Literary references

The business of comparing national literatures across languages and time is definitely tricky. Take the English 19^th century prose from Jane Austen through Dickens, the Brontë sisters, Trollope, George Eliot, Hardy, to Joseph Conrad. By any yardstick it would be recognized as an exceptional constellation of talent. How exceptional? Maybe not so exceptional when one brings in the Russians. The 19^th century Russian novelists and short story writers, that is. What we have there is a fully comparable embarrass des riches: Pushkin (yea, “Eugene Onegin” is a novel) Lermontov (“A Hero of Our Time”), Gogol, Herzen, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Chekov.

It may not come as a complete surprise to the reader of this blog that I love 19^th century Russian literature (I love the English 19^th century too). In fact, the alert reader of “The Estate of Wormwood and Honey” might notice that the book pays specific homage in a number of instances to these 19^th century Russian writers by making references to the various themes that were important either in their lives or in their books.

I challenge you to engage in some harmless literary detective work. Your object is to match a theme in the book to at least one 19^th century Russian writer from among those listed above. Some connections are fairly obvious, others might not be. Correct answers will be provided in future posts.

Themes/references in “The Estate of Wormwood and Honey”:

1.     Battle of Borodino (Chapter XXX)

2.     Inanities of provincial courtship (Chapter XXXII)

3.     Libraries (Chapter XXXII)

4.     Provincial officialdom (Chapter V)

5.     Close bonds with old servants (Chapter X)

6.     Siberian penal settlements (Chapter XXVIII)

7.     Losing one’s prized possessions to gambling (Chapter XXVI)

8.     Cruelty to and abuse of one’s own family members (Chapters XXII, XXIII, and XXVIII)

9.     Elderly decorated officials and their pretty young wives Chapter (Chapter V)

10. Obrok vs. barshchina (modalities of settling serfdom obligations) (Chapter VIII)

11. German relatives (Chapters X, XIX, and XXIII)

12. Natural sons (Chapter XVII and many others)

Strange Moment in American-Russian Relationship

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

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

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

Rules for Writers to Help Them Write

Many writers develop rules to help them write.  Sometimes such rules embody almost inhuman abilities in areas such as discipline.  Anthony Trollope would write several hours every morning, no matter what.  Once he finished a novel while he still had time allotted to write.  So without waste, he started on a new novel.

Two years ago, the British newspaper “The Guardian” asked several prominent writers what rules proved useful for them.  Some of them offered great advice.  Zadie Smith has a rule about writing on a computer that disconnected to the Internet.  Elmore Leonard crosses out anything that a reader might skip. Margaret Atwood’s advice is to bring pencils to write on flights, as pens tend to leak.  Roddy Doyle has a rule against checking on Amazon.com for books you haven’t written yet.

Some writers have rules for what they will write about.  Francis Spufford wrote about himself:

“I'm a writer of non-fiction who is creeping up gradually on writing novels. I write slowly and I always move to new subject-matter with each book, because I want to be learning something fresh every time, both in terms of encountering history and people and thinking which are new to me, and also in the sense of trying out a new way of writing. My idea of a good project is one that I can only just manage. I've written a memoir of my childhood as a compulsive reader, an analysis of the British obsession with polar exploration, a book about engineers which is also a stealth history of Britain since 1945, and […] "Red Plenty", about the moment in the early 1960s when it looked as if Soviet communism really might be beating the capitalist west in the race to abundance.”

“Red Plenty” is a great book and will have blog posts of its own.  By the way, Francis Spufford has just published another book “Unapologetic”, which is about his being a practicing Christian.

Now on Twitter

Get updates on the novel and other various ideas at Twitter. Follow me here: https://twitter.com/Berengaut.

Where is Europe?

Is this a silly question?  It certainly seems silly.  Of course, we all know where Europe is.  But do we really?

To know where Europe is one has to know where its borders are.  And what are Europe’s borders?  Well, it’s all water, isn’t it?  The Artic Ocean, the Atlantic Ocean, the Mediterranean Sea, the Black Sea, The Caspian…But what about the islands?  Is Greenland part of Europe?,  Well it’s part of Denmark, isn’t it, even if it is closer to the Western Hemisphere.  And what about Malta in the Mediterranean?  For centuries, it was considered a part of Africa but now it is a member of the EU.  And what about Cyprus?  Its closest neighbors are Turkey and Syria but it is considered part of Europe even if it is to the east of Anatolia which isn’t.  (Not such a long time ago, Milan Kundera complained that Prague was considered to be in Eastern Europe while Vienna was in Central Europe—an absurdity if one actually looks at the map.)

Things get really complicated when we go to Russia.  The Greeks and the Romans thought that the border between Europe and Asia was the river Don. More recently, the Ural mountains were considered to be the boundary between Europe and Asia, between European Russia and Siberia.  How about the Caucasus?  The geographers apply the notion of the watershed and rule that Georgia and Azerbaijan have small parts that are in Europe and Armenia (tough luck) s all in Asia.  And we haven’t even talked about Kazakhstan…

These are the judgments of maps and professional cartographers.  What about ordinary people?  When Russian noblemen in XIX century (such as those that populate “The Estate of Wormwood and Honey”) talked about visiting Berlin or Paris or Vienna, they talked about “going to Europe.”  And when Peter the Great, established St. Petersburg on the Baltic and moved Russia’s capital there, it was widely understood that “Pétersbourg est la fenêtre, par laquelle la Russie regarde en Europe.” (as quoted by Pushkin in “The Bronze Horseman.”)

Conventions used for the boundary between Europe and Asia during the 18th and 19th centuries. The red line shows the modern convention, in use since ca. 1850.

  Europe

  Asia

  historically placed in either continent, with the red line denoting the most common current boundary.