Gogol's Taras Bulba

 

Jacket of the 1962 Lancer Books edition of Taras Bulba, translated by Bernard Farbar.

To each of Bulba's sons the esauls brought their old mother's blessing and a cypress icon from the Mezhigorsk Monastery in Kiev. Both brothers hung the holy images round their necks, and despite themselves grew pensive at the thought of their old mother. What did her blessing mean, what did it forebode? Was it a blessing for their victory over the enemy, and then for a happy return to the land of their fathers, with booty and glory, ever to be sung by the bandura-players? Or was it . . .? But the future is unknown, and it stands before man like the autumn mist that rises over the marsh; birds fly blindly up and down in it, flapping their wings and never seeing each other -- the hawk seeing not the dove, nor the dove the hawk -- and none ever knowing how far he may be flying from his death . . .

Ostap had long since returned to his duties and gone to the kurens. But Andrei, though he knew not why, felt a stifling weight at his heart. Already the Cossacks had finished their supper; evening had long since faded; the beautiful July night had filled the air; still he did not go to the kurens, nor lie down to sleep, captivated by the picture before him. Numberless stars twinkled, clear-cut and sharp, in the sky. The field was strewn far and wide with wagons, loaded with various goods and provisions captured from the enemy, with dripping tar-buckets hanging under them. All about the wagons Zaporozhians were to be seen, sprawling on the grass. They slept in peculiar positions, their heads resting on a sack, or a cap, or simply on a comrade's side. Sword, pistol, short-stemmed pipe with brass mountings, wire brushes and flint-box were inseparable from every Cossack. The heavy bullocks lay like huge whitish masses, their feet turned under them, resembling grey boulders scattered on the slopes of the field. On all sides the sonorous snoring of the sleeping host had already begun to arise, and was answered from the field by the ringing neigh of the stallions, indignant at having their feet hobbled. Meanwhile the beauty of the July night had acquired a magnificent and awesome quality. It was the glare of the neighbouring districts which had not yet burned to the ground. In one place the flame spread slowly and majestically over the heaven; in another, meeting with something inflammable and bursting into a whirlwind, it hissed and flew upwards to the very stars, and its severed tongues died in the highest regions of the sky. Here stood the charred, black monastery, like a stern Carthusian monk, displaying its gloomy grandeur at every new outburst of flame; there blazed the monastery garden. One could almost hear the trees hissing as they were wrapped up in smoke; and as the fire broke through, it suddenly lighted up clusters of ripe plums with a hot, phosphorescent, violet gleam or turned the yellow pears here and there to pure gold; and in the midst of all this, hanging against the wall of the building or from a bough, would be seen the black figure of some poor Jew or monk whom the fire was devouring together with the building. Birds, hovering far away above the conflagration, looked like a mass of tiny black crosses upon a fiery field. The beleaguered town seemed to be slumbering. Its spires, roofs, stockade, and walls flickered quietly in the glare of the distant conflagrations. 

(from Taras Bulba (1842 version), Ch 5, in Bernard Farbar's translation.)

It's a brilliant passage in a book with many. The description of this July night begins as pure calm pastoral, for instance the "huge whitish masses" of the bullocks. And then, without denying that, the passage develops dramatically, revealing the cossack forces as surrounded by the horrors they themselves have brought to a foreign country (Poland): corpses hanging from trees, fired buildings, a town being starved into submission. 

So, trenchantly as he expresses it, I can't accept that Simon Karlinsky describes Taras Bulba adequately when he calls it (truly) "one of the most ultra-nationalistic works works in all literature" and notes (truly, and with specific reference to the expanded 1842 version) that "Russian governments -- from that of Nicholas I to the present-day Soviet one -- value it for its insistence on the eternal unity of the Russian and Ukrainian people under Russian rule and its implicit opposition to any Ukrainian separatist tendencies" (The Sexual Labyrinth of Nikolai Gogol (1976), p. 77). The author, a Ukrainian writing in Russian, had certainly, by 1842, embraced a Slavophile agenda, though there might have been some political pressure too. But the 1842 version's "Russian" (i.e. soul, character, etc) allows more than one interpretation, because the term "Little Russia" was used in Gogol's time to mean central Ukraine, the historical area of the Cossack Hetmanate. 

As Taras Bulba developed from its embryonic 1835 version, Gogol increasingly cast it in a Homeric mode. Taras Bulba and his comrades are indeed heroes, but only in the same way that Achilles or Odysseus or Agamemnon are heroes: that is, formally. The Greek heroes were magnificent but they were not role models, they were really as appalling as they were magnificent. That's not a particularly modern view: Euripides would certainly have agreed, Plato said it outright. Gogol's story is quite open about e.g. Taras Bulba seeking a pretext to make war on the basis of little more than tittle-tattle, greed and lust for violence. This hero doesn't so much have values and integrity as prejudices and ingrained habits. 

And so I want to say that Taras Bulba is also deeply anti-nationalist. It's a hymn of Slavophile ideals but also an exposure of their rotten foundations. And since that insight applies to all other nationalisms and patriotisms too, it has an international dimension. 

*

I wasn't going to write about Taras Bulba: I've got a house move looming and was hoping to quickly read it and fling it into the clearance pile. What changed my mind was discovering that the Scott influence I'd vaguely hypothesised while reading had some real substance to it. Scott was, apparently, Gogol's favourite foreign author (I learned this from Gary Rosenshield's essay, referenced below). 

Of course, that hypothesis was scarcely very bold. Any historical fiction from the 1830s is probably going to have some sort of Scott connection, unless it comes from wholly outside the European tradition. 

Still, the Scott influence is quite deeply submerged in Taras Bulba. Its surface is a "miscellany of styles" (David Bentley Hart) among which Homeric epic, zany comic exaggeration and Ukrainian folktale are some of the more prominent. (I ought to say that the brilliant passage I quoted at the head of the post is by no means typical of the novel as a whole, except in demonstrating the breadth of Gogol's resources; here the story is momentarily filtered through Andrei's lyrical and reflective temperament.)

But none of its styles is like Scott. Nevertheless the influence is there, as Gary Rosenshield demonstrates, specifically comparing (and contrasting) the handling of Jewish characters in Ivanhoe. One could go further, for instance in noticing Scott's way of celebrating a somewhat mythologized historical past while also criticizing it by balancing it against other cultural perspectives. Taras Bulba's two sons, for example, fresh from the Kiev seminary, bring something of an outsider's perspective to our view of an older Cossack culture, an idea very familiar from Waverley and its successors. Further still, the scene in Ch 7 where Yankel tells Taras Bulba about Andrei's betrayal while affecting to be quite unaware of his listener's discomfiture, adopts a very characteristic situation in Scott's novels, though without the same context of a settled society. It's still comedy, but it isn't social comedy. 

Or consider how Scott always looks away discreetly from the details of bloodshed and atrocity (even in The Legend of Montrose, closest in time to the historical events of Taras Bulba, and most clearly focussed on the grim realities of war). Superficially, Gogol's practice is in total contrast to Scott's: streams of blood flow during its Homeric combats, savagery abounds. But the explicitness is a little illusory because it's intentionally not very realistic, and the reader is supposed to understand that. For all its invocation of epic and folktale, this is distinctly a modern (nineteenth-century) creation with a conscious distance from the events and cultures it portrays. Gogol's novel is very different from Scott's, but his conception of historical fiction does owe something to his predecessor. 

*

"Short-stemmed pipe with brass mountings.. "

Gogol often mentions the Cossacks' passion for pipe-smoking, and you might wonder, as I did, whether they were already smoking tobacco in early 17th-century Ukraine. Well, I found an informative reply here: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/apuvib/what_would_an_average_zaphorozian_cossack_put_in/

The answer is yes. Tobacco was introduced via Spain (c. 1500) to Ottoman culture, and before 1600 the Ottomans were already cultivating it in Anatolia. The Cossacks swiftly embraced the habit and were soon growing it in SE Ukraine too.

*

Bernard Farbar's translation seemed pretty good to me (the "miscellany of styles" is a challenge, you cannot just flatten it to modern English), but I discovered after reading it that the publishers' claim that it's "Complete and Unabridged" was untrue. It drops the whole episode (in Ch 4) in which the enraged Cossacks set about drowning the local Jews (and Taras Bulba spares Yankel, for his own ends).  Instead, when Yankel shows up in Ch 7, he's introduced as a new character ("a merchant"). Presumably this bowdlerization was what the publishers meant by "This new translation is designed especially for modern readers." 

The bowdlerization doesn't achieve much in the way of purging Taras Bulba of gross Jewish stereotypes, nor of portrayals of Jews being killed; there is plenty of both elsewhere. But it does arguably mean that something important gets missed: Yankel's desperate claim that the Jews and Cossacks are like brothers.

At the time this only raises Cossack fury to new heights. But as the novel proceeds Taras Bulba is increasingly compelled to accommodate himself to what Yankel says. His appalling vengeance in Ch 12 is aimed entirely at Poles, not at Jews. (Not that this makes it anything but appalling.) And while Yankel is portrayed as avaricious and cowardly and ridiculous in the tradition of anti-Semitic stereotype, I don't think this precludes arguing that Yankel's, nevertheless, is the novel's wisest voice.  

Anyway, you can read the whole of Taras Bulba here: 

  https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1197/1197-h/1197-h.htm

(No translator is credited, but I believe this is C. J. Hogarth's translation, first published in 1918.)

*

Recommended: 

David Bentley Hart's 2004 article for First Things on Taras Bulba: https://www.firstthings.com/article/2004/01/taras-bulba .

Gary Rosenshield's "Taras Bulba and the Jewish Literary Context: Walter Scott, Gogol, and Russian Fiction", Ch 2 of his 2008 book The Ridiculous Jew: The Exploitation and Transformation of a Stereotype in Gogol, Turgenev, and Dostoevsky : https://academic.oup.com/stanford-scholarship-online/book/14660/chapter-abstract/168821161?redirectedFrom=fulltext . I was apparently lucky to read this excellent chapter. When I went back for another read, the institutional shutters had firmly come down.  

Ali Salami and Midia Mahammadi's 2021 paper "A Postcolonial Reading of Nikolai Gogol's Taras Bulba" (University of Chitral Journal of Urdu Language & Literature 4(II):131-143): https://www.researchgate.net/publication/355445029_A_Postcolonial_Reading_of_Nikolai_Gogol's_Taras_Bulba .

Ilya Repin's Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks, painted 1880-1891.

(Photo taken in Bolero Lounge, Yate.)

The cossacks write an insulting and ribald response to the Turkish sultan. Based on a dubiously historical event of 1679. The man in the white hat is meant to be Taras Bulba. The figures were mostly modelled by Repin's friends. The model for the man in the yellow hat (left of Taras Bulba) was Igor Stravinsky's father. 

Prelude No 17

 

One more prelude, No 17 in D minor. My progress towards the full 24 is slowing down, because now I'm no longer relearning older compositions but writing them from scratch. It's better if I don't pre-think what I want the composition to be like, but this time I did. I knew I wanted a feeling of the random sounds of nature but I was also thinking about the heavy angular polska rhythm (Swedish dance): there are a few quotations here. The result is rather unsettled.

michaelpeverett · Prelude No 17 In D Minor

Listen to all the preludes so far:

michaelpeverett · Preludes

I'll be picking bird cherries...

Ripe bird cherries (Prunus padus). Novosibirsk, 24 July 2019.

[Image source: https://vn.ru/news-pervaya-cheremukha-sozrela-v-novosibirske/ .]

From Wild Berries (Ягодные места  - Yagodnyye Mesta, lit. Berry places, 1982) by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, 1984 translation by Antonina W. Bouis. 

It begins up in space, and from this opening my only (unnecessary) advice to the reader is, just go with it. In other words, without stopping to worry about what kind of novel it is or whether this or that section is good or bad. At any rate readers in 1981 can't have been bored and I don't think it would be any different for a reader today. 

'Along the midnight sky an angel flew. . . .'

The cosmonaut recalled the poem and smiled sadly. 'Some angel I make!' His face, reflected in the porthole of the capsule, was tired, no longer young, yet animated with childlike curiosity. He had never been beyond his country's borders before, And suddenly there were no borders; the striped barriers, no-man's-lands, border guards, German shepherds, and customs points all had disappeared. Now they seemed unnatural, ridiculous. Other things were difficult even to imagine: for instance, the idea of mandatory residency registration.

Below, the lights of Paris glittered, a handful of gold dust scattered across black velvet. ...

(Beginning of the Prologue of Wild Berries.)

Lermontov's poem "Angel", published in 1831 when he was sixteen, is mentioned again in the final lines of the Epilogue. Here it is in full:

По небу полуночи ангел летел,
  И тихую песню он пел;
И месяц, и звёзды, и тучи толпой
  Внимали той песне святой.

Along the midnight sky an angel flew

a silent song he sang

the moon the stars the clouds together

heard that holy hymn

Он пел о блаженстве безгрешных духов

  Под кущами райских садов;
О боге великом он пел, и хвала 
  Его непритворна была.

He sang the bliss of pure souls

under Eden's boughs

and he sang the greatness of God

intently, devoutly

Он душу младую в объятиях нёс
  Для мира печали и слёз;
И звук его песни в душе молодой
  Остался -- без слов, но живой.

In his arms an infant soul, bound for

this world's tears and sorrow

and his song remains in the infant soul

wordless but alive

И долго на свете томилась она,
  Желанием чудным полна,
И [звуков]1 небес заменить не могли
  Ей скучные песни земли.

The soul lingers long in this world,

lost in yearning for

the song of heaven that passes

all earth's dull strains

The novel's title hints at two things about it: its accent on youth/freshness/ripeness (the really young, like Lermontov, and the young in spirit, like the cosmonaut); and its setting in the Siberian taiga, at any rate the setting of its central narratives. For (like the cosmonaut, again) Wild Berries has a strongly centripetal temper; it isn't a "local" novel as we normally conceive it. Indeed you might reasonably call it a global novel, though I feel the limitations of "global", the way it's deployed in news media. The novel goes a long way beyond that. 

The novel "Berry Places" (1981) is fascinating and unusual, multi-layered and multi-character. This is a novel about Russia and the planet Earth, about humanity and man, about history and modernity. "Where is the world heading?" - this main question is always relevant, and the literary skill of the author simply cannot but surprise the attention. Yevtushenko remains a true great poet even in prose.

I'm quoting an unpretentious description from https://avidreaders.ru/book/yagodnye-mesta.html , because it saves me the donkey work. And this description seems quite accurate, unlike Google Books talking about "the tale of Soviet scientists on a search for rare ore in the far northern taiga" (the main locations are about the same latitude as York or Hamburg, admittedly a latitude that would feel pretty northerly in Canada).

Anyway I think the description is quite right to see Wild Berries as basically a novel of ideas: that's what makes it all hang together. And yet, maybe paradoxically, it's unquenchably narrative in form. There are no authorial discourses, its chapters never stop telling stories, the Prologue and Epilogue just as much as the rest. 

*

And, of course, the title also means what it says, so let's get ethnobotanical.

"His cheekbones were prominent, like those of many of his fellow Siberians. The teeth were white and strong, probably thanks to 'sulfur' -- a Siberian chewing gum made from leaf resin" (Prologue, p. 10). 

Actually made from the gum of conifers, such as the Siberian Larch (or here, at Zima, the intergrade with the Dahurian Larch). It can also be made with the gum of the Siberian Pine (see below). 

*

"Then he'd send his daughter, Ksiuta, the only other living creature around besides Charlie, down to the cellar for red bilberry juice." (Ch 3, p. 39)

"...the crimson sprays of red bilberry, hardening on dark lacquered leaves..." (Ch 9, p. 116)

I'm guessing this means Cowberry or Lingonberry (Vaccinium vitis-idaea). From what I can see, Siberia has similar berry resources to Sweden: Lingonberry, Bilberry, Northern Bilberry, and the old-world Cranberry. (But Red Bilberry is a western N. American species (Vaccinium parvifolium).) 

*

When Tisha was leaving, Dasha ran out into the yard after him to hold the dog, which had been let off its chain. Unexpectedly she whispered in his ear, 'Come to Crooked Hill tomorrow at noon . . . I'll be picking bird cherries . . .'

The bird cherry trees were a marvelous sight on Crooked Hill. The bushes were weighed down by the black fruit, sprinkled with last night's rain. You could pick a big bunch, toss a handful of berries into your mouth, and using your tongue to separate the flesh from the pits, cover your whole palate with a tart, sweet film. Tisha bent the bushes down to make it easier for Dasha to pick,and she squealed like a child when the rain from the branches showered down on her, creeping in under her neckline and trickling down her back. Two baskets were quickly filled.

'Too many leaves!' Dasha sighed. 'I'll have to pick over them.'

And suddenly she strode over to Tisha, put her hands on his shoulders, and pressed up against him. Her malachite eyes were so close to his that he could see thin veins in them, as if they were real malachite . . .

They lay next to each other between the two baskets filled with berries. A clumsy movement of Tisha's turned over a basket, and the berries fell on Dasha's naked breasts. Tisha kissed the berries from her.

(from Ch 4, pp. 76-77.)

The Bird Cherry (Prunus padus) has a large native range, from Atlantic shores (including the northern British Isles) right across Europe and almost right across Russia. In Europe there's basically no tradition of doing anything with the fruit, but in Siberia it's a different matter. Check out ForagerChef's article on Siberian bird cherry cake. Out in the taiga, Kalya breakfasts on "bird cherry salad and soup with meat and dried potatoes" (Ch 16, p. 225).

*

[Uncle] personally spread his bear-fur coat for them in the haystack and conjured pregnancy with vagabond's gibberish. He gave them a magic cedar cone to use whenever they started arguing - each had to eat a seed, and the argument would cease immediately. He unexpectedly burst into tears and said he had been a scoundrel to his own wife, and that if his nephew followed his example, he would beat him in front of all decent folk . . .

(from the Prologue, p. 23)

Two pine cone collectors were industriously at work in the taiga ... The Buryat struck the cedar trees with a long hammer-headed pole. The cedar shook, groaning hollowly and reluctantly shedding a sprinkling of cones onto the grass.

(from Ch 20, p. 259.)

This is the Siberian Pine (Pinus sibirica). It has edible seeds which are marketed in Russia as "cedar nuts", and indeed the tree is often called Siberian cedar, to the confusion of translators. 

[Being as Euro-blinkered as I am, I had previously imagined that the only pine with seeds worth eating was the Stone Pine of the Mediterranean (Pinus pinea). However, there are also the "pinyons" of south-west N. America, a group of related species of great significance in Native American food cultures. (Pinus edulis is one of the most widespread species; another, Pinus monophylla is the world's only one-needle pine; and there's about ten others.) But the most important edible species, globally, is the Korean Pine (Pinus koraiensis), native to much of E. Asia; I've read that most of the "pine nuts" sold in Europe and the USA actually come from this species. In fact most pine species have seeds that are technically edible, just too small to be worth the trouble -- normally. Jacob Hunter's useful post explains what's involved.]

*

Chronology

Yevgeny Yevtushenko (1933 - 2017). Wild Berries was published in 1982.

The date of the main narrative (taking that to mean Seryozha Lachugin's time in Siberia) is July-August 1973. We know this because of the abandoned Japanese radio (Ch 21), broadcasting news referring to the imminent downfall of Salvador Allende. What the radio announces in two sentences is also the occasion of the narrative in Ch 22. (Yevtushenko had been a good friend of Allende.)

After reading the book and being thrown around to so many scenes and times, I was surprised to find how many of its chapters are, at least nominally, set at this date: 1, 2, 4 (only the frame: the rest is Tikhon by the Lena river about forty years earlier, during the era of dekulakhization (1929-34)), 5, 7, 8, 9, 12 (though it also includes Sitechkin's early life), 16, 17 (though it's mainly war narratives from WW2 and Vietnam), 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, and 23. 

To which list -- though it isn't explicitly stated -- you can reasonably add the Prologue (i.e. the cosmonaut in space), and Ch 13 (The Tails' first gig in Honolulu).

Yevtushenko himself was 41 in August 1973, so he (rather unusually) makes his young hero belong to a younger generation than his own; most novelists shy away from this. We think about the author a lot, of course. Young Seryozha sometimes embodies Yevtushenko's own experience (for instance in Kazakhstan); but so does the expedition leader Kolomeitsev, who is around fifty, that is, around Yevtushenko's age when he was actually writing the novel. And actually I suppose Yevtushenko himself makes a brief covert appearance, in the story about the "famous poet" that Gagarin unintentionally places in peril (Prologue, p. 8) -- besides being explicitly dismissed as "passé" by Kostya Krivtsov (Ch 10, p. 125; that must have been back in the mid-1960s). Yevtushenko is writing about, not just Seryozha, but Seryozha's whole generation (Krivtsov, Seleznyov, The Tails). That's why the novel becomes a question about who we can be, what direction the world might go in. Its optimism and idealism, not at all cheaply assumed (think of e.g. Chs 17, 22), is something to ponder, to envy, maybe even to be inspired by. Because, forty years on, it feels like the light reflected by Yevtushenko has gone, we pretty much need to start all over again, idealism and youth have been neutered and repurposed by technology, profit and exploitation. 

The other chapters:

3, at Belaya Zaimka the previous summer (July 1972). 

6, the mushroomer's biography, covering the whole 20th century up to the time of the novel. 

10. Leningrad: begins with Seryozha's parents marrying (c. 1933?) and his grandfathers, both presumably purged by Stalin before WW2; then shifts to Seryozha's adolescence (mid-late 1960s)

11. Kazakhstan, Seryozha's first geological expedition (c. 1970?)

14. Krivtsov and Leningrad's literature circles (several years up to, presumably, 1973).

15. Leningrad: Selezhnyov and his father, c. 1970.

Epilogue. Mostly set in Kaluga, concerned with Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857 - 1935). From his conversation with Semiradov (p. 294), it must be mid-1914, just before the start of the First World War. 

*

Geography

In the Prologue the cosmonaut comes from Zima; Ch 1 starts in Zima, and we revisit it in Ch 19.  Zima (Zima Station, Zima Junction) is a town in Irkutsk. It's the subject of Yevtushenko's most famous poem.  Yevgeny was actually born in Nizhneudinsk (3.5 hrs drive away), but the family moved to Zima soon after his birth and (when he was still only one year old) to Moscow. However, Yevgeny and his grandmother returned to Zima as evacuees for several years during WW2.

If you try looking for Shelaputinki or Belaya Zaimka (where Belomestnykh lives) you won't find either, but you can maybe take a hint from Belaya Zima, two days walk to the SW of Zima. 

It is around 40km from Belaya Zaimka (via Shelaputinki) to the expedition campsite (Ch 9, p. 113). 

"..sent to the upper reaches of the Lena River to rid the taiga of rich peasants, called kulaks" (Ch 4, p. 72). The river Lena flows north from L. Baikal. Its source is not far from Irkutsk, 180 miles SE of Zima. 

"During his first field expedition in Kazakhstan..."  (Ch 11, p. 143). This is based on Yevtushenko's own experience, though it would have been twenty years before Seryozha's. After being expelled from school, the young Yevtushenko joined a geological reconnaissance expedition to Kazakhstan where fifteen unescorted convicts turned out to be under his command. 

Sources: 

Yevtushenko's entry in ru.wikipedia.org:  https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%95%D0%B2%D1%82%D1%83%D1%88%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%BA%D0%BE,_%D0%95%D0%B2%D0%B3%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%B9_%D0%90%D0%BB%D0%B5%D0%BA%D1%81%D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%B4%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%B8%D1%87 .)

This page, with biography and photos: https://uznayvse.ru/znamenitosti/biografiya-evgeniy-evtushenko.html .

*

Love relationships and sexual behaviour

Naturally they play a large part in a novel about youth and ripeness. But not just youth: Kolomeitsev, leader of the geological expedition, is an inveterate womaniser even in his fifties. The trail of destruction that he and others like him leave behind is one of the book's recurrent concerns. Anyway, here's a list of some of the main entanglements, running the gamut from idyllic to horrific. 

Prologue: Uncle's infidelities; the cosmonaut and the girl he falls for and marries (both unnamed). 

Ch 1: The handsome Grisha and the hopeful storekeeper; Ksiuta and the unknown father of her child (Was it Grisha? Tikhon?)

Ch 3: Ksiuta and her one-time lover: it was Kolomeitsev. Her father (Belomestnykh) and mother. 

Ch 4: Tikhon (Tisha) and Dasha. 

Ch 7: Belomestnykh and his wife, again. 

Ch 10: Volodya and Irina (Seryozha's parents). Seleznyov and the village singer Tonya.

Ch 11: Seryozha and Grunya (the beekeeper). Nakhabkin and his wife. 

Ch 12: Kesha and Kalya. Kolomeitsev and Yulya Vyazemskaya. Yulya's marriage to the "sad-faced dentist" Dodik. Sitechkin's parents.

Ch 14: the drunken man (Vasya) and the woman (presumably his wife). 

Ch 15: Seleznyov senior and his wife.

Ch 16: Kesha and Kalya again; Kalya's many men (including Kolomeitsev).

Ch 19: Tikhon and Darya; and their daughter. 

Ch 20: The old man (February) and the woman he kills (in his story); his "old woman". 

Ch 22: Allende and Hortensia. 

Epilogue: Tsiolkovsky and his wife Varvara Evgrafovna. 

The cherry tree at Sutton Scotney

Ornamental Cherry at Sutton Scotney, 4 May 2023.

On Thursday I stopped briefly at Sutton Scotney services northbound (Hampshire), filled a mug of tea from the thermos, and was staggered by the sight of this cherry tree, one of three, with the most ridiculous lateral spread I've ever seen. This was in the evening of 4th May 2023; the blossom was maybe a few days past its best but it still looked fabulous.

Ornamental Cherry at Sutton Scotney, 4 May 2023.

Ornamental Cherry at Sutton Scotney, 4 May 2023.

Ornamental Cherry at Sutton Scotney, 4 May 2023.

Ornamental Cherry at Sutton Scotney, 4 May 2023.

Ornamental Cherry at Sutton Scotney, 4 May 2023.

Ornamental Cherry at Sutton Scotney, 4 May 2023.

I didn't recognize the variety. The nearest match I've been able to find is 'Hanagasa' or 'Matsumae-hanagasa', also known as 'Pink Parasol', but I read that this variety, developed in Japan in the 1960s, has only been available in the UK for about twenty years. Surely the tree I was looking at was twice that age? 

Ornamental Cherry at Sutton Scotney, 4 May 2023.

Ornamental Cherry at Sutton Scotney, 4 May 2023.

Ornamental Cherry at Sutton Scotney, 4 May 2023.

At the time I supposed it must be 'Kanzan', though the tree shape seemed bizarre, but I just couldn't think of any other double pink cherry of this size, except 'Shirofugen' which looks totally different.  Anyway I went and took some pictures of late 'Kanzan' blossom today (7 May 2023), just to dispel any lingering doubts.

Late blossom on Prunus 'Kanzan'. Frome, 7 May 2023.

Late blossom on Prunus 'Kanzan'. Frome, 7 May 2023.

Late blossom on Prunus 'Kanzan'. Frome, 7 May 2023.

Late blossom on Prunus 'Kanzan'. Frome, 7 May 2023.

Late blossom on Prunus 'Kanzan'. Frome, 7 May 2023.

So no, we can rule out 'Kanzan'. Though the blossom fades from its initial deep pink, the petals never turn white. But on the Sutton Scotney tree, it's apparent that the inner petals are white when they're freshly open, only turning pink as they age. 

This started me thinking about 'Shirofugen' again, because its blossom does the same thing. I reflected that maybe I'd been too hasty in writing it off; that after all 'Shirofugen' is typically flat-topped (unlike 'Kanzan') and that it does change its appearance a lot during its three weeks of flowering. 

So I paid another visit to the senescent 'Shirofugen' at Beanacre, now at a late stage of flowering. 

Late blossom on Prunus 'Shirofugen'. Beanacre, 11 May 2023.

Late blossom on Prunus 'Shirofugen'. Beanacre, 11 May 2023.

Late blossom on Prunus 'Shirofugen'. Beanacre, 11 May 2023.

Late (though in this case fairly fresh) blossom on Prunus 'Shirofugen'. Beanacre, 11 May 2023.

Late blossom on Prunus 'Shirofugen'. Beanacre, 11 May 2023.

But, I think you'll agree, it's definitely different from the Sutton Scotney tree, though the differences aren't that easy to articulate. The most tangible thing is that on the Sutton Scotney tree the sepals are often deep red and the scales of the leaf-buds are bright red, both features that you can find on 'Kanzan' when the blossom is fresh, but never on 'Shirofugen' where the colours of both are bronzy. Besides that, I'd venture that the outer petals of the fresh Sutton Scotney blossom are a more purplish shade of pink while on 'Shirofugen' they are more flesh-pink or wine-pink; and overall the blossom on the Sutton Scotney tree is a little more blowsy and opulent, the sort of thing Collingwood Ingram probably wouldn't have approved of.  

And there I'll have to leave it, hoping that some cherry-blossom aficionado will come by and tell me what's going on. 

Late blossom on Prunus 'Shirofugen'. Beanacre, 11 May 2023.