May 2026 in Books: Rereading Sense and Sensibility

Life is tough, so instead of widening my horizons in contemporary literature I've metaphorically pulled up the blankets and returned to classics.

Rereading Sense and Sensibility — one of the first Jane Austen books that my mother put into my hand when I was perhaps ten or eleven years old — after a long gap was rewarding. It was never my favourite Austen, so the Emma Thompson film adaptation feels like a more recent and vivid overlay to the text than the way I'd pictured the scenes and characters as a fledgling reader.

Sense and Sensibility was conceived before Napoleon attained power, but finally published when the Wars were well underway. (To me, the gloomy aspects of Colonel Brandon's personality reflect the weightiness of war in a way in which Austen's later novel Persuasion's cheerfully profiteering Captain Wentworth no longer does.) Austen updated not just the tone or writing style, I'm guessing, but also the cultural references. There is a whiff of Regency fan fiction in the book — she wrote the story also for her own family, to whom she read it aloud; you can imagine that her family offered opinions about which love interest deserves to win the hand of the heroine, etc. — but, given the domesticity of its setting, that only adds to the atmosphere.

The novel is about a family of women who are forced to move to a new home in the English countryside. Why? The head of the Dashwood family has died, and the only son has married a woman who is eager to squirrel away any land and money she can from her family-in-law. Deprived of their home through this mixture of greed and the laws of inheritance, the mother and three sisters move to the smaller Barton Cottage, rented to them by an extended relative. There, the women are left to figure out on their own what their logistical and romantic futures should look like.

Eldest sister Elinor finds herself removed to a greater distance from the clergyman whom she has fallen in love with. She bears the distance philosophically, partly due to her logic-loving personality — partly also due to her sense that something has been off with the clergyman lately. But the younger sister Marianne meets a handsome and dashing young man who seems to share all her enthusiasm for literature and music. They navigate the new beauties of Romantic literature together, William Cowper and all. Things are going well enough, but then lurking secrets come to the surface and both of the sisters' romantic relationships implode...

As always, Austen paints beautiful portraits of high-minded morals and psychological self-analysis, side by side with the daily drip of benign silliness (e.g. the ever helpful Mrs. Jennings) and poisonous malice (e.g. Lucy Steele, Elinor's rival) that make life amongst other human beings so challenging.

Two hundred years later, I think we could find counterparts to most of Austen's characters. That said, many social Regency conventions that form the novel's plot (like giving a clergyman a job due to 'connections' rather than a meritocratic application process, or shunning unmarried women who become single parents) are happily out of date. Has Sense and Sensibility survived the passage of time worse than, as well as, or better than, Austen's other books? — Not having thought about it in depth before, I'll evade the question.

Now that I am decades older than when I first read Sense and Sensibility, it strikes me that Austen intended a gentler contrast between the sisters Elinor and Marianne than I'd realized when I was little. Marianne is often rude and self-absorbed to acquaintances, but Austen does justice to her good intentions, capacity for sympathy, and intellectual curiosity. These nuances and Austen's moments of ironic detachment are what makes her novel more of a well-rounded character study than merely a morality tale. Besides, sharp-tongued though she may often have been, as a youthful writer she is indulgent: it's all right for young people to make mistakes.

Classics of the 19th Century: Rereading Maria Edgeworth's "The Bracelets"

Maria Edgeworth wrote novels, short stories and essays from her home in Ireland into the first decade of the Victorian Age. Her father, who influenced her work and wrote prefaces for her publications, was a clergyman. She lived through the historical caesura of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars; she and her family travelled to Belgium and France during an early pause in the Wars, but she also knew personally the wife of the Duke of Wellington. In her books, she also published observations on rural poverty — she died during the Irish Potato Famine era — and the differences between English and Irish life. I've left out a lot in this mini-biography, but a wealth of secondary literature does supply the juicier gossip; The Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth also fills in much detail.

Edgeworth's novel Belinda (1801) was popular enough in her day that Jane Austen mentioned it in Northanger Abbey. Over 70 years later, the American writer Louisa May Alcott referred to Edgeworth's children's story, "The Purple Jar" (1796), in her own book Eight Cousins. Sir Walter Scott, too, admired her work.

But since the Victorian Age — and in their emphasis on domesticity, virtue and morality, Edgeworth's pre-Victorian stories also feel anachronistically Victorian — Edgeworth's writings have become more obscure. She was never mentioned in any English class that I took in Canadian school or college. That said, Penguin Classics and Oxford World's Classics have reprinted Belinda, Castle Rackrent, Ennui, and The Absentee since 2000; and I stumbled across a secondhand paperback edition of Patronage in a Canadian bookshop in 2018.

In my late teens and early twenties I read Maria Edgeworth's books and stories often, mostly because they were mentioned in the Victorian works that I'd read earlier. Some of her moral dilemmas and precepts I thought were worth thinking over. But now I am skimming through her works in the e-book collection at Project Gutenberg again, over a decade later, and feel ready to give my take with a fresh perspective.

***

Her Children's Stories: "The Bracelets: or, Amiability and Industry Rewarded"

The Bracelets (ca. 1820?) is set in a private, rural English school, where a teacher named Mrs. Villars raises twenty girls. To reward the pupil who has done the best work, she offers a bracelet. The pupil Cecilia wins it, and then the problems begin: Cecilia begins to treat her schoolmates rudely, and — for example — laughs at a schoolmate who accidentally broke one of her toys after Cecilia barged into her. After soul-searching, the school decides to award another bracelet to the kindest schoolmate. Needless to say, the resulting competition amongst the girls to see who is kindest (Cecilia and her friend Leonora are the frontrunners) leads to even more friction.

*

As soon as Mrs. Villars had given her the bracelet, all Cecilia's little companions crowded round her, and they all left the hall in an instant. She was full of spirits and vanity—she ran on, running down the flight of steps which led to the garden. In her violent haste, Cecilia threw down the little Louisa. Louisa had a china mandarin in her hand, which her mother had sent her that very morning; it was all broke to pieces by the fall.

"Oh! my mandarin!" cried Louisa, bursting into tears. The crowd behind Cecilia suddenly stopped. Louisa sat on the lowest step, fixing her eyes upon the broken pieces; then turning round, she hid her face in her hands upon the step above her. In turning, Louisa threw down the remains of the mandarin; the head, which she had placed in the socket, fell from the shoulders, and rolled bounding along the gravel-walk. Cecilia pointed to the head and to the socket, and burst out laughing; the crowd behind laughed too. At any other time they would have been more inclined to cry with Louisa; but Cecilia had just been successful, and sympathy with the victorious often makes us forget justice. Leonora, however, preserved her usual consistency. "Poor Louisa!" said she, looking first at her, and then reproachfully at Cecilia. Cecilia turned sharply round, colouring, half with shame and half with vexation.

*

It strikes me that several parts of the tale have not survived the past two centuries all that well: its views on education and on feminine virtues, and its subordination of literary pleasure to narrative preaching and overelaborate sentences. 

I'd start by questioning the whole pedagogical premise of the story, and asking if the adult narrator and adult teacher are behaving properly themselves. Can classmates voting for a prize be reliable, absolute moral arbiters? Do prizes really encourage children to adopt kind behaviour and feel a sense of achievement? or do they encourage children to be ostentatious about kindness, and believe that the purpose of kindness is to look better than others? Are prizes just a popularity contest where kindness is a secondary criterion? That said, given my own school experience, I don't think that pedagogy has developed past these ambiguous incentives even nowadays.

The second premise I'd question is Maria Edgeworth's view on gender difference. [General note: anyone who strongly believes in 'show, don't tell' writing might want to avoid reading Edgeworth for the sake of their blood pressure.] For example, this passage about how Cecilia's widower father has raised her to be more masculine than properly feminine will likely be read very differently in 2026 compared to, say, 1826:

All small objects and small errors she [Cecilia] had been taught to disregard as trifles; and her impatient disposition was perpetually leading her into more material faults; yet her candour in confessing these, she had been suffered to believe, was sufficient reparation and atonement.

Leonora, on the contrary, who had been educated by her mother in a manner more suited to her sex, had a character and virtues more peculiar to a female; her judgment had been early cultivated, and her good sense employed in the regulation of her conduct; she had been habituated to that restraint, which, as a woman, she was to expect in life, and early accustomed to yield; compliance in her seemed natural and graceful.

In a specific sense, ignoring matters of gender for the moment, Edgeworth tells us that Cecilia prefers to act first and apologize later. For example, when Cecilia sells a present that Leonora had given her, she only confesses the truth and acknowledges her wrongdoing much later, hoping that this will cancel out her misdeed. But the harm is already done: Leonora finds out what happened to the present early, and assumes that Cecilia despises her.

But, beyond this particular plot point, where did Edgeworth's ideal of womanhood as "restraint" and "compliance" come from, did she genuinely think it through, which groups or individuals shared that ideal, and whom does this ideal serve?

Illustration from The Bracelets
1850 edition
(Project Gutenberg)

Thirdly, I'd nitpick that Edgeworth's plot, characterization, and scene-setting (although I could still picture the scenes in my mind's eye), begin to feel distractingly mechanical when they serve a moralizing schematic rigidly.

For example, this passage is easy to read

The moment it [the bracelet] was completed, every body begged to try it on. It fastened with little silver clasps, and as it was made large enough for the eldest girls, it was too large for the youngest; of this they bitterly complained, and unanimously entreated that it might be cut to fit them.

"How foolish!" exclaimed Cecilia. "Don't you perceive that, if you win it, you have nothing to do but to put the clasps a little further from the edge? but if we get it, we can't make it larger."

"Very true," said they, "but you need not to have called us foolish, Cecilia!"

However, this sentence feels like a sledgehammer:

Let those who are tempted to do wrong by the hopes of future gratification, or the prospect of certain concealment and impunity, remember that, unless they are totally depraved, they bear in their own hearts a monitor who will prevent their enjoying what they have ill obtained.

Edgeworth's psychology, though not mechanical, is undoubtedly Manichean (figuratively speaking). It's rare that we can separate the sheep from the goats in our world as clearly as she does in her fiction. And a child who reads The Bracelets and then looks around at the adults in their lives will probably question if any evidence supports the author's thesis: that growing up is at times a process of perfecting one's self into ethically consistent sainthood.

Lastly, The Bracelets' dialogue is admittedly also not very contemporary. — Perhaps even by Regency standards it was written more as one would write and not as one would speak? For example, if a child in 2026 ever thinks in an internal monologue like Leonora's, I'll eat my hat:

And how pleasing Cecilia can be when she wishes to please! how candid she is! how much she can improve herself!—let me be just, though she has offended me—she is wonderfully improved within this last month; for one fault, and that against myself, should I forget all her merits?

In short, re-exploring The Bracelets in 2026, I still enjoy the plot, characters, and scenery, as well as Edgeworth's observations on the details of everyday life, just as I enjoyed reading Frances Hodgson Burnett's A Little Princess as a girl. I tend to skip past the unsubtle morals and ignore dialogues' implausibility. But I suppose one of the tale's other lasting values, outside of its place in English literary history, is Edgeworth's insight into how part of the upper classes — those who would have read Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Emile [Note: I haven't read this myself, so I'm relying on synopses] — envisioned childhood education in the British Isles, during the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

***

Maria Edgeworth [Wikipedia]
The Bracelets; or, Amiability and Industry Rewarded [ebook in Project Gutenberg]

A Thoreau Thought for Easter

It may be a passage from the end of an essay by Henry David Thoreau that I have not fully read ("Walking," from the 1850s). It may be describing a scene that Thoreau saw in November. It may also be a bit of a mishmash between ancient Greek and 19th-century American Christian religion.

Springtime (early 1920s), by Ugo Flamiani
via Wikimedia Commons

But I think that this sprig of nature philosophy still feels timely, as I enter the Easter weekend:

We walked in so pure and bright a light, gilding the withered grass and leaves, so softly and serenely bright, I thought I had never bathed in such a golden flood, without a ripple or a murmur to it. The west side of every wood and rising ground gleamed like the boundary of Elysium, and the sun on our backs seemed like a gentle herdsman driving us home at evening.

So we saunter toward the Holy Land, till one day the sun shall shine more brightly than ever he has done, shall perchance shine into our minds and hearts, and light up our whole lives with a great awakening light, as warm and serene and golden as on a bank-side in autumn.

The essay — although Thoreau had read it aloud in lecture halls before — was first printed shortly after his death, in 1862.

***

Source: Essays and Other Writings of Henry David Thoreau. Will H. Dircks, ed.
     London: Walter Scott Press

July 2024 In Books: What I'm Reading

Thanks to anaemia, a traffic accident, and a broken glass bottle, I've been (in roughly equal measures) sulking and reading at home.

An African History of Africa: From the Dawn of Humanity to Independence
Zeinab Badawi

Cover of Zeinab Badawi:
An African History of Africa
Penguin Books

It's been energetically praised in the British press, and I am also charmed by this book, which I found at a bookshop near the Free University here in Berlin.

BBC World anchor Zeinab Badawi sets aside many of the piles of colonialist histories of (in the earlier chapters of her book) northern African countries, to expose the reading public to snippets of neglected knowledge about former kingdoms, leaders, and citizenries. She draws from modern experts and personal travel in nations like Egypt, Sudan, and Eritrea as much as she can, rather than relying on archives only.

It is also an 'alive' field of study: while ancient Egypt's dynasties are well charted, ancient sites of the kingdom of Kush in Sudan, and Adulis and Qohaito in Eritrea, are only partly excavated. There is much left to reveal itself.

Cover of Francisco Coloane: Feuerland
Unionsverlag

Feuerland (Tierra del Fuego (1956))
Francisco Coloane (tr. into German by Giò Waeckerlin Induni)

Like Jorge Luis Borges historical stories/essays, Coloane's collection of tales puts the reader back into the morally ambiguous, colonialist era – this time, in southernmost Chile.

Die untergehende Sonne ließ ebenfalls große Goldnuggets am Rand der Horizontpfanne zurück, goldene Kumuluswolken, mit denen die feuerländische Abenddämmerung ihre unablässig wechselnden Phantasmagorien entzündet.

('The setting sun left behind huge gold nuggets at the rim of the horizon's pan, golden cumulus clouds with which the Fuegian dusk was kindling its unceasingly changeful phantasmagorias.') 

The first tale touches on Romanian gold magnate Julius Popper, his mercenary army, and genocide of Ona Indigenous peoples; and the multifarious journeys of Europeans to South America. In inhabiting a men's world, it is rather like Hemingway. But perhaps it is more philosophical.

It's impossible not to picture the landscapes, birds, and animals that Coloane portrays in so much detail, in my mind's eye – no matter how ignorant I was of Patagonia going in.

Coloane experienced popularity abroad in the 1990s, and the Unionsverlag hardcover copy of Feuerland that I am reading was printed during that time.

"Patagonian landscape with single tree before night sky" (1832)
Eduard von Buchan (1800-1876)
Wikimedia Commons

The Hidden History of Burma: Race, Capitalism, and the Crisis of Democracy in the 21st Century
Thant Myint-U

A descendant of a United Nations Secretary-General, raised in the United States but drawn into Burma/Myanmar at various epochs in the 1990s through to the present, Thant Myint-U has written not just a scholarly examination of the country's history.

Cover of Thant Myint-U: The Hidden History of Burma
W. W. Norton

He also gives a journalist's insights into life stories of Burmese people who have fallen prey to external and internal social, political, and economic developments; as well as a diplomat's insights into international and national machinations.

It would be too crude to state without qualification that the path to hell is paved with good intentions: the intentions of a few Burmese governments, of Aung San Suu Kyi, of the U.S. government, of the United Nations, ... But, with more nuance, this phenomenon is at least one leading thread in Burma/Myanmar's recent history.

I'm listening to the audiobook recording.

***

Letters and Journals of Lord Byron, Vol. II (1830)
Thomas Moore, ed.

Inspired by a seminar I'm in about the Greek Revolution of 1821, which had led the English poet to travel to the mainland north of the Peloponnese, I looked up Lord Byron in Google Books. There I found a very "warts and all" compendium of letters, journal extracts, book passages by Byron's partner Teresa Guiccioli, and commentary from Thomas Moore (who had been Byron's friend), published 6 years after Byron died of fever.

"The Reception of Lord Byron at Missolonghi" (1861)
Theodoros Vryzakis (1814-1878)
Wikimedia Commons

...This is more of a rant than a review. I will start by apologizing to the above authors for inadvertently grouping together their works with Byron's. Secondly, because people often feel injured by what they consider 'cancel culture,' I'll emphasize that I don't judge the many readers who appreciate Byron's poems on their own merits.

So:

First of all, this is not news, but: he was not a considerate romantic or sexual partner. He chatters incessantly about his 'conquests' to his male friends in his letters, underlining how little respect he has for these women. In 21st-century terminology: toxic masculinity leaks from every page.

Secondly, Byron keeps lying to himself and others about his intentions:

To give one example, he got rid of his illegitimate daughter Allegra in a convent school.

It was supposedly a good school. But she became 'peculiarly quiet' according to visitors who'd known her before, and she died from a fever there at the age of 5. Claire Clairmont, her mother, was inconsolable.

He had made a big deal in letters to friends about how noble he was, nobler than that atheist Percy Bysshe Shelley (who'd by all accounts been kind to Allegra), for wanting his daughter to grow up religiously and 'purely' ... Not that he'd ever put his money where his mouth is, and tried to be properly 'religious' or 'pure' himself.

Thirdly, he's hugely catty about Leigh Hunt, John William Polidori, and others. Part of it can be explained, I suppose, by his being bisexual but not wholly self-accepting.

But the worst passage so far is a letter to Sir Walter Scott, in January 1822:

I need not say how grateful I am for your letter, but I must own my ingratitude in not having written to you again long ago. […] I can only account for it on the same principle of tremulous anxiety with which one sometimes makes love to a beautiful woman of our own degree, with whom one is enamoured in good earnest; whereas, we attack a fresh-coloured housemaid without (I speak, of course, of earlier times) any sentimental remorse or mitigation of our virtuous purpose.

I think a few years of imprisonment might have helped, and I certainly hope no one will excuse him on the grounds of being 'misunderstood.'

***

Also reading:

Auf der Reise im Dazwischen (Austria, poetry) by Omar Kir Alanam
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (United States, nonfiction) by Michelle Alexander

June 2024 in Books: What I'm Reading... by Chekhov

Progress has been made in a 1970s Penguin Classics paperback of Chekhov's Lady with Lapdog and Other Stories: I read "The House with an Attic (An Artist's Story)," translated by David Magarshack, today.

I. I. Shishkin and A. V. Gine in the Studio on the Valaam Island (1860)
by Ivan Shishkin (1831–1898). Wikimedia Commons.

One day [...] I found myself by sheer chance on an estate I had never been to before. The sun was already low on the horizon and the evening shadows lay over the flowering rye. Two rows of very tall, solidly planted old fir trees stood like solid walls, forming a beautiful dark avenue.

***

Chekhov's short story recounts an episode in the life of a cynical artist. The artist, the narrator of the tale and not in an omniscient sense, is renting a house in the countryside. There he gets to know a family of three women: the mother Yekaterina Pavlova, the elder daughter Lydia, and the younger daughter Zhenya.

Lydia is occupied with charitable works: teaching, providing medical care, and lending books. The artist squabbles with her: according to him, she is merely greasing the wheels of a homicidal system that condemns poor Russians to overly long working hours, which permit them no time to enjoy the fruits of education, and will make them sick anyway.

In Front of the Mirror (1870)
by Ivan Shishkin. Wikimedia Commons.

I asked myself while reading if Lydia herself is attracted to the artist. Is she even more irritated that he does not fall in with her views, because her political principles force her to see an obstacle between them because of that? Is the artist also interested, but finds her 'too difficult'? I suspect it, but perhaps Chekhov didn't intend it – then either it's a subconscious subtext, or I am wrong. Perhaps the author sees Lydia's intention exactly as the artist interprets it: she thinks that she needs to punish the artist for his views, which get in the way of her labour.

At any rate, the artist falls for Zhenya. As Zhenya is only 17 years old, and portrayed as naive rather than well-informed and independent for her age, I winced while reading.

She longed for me to introduce her into the sphere of the eternal and the beautiful, into that higher world in which, as she imagined, I was quite at home

In the passage where he describes Zhenya's body as "unformed," the artist seems himself to feel a line has been crossed, albeit not in a legal or criminal sense given customs and legislation of the time. The story was published in 1896, and Chekhov died in 1904.

Corner of overgrown garden. Ground elder (1884)
by Ivan Shishkin. Wikimedia Commons.

It's the second story of Chekhov's I've read where his characters self-reflect ambiguously about what 20th century sociological theorists might call the 'male gaze.'

(In the short story Ariadne, he writes about a young Muscovite who is dismayed at the thought of treating partnerships as pairing together heterosexual couples regardless of liking or character or any other factor. Another character, who conducts an adulterous affair with the titular Ariadne, just thinks that any woman is fair game if he's attracted to her: no deep feelings, thoughts, or sentiments needed.)

APPARENTLY Chekhov's stories were often not so much 'inspired by' as directly based on his own life and people he knew. Which sounds dangerous, but as his stories appeared in magazines and Russians in his circles read and reacted to them, he seemed to be fine risking a fist to the face from a disgruntled acquaintance.

Given that garden-variety gossip arguably informed his plotting, it isn't clear to me: was he trying to make a deeper point about Lydia's character here? or can we just understand "The House with an Attic" as a straightforward narrative drawn from real-life experiences of 1. debating how to improve the Russian society of his time, and 2. finding a love that escapes?

THE PROTAGONIST'S ASSERTIONS about sociopolitics seem largely unreasonable, with veins of the reasonable. Of course everyone is prone to exaggerate due to the heat of debate, or because they lack direct illustrations and examples. Chekhov was a doctor, but/so it's hard to believe that the author agrees with every word:

Lydia asks,

But you also deny the usefulness of medicine, don't you?

The artist replies,

Yes. [...] Do away with the main cause of disease, physical labour, and and there will be no more diseases. 

*

I like the poignant ambivalence when Chekhov leaves hopeful loose threads in his stories – to be continued – for his characters, instead of plunging into an impressive but gloomy dead end.

A Forest (1890s)
by Ivan Shishkin. Wikimedia Commons.

March 2022 in Books: What I'll Be Reading

BECAUSE of the literary tour around the world begun last year, I'd been reading Ukrainian books when the country was invaded on February 24th.

In the family's translated copy of Nikolai Gogol short stories, I have finished "The Tale of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich" and begun reading "The Nose."

Portrait of Nikolai Gogol (early 1840s)
by Otto Friedrich Theodor von Möller
via Wikimedia Commons

Even as a sheltered Berliner in peacetime Germany, it hurts the soul to read the jaunty, satirical prose — framed in imperial Russia; with its tin soldier figures, small-town drama, and tempests in a teapot. Because his tales are harshly real at times, but at other times far away from harsher realities even of Gogol's time.

(That said, since I was also a reader who did not want to read pandemic literature during Covid, but others enjoyed 'the hair of the dog' as an approach to handling times of duress, your mileage may vary.)

I am often thinking before reaching for the book of the decimated 21st century apartment buildings, dead Ukrainians and Russians, and fleeing civilians of 150 years later.

"Picket Ural Cossacks" (1813)
by Korneev E. M. (1782 – 1839)
via Wikimedia Commons

But, to paraphrase the Bible, the wars are always with us. In Berlin, I live in what used to be a village that was practically annihilated during the Seven Years' War. Gogol would certainly have known war at least at a distance — like the heard roll of cannon thunder.

The beautiful depictions of landscapes, people, and other vignettes in his prose are a little, but very little, comfort. Here is a passage from "St. John's Eve," another Gogol story I haven't read entirely yet, which illustrates his style:

As I now recall it,—my old mother was alive then,—in the long winter evenings when the frost was crackling out of doors, and had so sealed up hermetically the narrow panes of our cottage, she used to sit before the hackling-comb, drawing out a long thread in her hand, rocking the cradle with her foot, and humming a song, which I seem to hear even now.

Or

The sky is red only on one side, and it is already growing dark. It grows colder in the fields. It gets dusky and more dusky, and at last quite dark. At last! With heart almost bursting from his bosom, he set out on his way, and cautiously descended through the dense woods into the deep hollow called the Bear's ravine.

Nightingale
by A. Weitzel, 2013 (attr.)
via Wikimedia Commons

Or, from "A May Night"

The nightingales of the Ukraine are singing, and it seems as though the moon itself were listening to their song. The village sleeps as though under a magic spell; the cottages shine in the moonlight against the darkness of the woods behind them. The songs grow silent, and all is still. 

Which reminds me indirectly of Thomas Hardy's consoling poem "The Darkling Thrush" (1900), about another songbird:

So little cause for carolings
  Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
  Afar or nigh around.
That I could think there trembled through
  His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
  And I was unaware.

*

(Off topic, I haven't even gotten far into "The Nose" yet. But also based on the internal evidence of "Ivan Fedorovich Chponka and His Aunt", I have already decided that the author is not the Feminist of the Century.)

It also turns out that Gogol influenced Sholem Aleichem, another Ukrainian prose author whose work is sitting on my desk.

***

Emma Graham-Harrison, foreign correspondent for the Guardian newspaper, noted via Twitter on March 4th:

"We aged a hundred years and this descended/

In just one hour, as at a stroke."

Only realised today that the great 20th century poet Anna Akhmatova was born in Ukraine and had Ukrainian roots.

Her poem on the outbreak of WWI, "In Memoriam" seems apt 

https://poetrybyheart.org.uk/poems/in-memoriam-july-19-1914/

***

Aside from Ukrainian works, the Jimmy Carter biography His Very Best, Canadian author Esi Edugyan's historical Half Blood Blues, Vincent Sheehan's Louis XIV and Omar el Akkad's What Strange Paradise are a few of the half-read books I'm working on.

Valentine's Day: Do Poets' and Novelists' Arrows Hit, or Miss?

[Disclaimer: As a Valentine's Day skeptic, I am also purposely publishing this blog post two days early in sign of protest.]

In my Canadian high school, an English teacher asked us to bring in and discuss a poem that expressed to us what love is. I failed in that attempt because it was hard to find anything that did, even though in the end a Shakespeare sonnet was what came closest. As a teenager, to me there were three pieces of literature that came to mind:

War and Peace. For some reason the later scenes with [spoiler alert: please drag your cursor over the white spaces if you don't mind the spoiler] Pierre and Natasha represented to me what true love was all about. Everyday, boring happiness where you're a little starry-eyed about each other even in your forties; a type of relationship whose harmony makes it livable and comfortable for others (children, friends, relatives) to be around you.

Shakespeare's Sonnet 116.

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:

O, no! it is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.

Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

⁠If this be error, and upon me prov'd,
⁠I never writ, nor no man ever lov'd.

The Scarlet Pimpernel. Even as a teenager I knew that the book was soap opera in its depictions of relationships and human psychology. But this scene was still moving and while it felt over-the-top as a scenario, held a kernel of possible emotional truth:

Pride had given way at last, obstinacy was gone: the will was powerless. He was but a man madly, blindly, passionately in love, and as soon as her light footsteps had died away within the house, he knelt down upon the terrace steps, and in the very madness of his love he kissed one by one the places where her small foot had trodden, and the stone balustrade there, where her tiny hand had rested last.

***

In the intervening years, I've read other poems that were felt to be romantic classics — amongst others — by the Victorians. For example:

Wordsworth's She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways

She dwelt among the untrodden ways
Beside the springs of Dove,
A Maid whom there were none to praise,
And very few to love.

A Violet by a mossy stone
⁠Half-hidden from the eye!
—Fair as a star, when only one
⁠Is shining in the sky.

She lived unknown, and few could know
When Lucy ceased to be;
But she is in her Grave, and, oh,
The difference to me!

I think a poem that idealizes a woman's life being largely unappreciated and ending in early death, is a strange choice as a love poem. Wordsworth's other poems are also infantilizing (Note: which is not to say that I don't appreciate Wordsworth in general):

A Creature not too bright or good
For human nature's daily food;
For transient sorrows, simple wiles,
Praise, blame, love, kisses, tears, and smiles

*

As a 36-year-old, here's my latest take:

In the end, the Corinthians in the Bible give perhaps the best nudge toward how to love when you have the chance, platonic or romantic:

Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up,
Doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil;
Rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth;
Beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.

"1 Corinthians" in: The King James Bible. Oxford: 1769 (Wikisource)

As a teenager I'd probably think this idea of 'love' is to be soft-spoken and ingratiating, and find it vomitous. But now I think I understand. It's encouragement to keep fighting the battle not to make ourselves feel better by depreciating others, or by getting hung up on silly arguments.

And, to drop Shakespeare's idea of a constant love that had convinced me as a teenager, I think love needs to keep changing, adapting, growing, stretching and improving the older we grow and the more challenges we find.

*

Lastly Charles Baudelaire's "L'Harmonie du soir" comes to mind, especially the elegiac but heartwarming final line "Ton souvenir en moi luit comme un ostensoir!" ('Your memory, in me, glows like a church monstrance.')

***

Sources:

"Sonnet 116" in: Shakespeare, William. Shakespeare's Sonnets. Edward Bliss Reed, ed. Yale University Press: 1923. (Wikisource)

Orczy, Baroness Emmuska. The Scarlet Pimpernel. Ch. XVI. (Wikisource)
[Edited to add - Feb. 13th: As a strange historical footnote, apparently The Scarlet Pimpernel's central narrative, adopted into a 1940s anti-fascist propaganda film, inspired Raoul Wallenberg.]

Wordsworth, William. Poems, Vol. I. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown (1815) (Wikisource) and "She was a Phantom of delight"

(I hate when people do this self-referential thing, but will do it anyway: For Baudelaire's poem, please see my blog post)

Danish, Icelandic, Irish Mythologies of Winter: A January Hodgepodge

One thing that's delightful to read across religions, philosophies, and tales is the explanations we have written down for the natural world that surrounds us.

Sitting at my laptop on a grey January day in the Northern Hemisphere, the coal stove fired up, buds still rarer on the oak twigs outside the window, green bulbs beginning to form on the forsythia indoors and a hyacinth bursting into pale pink blossoms on the windowsill, of course looking at winter makes sense. And I'll also reach back further in time than I've done lately on this blog.

***

Très Riches Heures du duc de Berry Folio 1, verso: January
("A New Year's Day feast including Jean de Berry")
by the Limbourg brothers (fl. 1402–1416)
via Wikimedia Commons

Pliny the Elder wrote in his Natural History:

In the Bleak Midwinter, in a Nutshell

Christina Rossetti, one of the clan of Pre-Raphaelites, wrote a religious poem that has since been set to music by Gustav Holst and others, and turned into a Christmas hymn.

I've not entirely been a fan of her writing style, which in the first verse of this poem has a kind of literally lapidary Cubist quality even if she was writing decades earlier, in the 19th century. But it is undoubtedly also moving.

From Pre-Raphaelitism and the pre-Raphaelite brotherhood (1905)
Likely by William Holman Hunt, via Wikimedia Commons

In the bleak mid-winter

Frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron,
Water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow,
Snow on snow,
In the bleak mid-winter,
Long ago.

Night
by Edward Burne-Jones
via Wikimedia Commons

Our God, Heav’n cannot hold him
Nor earth sustain;
Heav’n and earth shall flee away
When he comes to reign:
In the bleak mid-winter
A stable-place sufficed
The Lord God Almighty
Jesus Christ.

[...]

What can I give him,
Poor as I am?
If I were a shepherd
I would bring a lamb,
If I were a Wise Man
I would do my part,
Yet what I can I give him,
Give my heart.

***

To me, an element of William Blake's mysticism tinges the second verse: having an idea of religion in which there is always a conflict or a wrangling for a central role, the Tyger and the Lamb. Maybe inspired by Paradise Lost?

I see this portrait of conflict as projecting a personal struggle with faith, or with the world. Seen as an 'objective' reader of the poem: why, in a Christian cosmology, can't a loving God coexist with heaven and earth?

It's also unclear why Jesus would expect gifts; but that might be just my opinion, influenced by my Black Friday season anti-consumerism.

*

'Pre-Raphaelite window
in Highfield United Reform Church, Rock Ferry'
In the Pre-Raphaelite style.
via Wikimedia Commons

The King's College Choir at Cambridge recorded a rather fine version of Holst's musical setting in 2005, and it is available on YouTube.

In the Bleak Midwinter (1872) [Wikipedia]

A Toast to Winter, Part V: Oscar Wilde's Selfish Giant

When I was a child in Canada, I read The Happy Prince and Other Tales by Oscar Wilde. The tales that stayed with me were "The Happy Prince" itself — the tale of a golden statue that beggars itself to mend the inequality of rich and poor in late Victorian London — and "The Nightingale and the Rose," and "The Selfish Giant."

What is "The Nightingale and the Rose" really about? — is it about people pouring out their heart's blood for the sake of love only to find out that it is lost, or if it is about people sacrificing themselves for art? I haven't figured it out yet and it isn't wintry.

"The Selfish Giant" is very wintry, however. It has been turned into a film and, despite its simplicity, appears to hit a fundamental chord with readers still.

"[P]late illustrating a story 'The Selfish Giant' in Wilde's
The Happy Prince and Other Tales. London: Nutt. 1st ed." (1888)
Picture by Walter Crane (1845-1915)
via Wikisource

***

The villain-turned-hero of the tale is a giant who keeps neighbouring children out of his yard. That is why he is selfish.

(Given how ogres behave in many fairy tales, presumably the infants can count themselves lucky that they didn't feature on the giant's dinner menu that evening. But Wilde doesn't see gianthood that way.)

Then the Spring came, and all over the country there were little blossoms and little birds. Only in the garden of the Selfish Giant it was still winter. The birds did not care to sing in it as there were no children, and the trees forgot to blossom. Once a beautiful flower put its head out from the grass, but when it saw the notice-board it was so sorry for the children that it slipped back into the ground again, and went off to sleep. The only people who were pleased were the Snow and the Frost. "Spring has forgotten this garden," they cried, "so we will live here all the year round." The Snow covered up the grass with her great white cloak, and the Frost painted all the trees silver. Then they invited the North Wind to stay with them, and he came. He was wrapped in furs, and he roared all day about the garden, and blew the chimney-pots down. "This is a delightful spot," he said, "we must ask the Hail on a visit." So the Hail came. Every day for three hours he rattled on the roof of the castle till he broke most of the slates, and then he ran round and round the garden as fast as he could go. He was dressed in grey, and his breath was like ice.

ONE DAY the children break in through the wall and visit the garden sneakily. Spring creeps in after them and the trees begin to flower again.

The Giant's heart is softened at the sight. He sees that one of his little visitors hasn't been able to perch in a tree like the others, so he lifts the disconsolate boy into the branches.

At that gesture, the neighbourhood children see their formerly grumpy neighbour in a different light. His garden is teeming with frolicking youth for the rest of the giant's life.

He saw a most wonderful sight. Through a little hole in the wall the children had crept in, and they were sitting in the branches of the trees. In every tree that he could see there was a little child. And the trees were so glad to have the children back again that they had covered themselves with blossoms, and were waving their arms gently above the children's heads. The. birds were flying about and twittering with delight, and the flowers were looking up through the green grass and laughing.

***

The Christian subtext (the echoes of "Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me" when the giant helps the boy, the stigmata later in the story, etc.)  and Victorian worship of childhood innocence here, might be a little too saccharine for modern tastes.

Around the World in 32 Countries: Spain

It has been surprisingly difficult to gather a list of Spanish books that I would like to read that feel representative of the country and its history.

Don Quijote de la Mancha by Miguel de Cervantes requires no further introduction. This tale of adventure and knighthood is not nearly as tough to read for an Anglo-German speaker like me as, for example, some 19th century Spanish-language literature. It is also reassuring to have a massive yellow-covered Langenscheidt dictionary at hand. That said, I am still reading all of the prologues and state censors' notes and dedications, so I haven't yet reached even the opening phrase:

En un lugar de la Mancha, de cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme, no ha mucho tiempo que vivía un hidalgo de los de lanza en astillero, adarga antigua, rocín flaco y galgo corredor. Una olla de algo más vaca que carnero, salpicón las más noches, duelos y quebrantos los sábados, lantejas los viernes, algún palomino de añadidura los domingos, consumían las tres partes de su hacienda.

[Loosely translated: In a village in the Mancha, whose name I cannot be bothered to remember, not so long ago there lived a knight of somewhere, who had a lance put away, an old shield, a thin workhorse and a coursing greyhound. A pan of something more inexpensive beef than mutton, cold cuts most nights, eggs with bacon or sausage on Saturdays, lentils on Fridays, scrapings in addition on Sundays, consumed three-fourths of his pension.]

15 pages down, perhaps 1300 to go.

*

Reading a sound biography of Federico García Lorca — a German one, by Karen Genschow — and a translation of The House of Bernarda Alba has also been good as an 'encapsulation' of Spain. I did this a few years ago, however.

García Lorca's life ended prematurely in the 1930s, the era of Spain's Civil War. Leftist intellectuals and workers fought General Franco and the Church; Pablo Picasso was inspired to paint the gruesome violence of a Guernica that had been wasted by the aerial bombing of his countrymen; and the fascist brutality of World War II was foreshadowed. But his biography also spans a traditional upbringing in the late 19th century, the leftist stirrings of the early 1900s, as well as his generation's endeavours to explore and uphold Spanish regions' cultural identities. (Much like the Andalusian, Sevillan, etc. dances that Isaac Albéniz and Enrique Granados were composing during García Lorca's lifetime, to speak of music instead of literature.)

In terms of media, García Lorca delved not just into traditional/modern poetry, theatre, etc. but also into the fledgling art of film.

Mujer 1: Los pobres sienten también sus penas.
Bernarda: Pero las olvidan delante de un plato de garbanzos.
Muchacha 1: (Con timidez) Comer es necesario para vivir.
Bernarda: A tu edad no se habla delante de las personas mayores.

(First woman: The poor also have their sufferings.
Bernarda: But they forget them as soon as they see a plate of chickpeas.
First girl: (timidly) Eating is necessary to live.
Bernarda. At your age one does not speak in front of older persons.)

"Parroquia Nª Sª de la Granada, Moguer. (Huelva, España)."
Church in the village of Moguer, where Juan Ramón Jiménez was born.
© Miguel Angel, via Wikimedia Commons

*

Around the World in 32 Countries: Polish Literature for Beginners

1989: Poland forms its Third Republic and ends its decades 'behind the Iron Curtain'

Capital City: Warsaw

Surface area: 312,696 km2 (larger than Italy, smaller than Norway)

Currency: Polish złoty

Driving side: right

Historical figures:

Casimir III, who ascended the throne in his early twenties and was king from 1333 to 1370, is apparently Polish history's answer to French history's Henry IV. He weakened the predominant power of the aristocracy in the nation's law, creating a balance with the bourgeoisie, and "was known for siding with the weak when the law did not protect them from nobles and clergymen." Besides he encouraged Jewish people to settle in Poland, and forbade Christians to kidnap Jewish children for religious conversion. When the Black Death broke out in 1347, the King closed the borders and Poland was mostly safe. Also, for example, he established the University of Kraków. His rule ended when he died during a hunting excursion.

Sources:

Poland [Wikipedia]

Casimir III the Great [Wikipedia]

List of countries and dependencies by area [Wikipedia] 

***

For Polish literature, I will content myself, I think, with not reading a whole book; instead I will mention a few works.

THE EARLY PARTS of Ève Curie's biography of her mother, Madame Curie, give (I think) a fine snapshot of Poland in the late 1800s.

The daughter writes of the familiar places where Marie Curie grew up, not just in Warsaw where Marie's family lived but also in the countryside where she might go for holidays as a child. Here she quotes one of Marie Curie's letters:

We go out in a band to walk in the woods, we roll hoops, we play battledore and shuttlecock (at which I am very bad!), cross-tag, the game of Goose, and many equally childish things. There have been so many wild strawberries here the once could buy a really sufficient amount for a few groszy [...] Every Sunday the horses are harnessed for a trip in to Mass [...]

Ève Curie describes public, educational and vocational life beneath Russian domination (every Russian whom she names is apparently a villain), the Polish hierarchy that divided the aristocracy and a professor's family. Also, it is clear how few resources there were for women who wanted to study there — which made emigration to France attractive.

"Specjalny obszar ochrony siedlisk Dolina Środkowego Świdra." c. 2015
by M. Nowaczyk?
via Wikimedia Commons (CC-BY-SA-3.0-PL Licence)

ISAAC BASHEVIS SINGER's The Magician of Lublin has wonderful passages on Polish scenery, animals and trees and snow; the food; and Jewish faith. He wrote after the Holocaust and in his books rebuilt a lost world; it is estimated that some 3 million Polish Jews died under Nazi rule. I did not finish the book. (After Singer began writing about the third extramarital affair of the main character, and it really began to be questionable if the mistresses were free agents or if they were being manipulated by the main character or by their circumstances, I decided that enough was enough.) The delineations between the religious and ethnic communities — e.g. the difficulty of intermarriage — were also kind of depressing; but I imagine that it was the same in most or all countries. But aside from that, from a literary perspective and for its social insights, it was exactly the book I want.

Überall war Gottes Hand sichtbar. Jede Obstblüte, jeder Kieselstein, jedes Sandkörnchen verkündete Sein Dasein. Die taunassen Blätter der Apfelbäume funkelten im Morgenlicht wie kleine Kerzen. Jaschas Haus lag am Stadtrand, sodass er auf die großen Weizenfelder hinausblicken konnte.

(Roughly translated: God's hand was visible everywhere. Every fruit tree blossom, every gravel stone, every grain of sand announced His presence. The dew-dampened leaves of the apple trees glittered in the morning light like little candles. Yasha's house lay at the edge of the city, so that he could look out onto the great wheat fields. German translation from the English/Yiddish by Susanna Rademacher, Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2017.)

"Henryk Sienkiewicz i jego wizje" (1905)
by Czesław Tański (1862–1942)
via Wikimedia Commons

MANY YEARS ago, I read Henryk Sienkiewicz's Quo Vadis, written in an earlier generation of Polish writers and representing Poland's Catholic side. Taking place in ancient Rome, it is (as far as I remember) a saccharine but readable story of young Christians making their way against their decadent Roman overlords; St. Paul appears in vignettes. Looking at it again now, every feminist fibre of me is horrified by the beginning of the book. But if one decides to ignore the objectification of women (also of Black women who appear incidentally as the scene is set), it seems entertaining.

The best of all times for visiting is after noon, but not earlier than when the sun sinks towards the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus, and begins to throw oblique shadows on the Forum. It is usually still very warm in the autumn, and people are fond of sleeping after eating. At this time it is pleasant to listen to the murmuring of the fountain in the great hall, and when one has taken the thousand obligatory steps, to muse in the purplish light sifted through the purple of the half-drawn awning.

(Quoted from Quo Vadis, Henryk Sienkiewicz.

Translation by S.A. Binon and S. Malevsky, Philadelphia: Henry Altemus, 1897. p. 15. via Hathi Trust)

*

Artur Rubinstein's My Young Years: It's well over 15 years that I read it. In my recollection the famous 20th-century pianist mixes extraordinary talent — of which he is extremely aware — with likewise extraordinary cattiness, also with despair and gloom. Whether it offers insight into Polish history and society I don't recollect, but doubt.

*

A colleague recommended (but with a warning) Jerzy Kosiński's The Painted Bird, which is apparently a dark book about a childhood during the Holocaust. I kind of doubt I will read it because it sounds too grisly. He also recommended Joseph Conrad 'if Conrad counts' — I decided that his books do have more of a British perspective — and Stanislav Lem's science fiction classic Solaris.

*

RYSZARD Kapuściński's speeches, The Other, are in the family bookshelf. It is no longer entirely up-to-date, I'd say. The translator — his speeches were held in Polish — uses the phrase 'Third World.' Also, I'd argue we rarely still need to read European anthropologists to learn about the world — we have books, videos, and social media written by people who live elsewhere. It's still fascinating to think of what Kapuściński saw during his journalistic career. While his focus is beyond the borders, he also illustrates, perhaps, the change in Poland's 20th century fortunes. First he was a representative of an Eastern Communist state as a foreign correspondent; but his speeches have allusions to Christian belief and the theology of Pope John Paul II now. His literary, anthropological, religious, etc. references are often Polish, despite his international career; perhaps this is also because the audiences for these specific speeches were Polish. But aside from that, rather than Russian, he cites British influences.

*

LASTLY, as an outsider's look at Polish history for those who love early 19th-century English kitsch, I'd recommend Jane Porter's Thaddeus of Warsaw. In a more contemporary vein, a book subscription service I use has books by Olga Tokarczuk; so I've started reading Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of The Dead.

***

Madame Curie, by Ève Curie [Goodreads]

The Magician of Lublin (novel), by Isaac Bashevis Singer [Wikipedia]

Quo Vadis, by Henryk Sienkiewicz [Goodreads]

Quo Vadis (film) dubbed into Russian [YouTube]

My Young Years, by Artur Rubinstein [Goodreads]

Jerzy Kosiński [Wikipedia]

The Painted Bird, by Jerzy Kosiński [Wikipedia]

Lord Jim, by Joseph Conrad [Wikipedia]

Ryszard Kapuściński [Goodreads]

The Other, by Ryszard Kapuściński [Goodreads]

Thaddeus of Warsaw, by Jane Porter (Later 1831? edition) [Hathi Trust]

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, by Olga Tokarczuk [Goodreads]

***

Lady with an Ermine (ca. 1483-1490)
by Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519)
Although an Italian painting, it was brought to Poland in 1798 by Prince Adam George Czartoryski.
It now belongs to the Polish government. (Source: Lady with an Ermine, Wikipedia)
via Wikimedia Commons

Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South: Social Classes, Labour and Romance

Once one has read all of Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters, the natural next step is generally to read Elizabeth Gaskell. She wrote more than one novel. She also wrote a biography of Charlotte Brontë — whom she knew personally. It was the first Brontë biography, and is still read today although critics now consider it to have taken great liberties with the truth. Although Cranford — a gently-paced look at middle-class village life in the 19th century — has also been filmed for TV with Dame Judi Dench and other venerable actors, North and South is perhaps her most enduringly popular novel.

Gaskell was the daughter of a preacher/tutor/gentleman farmer/keeper of records. She ended up marrying a Unitarian minister and moving from rural Cheshire — the land of Cranford — to the industrial city of Manchester. There she mixed socially with members of parliaments, bankers, and literary figures; while she and her husband also undertook many charitable projects. She published novels in serialized form, and short stories, in a magazine that Charles Dickens ran (1850-59): Household Words. The two of them had conflicts of opinion, but for example I am glad that Dickens suggested North and South as the title instead of Gaskell's suggestion: Margaret Hale.

Elizabeth Gaskell, ca. 1860
via Wikimedia Commons

*

North and South begins as the heroine, Margaret Hale, returns to the countryside parsonage where her father and mother are living. As a young girl she had been sent to live with London cousins, and now at the age of around 18 she has not seen her only brother Frederick for years, and has not had the closeness to her parents that she would otherwise have had.

Her father, the minister, begins to have doubts about the Anglican Church. Out of principle, he refuses to rise in the ranks of the Church, even though his family would be richer and his wife could climb back toward the aristocratic lifestyle into which she was born. He goes even further and gives up his work in Helstone (where the parsonage lies), stepping out of the Church entirely soon after his daughter returns to the household.

Howard's Lane in Holybourne,
where Elizabeth Gaskell bought a house just before she died

Photograph by Hugh Chevalier
via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0 licence

AS HIS PLACE of self-exile from everyone who knew him before, Mr. Hale chooses Milton, a northern industrial town that is based on real-life 1850s Manchester. By moving so far away, he wants to escape the blame and ignominy that he would face as someone who has 'foolishly' imperiled his financial standing and respectability by offending a major social institution. The wife, despite her long running complaints about Helstone, is aghast; and so is Margaret.

Milton is a grim home. No greenery grows except at the fringes of the expanding city, the streets are bustling, industrial pollution spreads grime through the air and onto the scene, and factory machinery that does the business of the cotton industry renders it, at times, tremendously noisy.