We all have in our hearts some lines of poetry which struck us like lightning when read for the first time. For me such lines were the beginning of Taras Shevchenko’s poem Maryna: “Nenache tsviashok v sertse vbytyi / otsiu Marynu ia noshu” (“Like a nail driven in the heart, / I carry this Maryna with me” [translated by Peter Fedynsky])

As a teenage girl in Ukraine I could not stop thinking about Maryna and her tragic fate. Shevchenko wrote this poem in 1848 –  his second year of exile as a private soldier near the Aral Sea.  Memories and stories from his childhood and two recent visits to Ukraine (before his arrest, imprisonment, trial and condemnation to 10 years of soldiering) flooded his imagination.

                             Shevchenko. Self-portrait as a soldier, 1847 (From Wikimedia Commons)

The tragic story of Maryna, a newly-married young woman, who was spotted by a lusty landowner during her wedding and consequently made one of his many mistresses, would not leave him day or night and so it needed to be told, as well as stories of other women, usually serfs, by whose fate he was touched and with whom he empathised so much. In fact it is very hard to find in the whole of world literature another poet who would express his empathy for women so warmly and in such a passionate way as Shevchenko. As we have just celebrated International Women’s Day  and now are commemorating Shevchenko Days (9-10 March) it is appropriate to say something more about the women in his poetry.

As the literary critic Myroslav Shkandrij noted in his blog “Shevchenko’s Relevance Today” :  

[…] perhaps no other great poet has been so woman-centred. The fate of his female characters dominates his poems and stories. The deceived and abandoned girl, the enslaved, wronged or suffering woman are recurrent images, and their stories provide the basic narrative of many works. Yes, this feature of his poetry can be interpreted as a trope – a metaphor for the situation of the Ukrainian people -- but it is also a metaphor for the situation of all the vulnerable, voiceless, and subaltern.

The best known and most translated poem by Shevchenko is Kateryna (the British Library holds translations into many languages, including one into Esperanto: Katerino, Paris, 1912; RB.23.b.6700). Shevchenko dedicated it to Vasily Zhukovsky, the famous Russian poet who contributed so much towards Shevchenko’s own emancipation from serfdom in 1838. The heroine of the poem, Kateryna, is a village girl who fell in love/was seduced by a Russian officer when soldiers of the Russian imperial army stayed in her Ukrainian village. The officer leaves. Kateryna gives a birth to a boy and is ostracised in the village. Her strict conservative parents throw her and the baby out of their house. Kateryna tries to find the officer and commits suicide after his rejection.  Generations of Ukrainian women, many of whom could not read and write themselves, shed tears about the fate of Kateryna and knew many lines from this poem by heart. Shevchenko, being a very gifted painter,  also painted his heroine.

Kateryna. Oil painting by Taras Shevchenko 1842 (From Wikimedia Commons)

Shevchenko was orphaned very early: his mother died when he was nine years old and his father when he was twelve. As an orphan and a serf in the estate of the rich land-owner Pavel Engelhardt  he was separated from the rest of his family at the age of thirteen and  taken to St Petersburg.  Yet the fate of women serfs was often even harder. In St Petersburg Shevchenko composed his first ballads based on the rich Ukrainian folklore: Prychynna (‘Bewitched’, 1838), Dumka (‘A Thought’, beginning  “What good are my dark brows to me…”, 1838), Topolia (‘The Poplar’, 1839) and others. In Topolia a young girl in love, whose "dearly cherished"  Cossack  "went away and perished", is transformed into a poplar by the depth of her sorrow. Her story is well-known, so "the chumak on his journey sees it,/ Bows his head before it; /The shepherd with his reed-pipe sits / On the gravemound on the morning, / Sees it and his heart is aching..." (translated by Vera Rich). 

After writing a lot about Zaporozhians and the great Cossack past of Ukraine Shevchenko returned to the fate of women during his two journeys to Ukraine (1843 and 1845-1847), when he, already a free man himself, observed the fate of servant women in his  poems Naimychka (The Hireling, 1845), Malen'kii Mar’iani (To little Maryanne,  (1845) and others.

He continued to write and paint in exile. Here is one of a few works by Shevchenko depicting Kazakh girls:

                      Shevchenko. Katya, a Kazakh Girl. Fort Novopetrovsk, 1856-1857. Sepia on paper (© The National Museum of Taras Shevchenko)

One of the best- loved  of Shevchenko’s poems in Ukraine is his Son (The Dream), written after he returned from exile.  It describes the dream of a serf-woman in summer: 

She reaped the wheat in serfdom’s labour;
Worn–out;   for the rest she did not come
To the sheaf - she made her way there
To feed Ivan, her little son….

She falls asleep, and in her dream she can see:

She saw, in dreams, her son Ivan
Grown up, of handsome, manly carriage,
Wealthy, betrothed, and now his marriage
To a free bride – he a free man,
No more the lord’s, they lived in freedom…
                                               (Translated by Vera Rich)

This poem was dedicated to the  bright young Ukrainian writer Marko Vovchok, whose debut (the publication of  Narodni opovidannia  [ ‘Folk stories’]  in 1858; we hold the second edition from 1861; 12590.g.2) Shevchenko greeted with great enthusiasm.

                                 Portrait of Marko Vovchok  (stamp of Ukraine) From Wikimedia Commons

The poem was written in 1858. The Emancipation reform  in the Russian empire happened a few years later.  Shevchenko did not live to see it.  On 17 February 1859 he dedicated another poem “To Marko Vovchok” in which he called her “My light, / You are my holy star in truth / You are for me the strength of youth.” Marko Vovchok lived a long life and became one of the classic writers of Ukrainian literature, many of whom are women. They all acknowledge Shevchenko’s poetical skills and his profound humanity which makes him a poet so much loved by every new generation in Ukraine.   

Olga Kerziouk, Curator Ukrainian studies

References

The Complete Kobzar. The Poetry of Taras Shevchenko, translated from the Ukrainian by Peter Fedynsky.  (London, 2013). YK.2014.a.17425

Shevchenko, Taras. Kobzar. [Translated by Vera Rich] (Kyiv, 2013). YF.2014.b.264

Shevchenko, Taras. Songs out of Darkness. Selected poems translated from the Ukrainian by Vera Rich. (London, 1961). 11303.bb.3 and W60/0682


 

Thanks to the championing of his work by Charles Baudelaire and  later by Stéphane Mallarmé who, respectively, translated his prose works and poems, the reputation of Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) in France has always been high, and his influence on the Symbolist generation of writers, artists and composers enormous. Though Baudelaire largely avoided translating Poe’s poetry, he did translate, in 1853, ‘The Raven’ which thus has the distinction of having been translated by two of the greatest poets of the 19th century. Mallarmé’s translation, Le Corbeau, was, moreover, published in a de luxe edition in 1875 with illustrations by Édouard Manet, a volume which is generally considered to be one of the first and greatest examples of the modern French livre d’artiste. 

Mallarmé first met Manet in 1873 and the two men soon became close friends. Manet’s portrait of Mallarmé in his study, now in the Musée d’Orsay, was painted in 1876, the year L'Après-midi d'un faune, their second book collaboration, appeared.

The publisher of  Le Corbeau was Richard Lesclide (1825-1892) who had also published another book illustrated by Manet – Charles Cros’s Le Fleuve (1874). The commercial failure of the two books meant the abandonment of another Poe project, a similarly translated and illustrated publication of ‘The City in the Sea’.

Le Corbeau, a bilingual, illustrated, large folio edition, was published in a limited edition of 240 copies (the British Library copy (shelfmark C.70.i.1) is no. 53) signed by Manet and Mallarmé. Manet’s illustrations were transfer lithographs (i.e. brushed with transfer ink on sheets of paper then transferred to zinc plates for printing); they were printed on laid paper (as in our copy) or on China paper. There were four full-page illustrations inserted between the double pages of Poe’s English text and, on opposite pages, Mallarmé’s translation, and also a head of a raven in profile (below left),  also used for the poster advertising the publication, and a flying  raven for the ex-libris (below right).

When the book was published Mallarmé was still an obscure poet but Manet was already an established, albeit controversial, artist. Accordingly, the title page gives greater prominence to Manet (whose name is in larger characters and printed in red, like Poe’s) than Mallarmé. Perhaps as a friendly gesture Manet, gave the narrator/poet Mallarmé’s features.  

Title-page of Edgar Allan Poe  Le Corbeau = The Raven

In Poe’s narrative poem, first published 30 years earlier, the poet, tormented by the death of his beloved Lenore, is visited by a raven, a bird of ill omen, but also the poet’s alter ego. It perches on a bust of Pallas Athene, the goddess of wisdom, and its repeated answer to the poet’s questions about his dead love is a relentless ‘Nevermore’ reminding him of his irrevocable loss. Manet’s four full-page illustrations show  the poet in his study (a claustrophobic, Nabi-like interior) [plate 1], opening the window shutters to let in the raven (revealing, in the process, a Parisian cityscape) [plate 2], staring up from his ‘cushioned seat’ to the raven [plate 3]. In the last illustration [plate 4] the poet has disappeared or, perhaps, been assimilated into the shadow of  the raven which can be seen on the floor, from which his soul ‘shall be lifted-nevermore’.

Plate 1 of Le Corbeau, “Once upon a Midnight Dreary (Sous la lampe)” 

Plate 2 of Le Corbeau, “Open here I flung the shutter (A la fenêtre)”.

Plate 3 of Le Corbeau, “Perched upon a bust of Pallas (Sur le buste)”.

 
 Plate 4 of Le Corbeau, “That shadow that lies floating on the floor (La chaise)”

The modernity and originality of Manet’s interpretation is best appreciated when compared to the steel engravings after Gustave Doré, his exact contemporary, in his last work, published in 1883. Doré’s engravings hark back to the work of earlier illustrators of the Romantic generation as well as to his own earlier works, emphasizing the supernatural atmosphere of the poem, showing, for example, the ‘Seraphim whose foot-falls tinkled on the tufted floor’, which Manet omits, or the body of the poet in the shadow of the raven.

 
Gustave Doré “Till I scarcely more than muttered ‘Other friends have flown before’”

Gustave Doré “ And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor shall be lifted – nevermore” - the poet’s body in the raven’s shadow

Doré’s illustrations, though published eight years after Manet’s, are closer to those of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s four unpublished drawings (which were produced nearly 40 years earlier and are among his earliest works). Rossetti also shows the poet surrounded by angels and spirits, and his drawings range in style from a Faust-like unbridled Gothic composition to more ethereal depictions of angels that look forward to Pre-Raphaelitism.   

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, “The Raven: Angel  Footfalls” (above, ca. 1846; below, ca. 1848) 

In 1881 Rossetti wrote to Jane Morris that he had been given a copy of ‘…a huge folio of lithographed sketches from the Raven, by a French idiot called Manet, who certainly must be the greatest and most conceited ass who ever lived. A copy should be bought for every hypochondriacal ward in lunatic asylums. To view it without a guffaw is impossible’. Was this extreme reaction due to Rossetti’s general dislike of the ‘new French School’ (Impressionism) or to professional jealousy?

 References:

Paris à l'Eau-Forte. Redacteur en chef: R. Lesclide. Directeur des Eaux-Fortes: F. Regamey. vol. 1-3. (Paris, 1873-74). P.P.1932.g.

Edgar Allan Poe, Le Corbeau. The Raven. Poëme ... Traduction française de S. Mallarmé avec illustrations par E. Manet  Paris, 1875. (C.70.i.1.)

Edgar Allan Poe, The Raven. Illustrated by G. Doré, with a comment upon the poem by E. C. Stedman. (London, 1883) 1870.b.5.

Patrick F.Quinn, The French face of Edgar Poe. (Carbondale, 1957). 11874.ppp.15.

Baudelaire and Poe: an exhibition in conjunction with the inauguration of The Center for Baudelaire Studies, Furman Hall, Vanderbilt University, April Nineth to Thirtieth, 1969.  ([Nashville], 1969). W17/7609.

Alastair I. Grieve, “Rossetti’s illustrations to Poe”, Apollo Magazine 97 (1973), p.142 -45. P.P.1931.uf.

Frances Carey and Antony Griffiths, From Manet to Toulouse-Lautrec: French lithographs, 1860-1900: catalogue of an exhibition at the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum. (London, 1978). X.421/10785.

Manet, 1832-1883 [catalogue of the exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York]. (New York, 1983).  YA.1995.b.6128

Juliet Wilson-Bareau, Breon Mitchell, “Tales of a Raven. The Origins and Fate of Le Corbeau  by Mallarmé and Manet”, Print Quarterly, VI, no 3, Sept. 1989, p.258-307. P.423/617

Le Corbeau / Edgar Poe ; traduction de Stéphane Mallarmé ; illustré par Edouard Manet ; dossier réalisé par Michaël Pakenham. (Paris,1994) YF.2013.a.5982

James H. Rubin, Manet’s silence and the poetics of bouquets. (London, 1994). YC.1994.b.5598.

Mallarmé, 1842-1898: un destin d’écriture [Published on the occasion of the centenary exhibition "Stéphane Mallarmé, 1842-1898" at the Musée d'Orsay].  (Paris, 1998) LB.31. b.17750.

Lois Davis Vines (ed.)  Poe abroad: influence, reputation, affinities. (Iowa City, 1999). 99/40530.

Chris Michaelides, Curator  Italian and Modern Greek

The 1926 book Once I Had a Home purports to be the memoir of émigrée Russian aristocrat ‘Nadejda’, including diary extracts and remembrances. ‘Nadejda’ recounts her childhood in Tsarist Russia, and her early adulthood through the First World War, the February Revolution, the October Revolution, the Russian Civil War and her eventual escape aboard HMS Marlborough in 1920, alongside the dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna. Apparently, in order to protect the identities of those suffering persecution under the continued Bolshevik rule, most names have been changed. The narrative is explicitly addressed  ‘to the men and women of the British Empire’, a warning to take the dangers of socialist agitation seriously from one who had suffered it first-hand.

Or had she? The British Library catalogue lists Once I Had a Home under the authorship not of ‘Nadejda’, but of Phyllis M. Gotch, the daughter of Pre-Raphaelite artist Thomas Cooper Gotch. She was the model for some of his most successful paintings, most importantly The Child Enthroned, and had a number of books published. These ranged from illustrated ‘Boo-Bird’ children’s books in the 1900s under her own name (British Library 012803.a.49) to the novel Golden Hair in 1938, now in the guise of ‘Felise, Marquise de Verdieres’ (NN.28863), a title conferred from an ex-husband. In this work, 12 years later, Once I Had a Home is listed as the only other book ‘by the same Author’.

The Child Enthroned, Thomas Cooper Gotch’s portrait of his daughter (image from Wikimedia Commons)

Once I Had a Home was published in the wake of a number of successful memoirs of the revolution by White Russian émigrés, such as The Real Tsaritsa, Lili Dehn’s defense of the Empress, and Anna Vyrubova’s Memories of the Russian Court. Material about Russia had high market value in the years after the revolution, and as Ben Yagoda writes of the memoir form, ‘in any society where a particular currency has high value and is fairly easily fashioned, counterfeiters will quickly and inevitably emerge’ (p. 243). There is little evidence whether the audience would have related to the bookas fact or fiction, despite its advertisements clearly labelling it as fact. The book itself is consistent in its claim that ‘a Russian voice is speaking to you’, and nothing in its publishing information betrays its secret.

Title-page of Once I had a Home by ‘Nadejda’

So why would she write about the Russian revolution? As Phyllis Gotch related in a letter to a family member in 1960:

My Mother told me that perhaps their most outstanding visit was to Russia. They had many letters of introduction and were received by the Tsar’s Court. There were two court balls while they were there. My Mother went to them with the Embassy party, but her father could not make the effort. A special entertainment of gypsy songs and dances was given to both of them however, and the Tsar presented my Mother with a set of beautiful Russian dessert mats, all hand made and worked in gold, silver and fine silk. I have them carefully packed away at home. My Mother met many distinguished Russian authors and musicians while they were in St. Petersburg and she was actually given a manuscript copy of Tchaikovsky’s ‘Chanson Triste’. (Christopher Gotch, 2011. p. 196)

Possibly, her inspiration for ‘Nadejda’ came from her mother’s stories about the Tsarist court and its ‘mad, gipsy music’ (p.70). Equally, this could be an invented story used to bolster Gotch’s claims to aristocratic status – after her divorce she claimed to have inherited the Verdieres title. I have so far been unable to find any references to this trip elsewhere.

Judging from the book’s warnings against revolution, there may be another reason why it was written. Published in 1926, the first advertisement for Once I Had a Home in The Times came on the 22nd of October, some five months after the end of the General Strike in Britain and a month before many of the miners ceased their action. In its propaganda around the General Strike the government consistently played on fears of a British revolution, and the middle and upper classes responded to the call in force, volunteering in various ways to combat the strike. Writing such an anti-socialist book as Once I Had a Home may have been one of these ways.

References:

Phyllis M. Gotch, Once I Had a Home: The Diary and Narrative of Nadejda, Lady of Honour to Their Imperial Majesties the late Empress Alexandra Feodorovna and the Empress Maria Feodorovna of Russia. (London, 1926). Copies at 010795.ee.49, W30/1037 and 947.08 *2905*

Ben Yagoda, Memoir: A History. (New York, 2009). m10/.10045

Christopher Gotch, The Gotch Family of Kettering 1755-1964 (2000), updated by Adam Robin Gotch.  ([Kettering, 2011). YK.2012.b.12504

Keith Laybourn, The General Strike Day by Day (Gloucestershire, 1996) YC.1996.b.9218

Rachelle H. Saltzman, ‘Folklore as Politics in Great Britain: Working-Class Critiques of Upper-Class Strike Breakers in the 1926 General Strike’, Anthropological Quarterly 67, 3 (July, 1994) Ac.2692.y/37.

Lili Dehn, The Real Tsaritsa (London, 1922) 010795.c.23

Anna Vyrubova,  Memories of the Russian Court.  (London, 1923) 010795.aaa.30

Michael Carey, CDA PhD student 

 

A minor by-product of the Charlie Hebdo controversy has been the realisation that even in their less controversial cartoons the cartoonists made sure the figures they were lampooning were recognised because they were clearly identified in a caption.

A labelled caricature of a seven-headed Martin Luther, detail from the title-page of J. Cochlaeus, Sieben Köpffe M. Luthers vom Hochwirdigen Sacrament des Altars (Leipzig, 1529) British Library 3905.f.81.(1.)

Classical and medieval rhetoricians distinguished simile (which makes clear what is being likened to what) and metaphor (which doesn’t). Quintilian says:

In general terms, Metaphor is a shortened form of Simile; the difference is that in Simile something is [overtly] compared with the thing we wish to describe, while in metaphor one thing is substituted for the other.—Institutio Oratoria, 8.6, 8–9.

The same distinction obtained at a higher level between “full allegory” and “mixed” (Quintilian 8.6.44-53): full allegory doesn’t tell you what it means (El espíritu de la colmena or The Prisoner being modern examples which have perplexed me over the years) while mixed prefers labels and personifications (like Pilgrim’s Progress, with Mr Worldly Wiseman and the Slough of Despond).  Calderón wrote two versions of La vida es sueño: a comedia with characters called Segismundo, Clotaldo et al., and an allegorical auto sacramental, where these become Man and Wisdom.

My granny had a hat which my mother used to say made her look like the poster “Keep death off the roads” (I have to point out in filial piety that the resemblance was limited to the hat.) The relationship between image and word here is a subtle one:  we understand easily that the spooky lady is Death with a capital D, but we also need the prompt from the text.

In modern (and early modern) times it’s seen as bad form to use words to explain an image: as Cervantes has it:

“Thou art right, Sancho,” said Don Quixote, “for this painter is like Orbaneja, a painter there was at Ubeda, who when they asked him what he was painting, used to say, ‘Whatever it may turn out’; and if he chanced to paint a cock he would write under it, ‘This is a cock,’ for fear they might think it was a fox.” (Don Quixote, II, lxxi).

A common exchange from my childhood was:

“What are YOU looking at?”
Dunno: the label’s dropped off.”

Doubtless an allusion to Quintilian.


References:

Cervantes, Miguel de, The ingenious gentleman: Don Quixote of La Mancha: a translation with introduction and notes by John Ormsby. (London, 1885). 12489.k.4. (Available online at http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Don_Quixote)

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

http://genius.com/William-shakespeare-the-seven-ages-of-man-annotated

Pedro Calderón de la Barca, La vida es sueño: edición crítica de las dos versiones del auto y de la loa, ed. Fernando Plata Parga (Pamplona, 2012) YF.2014.a.11638

Barry Taylor, Curator Hispanic Studies