Honoré de Balzac: Le Colonel Chabert

[Image source: Wikipedia . Poster for René Le Hénaff's 1943 movie,  with Raimu in the title role.]

Le Colonel Chabert is only a novella, not one of the big cornerstones of La Comédie humaine, but I have the impression that it's one of Balzac’s most read books, in particular by French-speaking students. Its hundred pages constitute a brilliant sampler of major Balzacian themes and techniques, and its tale continues to resonate: the dead hero from a time gone by, who returns to find the world has changed and no-one wants him back. It's been filmed several times: René Le Hénaff's 1943 movie, with Raimu in the title role, is the most admired. (NB, You can watch it in full here .)

*

The movie-makers faced inevitable challenges adapting Balzac's kinetically evolving text. He delays until halfway through before introducing us, via one of his absorbing but leisurely commentaries, to the Countess de Ferraud and her situation. How to achieve this in a movie? In both the 1943 and 1994 movies, the Ferrauds are placed up front, the female lead is shown to the audience and her present insecurities dramatized. It's an understandable rejigging, but it sacrifices the mystery of Balzac’s opening and its abject client.

In fact neither movie really attempts to give us the protean, uncanny Chabert of the novella; a double or treble image: a disfigured half-dead revenant, without hair or teeth or eyebrows, unrecognizable by his former acquaintances, a shuffling tramp broken by humiliation and habituated to derision; simple, humble, grateful and feeble; and simultaneously a glorious war hero, fiercely conscious of his former brilliant position in the military and in the world. The reader's image of Chabert keeps restlessly changing, we can't resolve it. Raimu in 1943 and Gérard Depardieu in 1994 are hampered by the concreteness of their star quality. They compel our gaze from the start. You would never think of throwing bread pellets at them!

So both movies rather misrepresent one of Balzac’s most persistent themes: the terrible and wonderful stories that lurk behind shabby and unremarkable appearances.

*

On returning to his private room, he [Derville] found the Colonel in a towering rage, striding up and down.

“In those times a man took his wife where he chose,” said he. “But I was foolish and chose badly; I trusted to appearances. She has no heart.”

“Well, Colonel, was I not right to beg you not to come?—I am now positive of your identity; when you came in, the Countess gave a little start, of which the meaning was unequivocal. But you have lost your chances. Your wife knows that you are unrecognizable.”

“I will kill her!”

“Madness! you will be caught and executed like any common wretch. Besides you might miss! That would be unpardonable. A man must not miss his shot when he wants to kill his wife.—Let me set things straight; you are only a big child. Go now. Take care of yourself; she is capable of setting some trap for you and shutting you up in Charenton. I will notify her of our proceedings to protect you against a surprise.”

The unhappy Colonel obeyed his young benefactor, and went away, stammering apologies. He slowly went down the dark staircase, lost in gloomy thoughts, and crushed perhaps by the blow just dealt him—the most cruel he could feel, the thrust that could most deeply pierce his heart—when he heard the rustle of a woman’s dress on the lowest landing, and his wife stood before him.

“Come, monsieur,” said she, taking his arm with a gesture like those familiar to him of old. Her action and the accent of her voice, which had recovered its graciousness, were enough to allay the Colonel’s wrath, and he allowed himself to be led to the carriage.

“Well, get in!” said she, when the footman had let down the step.

And as if by magic, he found himself sitting by his wife in the brougham.*

“Where to?” asked the servant.

“To Groslay,” said she.

The horses started at once, and carried them all across Paris.

“Monsieur,” said the Countess, in a tone of voice which betrayed one of those emotions which are rare in our lives, and which agitate every part of our being. At such moments the heart, fibres, nerves, countenance, soul, and body, everything, every pore even, feels a thrill. Life no longer seems to be within us; it flows out, springs forth, is communicated as if by contagion, transmitted by a look, a tone of voice, a gesture, impressing our will on others. The old soldier started on hearing this single word, this first, terrible “monsieur!” But still it was at once a reproach and a pardon, a hope and a despair, a question and an answer. This word included them all; none but an actress could have thrown so much eloquence, so many feelings into a single word. Truth is less complete in its utterance; it does not put everything on the outside; it allows us to see what is within. The Colonel was filled with remorse for his suspicions, his demands, and his anger; he looked down not to betray his agitation.

“Monsieur,” repeated she, after an imperceptible pause, “I knew you at once.”

“Rosine,” said the old soldier, “those words contain the only balm that can help me to forget my misfortunes.”

Two large tears rolled hot on to his wife’s hands, which he pressed to show his paternal affection.

(from Le Colonel Chabert, in the translation by Ellen Marriage and Clara Bell.)

* Balzac wrote: le coupé.  The Countess would have used a grand coupé, with two forward-facing seats inside, and the coachman outside. "Brougham" is anachronistic for 1817, the date of the action. It was a similar but more compact English variant introduced in 1838. 

So Chabert, who has just made the Countess' eyes glow like a tiger's, comes moodily downstairs and falls into precisely the kind of trap that Derville has just predicted. But it feels more like a fairytale rescue; the rustle of a dress, being whisked off in a coach; as if the frightfulness of the last ten years had simply been cancelled. 

It's an incredibly moving scene. Is this a love story? I think what really makes Chabert break down is the recovery of his identity, the fact of his wife acknowledging him, this momentary restoration of his past. 

The emotion is about that, more than his wife herself. Chabert was evidently a devil with the ladies before his disfigurement. Now he loves her (and hates her), but the intensity is because of her prolonged refusal to know him, not because of their shared past. And yet the familiar gesture of her taking his arm begins the triggering of his emotion. Evidently the hot-tempered Chabert was always susceptible to her. Even back then -- given where he picked her up -- he must have known in one corner of his mind that she was acting. He knew it and he didn't mind. 

Is the Countess moved too? That's for each reader to decide. The paragraph beginning "Monsieur" is tricksy. Each time I read it it seems at first to claim an ultimate genuineness in her soul's expression, in defiance of all the contra-indications. The line between performed emotion and real feeling isn't always distinct. She intends to take everything from him, certainly. But obtaining things from him was what he always liked. Maybe this was how she loved him.

And for now the pair are united in reviving the familiar act. It isn't easy. The Countess has to work very hard to put a positive spin on her years of ignoring him. Chabert, likewise, is working hard to keep down his doubts. He wants to inhabit his old identity, so he wants his old illusion.

*

— Allons ! encore notre vieux carrick !

“Hullo! There is that old Box-coat again!”

The clerks identify repeat visitors by some feature of their appearance. 

The carrick, a long coat with cape collars (at least one, often more) originated in Britain as a coat for coachmen, suitable for the wind and weather on the outside of a coach. But it soon became standard outerwear for  gentlemen too, and remained so through much of the nineteenth century. In Britain it was also known as a Garrick or box-coat. 

What attracts the clerks' mockery is not the type of coat but its being so shabby, greasy and frayed. It's evidently second- or third-hand, and hence Godeschal's argument that its wearer must be a porter. 

Raimu as Colonel Chabert wearing the old carrick.

[Image source: https://www.ebay.com/itm/186699059993 . A 1943 Danish movie program. In the 1994 movie Gérard Depardieu wore a long dark coat, but it wasn't a carrick.]

Eylau. 

The scene of Chabert's "death" was a brutal but inconclusive battle against the Russian army, fought on 7-8 February 1807. It came to be seen as a turning point, the end of Napoleon's era of invincibility, presaging the more mixed success and bloodier encounters that would characterize his later campaigns. But one heroic episode stood out amid the depressing slaughter of Eylau; Murat's famous cavalry charge, which rescued the French centre from imminent collapse. In Balzac's story Chabert is instrumental to Murat's triumph.  The "dead" Chabert is thus an undimmed symbol of Napoleon's glory days.  

Man and beast went down together, like a monk cut out of card-paper.

La bête et le cavalier s’étaient donc abattus comme des capucins de cartes.

The monk should be "monks" -- well, actually "friars" --, and even then I needed a bit more explanation. The expression refers to a child's game that involved folding and cutting playing cards so as to produce small figures that resembled robed and hooded capuchins. The figures were then lined up close together so that one fall would trigger a general collapse.

Toppling capuchins

[Image source: this informative article by David Graham Mitchell:

https://davidgrahammitchell.substack.com/p/capucins-de-cartes?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web .]

Chabert. 

He may have been partly suggested by the Général Jean-Joseph Ange d'Hautpoul, who would likely have been appointed a Marshal of France if he had not died at Eylau. 

Balzac’s innovation was to combine this high-status death with the immemorial (and sometimes true) tales of less prestigious soldiers who reappeared years after being supposed dead.

WW1 soldiers who returned after being reported dead: 

https://www-bbc-com.cdn.ampproject.org/v/s/www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-36725501.amp?amp_gsa=1&amp_js_v=a9&usqp=mq331AQIUAKwASCAAgM%3D#amp_tf=From%20%251%24s&aoh=17331339910944&referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com&ampshare=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.bbc.com%2Fnews%2Fuk-england-36725501

Walter Dixon: a real-life Chabert from the Korean War. When he eventually returned after incarceration in a N Korean camp, he found his wife had remarried and had a child. (She and her first husband got divorced.):

https://www.npr.org/2019/07/27/745104831/declared-dead-at-war-he-returned-alive-to-find-his-world-had-moved-on-without-hi

There was also a real Colonel Chabert who served under Napoleon; a colonel in 1809, later a general. But it's only his surname and age that resembles Balzac’s hero.

Biography of Pierre Chabert (1770 - 1839):

https://www.medarus.org/Ardeche/07celebr/07celTex/chabert_pierre.html

In contemporary literature the motif of the lost soldier who comes back had a vigorous existence. Compare Balzac's own Philippe de Sucy in his 1830 story "Adieu". Another military revenant was General d'Archambeau in Éléonore, anecdote de la guerre d’Espagne en 1813, an anonymous novel of 1826 that Balzac had certainly read.

The motif persists in popular fiction today. In a novel I read recently, Klar Himmel by Kristin Fägerskjöld (2020), the wartime colleague that the heroine passionately loved and mourned turns up several years later; in the meantime she's made a sensible if unpassionate marriage and is a mother. She needs to make him accept that their time has irrevocably passed, her commitment is now to her family and excellent husband.

As Kristin Fägerskjöld shows, the wife's dilemma is in many ways the natural centre of interest.  In Balzac's story the colonel is presented as a man of integrity and generous, simple feelings; his wife as coldly unscrupulous. But it wouldn't have taken much to present the story quite differently; to cast the hero as blindly driven by self-importance and by merely legal claims to a position and fortune he was lucky ever to obtain; his wife as someone who is both realistic and selfless, determined to protect her family and marriage from this eruption out of her remote past. 

Groslay.

The Countess' country house is 15km north of Paris.

Mais où allons-nous ? dit le colonel en se voyant à la barrière de La Chapelle.

A former tollgate on the northern edge of Paris (the site is now Place de La Chapelle), on the road to Saint-Denis. 

au dépôt de mendicité de Saint-Denis...

Mendicity means begging. The dépôt was in an old and insalubrious leather factory in Saint-Denis, north of Paris. Inmates had to work for their keep. The death-rate was appalling. As Balzac says, there was no release unless you could prove you had means. 

https://archives.ville-saint-denis.fr/documents-du-mois/document-la-maison-de-repression-ci-devant-depot-de-mendicite-de-saint-denis-50/n:14#:~:text=Un%20%22lieu%20infernal%22%20pour%20r%C3%A9primer%20la%20mendicit%C3%A9&text=Cr%C3%A9%C3%A9e%20suite%20%C3%A0%20un%20arr%C3%AAt,dans%20la%20r%C3%A9gion%20de%20Melun).

Charenton. 

A lunatic asylum in SE Paris. In Le Colonel Chabert it's simply "that terrible name", the threat of confinement that the hero rightly fears. There's no hint in Balzac's story of the enlightened practices introduced at Charenton by the Abbé de Coulmier, e.g. the lenient treatment of the Marquis de Sade. ]

Bicêtre.

Another asylum, on the southern edge of Paris. This one had a mix of inmates, the aged and feeble as well as the insane. 

How Chabert came to Bicêtre is left in the dark. Perhaps he was moved there because he was too feeble to earn his keep at Saint-Denis. 

Alternatively,  perhaps it was connected with Chabert's undisclosed letter. Chabert might have agreed to live permanently as a nameless pauper at Bicêtre if the Countess made the arrangements. Necessarily there would be costs, including the repayment of Derville's advances; the pauper could not be a debtor. On his part Chabert would escape being sent to Saint-Denis because he wouldn't be a vagrant any more. On her part the Countess would feel more secure with Chabert at Bicêtre than simply out of her sight; it would remove the threat that he might one day reappear. Maybe she felt just a trace of compunction, too. 

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Textual history of Le Colonel Chabert

The textual history of Le Colonel Chabert is confusing. The first publication was in 1832 as La transaction.  (The transaction is the out-of-court settlement that Derville tries to arrange; of course neither his draft, not Delbecq's more punitive one, end up being agreed.) 

Then came a substantially revised version, titled La Comtesse à deux maris, in 1835. More revisions occurred in 1839 and 1844, when the story finally appeared under its present title, being placed in Scènes de la vie Parisienne. 

Early versions can be checked here (you need to view it on a laptop, really):

https://variance.unil.ch/honore_de_balzac/le_colonel_chabert/comparaison/1chabert1832-2chabert1835

Balzac wrote a final round of revisions onto his 1844 copy:

https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/%C5%92uvres_compl%C3%A8tes_de_M_de_Balzac_Sc%C3%A8ne/6XgOAQAAIAAJ?gbpv=1

Le Colonel Chabert was moved to Scènes de la vie privèe in 1845. 

French text (without Balzac's final revisions):

https://fr.m.wikisource.org/wiki/Le_Colonel_Chabert

French text (with Balzac's final revisions):

https://www.lire-des-livres.com/le-colonel-chabert/

English translation by Ellen Marriage and Clara Bell:

https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/1954/pg1954-images.html

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The Conclusion.

The concluding scene went through significant changes. 

In 1832, the scene is described as taking place in 1830. Derville's companion is the narrator himself. (So the scene is narrated in the first person.)

In 1835, 1839, and 1844 the scene is described as taking place in 1832. Derville's companion is an unnamed young lawyer who has taken over Derville's practice. (Derville's powerful closing reflections were added in 1835.)

In his final round of revisions Balzac pushed the date back again, this time to 1840. Derville's companion and the inheritor of his practice is now named as Godeschal. (Balzac adds Godeschal's final remark, about Desroches' office.)

I suppose the reason for these changes was to fit in better with other parts of the Comédie Humaine, actual or projected. But making Godeschal the companion wasn't an entirely happy idea. This Godeschal appears to have no knowledge of Chabert's story, though in the earlier scenes he had been closely involved. Likewise his remark about the Countess de Ferraud -- "agreeable, but rather too pious" -- sounds like a young man (such as the companion in previous versions) who has only known the Countess in her later years. But Godeschal wouldn't be a young man at this date, and we know he had seen the Countess in her prime.

*

This is the copy I read, found at a motorway services in France. I left it behind in Spain, and can't remember if there was any information about the jacket illustration, in which the Countess prepares for battle. 

*

One of my long-time blogging heroes, Guy Savage, writes about Le Colonel Chabert:

https://swiftlytiltingplanet.wordpress.com/2012/11/21/balzac-nailed-it/

*

My posts about Balzac:

Sarrasine (1830):

https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2012/01/libravoxcom.html

Le Colonel Chabert / Colonel Chabert (1832):

https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2024/12/honore-de-balzac-le-colonel-chabert.html

"Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu" / "The Unknown Masterpiece" (1832), "Les Marana" / "The Maranas" (1832), "Un drame au bord de la mer"  /  "A Seashore Drama"  (1834), "L'Auberge rouge" / "The Red Inn"  (1831), "Maître Cornélius" / "Master Cornelius"  (1831):

https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2019/03/minor-balzac.html

Le Curé de Tours / The Abbé Birotteau (1832), L’Envers de l’Histoire Contemporaine / The Seamy Side of History (1842-1847), Histoire de la Grandeur et de la Décadence de César Birotteau / The Rise and Fall of César Birotteau (1837), La Marâtre / The Stepmother (1848):

https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2015/03/honore-de-balzac-1799-1850.html

The Lily of the Valley (1835):

https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2020/03/honore-de-balzac-lily-of-valley-1835.html

Mémoires de deux jeunes mariées / Letters of Two Young Married Women (1842):

https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2012/02/memoires-de-deux-jeunes-mariees.html

Le Cousin Pons / Cousin Pons (1847):

https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2016/04/honore-de-balzac-le-cousin-pons-1847.html

et maintenant

Well, we're back. Almost a quotation of Sam Gamgee at the very end of The Lord of the Rings.... the best line of the whole book, in some ways. 

We're back, still conversing in franglais. We stayed overnight at Cobham services on the M25... extortionate even by English standards, but a good peaceful night, well away from the freezer lorries. 

In the afternoon we crossed Calais to Dover in the remnants of storm Bertie. A strong south-westerly, the captain called it. The waves were lively but these enormous modern ferries are massively stable; no need for the "hygiene bag" supplied at table, nor for the cocktail of Kwells and Sea-legs that used to knock us out in my youthful days when there were still ferries to Gothenberg.

Waiting outside Port of Dover, a wonderful mix of seabirds flying around the ship. Crookwinged gannets soaring and diving. Little black whizzers and terns and gulls of every size... I used to think I could name gulls, but every time I look them up there seem to be more species, so I've given up.

A gannet

It was blowy on the Côte d'Opale. When I opened my door at Aire de l'épitre, the wind snatched it and nearly ripped it off its hinges. Memo: in these conditions, you should wind down the window first!

Before that, we stopped at Aire de la Baie de Somme, but the power kept going on and off. Card payments stopped working and the tea was scarcely warm. However, I did manage to buy a French translation of one of Viveca Sten's Jämtland whodunits.... a final and particularly pointless indulgence, because my Swedish needs more practice than my French. 

*

It was difficult getting into France, because of the flag-bedecked tractors protesting the Mercosur deal. We were already in a hurry, having dawdled up the Mediterranean coast enjoying the late sun. Blocked off, we headed back down past Barcelona,  thinking to cut across to the west via Zaragoza, but after spending the night below the steep slopes of Montserrat at El Bruc we learnt that the protest was over, so we went back to La Jonquera and this time we sailed through. Laura's brother whatsapped us a YouTube of Homeward Bound, a song that rang through my head for the rest of the journey. 

Aire de Fitou

We missed our usual walk at Aire de Salses but we stopped at Aire de Fitou instead, for a last view of the hazily sunny Mediterranean, here bordered with reedy marshes.

Voyez Près des étangs Ces grands roseaux mouillés...

We swung inland and it started to rain. We made it past Toulouse as darkness fell, stopped overnight at Frontonnais.

Beautiful clear weather the next day, but we pushed on, with little stops at Graves, St Leger, Fenioux. (Fenioux has a wonderful walk through chestnut woods to the village and chandelle des morts, but now wasn't the time.)

We were buying family gifts in the services: patés, soft toys, mustards, saucers. Somewhere I found myself another book, by Marie-Paul Armand, novelist of Normandy life.

Meanwhile the temperature dropped sharply. Poitiers-Chincé was our coldest night in the van; but the services building, reduced overnight to an angular corridor, was delightfully warm.

The next day we began to see snow patches north of Tours. Stopped at Sarthe-Touraine and again at Sarthe-Sargé-Le-Mans for lunch. Andouillette de Vouvray not being available,  we both stuck to assiettes de legumes. 

More snow lying on the fields. Aire de Haras was at its bleakest, empty and the drinks were almost cold.

Every day's an endless stream / of cigarettes and magazines ...

Through the hundreds of miles we played the bridge game. At least, Laure did. The rules are simpler than the other kind of bridge game. You spot a bridge ... either one above the road, or below it, and you shout BRIDGE!! in the shrillest and most grating way possible. I did well, but cannot pretend it was a close contest. 

We reached Rouen as darkness fell and I made a mess of getting across it, ending up on the wrong road. Laure got me back on track, but we were tired and stopped at Bosc-Mesnil, though currently it's just portacabins and huge piles of rubble. At least the portacabins were warm, and there was reliable hot water all night. 

You know the rest. So that was our quick crossing of France. I loved every minute. 

Mediterranean November

 

Torrenostra

Dead Aleppo Pines

Lots of dead Aleppo Pines in 2024. This photo is from Sagunto, near Valencia.

Swathes of this white member of the cabbage family across the Valencian plains.

Another plant in the cabbage family, not much smaller overall but with relatively tiny yellow flowers.

On the same theme, the large leaves and small flowers of Mediterranean Stork's-bill, Erodium malacoides. 

A mud cliff at Villajoyosa. We saw a pair of Black Wheatears here (Oenanthe leucura).

Peter Jones' fascinating article about them:

https://www.andaluciabirdsociety.org/article-library/the-black-wheatear-oenanthe-leucura-leucura/

We're a bit later in the Med than usual. So I never caught the dramatic blooming of Cape Honeysuckle before. 

Books I read or acquired during our trip. Most of them I've only dipped into.

Contes per a tot l'any is a Catalan children's book (Stories for all the year round). The only thing I've taken in is the intriguing way of differentiating certain double-L type words, e.g. il·lustració, col·lecció ...

I had to download the Catalan keyboard to my phone to type that. 

I did read Balzac’s great novella Le Colonel Chabert in its original language; generally his French is too difficult for me. 

But I came across Stendhal's short stories in Spanish translation. This was on top of a hill on the edge of Aranjuez. 

Also in Spanish, the 1950 noir thriller Portrait in Smoke by the US author Bill S. Ballinger. I have the impression he's now better known here than in the English-speaking world. At any rate, his Spanish Wikipedia entry is much more detailed. 

Largo do Espírito Santo

 

Largo do Espírito Santo 

I.e. The Square of the Holy Spirit. 

A cobbled plaza above the bullring, containing the small Capela do Espírito Santo and a large nettle tree.

The Capela

Capela do Espírito Santo

Nearby waterfall

Eight vultures

Millipede

Southern Nettle Tree 

Bullring

Inscriptions from Egitânia

All through England, France, Spain, and even here, the Conyza fleabanes are now one of the most familiar sights of the autumn. There are several species, not very easy to tell apart. They are native to the Americas, but Conyza canadensis was being noticed in England as far back as the late 17th century.   

Largo do Espírito Santo 

Southern Nettle Tree 

Quatuor

'Kwatt-oo-or

'Kwatch-or

'Kwatt-roar

Those are three ways that you can -- very approximately  -- pronounce "quatuor", which is the French for quartet.

(String quartet = quatuor à cordes)

I never knew before that there are exceptions to the rule that French "qu" is pronounced like k. 

I should have known, because of "aquarelle". Usually these "kw" exceptions are in borrowed words (e.g. quatuor from Latin) and usually they come before the letter a.

A quintet in French is "quintette" and this exemplifies another unusual pronunciation of "qu", though not by all French speakers. Some pronounce it koo-ang-'tett, though many just say kang-'tett. 

In English, too, quartet and quintet demonstrate two different ways of pronouncing "qu" : at least for me and everyone I know. We pronounce quartet kor-'tet, but Google Translate gives the pronunciation kwor-'tet.

"Quartet" derives from an older French word "quartette", ultimately from Italian "quartetto". The oldest English uses seem to be in the context of vocal pieces, e.g in operas. 

feet up on the picture thinking homemaker

Reconstruction of Etemenanki ziggurat, Babylon.

[Image source: Wikipedia  . Created by Jona Lendering after Hansjörg Schmid.]

actually cramped in standardized          firm

quarters

draped asbestos ranked statuesque 

in situ 

its figurate living mind whose nature   feet

strolls

within the floor area the budget will 

afford 

pace Mayakovsky’s pacing breath         then

stretcher

atop a concrete slab laid upon 

minimalists 

whose song of the box or cupboard      slippery

draw 

drives a coach and fiat through the 

whole 

will to reside in architectonic                 tops

vocabularies 

no bulky buffet arrangement 

needed here

later deployed in low brow                     nature

configurations 

all hail Ikea and the stripped soul 

flooring 

the cause economy in light brown        makes

parquet 

strung out vacantly over gypsum 

lego sets 

till vermiculite sheathing holds             no

each whole 

of resin-bonded wood chips in 

rigid ranch 

the blue-collar coffee set dreaming      bounds

a buck 

this is plywood world on the verge 

of mdf 

a legacy of military design in every      etc.

trainer 

slash freedom’s no blank indeter-

minateness 

how goes it bonnie maid versatile         trenches

linoleum 

under which circumstances a dou-

ble want 

as a counter-poise to the absolute         puckered

standing 

partly too for something fixed and 

secure 

feet up on the picture thinking              lips

homemaker 

while glamour steals a march on 

the bath 

before sitting pretty up on execu-         in

tive foam 

every picture window brought to 

you by 

technology sanctified in modernist      furrows

points 

yonder the hum of happy wreck-

ing crews

and the inherent problems of an-         faces
gular form 

giving way to the revenue view or 

upkeep 

left to run from elegance to stark         come

brutalism 

hey you stop roaming in empty 

abstraction 

keep your eyes open for lay                  physic

Althusserians 

then there’s the horizontal cadence 

calling

I've been reading Drew Milne's Blueprints & Ziggurats, which is one of the two long sequences that were published for the first time in In Darkest Capital: The Collected Poems of Drew Milne (Carcanet, 2017).

The whole sequence, as you may have surmised, is preoccupied with architecture, design and construction. Perhaps we could be more specific and say it's about the human players; the architects, the bankers, the builders, the dwellers and everyone else who's impacted by what's built or (often) not built. 

Though (mindful of Althusser) I could be placing too much emphasis on individuals and not enough on social structures. But when I think of the robustly demotic vein in Milne's poetry, I feel I'm right. 

Near the start we have the spectacle of the superannuated Frank Lloyd Wright, when invited by the oil-rich King Faisal II to make proposals for developing a westernized Baghdad in the 1950s, suggesting a grandiose scheme for an opera house that would be topped off with sculptures of a heritage camel and Aladdin's lamp. (The scheme foundered when Faisal and his family were killed in the revolution of 1958.) It was a story that had lost none of its grotesque eloquence at the time Milne was writing the poem and Baghdad was being patrolled by US tanks.

My extract comes from a section titled "The bruise that Heidegger built". This may just possibly be in highly critical dialogue with Heidegger's paper "Building Dwelling Thinking" (1951) [PDF], though I say this with an uneasy feeling of either being stupid or stating the obvious. 

But having gone this far I may as well venture another guess, that "hey you" refers to Althusser's concept of interpellation, i.e. how social structures persuade people to self-identify as subjects (which he illustrated by the way someone feels they have to turn round when a policeman calls "Hey, you there!").

Embrasures:

Embrasures at Keoti Fort, India.

[Image source: Wikipedia . Photograph by Timothy A. Gonsalves.]

            here an almshouse there 

            a palladian disability unit 

            baldachino for ciborium 

            and embrasures of within 

angular                                          lean to 

capital                                            roofing 

bloods                    care                  single 

capital                    shed                 roofing 

block                       tree                  screen 

capital                    folly                 framed 

cushion                                          rip offs 

capital                                            scallop 

             old style scandal mews 

             in debt to public private 

             injection traceries swag 

             now a pension torus in 

             wall to wall vernaculars

(from "Embrasures")

City of dogs:

Temple of the Feathered Serpent, Teotihuacán. 

[Image source: Wikipedia  .]

The poem "City of dogs" is available online, here:

https://blackboxmanifold.sites.sheffield.ac.uk/issues/issues-1-10/issue-2/drew-milne

It's all about Teotihuacán, the ancient meso-American pyramids and temples near Mexico City.

In the post below 'Laura' visits the site, and talks about the "city of dogs" aspect:

https://funlifecrisis.com/visiting-teotihuacan-pyramids-in-mexico-city/

Skylon song:

The Skylon was a vertical cigar-shaped steel tensegrity structure that appeared to stand in mid-air, created for the Festival of Britain, 1951.

The Skylon illuminated at night.

[Image source: Wikipedia  . Photograph by Bernard William Lee, 1951.]

                   o  

                 sky 

                song 

              skylon

            half way 

           house and    

         paths lost but 

        summit meagre 

      brick charred ruin 

     burning burning so 

     still the none comes 

   and portals to watery 

   beds how sweet flows 

   concrete steel a thread 

   its once and future city 

  shows this slender cigar 

  steel that floats and flags 

 bonfire of the modernists 

 how each visible support 

  does a lash propaganda 

 sleek symmetry as cakes 

 for the millions who saw 

  who came who felt a sky 

  high into vertical breeze 

  to scrap of ashtrays and 

  satellite dishes air spear 

  here over the whimsy of 

  fabric and braced bulbs 

 their aluminium lattice of 

  something darkly atomic 

  who gave us the housing 

 scheme as advertisement 

 such as its fallen to furies

(Opening lines of "Skylon song")

Starter kit for Turgenev's A Sportsman's Sketches

Sometimes we just start again. It's 45 years since I've read anything by Turgenev. But there we are, A Sportsman's Sketches is on Gutenberg in Constance Garnett's 1895 translation, which is divided into two volumes.

Volume 1:

https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/8597/pg8597-images.html

Volume 2:

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/8744/8744-h/8744-h.htm

Here's the Russian text: 

https://ru.m.wikisource.org/wiki/%D0%97%D0%B0%D0%BF%D0%B8%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%B8_%D0%BE%D1%85%D0%BE%D1%82%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%BA%D0%B0_(%D0%A2%D1%83%D1%80%D0%B3%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%B5%D0%B2)

Our extract begins with the sportsman and his companions up to their necks in water, after the sinking of Sutchok's punt.

'I will go and find the ford,' continued Yermolaï, as though there must infallibly be a ford in every pond: he took the pole from Sutchok, and went off in the direction of the bank, warily sounding the depth as he walked.

'Can you swim?' I asked him.

'No, I can't,' his voice sounded from behind the reeds.

'Then he'll be drowned,' remarked Sutchok indifferently. He had been terrified at first, not by the danger, but through fear of our anger, and now, completely reassured, he drew a long breath from time to time, and seemed not to be aware of any necessity for moving from his present position.

'And he will perish without doing any good,' added Vladimir piteously.

Yermolaï did not return for more than an hour. That hour seemed an eternity to us. At first we kept calling to him very energetically; then his answering shouts grew less frequent; at last he was completely silent. The bells in the village began ringing for evening service. There was not much conversation between us; indeed, we tried not to look at one another. The ducks hovered over our heads; some seemed disposed to settle near us, but suddenly rose up into the air and flew away quacking. We began to grow numb. Sutchok shut his eyes as though he were disposing himself to sleep.

At last, to our indescribable delight, Yermolaï returned.

'Well?'

'I have been to the bank; I have found the ford…. Let us go.'

We wanted to set off at once; but he first brought some string out of his pocket out of the water, tied the slaughtered ducks together by their legs, took both ends in his teeth, and moved slowly forward; Vladimir came behind him, and I behind Vladimir, and Sutchok brought up the rear. It was about two hundred paces to the bank. Yermolaï walked boldly and without stopping (so well had he noted the track), only occasionally crying out: 'More to the left—there's a hole here to the right!' or 'Keep to the right—you'll sink in there to the left….' Sometimes the water was up to our necks, and twice poor Sutchok, who was shorter than all the rest of us, got a mouthful and spluttered. 'Come, come, come!' Yermolaï shouted roughly to him—and Sutchok, scrambling, hopping and skipping, managed to reach a shallower place, but even in his greatest extremity was never so bold as to clutch at the skirt of my coat. Worn out, muddy and wet, we at last reached the bank.

Two hours later we were all sitting, as dry as circumstances would allow, in a large hay barn, preparing for supper. The coachman Yehudiil, an exceedingly deliberate man, heavy in gait, cautious and sleepy, stood at the entrance, zealously plying Sutchok with snuff (I have noticed that coachmen in Russia very quickly make friends); Sutchok was taking snuff with frenzied energy, in quantities to make him ill; he was spitting, sneezing, and apparently enjoying himself greatly. Vladimir had assumed an air of languor; he leaned his head on one side, and spoke little. Yermolaï was cleaning our guns. The dogs were wagging their tails at a great rate in the expectation of porridge; the horses were stamping and neighing in the out-house…. The sun had set; its last rays were broken up into broad tracts of purple; golden clouds were drawn out over the heavens into finer and ever finer threads, like a fleece washed and combed out. … There was the sound of singing in the village.

(End of #7 (Lgov))

Illustration for "Lgov" by Pyotr Sokolov

[Image source: Wikipedia  .]

*

1. Hor and Kalinitch 

2. Yermolaï and the Miller's Wife 

3. Raspberry Spring 

4. The District Doctor 

5. My Neighbour Radilov 

6. The Peasant Proprietor Ovsyanikov 

7. Lgov 

8. Byezhin Prairie 

9. Kassyan of Fair Springs 

10. The Agent 

11. The Counting-House

12. Biryuk

13. Two Country Gentlemen 

14. Lebedyan

15. Tatyana Borissovna and her Nephew
16. Death
17. The Singers
18. Piotr Petrovich Karataev
19. The Tryst 
20. The Hamlet of the Shtchigri District
21. Tchertop-Hanov and Nedopyuskin 
22. The End of Tchertop-Hanov 
23. A Living Relic 
24. The Rattling of Wheels 
25. Epilogue: The Forest and the Steppe 

A Sportsman's Sketches was published in 1852, collecting 22 pieces that had nearly all been published in Nekrasov's magazine Sovremennik (The Contemporary) during the previous five years. 

[The only exception, I think, was "Two country gentlemen", written (like much of the collection) in 1847 but not published until now. Possibly the ending was too nakedly political for the magazine editors.]

In this 1852 version, the contents consisted of #1 - #21 and #25.

Twenty years later, Turgenev wrote and added three more pieces:

#22  The End of Tchertop-hanov (1872)

#23  A Living Relic (1874)

#24  The Rattling of Wheels (1874)

Trying to work all this out!

*

I thought my reading choice would be tasteful but light entertainment but of course that's wrong. Under the hood the sportsman's sketches are a devastating portrait of rural Russia during the serfdom era. Both the terrible ill-treatment of the peasants, and the corrupting effect on the landowners' outlook, are unsparingly portrayed. (This most toxic and dehumanizing phase of Russian serfdom was a relatively recent development; since the early 18th century really. Like chattel slavery in America it had attained a new level of ruthlessness.)

If Turgenev's book really contributed to the Czar's decision to abolish serfdom in 1861, then it's one of the most historically significant of literary fictions. Though there were other causes (e.g. Russia's ignominious defeat in the Crimean war.) And reform was in the air: Russia was backward, it was falling behind.... Besides, plenty of other Russian authors were idealizing the Russian peasant. Indeed Turgenev rather stands out for his restraint, his melancholy realism, his sense of limits. His sportsman may have access to the life of the country like no-one else of his class, but he's still an outsider. 

Anyway the czar left it to the landowners to organize abolition. They kept the best two thirds of the land, the ex-serfs had the worst third. The landowners were compensated, the ex-serfs had to pay. Since the ex-serfs had no money, their payment was in labour. So the best land still got worked for the landowner, while the wretched land from which the peasants were supposed to draw a subsistence lay neglected. In many ways their lives got even harder.

*

I've been looking up some basic information to assist my reading. I'll share my "research" (i.e. web searches) though I don't suppose it'll be much use to anyone else. In my youth I read thousands of pages of 19th-century Russian literature without ever bothering to understand these things, but now I want to.

Kvas, kvass:

Popular beverage in the rye belt of Russia and Eastern Europe. The main ingredient is rye; it is top-fermented but has little alcohol (<1.5%) or even none. Comparable to Sweden's once-popular svagdricka (weak drink), which my great-grandfather Karl used to haul up and down the Baltic coast.

Preference: 

A card game, mentioned frequently.  Still played in Russia, but the height of its popularity was in the 1850s. A three-player game with contracts and tricks. Uses a piquet pack (32 cards). Reminds me of solo whist, but more complicated. Also played in other variants across Eastern Europe. The Swedish version was called Priffe.

Wormwood:

In his nature descriptions Turgenev often mentions it as an aromatic wild plant. Wormwood is Artemisia absinthium. Probably that's what Turgenev was talking about, but I wondered momentarily if he might have meant Artemisia vulgaris (Mugwort), another fragrant plant. (You may have heard that "Chernobyl" means mugwort in Ukrainian.) This thought may have been prompted by mugwort being much more common than wormwood in southern England!

Verst:

A verst is basically a kilometer (1.0668kms, to be precise). Constance Garnett translates verst as mile, which is not very accurate. 

Broken-winded (horse):

A horse condition aka recurrent airway obstruction, characterized by increased effort to breathe. Comparable to human COPD, it is an allergic reaction. Typically caused by dust or mould spores and associated with horses fed on hay or bedded on straw (though as with other allergic reactions it only affects certain individuals). Limits a horse's ability to work.

Little Russia, Great Russia:

Commonplace terms in the 19th century, but less so since 1917.

The former term refers, broadly, to Ukraine. The latter term refers, broadly, to what we now call Russia. Another term was "White Russia", referring to Belarus. 

For Turgenev, growing up in and writing about the Oryol region, south-west of Moscow and not far from Ukraine, these were useful everyday terms. 

Today "Little Russia" is a controversial term likely to cause offense. 

The steppes:

The Eurasian or Great Steppe is a more or less uninterrupted band of semi-arid grassland stretching all the way from Hungary to Manchuria. The segment relevant to Turgenev's book is known as the Western Steppe.

The steppe region in its strict sense supports scrub but not the formation of forests, due to insufficient moisture. 

Today almost all of the Western Steppe is under the plough, and is used to grow arable crops. The most dramatic expansion of agriculture was in the 1950s. There are only a few scattered reserves of "virgin steppe".

This is the distant country mentioned by Kassyan: "And beyond Kursk come the steppes, that steppes-country: ah, what a marvel, what a delight for man! what freedom, what a blessing of God!" (#9 Kassyan of Fair Springs).

The book's locations, typically in the countryside around Oryol and Tula, lie well to the north of the Western Steppe. They are in an intermediate region that geographers  sometimes call forest-steppe, where steppe grassland is interspersed with e.g. oak-wood. So Turgenev usually uses the term "steppe" to mean grassland in contrast to forest (e.g. #25 Epilogue: The Forest and the Steppe). He describes Lgov (#7) as a steppe village, though it's on a swampy river. The steppe village of #17 (The Singers) is an upland village, though it's only three miles from the narrator's home. 

[Contrary to Wikipedia, Turgenev's Lgov is clearly not based on the cathedral town on the river Seym west of Kursk. Other placenames in the story (Bolhov, Karatchev) suggest that he was thinking of the village called Lgov in western Oryol Oblast. But even so, Turgenev only borrowed the name; the topographical details don't match up. His book's villages and estates aren't intended to be precisely identifiable, as is normal in fiction.]

Nightingales:

Commonly mentioned in the nature descriptions. We also learn that people liked to keep them in cages, and hence it was possible to make a precarious living by catching them. 

The nightingales of Kursk were proverbially the best singers. Hence "piping like a Kursk nightingale". [Nadezhda Plevitskaya, the opera singer and Cheka spy, was nicknamed the Kursk Nightingale.]

Picture to yourselves, gentle readers, a stout, tall man of seventy, with a face reminding one somewhat of the face of Kriloff, clear and intelligent eyes under overhanging brows, dignified in bearing, slow in speech, and deliberate in movement: there you have Ovsyanikov. (#6 The Peasant Proprietor Ovsyanikov):

The reference is to Ivan Andreyevitch Krylov (1769 - 1844), whose fables (1809 - 1836) made him famous throughout Russia. He had a reputation for indolence as well as wisdom. He was also fierce against modern fashions and strongly attached to old Russian ways; the sportsman mistakenly assumes that Ovsyanikov will be like that too. 

Ivan Krylov, 1839 portrait by Karl Briullov

[Image source: Wikipedia.]

You can read Krylov's fables here (in W. R.S. Ralston's prose translation):

http://www.pierssen.com/cfile/kahf.html#f049

I had once had a brother knocking about, with the English disease in his neck, but he soon died . . . (#20, The Hamlet of the Shtchigri District):

The "English disease" is rickets. Daniel Whistler, the first physician to describe it, found it invariably fatal in infancy, and often fatal later. "When the neck can scarcely support the head they seldom survive" (see https://www.jstor.org/stable/24619850 .)

Illustration for #18 (Piotr Petrovich Karataev) by Pyotr Sokolov

[Image source: Wikimedia Commons .]

*

A Sportsman's Sketches feels like quite a seminal book in Russian literature but of course it isn't that simple. The book was published in 1852, though many would have read individual stories in magazines from 1847 onwards. 

Anyway, what books had Russian readers already read? Here's some notable predecessors:

Pushkin, Eugene Onegin (1830)

Gogol, Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka (1832)

Pushkin, The Queen of Spades (1834)

Gogol, Taras Bulba (1835)

Pushkin, The Captain's Daughter (1836)

Lermontov, A Hero Of Our Time (1840)

Gogol, Dead Souls (1842)

Dostoevsky, Poor Folk (1846)

Dostoevsky,  The Double (1846)

Goncharov, The Same Old Story (1847)

Dostoevsky, Netochka Nezvanova first part (1849)

(Tolstoy was ten years younger than Turgenev. His first notable publication, Childhood, was published in The Contemporary in November 1852.)

*

Записки охотника

Zapiski Okhotnika ... : that's the title in Russian. It means Notes of a hunter, or A hunter's notes. "Zapiski" (= notes) is exactly the same word as in Dostoevsky's title Notes from Underground.

Constance Garnett gave the title as A Sportsman's Sketches. More recently it has even been rendered as Sketches from a Hunter's Album. As far as I can see this idea of sketches is an invention of the English translators. "Zapiski" means notes, e.g. short letters, or memoirs, but there's no pictorial connotation. (In French the book is known as Mémoires d'un chasseur.)

I wouldn't wish away any part of A Sportsman's Sketches, but I'm surely not alone in finding it quite an uneven reading experience. #2 (Yermolaï and the Miller's Wife) seems to me just a perfect short story; not a word wasted and everything contributing to its stunning impact. But what about #6 (The Peasant Proprietor Ovsyanikov)? It certainly packs a punch too: the tale about the narrator's own grandfather is one of the book's unforgettable pages. But after that the story seems to become an elongated ramble, moving on to other landowners of the past, landowners of the present, the activism of Osvyanikov's son ... the names of people we'll never hear of again pass back and forth, our attention wanders. Most inconsequently of all, the medley ends with the shoehorned story of Frantz Ivanitch Lejeune, a French drummer boy left behind by Napoleon who escaped drowning and ascended to the Russian nobility. Turgenev's mock-apology to the reader seems to acknowledge that he's pushed it a bit. 

This accommodating quality of the fictional memoirs is clearly important. We're invited to picture our sportsman spontaneously writing his unfiltered notes -- things he's heard or seen -- without troubling to decide what interest they may or may not have.

So even in #7 (Lgov), another perfectly concentrated story (and with something tragic at its heart, for all its comedy) -- even here, we find the sportsman taking the trouble to note down the details of the inscription about the Vicomte de Blanchy in the churchyard.

So Turgenev plays off the expectation of everything being relevant (e.g. in a literary work such as a short story) against his fictional setting of a sportsman jotting down random notes.

In #8 (Byezhin Prairie) our sportsman pretends to be asleep -- a common motif -- while he listens in to the chatter of the peasant boys. It's realism ... just such spooky tales as boys would recount during a night in the wilds; their way of talking and limited vocabulary, the resort to physical gestures, the boys wandering off the point and forgetting to finish the tale they began... But behind the ramble readers can find a deeper unity if they want to, faintly preluded by the lost sportsman nearly stepping off a precipice; the boys' trying to make sense of their difficult, chancy peasant existences, in which death and catastrophe are never far off; both mocking and supportive of each other, both afraid and brave, both innocent and too experienced. 

*

Ratik Asokan's introduction:

https://4columns.org/asokan-ratik/a-sportsmans-notebook