09 March 2016
Migration in Ukrainian literature
Since the early 20th century, Ukrainian literature has been composed in countries all over the globe. Waves of emigration by Ukrainian writers began after October 1917 and the subsequent war with Russia, and continued after the Second World War and during the Brezhnev era. Those waves were created by a threat to life and freedom.
Nowadays, writers do not generally have to flee for their lives and tend to leave Ukraine in search of betterment or fulfilment – as do many characters in their books. Ukraine-based writers, still living in the homeland of millions of labour migrants, are also increasingly turning to the subject of migration. During Soviet times, freethinking books in Ukrainian were published in the West and smuggled back into Ukraine. Today it’s a different story, and expat readers have to obtain Ukrainian books from Ukraine (there is no significant e-book system although plenty of pirated books online). Thanks to travel and social media, modern expat writers are in direct contact with their readership. Their books, whether written in London or Lviv, are published by mainstream Ukrainian publishing houses and sold through Ukrainian book stores to Ukrainian readers. Expat writers are no longer isolated from mainstream literature but are part of the same discourse.
The BBC Ukrainian Book of the Year awards recognise the best new work of fiction in Ukrainian with a prize of £1,000 awarded to the author. Since the Cultural Programme of the EBRD became a partner in 2012, the award has been extended to include the Ukrainian Children’s Book of the Year.
Most prominent modern expat writers have featured in the longlists and shortlists for the award over the years, and three have come away with the top prize: Volodymyr Dibrova (Harvard), Yaroslav Melnyk (Vilnius) and Vasyl Makhno (New York). All three were already recognised names in Ukraine – as a prose and drama writer, literary critic and poet respectively – before emigrating. Dibrova and Makhno, both university teachers, moved for work, and Melnyk for love.
Vasyl Makhno won the 2015 award with his first collection of short stories, Dim u Beiting Hollov (A House In Baiting Hollow). The book, which revolves around the town of Chortkiv in the Ternopil region of Ukraine, spans several decades, from before the Second World War to modern times, and nearly every story concerns migration.
Photograph of Vasyl Makhno (published with kind permission of Ostap Kin)
The first story takes us to Baiting Hollow, a seaside neighbourhood near New York City, where an impoverished Ukrainian intellectual and his much younger girlfriend try to make their home, hindered by history, memories and mental breakdown. Another story concerns a labour migrant who tries to legalise his stay in the US through a sham marriage. But the most heart-wrenching story tells us about the migrant that never was. In ‘Hat, figs, plums’, a Jewish fishmonger yearns to leave Chortkiv and join his brothers in America, but in the end cannot obtain a US visa. As events develop in the final days before the Soviet invasion, we realise that he will never reach Ellis Island. A passage in the story describes migration from Chortkiv in the preceding decades:
And Jews dissolved among the street traders, and passed on to each other - warm, like a chicken egg, - the word of Torah, so as not to forget who they are. And the Poles spread out from the Chicago slaughterhouses of Illinois to mines and farms of Pennsylvania, keeping church wafers under their tongues, so as not to forget who they are. And Ukrainians drifted into the streets of strange towns, bowing their heads as they read the Gospels, so as not to forget who they are. And if they were from Chortkiv, no matter whether Jews, Ukrainians or Poles, they found in their languages such words as to remember the dust of that land and the sky of that city.
Vasyl Makhno, Dim u Beĭting Hollov (Lviv, 2015) YF.2016.a.2477
Migration both to and from Ukraine also provided material for Ponaikhaly (‘Overrun’; YF.2016.a.4136) by Artem Chapay, a journalist and author from Kyiv. The protagonist starts out as a skinhead, “defending” his town from Arab, Afghan and African migrants. He leaves the skinhead group when he finds out that its leader gets kickbacks from local competitors of migrant businessmen. In the finale, Chapay’s hero, now himself a migrant worker in Moscow, gets punched up by local skinheads who take exception to his dark hair. Chapay’s book, is probably the most comprehensive exploration of migration today.
Cover of Ponaikhaly by Artem Chapai (Kyiv, 2015). YF.2016.a.4136
Another notable example from recent years is Frau Miuller ne nalashtovana platyty bil'she (‘Frau Müller is Not Willing to Pay More’; YF.2014.a.8581) by Lviv-based author Natalka Snyadanko, shortlisted for the BBC prize in 2013, which explores a relationship between two lesbian Ukrainian migrants in Berlin.
One effect of migration is accepting a new language, culture and identity. It has a similar effect on literature - migration has not only introduced a new topic into Ukrainian literature, but also authors who write about Ukrainian migration in English. One author who neither is nor writes in Ukrainian is the Scottish academic, translator and writer, Uilleam Blacker. After years of research on and translation of Ukrainian authors and of hanging out with young Ukrainian expats, Blacker wrote a play, Bloody East Europeans, which was first staged by Molodyi Teatr, an amateur London-based troupe consisting mainly of Ukrainian migrant workers, at the 2015 Edinburgh Fringe Festival. It explores identity, money, forced labour, sex labour, ethnic stereotypes, and tells many typical stories that abound in migrant communities.
British-Ukrainian novelist Marina Lewycka hardly needs an introduction. In her bestseller, A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, she looked at both post-war migrants and more recent arrivals. Her character Valentina, a fake-breasted Ukrainian blonde who marries the narrator’s elderly father, was hilarious to many British readers but did not endear Lewycka to Ukrainian publishers. Lewycka’s second novel, Two Caravans (Nov.2007/2003), which also takes labour migration as its subject, was translated (by myself) and published in Ukraine years before a publisher was found there for the first novel.
A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian by Marina Lewycka, in English (right: LT.2013.x.2459) and in Ukrainian translation (left: YF.2014.a.6053)
In the coming years, new perspectives on migration will probably emerge in Ukrainian literature, following the annexation of Crimea and the war in Donbas, with close to a million internally displaced persons now living throughout the country as a result. Their plight is already reflected in poetry by Serhiy Zhadan, born in Donbas and raised in Kharkiv, perhaps Ukraine’s most talented literary voice. Longer works of fiction, which take time, will surely follow, and some may well be in Russian and in Crimean Tatar.
Svitlana Pyrkalo, Principal Communications Adviser, EBRD London, and BBC Ukrainian Book of the Year judge
01 March 2016
Portraits of Ariosto, or not?
One of the greatest portraits in the National Gallery in London, Titian’s familiarly called Man with the Blue Sleeve (ca 1509), was for some three centuries thought to represent Ludovico Ariosto. Reproduced in editions of Orlando furioso, Ariosto’s most famous work, it became, for generations of readers, the best-known image of the poet. This painting is not, however, likely to feature in any books published this year, the 500th anniversary of the first edition of Ariosto’s epic poem as, after years of uncertainty about the Ariosto connection, the sitter was identified in 2012 as a member of the Barbarigo, an aristocratic Venetian family.
Titian, Portrait of Gerolamo (?) Barbarigo ca 1510 (National Gallery, London) and as reproduced on an editon of Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando furioso. Ed. Lanfranco Caretti. (Turin, 1966)
Another painting in the National Gallery, Palma Vecchio’s Portrait of a Poet (ca 1516), has also, at various times, been proposed as a portrait of Ariosto. When it was acquired by the gallery in 1860 it was also thought to be a portrait of Ariosto by Titian. A few years later, however, it was recognised as a work by Palma Vecchio and later attributions tended to alternate between the two artists, though other artists have also been proposed. As there is no written evidence that Ariosto ever sat for Palma Vecchio, the identification of the sitter as Ariosto was dropped each time the work was attributed to him, only to reappear when reattributed to Titian, as it was known from contemporary or near-contemporary sources that he had painted a portrait of Ariosto.
Palma Vecchio, Portrait of a Poet. ca 1516. The National Gallery, London.
The Palma Vecchio painting is thought to represent a poet because the arm of the sitter is resting on a book and his head is framed by laurel branches, the traditional attribute of the poet and an allusion to Petrarch’s Laura. Though there is no consensus among scholars, it is usually said to have been painted around 1516, the date of the first publication of Orlando furioso. Hence the temptation to identify the sitter as Ariosto even though the poet was by then in his mid-forties whereas the portrait is obviously that of a much younger man. There has also been a suggestion that the painting may not necessarily be a portrait and, worse, that the laurel may be a symbol of charity or faith, rather than poetry.
As Titian’s portrait of Ariosto mentioned by contemporary sources, has never been identified with any certainty, other portraits by the artist have at times been proposed. They include a portrait in the Indianapolis Museum of Art, one attributed to Titian, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and a portrait discovered in 1933 in Casa Oriani, Ferrara and attributed, in quick succession, to Dosso Dossi (by Giuseppe Agnelli) and to Titian (by Georg Gronau).
Titian, Portrait of Ariosto. Present whereabouts unknown. [Image from Fototeca della Fondazione Federico Zeri, Università di Bologna]
Gronau elegantly demolishes the attribution to Dossi and in his description of the portrait he amusingly says: ‘The painter, with true insight, chose this not very usual “lost” profile, for only in such position could he do full justice to the very characteristic and beautiful curve of the nose…If he had moved the head ever so slightly towards the front, the line of the nose would have been indistinct’. This portrait was lost in the Second World War, but there are two copies of it in the Biblioteca Ariostea di Ferrara, one by Carlo Bononi (1569-1632), the other an anonymous 17th-century work. More importantly, another copy was painted by Cristofano dell’Altissimo (ca 1552-1568), a Florentine artist who copied numerous portraits of famous men for Cosimo I de’Medici, now all in the Galleria degli Uffizi. Giorgio Vasari used this portrait in a fresco in the Palazzo Vecchio where Ariosto is seen in conversation with Pietro Aretino (also based on a portrait by Titian).
Left, Cristofano dell’Altissimo (1525-1605), Ludovico Ariosto, before 1568 (Image from Wikimedia Commons); Right, Detail from Giorgio Vasari, ‘The entry of Leo X into Florence’, Palazzo Vecchio, reproduced in Palazzo Vecchio: officina di opere e di ingegni, a cura di Carlo Francini. (Milan, 2007) LF.31.b.3647
The features of the poet – high forehead, hair receding at the top, aquiline nose, thin lips, lively eyes, and straggling beard – correspond to those of the woodcut after a lost drawing by Titian (engraved by Francesco Marcolini), published in the 1532 edition of Orlando furioso, the last revised by the poet
Portrait of Ludovico Ariosto, after Titian. Woodcut, with a decorative border by Francesco de Nanto, from Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando furioso (Ferrara, 1532) C.20.c.11
This woodcut, the most reliable likeness of Ariosto, has been described as the archetypal portrait of him and was copied in a variety of media and in later editions of his works. Two examples will suffice – the bronze medal produced by Pastorino de’ Pastorini (1508-1592), one of the most prolific medallists of the Italian Renaissance and the frontispiece in the monumental 1730 edition of the poem.
Above: Bust of Ludovico Ariosto. Cast bronze medal (obverse) designed by Pastorino de’Pastorini, ca 1555 (The British Museum) Below: Frontispiece portrait of Ariosto by C. Orsolini from vol.1 of Orlando furioso (Venice, 1730) 835.m.11
Traditions, however, die hard and the identification of Ariosto with Titian’s ‘Man with the Blue Sleeve’ is still strong in popular imagination as can be seen from a recent edition of Italo Calvino’s retelling of Orlando furioso in which the introductory double-spread illustration by Grazia Nidasio wittily combines the portrait of ‘Ariosto’, his blue sleeve resting on manuscripts of his work while he is adding corrections to the proofs of his text, with that of a mischievous-looking Calvino, and various knights on horseback riding over the Palazzo Estense in Ferrara.
Chris Michaelides, Curator Romance Collections
References/Further reading:
Giuseppe Agnelli, ‘Ritratti dell’Ariosto’, Rassegna d’arte, 1922. P.P.1931.plg
Giuseppe Agnelli, ‘Il ritratto dell’Ariosto di Dosso Dossi’, Emporium, lxxvii (1933), 275-282
Georg Gronau, ‘Titian’s Ariosto’, The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, Vol.63, no. 368 (Nov. 1933), 194-203. PP.1931.pcs
Harold E. Wethey, The Paintings of Titian: complete ed. Vol.2. The Portraits. (London, 1971). fL71/4158
Cecil Gould, National Gallery Catalogues: the Sixteenth-Century Italian Schools. (London, 1987). YK. 1994.b.9553
Philip Rylands, Palma Vecchio. (Cambridge, 1992). q92/05892
Paul Joannides, Titian: the assumption of genius (New Haven; London, 2001) LB.31.b.23190
David Alan Brown [et al.], Bellini, Giorgione, Titian, and the Renaissance of Venetian painting. (New Haven, Conn.; London, 2006). LC.31.b.2948
Orlando furioso di Ludovico Ariosto, raccontato da Italo Calvino, illustrato da Grazia Nidasio. (Milan, 2009) YF.2012.a.5411
A. Mazzotta, ‘A ‘gentiluomo da Ca’ Barbarigo’ by Titian in the National Gallery, London’, The Burlington Magazine, CLIV, 2012, 12-19. PP.1931.pcs
Giovanni C.F. Villa (ed.), Palma il Vecchio : lo sguardo della bellezza. (Milan, 2015). YF.2015.b.1072
Gianni Venturi, ‘Ludovico Ariosto: portrait d’un poète dans les arts et dans les arts visuels’, in L’Arioste et les arts, 61-72. (Paris, 2012). YF.2012.b.2238.
28 February 2016
Prometheus in Petersburg: Vyacheslav Ivanov (1866-1949)
The spell which the South cast over many poets from Northern Europe – Goethe, Byron, Shelley and Ibsen, to name but a few – is well known. Less familiar but equally potent was the enchantment which it held for the Russian Symbolist poet, playwright and philosopher Vyacheslav Ivanov, who was born in Moscow 150 years ago on 28 February 1866.
Portrait of Viacheslav Ivanov in later life, from the frontispiece of his poetry collection Chelovek (Paris, 1939) 011586.f.114.
After studying history and philosophy in Moscow, Ivanov travelled to Berlin in 1886 to pursue his studies of Roman law and economics under Theodor Mommsen, but at the same time discovered the writings of Nietzsche and the German Romantics, especially the mystical poetry of Novalis and Hölderlin’s highly personal evocation of ancient Greece. His passion for archaeology took him to Rome in 1892 to complete a doctorate in that subject, and it was here that he met the poet and translator Lydia Zinovieva-Annibal, who became his wife in 1899. Together they travelled to Athens, Geneva, Egypt and Palestine, as well as Italy, where Ivanov devoted himself to a new interest – the art of the Renaissance – as well as drawing inspiration from the landscape for his first sonnets.
Viacheslav Ivanov’s first work, Kormchiia Zviezdy (St Petersburg, 1903) 011586.h.101.
On their return to St. Petersburg in 1905, the Ivanovs’ home near the Tauride Palace became a vibrant literary salon and the cradle of the Symbolist movement. Every Wednesday, visitors including Aleksandr Blok, Nikolai Berdyaev and Vsevolod Meyerhold thronged to their soirées in such numbers that internal walls had to be demolished to accommodate them all. In a feverish cosmopolitan milieu, they discussed everything from ancient Greek to contemporary Scandinavian and French poetry, theatre and philosophy.
Facsimile of Ivanov’s handwriting from K. Balʹmont [et al.], Avtografy (Moscow?, 1920) RF.2005.b.173
As time passed, a second phase of Symbolism evolved, exchanging the influence of the French Decadents for that of Nietzsche and Wagner. Like them, Ivanov explored the message of the classical world for modern civilization, with special reference to the Dionysian mysteries and their role in the development of tragedy. Like Hölderlin, he was preoccupied by the gulf between the spiritual values of antiquity and the materialism and barrenness of contemporary society, and like Nietzsche with the contrast between the ecstatic cult of Dionysus and the joyless rigidity of institutionalized religion. He would follow Hölderlin in writing his own dramatic version of the legend of Prometheus, Prometei, in which he followed the principles of Aeschylean tragedy.
Viacheslav Ivanov, Prometei (Petersburg, 1919) X.909/88128.
The British Library copy, with its limp, unassuming cover, gives little idea of the importance of this work. It was printed under conditions of extreme austerity in the midst of the Russian Civil War (1917-22), testifying to Ivanov’s importance as a cultural figure who offered the hope that drama, the most powerful of the arts, could take the place of the Orthodox Church in guiding post-revolutionary Russia and offering a new kind of religious belief. Meyerhold in particular seized on Ivanov’s vision of a theatre in which (as in Wagner’s Bayreuth) there would be no separation between stage and auditorium, allowing actors and public to mingle and improvise freely, sharing masks, costumes and a sense of participating in a sacred rite where Dionysus/Christ would provide an example of ‘the total unity of suffering’.
The death of his wife in 1907 marked a turning-point in Ivanov’s creative as well as his personal life. His poetry became increasingly mystical, and he gradually abandoned it altogether in favour of a series of articles on Symbolism and translations of Aeschylus, Alcaeus, Sappho and Petrarch into Russian. Following the death of his second wife Vera (Lydia’s daughter by a previous marriage) in 1920, he became Professor of Classical Philology at the University of Baku, and, when the Soviet government finally allowed him to leave Azerbaijan in 1924, he settled in Rome as professor of Old Church Slavonic at the Collegium Russicum. His eclectic approach to religion culminated in his reception into the Russian Catholic Church in 1926, claiming that by doing so he became ‘truly Orthodox’ and embodied the principle of the unity of the Eastern and Western churches before the Great Schism.
Frontispiece by Konstantin Somov for Ivanov’s Cor Ardens (Moscow, 1911) 11586.dd.14.
The British Library’s collections span the full range of Ivanov’s work, from a first edition of his earliest collection of poems, Kormchiia Zviezdy (‘Lodestars’)and the sumptuously-illustrated Cor ardens (‘The burning heart’ ) to a collection of facsimile autograph items by Ivanov himself and other leading writers of his time including Konstantin Bal’mont and Sergei Esenin. They bear witness to the creative vitality of a man whose ability to move effortlessly between cultural and religious traditions and the sensuous and the scholarly resulted in a vivid and inspiring view of their power to redeem and transform.
Susan Halstead, Content Specialis (Humanities and Social Sciences), Research Engagement
21 February 2016
To the Moon and back: Svatopluk Čech (1846-1908)
Looking at portraits of several of the leading figures in 19th-century Czech literature, it is hard to reconcile their sober and often diffident appearance with the worlds of fantasy which they conjured up on the page. Svatopluk Čech (February 21, 1846 – February 23, 1908) was one of these. Born in Ostředek near Benešov as the son of the steward on a nobleman’s estate, he plunged into his father’s library to discover the works of the European Romantics and developed a strong sense of patriotism which coloured his writings but did not entirely obscure his critical vision.
Svatopluk Čech, frontispiece portrait from his Pravý výlet pana Broučka do měsíce (Prague, 1889) YA.1995.a.4931
After his studies in Prague he embarked on a career in law, but abandoned it in 1879 to live by his pen, and quickly established himself as a journalist, contributing to the nationalist periodicals Květy, Lumír, and Světozor, which he edited. He had already achieved success with his first poem, ‘Husita na Baltu’ (The Hussite on the Baltic), published in the almanac Ruch in 1868, contrasting the turmoil of the Hussite wars with the bonds between human beings. His choice of historical themes often served to point up the uncertain situation of the Czechs in the 19th century, in thrall to the Habsburgs at a time when their nationalistic feelings were increasing in strength, as in Václav z Michalovic, a story of oppression by the Jesuits set during the Thirty Years’ War when the catastrophic Battle of the White Mountain marked the conquest of the Protestant Bohemian nobles by the forces of the Holy Roman Emperor.
Title-page of Svatopluk Čech, Václav z Michalovic (Prague, 1882). X.902/777.
In his epic poem Evropa (1878) Čech describes an allegorical voyage on the ship Europa, where conflict breaks out among the passengers of different nationalities and is resolved by the union of two of them. In other works he adopts a more lyrical tone, both in poetry (Jitřní písně [Morning Songs], 1887) and in prose (Ve stínu lípy [In the shadow of the lime-tree], 1879), but blends his memories of an idyllic childhood in the Bohemian countryside with awareness of the social and political realities of his times. In his poem Lešetínský kovář (The Blacksmith of Lešetín; 1883 (confiscated); 1899) he addresses the problems of industrialization in a rural area, and his cycle of 23 poems Písně otroka (Songs of a Slave; 1895) attack the subjection of the Czechs to the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
It is, however, as a satirist that he is best known outside his native country. Although his mock epic Hanuman (1884) recounts a civil war between clothed cosmopolitan and naked ‘natural’ (nationalist) apes based on the corrupt and bureaucratic milieu of the Habsburgs, it is equally applicable to any authoritarian regime, and was translated into English well before the end of the century.
While several of his works were dramatized and later filmed, it is on the operatic stage that one of his creations achieved particular fame. Matěj Brouček (his singularly unheroic name means ‘little beetle’) is a prosperous but small-minded and cowardly Prague landlord whose fondness for beer leads him to frequent his local tavern, from which he is fantastically transported to the moon (full of pretentious artists and poets, mocking contemporary trends in literature) where he hitches a ride on Pegasus and where Čech himself appears as an apparition.
Brouček is transported back from the moon. Illustration by Viktor Oliver from Pravý výlet pana Broučka do měsíce
In a sequel Brouček travels through subterranean passages below the pub and emerges in the 15th century amid the Hussite warriors, where he fails to distinguish himself in battle and wakes up behind a barrel to discover that it was all a dream. These stories inspired Leoš Janáček to compose his opera Výlety pana Broučka (‘The Excursions of Mr. Brouček’ 1920), taking the pusillanimous protagonist on yet another journey and suggesting comparisons with another picaresque Czech anti-hero, Jaroslav Hašek’s not-so-Good Soldier Švejk.
Cover of Svatopluk Čech, Nový epochální výlet pana Broučka tentokrát do patnáctého století (Prague, 1889) 1568/802.
The pan-Slav movement which inspired poems such as Slavie (1882), set on another ship where the Russian brothers Vladimir and Ivan discuss materialism and idealism, may seem remote nowadays, but represents only one of Čech’s many themes. Through trenchant satire and mordant humour, this solitary and introverted man was able to transcend both his own limitations and those of a narrow nationalism to challenge chauvinistic patriots and express a breadth of vision and humanity which is as topical as ever nowadays.
Susan Halstead, Content Specialist (Humanities and Social Sciences), Research Engagement
19 February 2016
Mysteries in Black and White
The long poem ‘Weltwehe’ was written by August Stramm (1874-1915), one of the most original and intense poets of German Expressionism. For most of his adult life an official in the German Post Office, Stramm experimented with writing drama and poetry alongside his regular work. In 1913 he began contributing to the Expressionist periodical Der Sturm, developing a close friendship with its editor Herwarth Walden and beginning a productive period of writing during which he refined his highly individual poetic voice, but which was tragically cut short by his death in action in 1915.
August Stramm, ca. 1911. Reproduced in August Stramm, Das Werk, herausgegeben von René Radrizzani (Wiesbaden, 1963) X.909/12637.
Stramm’s poetry, influenced by Italian futurist experiments, condenses and intensifies language, playing with syntax and blurring the boundaries between different parts of speech. The resulting works are powerful and evocative, if not always easy to understand. The title of ‘Weltwehe’ is an example. ‘Wehe’ can mean labour pains, pain or woe generally, or the blowing of a wind. Is Stramm referring to a world being born, a world in pain or a world though which a wind blows – or which is itself waving in a wind? (The title may also be a deliberate echo of Jakob van Hoddis’s ‘Weltende’, a seminal work of German Expressionism although in a very different style to Stramm’s poetry.)
In 1922 the artist Hugo Meier-Thur (1881-1943) produced an illustrated limited edition of ‘Weltwehe’ (hyphenating the title into Welt-Wehe) as a joint commission for a Hamburg bibliophile society and the Sturm publishing house.
Title-page from Hugo Meier-Thur, Welt-Wehe: ein Schwarzweissspiel in Marmorätzungen zu einem Gedicht von August Stramm (Berlin, 1922) Cup.408.rrr.22
The entire work – covers, titlepage, poem and colophon – is composed of Meier-Thur’s white-on-black marble etchings, an unusual form which produces an almost ghostly effect, simultaneously magical and disturbing. Meier-Thur gave the book the subtitle ‘ein Schwarzweisspiel’ – a game (or play) in black and white.
The book opens with a series of fantastical images – landscapes, cityscapes, inscapes? – followed by the poem itself, engraved over seven leavess against similar backgrounds.
The poem begins with the words ‘Nichts nichts nichts’ (‘Nothing nothing nothing’) and rolls through associations of rhyme, alliteration and meaning, before ending with the same repeated words as it began.
The opening (above) and closing (below) pages of Welt-Wehe
Meier-Thur’s illustrations both enhance Stramm’s poem and deepen its mystery and many ambiguities. For example the page shown below could be seen as depicting a sun and stars with a dreamlike crystalline palace on the left-hand side, yet also as the explosions of shells in battle with the structure on the left fragmenting and falling before the forces of destruction. The poem was written in the last year of Stramm’s life when he had experienced the reality of the First World War, and Meier-Thur had also fought in the conflict.
Meier-Thur lived to see another World War engulf Europe. He was an opponent of Nazism and, as a teacher at the Hamburg School of Applied Arts, bravely refused to condemn modernism in favour of state-approved art. In 1937 copies of Welt-Wehe were removed from some libraries and destroyed as examples of ‘degenerate art’. The war brought worse tragedies: the deaths of his son in battle and his wife in a street accident, and the destruction of a large part of his original work when his house was bombed. Shortly after this last blow, in July 1943, Meier-Thur was arrested by the Gestapo; he died in December of that year as a result of torture.
Hugo Meier-Thur, reproduced in Maike Bruhns, Kunst in der Krise . Bd. 2 Künstlerlexikon Hamburg (Hamburg, 2001) YA.2002.b.1607
Although Meier-Thur remains little known as an artist, not least because of the loss of so much of his work, he is now commemorated with plaques outside his former home and workplace in Hamburg as part of the ‘Stolpersteine’ project, and a biographical dictionary of artists from the city persecuted under the Nazi regime has a long evaluative entry on him and his work. Decades after his murder, he has been brought out of the shadows. Yet the mysteries of Welt-Wehe - both words and images - continue to intrigue.
Susan Reed, Lead Curator Germanic Collections
05 February 2016
Why can’t a tree be called Pluplusch?
On 5 February 1916 at the Holländische Meierei restaurant on Spiegelgasse 1, Zürich, the Cabaret Voltaire was launched. The Cabaret was the brainchild of Hugo Ball (1886-1927) in collaboration with a small group of artists and writers disillusioned with conventional politics and an equally conventional aesthetic response. 100 years since the inauguration of the Cabaret Voltaire, it is worth sparing a thought for this radical intervention that resonates still today. Dada m’dada, dada m’dada dada mhm, dada dera dada.
Hugo Ball in 1916, reproduced in Hugo Ball, Gesammelte Gedichte (Zürich, 1963). X.907/140.
Immediately unsuccessful and threatened with closure, the Cabaret Voltaire housed performances of progressively more outrageous, absurd and irrational pieces of poetry (of the “sound” and “parallel” varieties most famously), song, drama and manifesto. Their provoking output piqued the curiosity as well as the anger of the Zürich public.
Hugo Ball performing at the Cabaret Voltaire, image from Wikimedia Commons
Irrationality was precisely the point, as Richard Huelsenbeck explains in his interview with Basil Richardson entitled ‘Inventing Dada’. Huelsenbeck, a German expressionist writer who helped establish the Cabaret in 1916, gives an account of the invention of Dada out of the foundations of the Cabaret Voltaire. He describes the humble beginnings borne out of life experience and not any concerted artistic movement as such. Ball and his companion Emmy Hennings worked factory jobs before deciding they must do something. This “something”, Huelsenbeck continues, was uncertain and undefined, or undefinable– what were they fighting for or against? He and the others soon realised that it was precisely this uncertainty that could define the motivations of their activity – irrationality was its essence.
Richard Huelsenbeck’s history of Dada, En avant dada (Hanover, [1920]). Cup.403.z.47.
Out of this sense of novelty and unconventionality came Ball’s sound poems, first performed in June at the Cabaret Voltaire. One famous example is ‘Gadji beri bimba’ (1916), a recording of which, among other sound poems, is to be found on the audio collection Dada for Now. The first verse reads:
gadji beri bimba glandridi laula lonni cadori
gadjama gramma berida bimbala glandri galassassa laulitalomini
gadji beri bin blassa glassala laula lonni cadorsu sassala bim
gadjama tuffm i zimzalla binban gligla wowolimai bin beri ban
o katalominai rhinozerossola hopsamen laulitalomini hoooo
gadjama rhinozerossola hopsamen
bluku terullala blaulala loooo
Ball tried to free himself from everyday language and invent new sound patterns, ultimately attempting to display a new level of artistic invention and creativity. (The Talking Heads song ‘I Zimbra’ from the album Fear of Music sets ‘Gadji beri bimba’ to music, giving it an African-inspired beat.) One month later, on 14 July 1916, at a Dada Soirée, Ball presented the first Dada manifesto, explaining his impulse to break from all rational notions of “the word”:
Each thing has its word, but the word has become a thing by itself. Why shouldn't I find it? Why can’t a tree be called Pluplusch, and Pluplubasch when it has been raining? The word, the word, the word outside your domain, your stuffiness, this laughable impotence, your stupendous smugness, outside all the parrotry of your self-evident limitedness. The word, gentlemen, is a public concern of the first importance.
Ball soon separated himself from the ambitions of the Dadaists and, consequently, the group’s second driving force, Tristan Tzara, declared a “Dada Movement”, exactly the kind of fixity and purpose Ball and Huelsenbeck wanted to avoid. However, the last word should go to the founder of the Cabaret Voltaire, the Hugo Ball of 100 years ago,
gaga di bumbalo bumbalo gadjamen
gaga di bling blong
gaga blung
Hugo Ball ca 1916, drawn by fellow-dadaist Marcel Janco. Reproduced in Gesammelte Gedichte.
Pardaad Chamsaz, Collaborative Doctoral Student, British Library / University of Bristol
References
Breaking the rules: the printed face of the European avant garde, 1900-1937, ed. By Stephen Bury (London, 2007) YC.2008.b.251
Richard Huelsenbeck, Inventing Dada (interview with Basil Richardson) (1959), 1CD0268503
Dada for Now: A Collection of Futurist and Dada Sound Works (1985), 1LP0007598
Talking Heads, Fear of Music (1979), 1CD0000326
Hugo Ball, Gesammelte Gedichte. Mit Photos und Faksimiles, herausgegeben von Annemarie Schütt-Hennings (Zürich, 1970) X.900/11006.
The Cabaret Voltaire in Zürich today (Photo from Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 3.0)
29 January 2016
Playwright, peacemaker, polymath: Romain Rolland (1866-1944)
When Romain Rolland was born on 29 January 1866 into a prosperous middle-class family in Clamecy, Nièvre, there was little to indicate that he would grow up to be a dramatist, critic and pacifist who would one day win the Nobel Prize. His ancestors included solidly well-to-do farmers, and he would describe himself as an offshoot of an ‘antique species’ deeply rooted in la France profonde.
From the first, his attempts to follow the predictable path towards a respectable calling as a schoolmaster were beset by problems; entering the Ecole normale supérieure at the age of 20, he rejected his course in philosophy to study history and, after two years in Rome, gained his doctorate in 1895 with a thesis entitled Les Origines du théâtre lyrique moderne. Histoire de l'opéra en Europe avant Lully et Scarlatti (British Library Hirsch 1877).
Romain Rolland during his time at the Ecole normale supérieure. Reproduced in Stefan Zweig, Romain Rolland (Frankfurt, 1921) 011851.aaa.38
This was to be the beginning of a distinguished career as a music critic and historian which had been launched by his encounter in Rome with Malwida von Meysenbug, governess to Alexander Herzen’s daughters and friend of Liszt, Wagner and Nietszche. After teaching at several Paris lycées while publishing studies of musicians past and present (Les musiciens d'autrefois and Musiciens d'Aujourd'hui ) he became the director of the newly-founded Ecole des Hautes Etudes Sociales and was appointed in 1903 to the first chair of the history of music at the Sorbonne.
However, at the same time he was developing a career as a dramatist. Like Wagner, he believed passionately in the power of theatre as a unifying social force rather than a mere pretext for pretentious display, and advocated a ‘people’s theatre’ going back to the dramatic tradition of the ancient Greeks. In his plays he portrayed the great events and personages of French history, from Madame de Montespan and Louis XIV (1904) to the French revolution in Le Triomphe de la raison, Georges Danton and Le Quatorze juillet, convinced that a people which was truly happy and free would need festivities rather than theatres, and would ‘always see in itself the finest spectacle’, as he wrote in Le Théâtre du peuple. His ideas were enthusiastically adopted outside France, notably by Erwin Piscator and the Freie Volksbühne in Germany.
The transcending of national and cultural boundaries through art was a central theme of Rolland’s writings and of his whole life. Although his retiring nature did not make him a natural teacher, leading him to resign from the Sorbonne in 1912, he spread his pacifist internationalist beliefs through his writings, and, unable to tolerate the chauvinistic patriotism reigning in France during the First World War, he moved to Switzerland, where he published his anti-war essay Au-dessus de la mêlée (‘Above the battle’) published in the year in which he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. His principles enabled him to overcome his natural diffidence and to engage with Mahatma Gandhi (on whom he published a study in 1923), Sigmund Freud and Stefan Zweig. The latter described their friendship extensively in his autobiography Die Welt von gestern, while Freud acknowledged the importance of Rolland’s influence in his Civilization and its Discontents (1929). He was also a close friend of Hermann Hesse, who dedicated his novel Siddhartha (1922) to him in tribute to their discussions of Eastern philosophy.
Rolland in 1919, portrait by Frans Masereel, reproduced in P.J. Jouve, Romain Rolland vivant (Paris, 1920) 011853.t.64.
Rolland’s great sequence of 10 novels Jean-Christophe (1904-1912) similarly explores the power of art to bridge cultural differences through the career of his hero, a gifted young German musician who settles in France and acts as the author’s mouthpiece for his ideas on the profound significance of music as a force for human understanding.
Opening of the preface from Rolland's manuscript of the last volume of Jean-Christophe Zweig MS 184, f.2r
In view of his achievements as a pacifist, including his work as a founding member in 1932 of the World Committee Against War and Fascism, it may seem startling that when, on a visit to Moscow three years later as the guest of Maxim Gorky, he met Joseph Stalin, he declared him to be the greatest man of his time. Although disillusionment set in as he became better informed about Stalin’s treatment of those who opposed him, he continued, with tact and fortitude, to represent the interests of French artists in his dealings with the U.S.S.R. and to campaign for the release of the writer Victor Serge and the Soviet politician Nikolai Bukharin, who was nevertheless executed in 1938.
Dedication from the manuscript of the last volume of Jean-Christophe, ‘To the free souls - of all nations - who suffer, who struggle, and who will triumph’
Rolland returned in 1937 to make his home in Vézelay, where he remained in complete isolation throughout the German occupation, working tirelessly on his memoirs, his life of Beethoven, and a study of the Catholic poet Charles Péguy, which he completed not long before his death on 30 December 1944. His message of pacifism and the power of art to speak above narrow political and national interests continues to make him an author of lasting significance in an age which sorely needs to hear it.
Susan Halstead, Content Specialist (Humanities & Social Sciences), Research Engagement.
Works by Rolland referred to in the text:
Les musiciens d'autrefois (Paris, 1908) W19/0525
Musiciens d'Aujourd'hui: Berlioz - Wagner - Saint-Saëns - Vincent D'Indy- Claude Debussy - Hugo Wolf - Richard Strauss - Le Renouveau de la Musique Francais depuis 1870 (Paris, 1908) W8/7005
Le Triomphe de la Raison (Paris, 1899) 11736.f.54.
Danton (Paris, 1901) 11740.d.35.
Le 14 juillet (Paris, 1902) 12208.pp.1/13.
Le Théâtre du peuple (Paris, 1903) 12208.pp.1/44.
Au-dessus de la mêlée (Paris, 1915) W18/5841
Mahatma Gandhi (Zürich, 1923) YA.1992.a.10990
Jean-Christophe (1904-1912) 12550.t.14.
27 January 2016
Crossing European Borders with Diego Marani’s ‘The Interpreter’
As in previous years, the British Library will host 2016’s European Literature Night on 11 May. As a taster, we look at a newly-translated work by an author who featured in 2014’s event.
Diego Marani’s The Interpreter (original Italian L’interprete, Milan, 2004y YF.2004.a.24136) begins in Geneva at the United Nations where an interpreter has developed a strange malady and starts speaking gibberish while claiming he has discovered the primordial language of mankind. Before he can be sacked he disappears, then his boss develops the same illness and goes to a sanatorium in Munich for a language cure. While at the sanatorium he decides his only chance of being cured is to find the missing interpreter and find out about the mysterious illness which has taken over his life. There now begins a journey through Europe which takes him as far as the Crimea. This is no travelogue but an exploration of cultural diversity, language, identity and crime.
It is a very entertaining novel with a lot of humour but also dark and frightening. It shows how easily all the certainties of life can disappear and how an individual can be left defenceless to the buffetings of external forces beyond his control. The narrator in the novel loses everything but the power of the human spirit keeps him alive and he fights back. For him life is an obstacle race where the obstacles can change from day to day, and where you must adapt to survive.
As with Marani’s earlier novels, New Finnish Grammar and The Last of the Vostyachs, the importance of language and identity are at the heart of the novel:
Languages are like toothbrushes: the only one you should put in your mouth is your own. It's a question of hygiene... it's dangerous to let yourself be contaminated by the germs of another tongue.
It is your language and your culture which give you your identity and make you what you are. When times get tough it is a bulwark against chaos and adversity. Your language and culture help you belong in society and connect you to both the past and the future. Whatever journeys we undertake, we take with us our language and culture and we do not lose them however much our life changes. We can learn new languages and immerse ourselves in new cultures, but we still retain the language and culture which surrounded us in our formative years and in which we were educated. This is why exile is so painful for most adults. Indeed, people who have left their homes for work in foreign countries remain truer to the traditions that they grew up with than people who remain behind in a changing society. For the exile, a country can’t change as it exists only in his mind, frozen in aspic, and it is to this country of the mind that he wants to return. Indeed, as many returning immigrants discover, the country they left behind no longer exists and they can’t readjust to the country which has taken its place.
The themes of the novel are carefully embedded in a thriller plot and do not interfere with a cracking yarn rich in event and the unexpected. Diego Marani shows that he is at home with the detective story, so it is not a surprise that he has gone on to write detective fiction with God’s Dog. The issues raised in The Interpreter are answered, but what the narrator has learnt does not seem worth the price that he has paid and will continue to pay.
Books by Diego Marani from the British Library's collections
Eric Lane, Dedalus Books
21 January 2016
Imagining Don Quixote
‘Imagining Don Quixote’, a free exhibition focusing on how Cervantes’ novel has been illustrated over time, opened in the British Library’s Treasures Gallery on 19 January and runs until 22 May. It explores how different approaches to illustrating the work have reflected changing interpretations both of Don Quixote, the novel, and of its eponymous protagonist. The most significant shift has been in the perception of Don Quixote as figure of burlesque fun to noble idealist brought low. This blog post looks at the depiction of Don Quixote himself.
Miguel de Cervantes’ El ingenioso hidalgo don Quixote de la Mancha, published in two parts (1605, 1615), tells how Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, his squire, set out to win fame by righting wrongs and succouring the weak and distressed. Cervantes gives succinct descriptions of Don Quixote: ‘approximately fifty years old; his complexion was weathered, his flesh scrawny, his face gaunt’ (DQ I, 1); later Don Diego de Miranda was ‘amazed by the length of his horse, his height, his thin, sallow face… a form and appearance not seen for many long years’ (DQ II, 16). Even so depictions of Don Quixote have varied over time and differences reflect changing views of the novel. In the 17th century it was appreciated for its burlesque, often physical humour, and character was subordinate to narrative. Illustrators do portray Don Quixote as tall and elderly, Sancho as shorter and more stout, but the contrast is not an exaggerated one, as in this anonymous English illustration:
Frontispiece of Miguel de Cervantes, The History of the Most Renown’d Don Quixote (London, 1687) Cerv.336
In the 18th century the editors of the first scholarly edition (1738) saw the novel as a satire directed against fantastical literature which caused readers to confuse fiction with history. They restricted the physical humour in the illustrations and sought to elevate the character of Don Quixote. Here he courteously greets two women as noble ladies, although Cervantes’ text indicates that they are prostitutes (DQ I, 2).
Miguel de Cervantes, Vida y hechos del ingenioso hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha (London, 1738) 86.l.2-5
John Vanderbank’s illustration adds a nobility of gesture to Quixote’s height, as prescribed by Cervantes.
One artist was crucial in establishing a sympathetic image of Don Quixote: Gustave Doré (1832-1883). The illustrations of his monumental edition (Paris, 1863) have been reproduced in many later editions. Doré’s Quixote is elongated and thin indeed but his bearing is altogether more heroic, especially in outdoor scenes. This portrayal – looking upwards, lance pointing skyward - accords with the growing Romantic tendency to see Don Quixote as an idealist brought low by harsh reality and the mockery of others (DQ I, 3).
Miguel de Cervantes, The History of Don Quixote…. (London, 1876-1878) 12491.m.2
Until around the middle of the 19th century not only book illustration, but also prints, drawings and paintings had depicted specific episodes of the novel. However, Doré’s contemporary Honoré Daumier (1808-1879) focused almost exclusively on the two protagonists. The skeletal figure of the tall, thin knight on a painfully bony horse is instantly recognizable and has become part of our collective imagery. Here, Sancho Panza is represented only by the smaller, rotund figure in the background.
Honoré Daumier, Don Quixote (1868). Neue Pinakothek, Munich.
Mention Don Quixote and Sancho today to most people and the image of a tall, thin man, accompanied by a short, fat man will come to mind. And that is without having read Cervantes’s novel. The image they are recalling, however vaguely, is most probably Picasso’s pen-and-ink drawing of 1955.
Picasso ‘Don Quixote’ (1955) (image from Wikimedia Commons)
Don Quixote is long of face and body; his horse, Rocinante, more haggard still; by contrast, rotund Sancho Panza sits comfortably on his donkey. Picasso’s drawing continues the restricted representation begun by Daumier in the previous century. Picasso also includes the windmills that appear in the best-known episode, when Quixote mistakes them for giants. The sun makes the drawing more emblematic of Spain.
Separation of the image of Don Quixote from the novel’s narrative has also enabled its use in many other contexts: propaganda, advertising, postcards, playing cards, ceramics, porcelain figurines… All of which serve to keep the picture of the tall, thin knight and his rotund squire in our collective mind.
Geoff West, former Head of Hispanic Collections
References/further reading
Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote, translated by Edith Grossman (London, 2004). Nov.2005/1526
La imagen del ‘Quijote’ en el mundo (Barcelona, 2004). LF.31.b.1670
Patrick Lenaghan, Imágenes del Quijote: modelos de representación en las ediciones de los siglos XVII a XIX (Madrid, 2003). LF.31.a.88
Rachel Schmidt, Critical Images: the Canonization of Don Quixote through Illustrated Editions of the Eighteenth Century (Montreal & Kingston, 1999 2708.h.767
19 January 2016
Tolstoy’s Anglophone Admirers: British, Irish and American visitors to Yasnaia Poliana
“The Englishman or American who wishes to know what the man [Tolstoy] was like in the environment - how he saw himself and was seen by those who shared it, cannot do better than read the long and detailed biography of the great Russian which was prepared by Paul Birukoff from material furnished by Tolstoy himself and often written by him.” (New York Times 25 February 1912).
Portrait of Tolstoy, 1880s. British Library Add. MS 52772 f.120
Of course, some Englishmen and Americans were prepared to travel a long way to be able to see Tolstoy and speak to him. This should not be surprising at all, if we remember that from the mid-1890s Tolstoy’s articles were frequently published in major British newspapers. The majority of his essays, both in Russian and English, first appeared in England as a result of the publishing activities of Tolstoy’s friend and supporter Vladimir Chertkov.
One of Tolstoy’s English visitors was Sir Charles Theodore Hagberg Wright (1862-1940), Secretary and Librarian of the London Library. He translated Tolstoy and had the reputation of being a liberal Russophile. Wright visited Tolstoy four or five times from 1890. On 13 September 1908 Tolstoy’s wife Sofia Andreevna noted in her diary that he was among the guests on one of those busy days of Tolstoy’s 80th jubilee. Wright presented Tolstoy with a letter signed by more than 700 English admirers. Apart from books on the London Library, catalogues, and translations from Russian, Wright wrote an essay ‘Books for Russian prisoners of war in Germany’ (T. W. Koch, Books in camp, trench, and hospital) and an introduction to C. E. Vulliamy’s selection of Russian state papers and other documents relating to the years 1915-1918, published in English as The Red Archives (London, 1929; 09455.ff.55.).
The American author Ernest Howard Crosby (1856–1907) was also very much influenced by Tolstoy and visited him in Yasnaia Poliana in 1894. He became the most devoted among Tolstoy’s nearly 70 American correspondents and did much to to promote Tolstoy’s ideas in America. In 1903, Crosby published a book Tolstoy and his Message (012203.e.7/1.) and a year later Tolstoy as a Schoolmaster.
E.H. Crosby, Tolstoy as a Schoolmaster (London , 1904). B.6.b.31
Crosby recommended to Tolstoy certain friends who also wanted to see the great man. One of them was Robert Hunter (1884-1942), an American sociologist, public figure and and socialist, who left a detailed account of a visit to Tolstoy on 12 July 1903 (Add. MS 52772 ff. 95-108). Hunter wrote what Tolstoy said about the dilemma that was preoccupying him at that time. Tolstoy felt that he should have disposed of his property and renounced all wealth and luxuries, but could not do so because of his wife and family. In the last decades of his life Tolstoy was painfully aware of the fact that his teaching was not in keeping with his family’s lifestyle. The thought that his inability to give away his material goods compromised his principles and beliefs brought him a lot of suffering and finally became the cause of his flight from home in 1910.
Robert Hunter (image from Wikimedia Commons)
Hunter’s description of his visit to Yasnaia Poliana is kept among the papers of Sydney Carlyle Cockrell (1867-1962), later Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. He visited Tolstoy in the company of “two American friends” (one of them was Hunter) and also left notes on this visit (Add. MS 5277, ff. 80-87v.). As an art historian, he was particularly interested in Tolstoy’s essay ‘What is art?’ (‘Chto takoe iskusstvo?’) and wanted to know Tolstoy’s opinion on William Morris and the John Ruskin who, in Cockrell’s view, had already said many of the things that Tolstoy stated in his essay. Cockrell’s file also contains photographic postcards of Tolstoy (Add. MS 5277, ff. 109-121).
The first Irishman to visit Tolstoy was the journalist and politician Michael Davitt (1846-1906). He came to interview Tolstoy in June 1904, but also appealed for his support of Ireland against England. Davitt visited Tolstoy again in February 1905, this time accompanied by another journalist and translator, Stephen MacKenna (1872-1934), who interviewed Tolstoy about ‘Bloody Sunday’. MacKenna’s account of this visit was published in The Irish Statesman of 1 October 1927. In his book Iasnopolianskie zapiski: 1904-1910 gody (ZF.9.a.5897) Tolstoy’s doctor Dushan Makovitskii noted that Tolstoy had called the Irishmen “lovely (slavnyi), vigorous and merry people”. In the entry of 19 November (2 Dec) 1907 Makovitskii wrote: “At 5.30 p.m. Mr Leslie arrived, a 22-year-old aristocrat and Irish nationalist. Wants to see a ‘simple life’. LN spoke to him in his study about important issues (ser’eznye voprosy)”.
Sir John Randolph Leslie (1885-1971), who wrote under the pseudonym of Shane Leslie, left accounts of his meeting with Tolstoy in his notes of conversations with him and in a letter to his mother Leonie dated 4 December 1907 (both in the National Library of Ireland). It was also later reflected in his fictional and autobiographical books The Cantab, and Long Shadows.
Shane Leslie. The Cantab (London, 1926). X14/7513
In both books Leslie gives fictionalised versions of his conversation with Tolstoy and sometimes he is slightly ironic. His protagonist “became a confirmed vegetarian and promised to learn to plough”. In real life, the meeting had little influence on either of them: Leslie converted to Catholicism in 1908, never abandoned either nationalism or ‘worldly riches’, and embraced pacifism only after his brother’s death in the First World War.
Katya Rogatchevskaia, Lead Curator East European Collections
References/further reading:
The diaries of Sofia Tolstaya, translated by Cathy Porter. (London, 1985) 85/24964
Leo Tolstoy: his life and work: autobiographical memoirs, letters, and biographical material, compiled by Paul Birukoff and revised by Leo Tolstoi. (London, 1906) 010795.ee.70.
L.N. Tolstoĭ i SShA : perepiska , sostavlenie, podgotovka tekstov, kommentarii, N. Velikanova, R. Vittaker.( Moscow, 2004) 2005.a.18966
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