view from the steppes

Daytime in the Steppes, 1852 painting by Aleksey Savrasov

[Image source: https://www.wikiart.org/en/aleksey-savrasov/steppe-day-1852 . In the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow. There are now thought to be only around 8,000 Great Bustards in Russia; the largest population is in Spain, with around 30,000.]

A goldfish swam in a big glass bowl,
As dear little goldfish do,
But she loved with the whole of her heart and soul
An officer brave from the ocean wave
And she thought that he loved her, too.
Her small inside he daily fed
With crumbs of the best digestive bread . . .

"The Amorous Goldfish" was the most popular number from The Geisha, a musical comedy first performed at Daly's Theatre (London) in April 1896. Harry Greenbank wrote the lyrics, "Owen Hall" (James Davis) the libretto, and Sidney Jones the music. It was the same team who broke big with The Gaiety Girl (1893) and they had several huge hits through the 1890s, until Harry Greenbank, always in delicate health, died in February 1899. 

The Geisha was the biggest hit of all. It arrived in New York later in 1896 (at another Daly's Theatre, this one being on 30th Street). And it swept Europe too; there are said to be records of 8,000 performances in Germany alone. 

In 1899 Anton Chekhov saw a production of The Geisha in the Crimean resort of Yalta, where he had moved the previous year. Consequently, the now long-forgotten musical comedy survives as a footnote to "The Lady with the Little Dog", when Gurov, unable to forget his Yalta dalliance, visits Anna Sergeyevna's provincial hometown of "S.", spots an advert for "the first performance of The Geisha" and surmises (correctly) that she and her husband might attend the first night. 

"I've suffered so much!" she continued, without listening to him. "I've thought about you all the time; all I've thought about is you. I wanted to forget about you, forget all about you. Why, oh why have you come?"

On the landing higher up, two schoolboys were smoking and looking down, but Gurov did not care; he drew Anna Sergeyevna to him and started kissing her face, her cheeks and her hands.

"What are you doing? What are you doing?" she said in horror, pushing him away from her. "We have both gone completely mad. You must leave today; you must leave now in fact ... I swear to you by all that is holy, I beg you... There are people coming!"

(from "The Lady with the Little Dog" (1899), translated by Rosamund Bartlett)

"The Amorous Goldfish", sung by Diana Martin (in 1985 at a Chappell Studios demo, piano by Lesley Hayes)

In The Geisha, the girls donned disguises to retrain flighty male passions along the right course, in the time-honoured manner of The Two Gentlemen of Verona and The Marriage of Figaro. Chekhov's open-ended story is haunted by just an agonizing glint of such happy and simple outcomes. Here the right course might be the transgression rather than reassertion of marital orthodoxy, and it's going to be messy at best.  

*

So Chekhov was back on the coast again. The first nineteen years of his life had been spent in the port of Taganrog, some 800km from Yalta, near the mouth of the Don on the Sea of Azov. It was provincial but it had links, both northward to Moscow and south-west to the Mediterranean . In 1855, five years before he was born, Taganrog had been bombarded by an Anglo-French fleet. 

Yet Taganrog was also on the edge of the Great Steppe, a vast plain you could only see beyond in a few places. 

Not having anything better to do, the awakened sheep, all three thousand of them, started eating the short, half-trampled grass. The sun had not yet risen, but distant Saur's Grave, with its pointed top which looked like a cloud, and all the other kurgans were already visible. If you climbed to the top of Saur's Grave, you could look out and see a plain that was as flat and boundless as the sky, manor houses and estates, German and Molokan farms, villages; a far-sighted Kalmyk would even be able to see the town and railway trains. Only from up here was it possible to see that there was another life in the world beyond the silent steppe and ancient kurgans, a life which was not concerned with buried treasure and the thoughts of sheep.

(from "Fortune" (1887), translated by Rosamund Bartlett)

The silent steppe was not the timeless repository of a purely local culture. Even the old man in the story, speaking of treasure concealed by spells, senses the movement of history, the influence of elsewhere. 

'There is treasure out there, but what is the use if it's buried in the ground? It will just be lost, without any use, like chaff or sheep droppings. But there is a lot of treasure, my boy, so much that there would be enough for the whole district, except that not a soul can see it! People will carry on waiting until the landowners dig it up or the government takes it. The landowners have already begun to dig the kurgans... They have sniffed them out! They are envious of the fortune which belongs to us peasants! The government has the same plan up its sleeve. It says in the law that if a peasant finds treasure, he has to report it to the authorities. Well, they are going to have to hang on a bit; they'll be waiting for ever! It's our treasure!'

No single interpretation can be forced onto the old man's words, but at some level he intuits that the treasure only belongs to the peasants so long as they never dig it up. The integrity of local culture depends on it being a culture of lack. 

Today Saur's Grave, near Shakhtars'k, is covered in monuments commemorating the Patriotic War. It's true, on very clear days it's even possible to glimpse the Sea of Azov, 90km away. The Germans recognized its strategic importance, but Soviet troops finally took it on August 31, 1943. (Now it's once more in a war zone.) Later that same year, the Kalmyks were accused of having cooperated with the Germans and the entire Kalmyk population were deported to Siberia; Kruschev authorized their return in 1957.

[Is Chekhov tuning in to a Europe-wide trope of shepherds telling tales of inaccessible treasure? It would be fascinating to trace the connection, if there is one, with Bécquer's story "El gnomo" in his Leyendas (1860-1865).]

*

Chekhov's stories abstain from dignifying an educated, cosmopolitan culture over an uneducated, local culture. The real problems of his characters' human existences are certainly connected with the cultural artefacts they encounter, both high and low, but in unexpected and sometimes trivial ways. The idea that education and high culture confer illumination or any other tangible benefit is, if not quite absent, persistently questioned. 

There was one time after evening tea when he was sitting on the balcony reading. In the drawing room they were learning the famous Braga serenade -- Tanya was singing soprano, one of the young ladies had taken the alto part, and the young man was playing the violin. Kovrin listened attentively to the words -- they were in Russian -- but he just could not work out what they meant. Finally, after he had put down his book and listened very carefully he understood: a girl with a febrile imagination hears some mysterious sounds one night in the garden, which are so beautiful and strange that she feels compelled to identify them as sacred harmony incomprehensible to us mortals, which must therefore fly away back to the heavens. Kovrin's eyes were starting to close. He got up and walked through the drawing room and the ballroom in a state of intense fatigue. When the singing stopped he took Tanya by the arm and went out on the balcony with her.

(from "The Black Monk" (1894), translation by Rosamund Bartlett)

The nerve-shattered Kovrin listens to the rehearsal of the popular serenade and its proposal of sacred harmonies acts as a catalyst for his own febrile spirits, sparking them into outright hallucination. At the end of the story, in Sevastopol, he hears the strains of the serenade again and with the same transforming effect. 

In Chekhov's world it is not a question of what art means, but of what it means to an individual. Kovrin's psychosis might have seized on anything. His millenial myth, his wild ecstacy of himself as messiah, just happened to start from a sentimental piece of parlour music that most of us, most of the time, would consider fairly mundane. He saw what the sane would not see.

Gaetano Braga's "La Serenata" is a dialogue between a worried mother and a daughter who hears an angel's voice calling her. In the arrangement described by Chekhov, the mother's part was evidently sung by the "alto" (contralto). More commonly, as below, one vocalist takes the parts of both mother and daughter:

All the Chekhov quotations come from Anton Chekhov, About Love, and other stories, translated by Rosamund Bartlett (Oxford, 2004).

Masses of Chekhov stories online, translated by Constance Garnett and others: 

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/57333/57333-h/57333-h.htm

Hjalmar Söderberg: Doktor Glas (1905)

Ulf Palme as Gregorius and Per Oscarsson as Glas in Mai Zetterling's 1968 movie

[Image source: http://www.alamy.com]

Doktor Glas is a book that I thought about a lot after I'd finished reading it. Not because there seemed to be any problem with the reading that I needed to resolve. It was more that I needed to get away from the Doktor's own narration in order to gather my thoughts; so insidiously had Söderberg led me into seeing things from Glas' point of view.

Even then it came as a shock, leafing through the Swedish copy on my shelves, to find the editor discussing whether there is a psykopatisk element to the narrator's character. That notion seemed wrong, but what really shocked me was that up till that moment I hadn't even conceived the possibility of anyone thinking it. 

The comparison of Glas with the narrator of Chekhov's Shooting-Party (see my earlier post) is fascinating; by chance I read the novels successively. The contrast, too.

In Chekhov's book the transformation in our idea of the narrator (from "bumptious" to "a little self-centred" to "brutish" to...) means that by the end we can barely credit anything of what we were told earlier; the whole narrative reveals itself as a journey into a diseased mind, its veracity entirely compromised.

Not so in Doktor Glas. In this book the transparent veracity of the narrator, inasmuch as he lyrically relates his personal impressions and the summer life of Stockholm - these pages (the bulk of the book), being a significant, perhaps the most significant, aspect of its great power ... well, Dr Glas as narrator remains almost, if not quite, untainted by our realization - we are apt to bury it, it's so inconvenient - that he has after all committed a murder. We continue to interpret the sentence "Nor do I tell the whole truth about myself, only what it pleases me to relate, but nothing that isn't true" as rather understating, if anything, the extreme honesty of the narrative. Whereas Chekhov's narrator (though perhaps ultimately intending a confession) fills his pages with subterfuge, Glas seems never to hesitate about confessing anything that he knows to confess.  

The question about truth arises, nevertheless. It becomes, in this case, not a matter of honesty but of whether Glas is capable of assessing other characters accurately. Generally his insights are strikingly keen, but no book makes it clearer that such keenness is never absolute, may indeed imply correspondingly exceptional blindnesses; above all our doubts concern Glas' view of Gregorius and his wife. Glas makes no bones about it; he finds Gregorius loathsome, and finds him loathsome long before Mrs Gregorius talks about the marriage. Glas is, we feel, ready to condemn Gregorius on any grounds whatever. As for Fru Gregorius, Söderberg's book is a pitiless examination of the illusions of love. Through the very transparency of Glas' own descriptions, we see that Fru Gregorius is not at all like the image of the loved one that overwhelms Glas' imagination. Pejoratively, you might say she is more shallow, more ordinary (Glas is definitely not ordinary). Glas in love completely ignores the commonsensical view that one might phrase in this way: After all, she has proven unfaithful, she has taken a lover... But the book is a moral minefield here. If Glas' own judgments are plainly skewed, he is also entirely successful in destroying our faith in such conventional social judgments. But what, for instance, do we make of this?

The very first time I ever saw her it struck me how unlike all others she is. She isn't like a woman of the world, or a middle-class wife, or a woman of the people. Mostly the last, perhaps; particularly as she sat there, just then, on the church steps, with her fair hair free and bared to the sun, for she had taken off her hat and laid it beside her. But a woman from a primitive folk, or one that never existed, where class distinctions had not yet begun, where "the people" still had not become the lower classes. A daughter of a free tribe.

Does this really say anything concrete about Helga, or is it just what Glas would be bound to think about any woman he fell in love with? Or  -  Isn't it merely the truth about every woman, the truth that only love discovers? Or does it reflect the situation in which Glas finds Helga - discontentedly not free -, which makes her seem paradoxically all the more kin to a freedom that preoccupies her and ought to be her birthright? 

In a way Glas' moral crusade seems to be terribly (yet somehow comically) misguided, the bubble of a perfervid imagination; yet who doubts that Fru Gregorius has a right to her own choices, to happiness and freedom? Glas is unable to give her happiness or her own choices, but he does give her freedom. And because he doesn't tell her what he's done and doesn't seek to take advantage of her, there is indeed something heroic about what Glas does. It might even be that, after the book is ended, Helga might find a happiness; a bourgeois kind of happiness that the un-besotted Glas would probably pour scorn on.

If the book continues thus to revolve in our thoughts, in another way this is satisfying; we perhaps don't need to make final judgments about characters that, as the book shows us, we can never entirely know.

There's another way in which Söderberg reminds me of Chekhov, who commented on the difficulty of eliminating a pistol-shot from his plays. Aesthetically this novel seems to require its murder (really, such an implausible kind of murder for anyone to commit) in order to be a complete image; that's an aspect of its era. A few years later Joyce and Proust would show how to do without this. Söderberg's era is characterized by this essential cheapness.

I actually read the book, not in my own Swedish copy, but in Paul Britten Austin's 1963 translation, reissued in 2002.

Some translation notes:

July 2

What's the matter, I asked. The word "ovillkorligen" ("inevitably") has been omitted.

- Last night he raped me. As good as raped me.

- I natt tog han mig med våld. Så gott som med våld.

 (Literally, "took me by force, as good as by force" - but rape in Swedish is våldta.)

What does Fru Gregorius mean by her qualification? Gregorius seems to have mentally bullied her into submission with talk of duty and emotional blackmail about his salvation. So the most likely sense is that, though he did not actually use physical force, the effect was the same: she was bullied into doing something she did not want to do. It's significant that Glas never thinks of Helga refusing to comply, even with the excuse of her health - in this marriage, that is apparently not a possibility - Gregorius' power is absolute.

How reliable is Helga's account? She has a powerful motive for exaggerating the brutality of marital attentions that have become hateful to her. Yet it is certain that Gregorius at any rate begs for, and has, sex with his wife while believing that this seriously endangers her health; he effectively confirms this by his reaction later. My reading is that Helga does pour out the truth; that a doubt about her honesty here would make the novel less interesting, not more so. But she has not told her husband that she hates him, and he of course would utterly reject the imputation that he has raped her.  

But how would it look if the rich brought along artistically embellished silver cups and the poor, maybe, a brandy glass?

This is part of the comic report of Gregorius on the communion-question. The original has "ett brännvinsglas" - brännvin being a general term for strong spirits, typically a vodka flavoured with spices such as caraway.  "Vodka-glass" or "shot-glass" gives a better idea of the class-connotations in this imaginary sacrilege of the communion service. Though Gregorius is a conservative or at any rate prudently conventional priest, he is also a man of the world; there is something of gusto and of plain-speaking in this clerical chatter.  Gregorius comfortably conceives his doctor as a brother-professional. As a matter of fact Glas does lead, to outward appearance, the clubman's life of a male professional. It is only within that he sees himself so differently.

Impossible to decide, whether he's more fool or fox.

"mera får än räv" - more sheep than fox. It remains difficult to decide. Though Glas succeeds in duping Gregorius, though he may well associate Gregorius's despised views with a sheep-like stupidity, yet Gregorius' worldly success (like his sexual drive) does, we suspect, make Glas feel a little inferior - though this he does not know to confess. We come away from the book with very little solid idea of how Gregorius really thinks about anything. In certain social contexts he is, we imagine, very shrewd. Yet there is no clue that he has any conception of his wife's, or Glas', inner lives.      

*

A year after the publication of Doktor Glas, John Galsworthy's A Man of Property also turns on a marital rape, though Soames Forsyte, at least as troubled by his own act as Gregorius, doesn't of course call it that. Ibsen lies behind both novels. Galsworthy's novel is notable technically for limiting its points of view to members of the Forsyte clan - sometimes admittedly stretching credulity to achieve it. The points of view of Irene and Bosinney are excluded, and some have criticized this as preventing empathy with Irene's difficult situation. But the idea I suppose is to put the reader in the position of the family - and of Soames in particular: to experience to the full their frustrations and to recognize that such things as they do, we also have the potential to do.

Another analogue, of sorts. Gregorius, even through Glas' unfriendly eyes, makes a far more acceptable impression on us than the instantly hateful lawyer Robert Dempster in George Eliot's "Janet's Repentance" in Scenes of Clerical Life .

Anton Chekhov: The Shooting Party (1885)

[The Shooting Party is an early work (1884), not re-published in Chekhov's lifetime. This, his only full-length novel, is no masterpiece, but if it's to be read at all it's essential to read it without knowing the ending, which I'm about to reveal. So make up your mind if you want to read on.]

A youthful Anton Chekhov wearing country clothes

[Image source: Wikipedia]

*

"I felt suffocated," says the editor, supposedly Antosha Chekhonte himself, on the final page. We do, too.

The Shooting Party is a novel in a frame. The inner novel is narrated by, and purportedly written by, Sergey Petrovich Zinovyev, an investigating magistrate. The murders he describes (they come late in the book) are in fact committed by him; his novel itself does not confess this, but "only a fool" (as Zinovyev himself remarks) would fail to observe the clues scattered through the later pages; the more so as the editor Antosha Chekhonte underlines them.

When the identity of the murderer is finally established, a transformation occurs in our view of the narrative. We become aware of how much trust we automatically place in the first-person narrator of a story. During the reading we've been continuously unsettled by the brutalities of the narrator (not the murders, but his other behaviour), and we've continuously sought ways to forgive them in order to be able to carry on trusting him. Every time he admitted something against himself, we added a minus to his moral ledger but we also chalked up a plus in his honesty ledger. We've accepted, as by convention, that he sees more sensitively into the motives and feelings of those around him than the other, relatively insensitive, characters. Now that his own character is finally seen to be psychopathic, we wonder how much else is unreliable about his narrative; for example, all those times when he reports other characters calling him "the best of men", or reports himself led astray by the moral turpitude of others, or reports women falling for his good looks and refined manners. There's actually no answer to these questions. The Chekhovian insights in the narrative imply a humane compassion that apparently doesn't square with Zinovyev's own indifference to the fate of those his actions have ruined. The result is a feeling of moral suffocation that bears more than a slight resemblance to the effect of cheap genre fiction in general, but is in fact brought about by other means.

In hindsight, much of Zinovyev's insights appear as "poetic", a literary sentimentality. Try this:

Never before had Zorka borne me so zealously as on that morning after the burning of the banknotes. She, too, wanted to go home. The lake gently rolled its foamy waves: reflecting the rising sun, it was preparing for its daytime slumber. The woods and willows along the banks were motionless, as if at morning prayer. It is difficult to describe my state of mind at the time. Without going into too much detail, I shall merely say that I was delighted beyond words – and at the same time I was almost consumed with shame when, as I turned out of the Count's estate, I saw by the lakeside old Mikhey's saintly face, emaciated by honest toil and illness. Mikhey resembles a biblical fisherman. His hair is as white as snow, he has a large beard and he gazes contemplatively at the sky. When he stands motionless on the bank, following the racing clouds with his eyes, you might fancy he sees angels in the sky . . . I'm very fond of such faces!

When I saw him, I reined in Zorka and gave him my hand, as if wishing to cleanse myself through contact with his honest, calloused hand. He looked up at me with his small, sagacious eyes and smiled.

(transl. Ronald Wilks, 2004)

In such passages we discern another writer behind Zinovyev's clichés. This other writer is less idealistic and less flippant. It's that same distance from the actual words that Chekhov sought in his plays.

(2007)

*

Morally dubious narrators -- those who exploit the reader's natural tendency to trust a narrator -- were becoming a thing. The narrator of Henry James' The Aspern Papers (1888) confides in us, he jokes about his literary rapaciousness so we're thoroughly disarmed, he even presents himself as a bluff Richard Hannay cracking a mystery in a household of the weird and unpredictable, a harmless fellow who's comically anxious to appease and comply. The coldness of his predation is only fitfully clear, perhaps never truly clear until we stop listening to his voice and its exonerations. 

For another variation, a narrator who's much more winning but perhaps even more self-deceived, there's Hjalmar Söderberg's Doktor Glas (1905):

https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2016/02/hjalmar-soderberg-doktor-glas-1905.html

We can see a kind of scepticism taking hold. Frank Osbaldistone (in Scott’s Rob Roy) had admittedly not behaved perfectly, and was perhaps even more imperfect than he realised, but still the story he narrates isn't purely his own story but a portrait of society, it belongs to us too, it has a typicality, is maybe even part of a national history. We might say the same of Pip or Esther Summerson or David Copperfield -- the latter with some unease, maybe. 

But in The Aspern Papers we begin to wonder if a true account is really possible, if there's anything independent of the self-serving impressions of a narrator. Deluded as this narrator may be, it isn't clear that any other account of these events (by Miss Tita, say) would necessarily be truer than his. Perhaps there cannot really be a true account of something so complex as human interactions. Perhaps individual experience is tragically isolated from the experience of others. There can be narratives, honest or not, but they're nevertheless imaginative constructs, possible paths through a wilderness whose only authority is that someone has taken the trouble to propose them.

librivox splurge

I moved house. As the drive to the office is now ten minutes not five, and as I've been making a few round trips to Frome and elsewhere, I thought it was worth downloading a bunch of Librivox audiobooks. (The splurge is, of course, free.)

Here's what I've listened to so far:

Marlowe, both parts of Tamburlaine the Great. A bit of a trudge through Marlowe's incessantly mighty line. It's not the fault of the readers - David Goldfarb and a good supporting cast. It's just that the uncut text needs something more than reading aloud to spark it into dramatic life. Listening to this, you are made aware that none of the participants are in the same location, and that each has recorded their speeches separately.  (As often in my own silent readings of Tamburlaine, I found the most lively part is the digressive episode at the beginning of Part 2 when the Christians under Sigismond betray their alliance with Orcanes.)

Benito Perez Galdos, Electra.  (see other post)  Here's proof that Librivox readings of plays can be very involving indeed. This is a proper performance. Brilliant production, recommended.

Balzac, Eugenie Grandet.  Absolutely wonderful. (I'd read it before, but a very long time ago). I am now at the age when everything in Balzac at last makes sense. Well, perhaps not all the financial details: I still don't entirely grasp how Grandet makes such a good thing of his brother's bankruptcy. The story (with its infinitely slow opening chapter) has me wide-eyed and gripped: it all seems real and unexpected, as if described events unfolding within my own family circle. Terrific reading by the great Bruce Pirie. (The only thing I'd comment on is that he somehow makes me really take to old Grandet, even in the face of all his selfishness, self-interest and tyranny.)  

Dostoyevsky, The Gambler - Good reading (mostly by Bill Boerst) - the book is entertaining and empty-headed. Doesn't really make me want to go back to this author whose books I so devoured as a teenager, though I realize The Gambler is not by any means a fair sample.

Chekhov The Lady with the Dog and other stories. A surprisingly disappointing experience. I'm a massive fan of Chekhov's short stories, but listening to these one after another doesn't show them off to best advantage. The downbeat endings tend to come as shocks or mere stops; unable to see the page, I had little sense of them arriving. And then there was no opportunity to reflect, to look back over the text and to admire the artistry: instead, I was straight off on another jaunt to some usually inconclusive destination. The details blur. The doctor who doesn't marry the pianist. The kiss on the theatre stairs. The pistol-shot. The jealous husband at the army dance.

Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho. Here's an author who is really new to me - at least, I've never read any of her books, though I imagined I knew something about them, I supposed I could "place" her. Now, all my thoughts are being revised. "Love the scenery of S. France  - the author must have remembered her travels well"; so I comment at this early stage.   (I was still near the beginning of vol 2). I've since discovered that she had never been on any travels. Her only trip abroad, later in life, was to Belgium.