continent, with the red line denoting the most common current boundary.

Etymology

There is something about etymology, the study of the history of words, which makes it difficult, once one has started to look up the origin of words, to stop. Perhaps it is because there is always another word that just begs to be looked up, and then another, and so on. Thus words tell stories: those that the writer wants to tell and those that they carry with them wherever they go.

Take “wormwood” for instance: it comes from Middle English wormwode or wormode. In Old English, it was wermōd which can be compared with German Wermut and the derived drink vermouth. There. I bet you didn’t know that.

Wormwood and Honey In Ancient Rome

In Chapter XXXI of The Estate of Wormwood and Honey, Sergey recalls his mother using wormwood as a medicinal remedy.  To overcome the child’s resistance to drinking the very bitter medicine, his mother smears some honey around the rim of the cup.  This particular way of dealing with the bitterness has roots that are quite ancient.

Lucretius (the Roman poet and philosopher who lived in the 1^st Century BC) expressed the same idea in his great philosophical poem De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things):

            “And as physicians when they seek to give

            A draught of bitter wormwood to a child,

            First smearing along the edge that rims the cup

            The liquid sweets of honey, golden hued.”

Lucretius was a great proponent of epicureanism, of which I hope to blog at some point in the future.  For now, let us pause for a moment to reflect on the good old days when great works of philosophy were written in the form of epic poetry.

Opening of De rerum natura, 1483 copy by Girolamo di Matteo de Tauris for Pope Sixtus IV

Titus Lucretius Carus was a Roman poet and philosopher. His only known work is the epic philosophical poem De rerum natura about the beliefs of Epicureanism, and which is translated into English as On the Nature of Things. He is believed to have been born circa 99 BC and died circa 55 BC.

Wormwood, Absinthe, Degas

The technical name of the wormwood plant is Artemisia absinthium.  Is there thus a connection between wormwood and the popular French drink absinthe?

The ever helpful “The Wormwood Society—America’s Premier Absinthe Association and Information Network” explains on its FAQ page: Absinthe is an anise and wormwood flavored distilled spirit, made from aniseed, fennel and wormwood.  

Traditionally, absinthe in France has been a working class drink, especially popular in the South, and associated with melancholy rather than exuberance. Edgar Degas said it best:

A Couple Reviews

Here is an excerpt from a great review at Amazon:

This novel is full of psychological aspects. You see the difficulties of Nicolas' mission, how much he suffered but also how strong he became. Furthermore you learn about Russia in the 19th century, a life on a Russian estate as well as about how bureaucracy worked and what way of thinking used to be. It contains an unbelievably vast range of issues from history to love and from humanity to justice. In the whole book Julian Berengaut describes the story so well that the reader can easily find himself part of the scene. It's definitely one of those unputdownable books you can't stop reading. Prepare to accompany Nicolas on his exciting, touching journey!

thanks Lara Kosa! And here's another: 

The mode in which the novel operates is similar to that of "The Life of Pi" by Yann Martel or "Blindness" by José Saramago: novels that are almost "philosophical" in their desire to sketch out some dilemmas confronting the living, but whose intellectual energy is inseparable from the vitality of a narrative thrust that impels the action forward.

thanks Alok Yadav!

Russian Corruption

The Governor-General of the Ryazan Province, who is introduced to readers in Chapter IV of The Estate of Wormwood and Honey, is a deeply corrupt man. His first instinct is not simply to look down on the people beneath him, but to use them in any way he can, and to abuse his power as thoughtlessly as possible. But how unusual is that? Not at all. In fact, most Russian Imperial officials were thoroughly corrupt.

In Hadji-Murat, Tolstoy’s great novel, his last major work, he digresses from telling the tale of a lonely Caucasian rebel to imagine Nicolas I, the Emperor of Russia meditating on the corruption of his underlings. He knows that they are all corrupt and he realizes that he couldn’t do anything about it because if he fired anyone, his replacement would as corrupt. Finally, Nicolas I has an illumination that he is the only honest government official in all of Russia.

Are things different now? Not much at least based on this recent article in the NYTimes which begins: 

Corruption in Russia is so pervasive that the whole society accepts the unacceptable as normal, as the only way of survival, as the way things “just are.”

The whole article is worth a read.