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)

Strange Moment in American-Russian Relationship

In 1775, Colonies in North America rebelled against the British rule.  The British government discovered that it had a serious problem.  It had the best fleet in the world but it hardly had an army.  The British, like other monarchies of that period, decided to solve the problem by hiring mercenaries.  And their first choice was to approach Russia.

The British Secretary of State for the North, the earl of Suffolk, cited “the increasing frenzy of His Majesty’s unhappy and deluded people on the other side of the Atlantic” as he asked the Russian Government for assistance and in particular for “20,000 disciplined infantry completely equipped and ready to embark as soon as the Baltic navigation opens in the spring.”  In the event, Catherine the Second (Great) turned the British down who, as everyone knows, settled on the Hessians .

The British historian Simon Sebag Montfiore (who is the source for this information) speculates that perhaps, had it been the Russian Cossacks supressing the revolt, the outcome might have been turned out differently.

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.

Does Handwriting Matter?

Does handwriting matter?  Philip Hensker thinks it does.  It’s more intimate, he says.  And it shows our personality.  And after accounting for such important part of our lives, it is disappearing.

I, for one, side with Hensker’s Ph. D. supervisor who, upon being presented with a handwritten thesis, returned it unread.  He was a reader and for us readers, handwriting isn’t such a great deal.

Actually, it wasn’t such a great deal for me as a writer either--from the very early stages.  When I was in grade school, my handwriting skills lagged and things haven’t improved much since.  Though, with laptops replacing typewriters everywhere, at least I am not punished anymore for having bad handwriting.

Schools in Poland had double desks and of course from the first grade, boys sat with boys and girls sat with girls. Except when a boy was being punished and the most diabolical punishment was to make him sit next to a girl. Other boys would pounce on such an opportunity to mock--being called “King of Women” was a great insult. (Nobody seemed to care how girls felt about being made an instrument of punishment).  Having to sit next to a girl was reserved for the misdemeanor of having a messy handwriting. With girls being in general neater than boys, the idea was that a boy, by sitting next to a girl, might absorb somehow, perhaps by sheer proximity, the virtues of good penmanship. 

In practice, the teacher would demand that all pupils open on their desks their notebooks with written work.  She would walk up and down the classroom between the rows of desks and look for what she could criticize.  She would  often stop at my desk and mock my very poor handwriting by comparing it to that of the girl sitting next to me saying something like: “How come you can’t do it if she can.  Look, look how neat her pages are.  And yours?  Ink spots, crippled letters, writing that doesn’t follow the lines on the pages.  Terrible.”

I used to hate that girl with all my heart.  I am ashamed to remember my happiness years later when were had to take exams that would steer us to either academic high schools or vocational schools, I learned that the girl flunked out and wouldn’t continue like most of us. 

“The Odyssey” in a Lvov Prison

Following the outbreak of WW2, which closely followed the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the Red Army occupied eastern Poland, including the city of Lvov. And following that, a lot of people started getting arrested.

Thus it came to be that a Polish intellectual found himself in a Lvov prison cell filled beyond capacity with Ukrainians, mostly nationalists and simple criminals. The first thing that happened to him was that he was robbed of his middle-class clothes. The second thing that happened was that he was approached by the leader of the Ukrainians who, pointing out to his compatriots who were fighting among themselves, said that the fighting would only get worse unless the Pole would tell them a story.

The Pole thought for a moment and then started on a tale of “events of long ago, when ataman (Ukrainian military leader) Odys, left his island of Ithaka and went to fight a war against a mighty enemy city in Turkey called Troy.” 

The tale lasted for a few days and kept peace in the cell. When it ended, the Ukrainians’ leader consulted with his group and approached the Pole again. He was to tell his tale again but this time without mistakes. In particular, in the second telling, it should be made clear that ataman Odys was Ukrainian all along, and also, that there should be included some thieving Russians among the suitors who were trying to fuck Penelope. The Pole complied without qualms.

The Brigidki Prison in Lvov (a former nunnery)

No time to read anymore?

David McCullough is unimpressed.

“Once upon a time in the dead of winter in the Dakota Territory, Theodore Roosevelt took off in a makeshift boat down the Little Missouri River in pursuit of a couple of thieves who had stolen his prized rowboat. After several days on the river, he caught up and got the draw on them with his trusty Winchester, at which point they surrendered. Then Roosevelt set off in a borrowed wagon to haul the thieves cross-country to justice. They headed across the snow-covered wastes of the Badlands to the railhead at Dickinson, and Roosevelt walked the whole way, the entire 40 miles. It was an astonishing feat, what might be called a defining moment in Roosevelt’s eventful life. But what makes it especially memorable is that during that time, he managed to read all of Anna Karenina. I often think of that when I hear people say they haven’t time to read.” 

Worse than yesterday, better than in ’37

Eugene Volokh is a renowned UCLA law professor and a very popular blogger (The Volokh Conspiracy). His family emigrated to the US from the Soviet Union when he was 7 years old.

In a recent post on his blog, he writes that he is often asked what he thinks about the situation in Russia.  His response echoes a poem written by Bulat Okudzhava, a great Russian bard (in Russian, the word denotes a poet who, like Bob Dylan, performs/sings his own poetry while playing a guitar). The poem was written in 1989 when the Soviet Union was disintegrating (it fell apart in December 1991).

In the poem, an emigrant returns from Australia to visit his sister and looks at Moscow from a taxi’s window. The narrator tells him that things aren’t all bad; true, it’s worse than yesterday but it’s better than in 1937 (the year of the worst Stalinist terror).

Professor Volokh agrees and adds “And, you know, that’s not chopped liver.”

I don’t disagree but to me it is the last line of Okudzhava’s poem that resonates the most.  It is: “But no-one’s born fortunate here.”  Okudzhava (and Professor Volokh, implicitely) accept it and so do, as a matter of course, many Russians.  

It is not clear to me why.

Teddy Roosevelt on Anna Karenina

Yesterday there was a post about Teddy Roosevelt's response to Russian literature. It’s worth quoting Teddy at length (from a letter to his younger sister dated April 12^th 1886):

“I took Anna Karenina along for the trip and have read it through with very great interest. I hardly know whether to call it a very bad book or not. There are two entirely distinct stories in it; the connection between Levine’s story and Anna’s is of the slightest and need have existed at all. Levine’s and Kitty’s history is not only very powerfully and naturally told, but it is also perfectly healthy. Anna’s most certainly is not, though of great and sad interest; she is portrayed as being a prey to the most violent passions, and subject to melancholia, and her reasoning power is so unbalanced that she could not possibly be described otherwise than as in a certain sense insane. Her character is curiously contradictory; bad as she was however she was not to me nearly as repulsive as her brother Stiva.”

For all its worth, I also like the story of Levin and Kitty much more than that of Anna and Vronsky. But I don’t think that Anna was insane. Now Adele H. certainly was. Her story is told in a great movie but a very sad one. It’s about a woman loving too much and losing everything, including her mind. Would I know where to draw a line? I would not.