At the opening of Don Quixote Cervantes describes the would-be knight’s bachelor home life:

In a village of La Mancha, the name of which I have no desire to call to mind, there lived not long since one of those gentlemen that keep a lance in the lance-rack, an old buckler, a lean hack, and a greyhound for coursing. An olla of rather more beef than mutton, a salad on most nights, scraps on Saturdays [‘duelos y quebrantos los sábados’],  lentils on Fridays and a pigeon or so extra on Sundays, made away with three-quarters of his income ...( I, i)

Duelos y quebrantos is defined in early texts as an omelette made with brains.

By examing early cookery books, Professor Barry Ife concluded that it may have been eating cat flesh that made Quijano/Quixote lose his senses.

Quixote’s experiences with cats were not happy ones:

Chapter XLVI: Of the terrible bell and cat fright that Don Quixote got in the course of the enamoured Altisidora’s wooing

[...]  Don Quixote had got so far with his song, to which the duke, the duchess, Altisidora, and nearly the whole household of the castle were listening, when all of a sudden from a gallery above that was exactly over his window they let down a cord with more than a hundred bells attached to it, and immediately after that discharged a great sack full of cats, which also had bells of smaller size tied to their tails. Such was the din of the bells and the squalling of the cats, that though the duke and duchess were the contrivers of the joke they were startled by it, while Don Quixote stood paralysed with fear; and as luck would have it, two or three of the cats made their way in through the grating of his chamber, and flying from one side to the other, made it seem as if there was a legion of devils at large in it. They extinguished the candles that were burning in the room, and rushed about seeking some way of escape; the cord with the large bells never ceased rising and falling; and most of the people of the castle, not knowing what was really the matter, were at their wits’ end with astonishment. Don Quixote sprang to his feet, and drawing his sword, began making passes at the grating, shouting out, “Avaunt, malignant enchanters! avaunt, ye witchcraft-working rabble! I am Don Quixote of La Mancha, against whom your evil machinations avail not nor have any power.” And turning upon the cats that were running about the room, he made several cuts at them. They dashed at the grating and escaped by it, save one that, finding itself hard pressed by the slashes of Don Quixote's sword, flew at his face and held on to his nose tooth and nail, with the pain of which he began to shout his loudest. The duke and duchess hearing this, and guessing what it was, ran with all haste to his room, and as the poor gentleman was striving with all his might to detach the cat from his face, they opened the door with a master-key and went in with lights and witnessed the unequal combat.

Don Quixote assailed by the cats, by Bartolomeo Pinelli, from his Le azioni più celebrate del famoso cavaliere errante Don Chisciotte della Mancia  (Rome, [1834?])  British Library Cerv.64

The duke ran forward to part the combatants, but Don Quixote cried out aloud, “Let no one take him from me; leave me hand to hand with this demon, this wizard, this enchanter; I will teach him, I myself, who Don Quixote of La Mancha is.” The cat, however, never minding these threats, snarled and held on; but at last the duke pulled it off and flung it out of the window. Don Quixote was left with a face as full of holes as a sieve and a nose not in very good condition, and greatly vexed that they did not let him finish the battle he had been so stoutly fighting with that villain of an enchanter.  (Book II, Ch. 46)

But look at the below picture from the 1830s. The dog at Quixote’s feet in straight from the text.  But where did the cat at his elbow come from?

Don Quixote at home, by Barolomeo Pinelli. (Cerv.649)

As I see it, not being much of a cat lover, the idea that a cat is a cosy companion to reading is a comfy 19th-century notion.

You probably know of Pangur Bán, who features in the ninth-century Irish poem:

I and Pangur Bán, my cat
'Tis a like task we are at;
Hunting mice is his delight
Hunting words I sit all night.
[...]
'Tis a merry thing to see
At our tasks how glad are we,
When at home we sit and find
Entertainment to our mind. [...] (Robin Flower’s translation)

But Pangur serves as a metaphorical parallel to the reading scholar rather than a literal reading companion.

Barry Taylor, Curator Romance Collections

References

Miguel de Cervantes, 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)

B. W. Ife, ‘Mad Cats and Knights Errant: Roberto de Nola and Don Quixote’, Journal of the Institute of Romance Studies, 7 (1999), 49-54. ZC.9.a.4077

En torno al Quijote : adaptaciones, imitaciones, imágenes y música en la biblioteca / Biblioteca Histórica Municipal de Madrid. (Madrid, 2005) LF.31.a.890

 

This April saw the launch of Prozhito.org  (‘Lives Lived’), an online database of thousands of 20th-century diary entries in Russian. Although the site primarily includes the published diaries of prominent writers, scientists and other notable public figures, its creators have also started to digitise the diaries of ordinary citizens from a range of backgrounds, an addition which will provide a fascinating insight into how different people experienced events such as the Russian Revolution. 

I recently came across one such ‘ordinary’ diary during my research at the British Library, which is yet to be published by Prozhito.org. Written by a young Russian girl named Nelly L’vovna Ptashkina, the diary contains her account of life between 1918 and 1920, a period of revolution and civil war in Russia. Nelly was from a middle class background and she describes how the Bolsheviks targeted her family, forcing them to flee Moscow for Kiev and eventually immigrate to Paris in late 1919.

An undated portrait of Nelly Ptashkina in the Russian-language edition of her diary. (British Library 010795.b.50.)

Nelly flits between astutely describing and reflecting on the political situation and relating her girlish and adolescent thoughts, interests and dreams, the latter giving away the fact she was only 15 when she began this diary in 1918. She is conscious of the gravity of the events unfolding around her and writes of her wish to record them:

Truly we are going through a terrible, terrible time … It would be a good thing to collect the newspapers, but that is impossible as we move from place to place; at least I have my diary. (29 January 1918)

While Nelly’s diary offers a fascinating glimpse into the life of a young girl during a period of immense change and upheaval, there is a tragic story attached to its publication. In July 1920, just days after passing her Baccalaureat examination at the Paris Sorbonne, Nelly slipped while walking by the Le Dard waterfall in Chamonix and fell to her death. She was just 17 years old. Two years previously, Nelly had written about a sudden premonition she had had of her coming death: 

I love to stand at the edge of an abyss, at the very edge, so that a single movement—,
and … to-day, stepping closer to the brink of a precipice, although not so deep as I should have wished, the thought came into my mind that some day I should die thus, crashing headlong into the chasm…  (20 October 1918)

Yet Nelly’s diary is also full of her hopes and dreams for the future, making her untimely death all the more tragic. Nelly’s mother decided to publish her daughter’s diary in Paris in 1922 to preserve her memory and so that others could ‘appreciate the tender unfolding of a soul’. The publication of Nelly’s diary is not only a tribute to a sensitive and talented young writer, but it also serves as a reminder of the experience of countless children during the revolution and civil war.

Katie McElvanney, CDA PhD student

References

Ptashkina, Nelly L’vovna, Dnevnik, 1918-1920, ed. by S. Svatikov (Paris, 1922). 010795.b.50.

Ptashkina, Nelly L’vovna, The Diary of Nelly Ptashkina, trans. by Pauline de Chary (London, 1923). 012591.aa.38.

The first book in the Basque language was printed in Bordeaux as late as 1545.  It is a collection of poems by the vicar of St.-Jean-Pied-de-Port, Bernat Etxepare, entitled Linguae Vasconum Primitiae (‘First fruits of the Basque language’). Only one copy survives, in  the Bibliothèque national in Paris. Subsequent printing in Basque, both in France and Spain, was not extensive. So how it is that so many books in Basque are now in the British Library’s collections?

In fact books in a wide variety of languages, including Basque, were in the foundation collection of Sir Hans Sloane, who owned copies of three editions of Jean Etcheberri de Çiboure’s Noelac eta berce canta esperitual berriac (‘Carols and new spiritual songs’; Bordeaux, 1645; Bayonne, 1699; Bayonne: [1700?]; British Library 1064.a.30.(30), (2), (1) respectively). He also possessed the third edition of Etcheberri’s Eliçara erabiltceco liburua (‘A book to carry to Church’).

 
Jean Etcheberri, Eliçara erabiltceco liburua (Pau, 1666;  C.53.gg.20)

It is doubtful that Sloane knew Basque, but books in foreign languages, including minority languages, were intrinsic to his collecting policy as language was seen as fundamental to the description of peoples. He also owned two key works about the Basque Country and the language: Andrés de Poza, De la antigua lengua, poblaciones, y comarcas de las Españas (Bilbao, 1587; 627.d.32) and Baltasar de Echave, Discursos de la antigüedad de la lengua cantabra vascongada (Mexico, 1607; C.33.i.6).  Both emphasized Basque’s perceived status as the first language of the  Iberian Peninsula.

The King’s Library contains a copy of what is arguably the most iconic book in the Basque language, Joannes Leiçarraga’s New Testament, printed in 1571.  For the Basques this text is their Tyndale and King James versions combined.

The opening of St Matthew’s Gospel from Joannes Leiçarraga’s Basque New Testament Iesus Christ Gure Iaunaren Testamentu Berria (La Rochelle in 1571) 217.d.2

In the second half of the 19th century, purchase became the main means of acquiring foreign books. Thanks to Antonio Panizzi, Keeper of Printed Books from 1837 until 1856, the British Museum Library secured sufficient funds to acquire contemporary works of foreign scholarship systematically. These included books about Basque, as about other foreign languages.

The increase in acquisition budgets also allowed the Museum to bid ambitiously at book sales.  One of the most important for minority language material was the 1873 Paris sale of the Bibliothèque patoise of  French bibliophile Jean Henri Burgaud des Marets (1806-1873), which included  more than 300 works relating to Basque. Of these the Museum purchased 130, mostly religious works, but also periodicals, books of music, travel writing, and scholarly works on the Basque language and region. Most were printed in the 19th century, but a number were from the 18th, e.g. Basque versions of  The Imitation of Christ (Bordeaux, 1720; IX.Basq.7.) and  St Francis de Sales, Introduction à la vie dévote (Toulouse, 1749; 886.d.2.)

The Museum received important donations material from two scholars of Basque during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The first was Napoleon I’s nephew, Prince Louis-Lucien Bonaparte, who spent much of his life in London.  He commissioned translations of the Song of Songs and of St Matthew’s Gospel into several minority languages and dialects, most notably Basque.  These  were used to compare dialects and as a result Bonaparte produced his dialect map of the seven Basque Provinces (Carte des sept provinces basques, 1863; Maps 18649(4)). Bonaparte’s basic divisions have largely stood the test of time.  

The second donor of Basque books to the Museum was the irascible and obsessive Oxford Bascophile Edward Spencer Dodgson (1857-1922).  A pupil of Resurrección María de Azkue, the first director of Euskaltzaindia, the Basque language academy, Dodgson devoted most of his life to studying Basque language and bibliography. This latter interest extended to collecting Basque books, most of which he donated to the British Museum.  These fall into two broad categories. The first were cheap, popular, small-format books in Basque. Their subject-matter goes beyond the usual works of popular piety to include translations of episodes from Dante’s Inferno and Cervantes’ Don Quijote, a popular tale, and various dramatic works.  The second group consists of Dodgson’s own publications: works about Basque, notably the verb, and his editions of earlier works (e.g. those of Rafael Mikoleta and Agustín Kardebaraz). Basque language courses, readers and conversation manuals can also be conveniently included in this group.

A conspicuous feature of Dodgson’s donations are his manuscript annotations. These indicate how, when and where he obtained a particular book, what he paid for it or who gave it to him. Other notes are corrections, including intemperate comments on the authors’ linguistic incompetence. Inside a copy of Tomás Epalza’s El euskara ó el baskuenze en 120 lecciones  he wrote: ‘The author of this collection of bad Basque and silly Castilian is Thomas Epalza of Bilbao’. He corrected the text in many places. In a second copy he wrote: ‘This book is of very little value.  Its lightest mistakes are misprints. These are very numerous indeed.’


Dodgson’s note in one of his copies of Epalza’s El euskara ó el baskuenze en 120 lecciones (Bilbao, 1896) 12978.c.38.(1)

The British Library’s early Basque holdings were thus built up in part fortuitously and in part strategically. That collection strategy has been maintained, with some variation. Today, the Library focusses on works about the language, editions of classic texts in Basque and a selection of contemporary literature (including in Spanish translation).

Geoff West, Former Curator Hispanic Studies