Gudrun Gut, drummer and bassist in German punk bands such as Din-A Testbild, Einstürzende Neubauten, Mania D. and Malaria, says she was there when Jäki Eldorado (née Hildisch) — ‘Germany’s first punk’ — licked Iggy Pop’s leg during a Stooges gig in 1977. Purely a publicity stunt according to Jäki, but one that would provide an iconic punk photo.

Jäki Eldorado licks Iggy Pop's leg (Image from mutantmelodien)

A decade after 1968, punk adopted a more chaotic and ‘publicity stunt’ mentality that had ‘nothing to do with social criticism’, Jäki suggests in Jürgen Teipel’s ‘docu-novel’ Verschwende deine Jugend (p. 66). He continues: ‘Punk Rock was so interesting precisely because there was no longer any ideological baggage. You could go crazy. Party. You wouldn’t care if someone walked around with a swastika or if someone else supported the RAF [Red Army Faction]’. Cyrus Shahan, in his Punk Rock and German Crisis: Adaptation and Crisis after 1977 (New York, 2013; YC.2014.a.10231) explains the phenomenon thus: ‘whereas student movements of 1968 and German terrorism both sought to establish (theoretically, violently) their own conceptions of a just, utopian society, punk was decidedly invested in an endless dystopia of the present’ (p. 2). Shahan echoes Eldorado in saying later, ‘Punk did not want to establish a new order to stave off chaos of the past. Punk wanted chaos. Punk did not want to erect barriers between fascism and the present. It wanted to tear down the present’ (p. 13).

Cover of Jürgen Teipel, Verschwende deine Jugend (Frankfurt am Main, 2001) British Library YA.2003.a.21455

While ‘punk in Germany was not English punk’ (Shahan, p. 11), punk bands in England did to some extent spark the creation of a German punk culture and music scene – arguably predominantly in Düsseldorf – in the summer of 1977. Alfred Hilsberg, contributor to Sounds magazine and owner of the labels Zickzack and What’s so funny about, calls English punk in England the ‘trigger’ for him to do something similar in Germany. Describing the performances he saw in London in 1976, he says, ‘it really blew me away that such a thing was possible: this eclectic, crazy cluster of people. There was a violent element of course. But that was only a game. It clearly wasn’t serious when they waged war with one another’ (Teipel, p. 28). This inspired Hilsberg to organise the first punk concerts in Germany, bringing over The Vibrators and The Stranglers. ‘Although, The Vibrators only half-count as punk. It was more rock,’ he says, ‘but at the time no one really knew what punk was’ (Teipel, p. 28).

The Ratinger Hof, a pub in Düsseldorf where the first punk performances in Germany took place (photo by Ralf Zeigermann from Wikimedia Commons)

Punk was a term that didn’t carry a solid definition sonically or aesthetically, an idea which blurred at the margins and incorporated or appropriated a broad range of references. In A Cultural Dictionary of Punk (London, 2009; YC.2010.a.8548), Nicholas Rombes, in line with Hilsberg’s understanding, labels The Vibrators a 60’s-influenced ‘pop-punk’ group: ‘Bands like The Vibrators cultivated the open spaces that more radical bands like the Sex Pistols cleared, making possible a longer arc for punk and a deliberate future in the face of No Future’ (p. 296). That ‘arc’ is evident in their recent resurfacing in Berlin’s Cassiopeia Club, nearly 40 years after their first gig in the city.

Frank Z, guitarist and singer from Abwärts, remembers The Vibrators’ second gig in Germany, in Hamburg’s Winterhuder Fährhaus — what Hilsberg calls a ‘nice place all round, the kind of place you went for tea and cake’ (Christof Meueler, Das ZickZack-Prinzip: Alfred Hilsberg – ein Leben für den Underground, Munich, 2016; YF.2016.a.22745). Frank Z again: ‘the singer [Ian ‘Knox’ Carnochan] was a proper skinhead. He came on stage – and then the first available person on the front row got a boot. Right in the face [Aber voll in die Fresse]’ (Teipel, p. 28). Axel Dill, the Abwärts drummer, corroborates: ‘they played for ten minutes – and then with a few brawlers, which they had brought with them, they set off into the crowd and started a huge fight. It was a full-on battle. All the furniture was flying through the air. Everyone was beating everyone. That was their concept’ (Teipel, p. 28). But Moishe Moser, an associate of Hilsberg’s and The Vibrators’ road manager on a later German tour, provides evidence of the band’s softer side. On the last night of the tour he went to give the band their share of the proceeds before realising that the money wasn’t there: ‘Then, The Vibrators clubbed together so that I could get a taxi home. That was the beginning of a friendship that is still going today’ (quoted by Meueler).

Style was undoubtedly influenced by the fashion in the English punk scene, something also focused on in the British Library’s ‘Punk 1976-78’ exhibition. Peter Hein – another pretender to the title of ‘first German punk’, and singer in Charley’s Girls and Fehlfarben among other bands – says as much: ‘to become punk was a totally conscious decision. I saw a picture in the New Musical Express – with jacket and paperclips and kid’s sunglasses. And I thought: ‘I’d like to look as good as that.’ So I wandered about just like that. Kid’s glasses, paperclips on my jacket collar.’ Amidst the chaos of the ‘No Future’ punk ethos, Peter Hein does appear to leave some room for thought into his own future. In another supposed – but presumably not wholly applicable – borrowing from England, Hein avoids alcohol during his years of creativity. This is, for him, in contrast to American bands who subscribe to a drug-fuelled lifestyle:

We were the juice-drinkers. At the time I drank no alcohol. Punk was a straight movement for us. […] We were against the druggy-bands. Against the pisshead bands. We were absolutely England-oriented. The Americans we never took seriously because their punk-rockers took drugs. That was not cool.

Peter Hein, playing with the band Fehlfarben in 2006 (Picture by Ulf Cronenberg from Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 3.0)

A bizarrely sanitized life, then. And, even more bizarrely, one inspired by our punk scene so closely associated with precisely the sort of intoxication Hein refuses. In the nostalgic accounts of German punk protagonists, there is a sense of openness and acceptance, where anything goes, but without a stereotypical radicalism. Jäki Eldorado says as much when he suggests that, whereas in England there may have been a radical break with what came before, in Germany there was a more fluid merging between hippy and punk movements: ‘when I started working in Dschungel [a punk record store], I even had long hair still’ (Teipel, p. 27).

Pardaad Chamsaz, Collaborative Doctoral Student, British Library and University of Bristol

 

The British Library has recently purchased a rare copy of a little-known French verse adaptation of Cervantes’ novel Don Quijote. The Abbé Jouffreau de Lagerie (or Lazerie), published his Don Quichote: Poëme héroï-comique, in two parts in 1782-3. Biographical information is extremely scarce and Jouffreau de Lagerie is in fact better known as the anonymous author of a collection of erotic verse, Le Joujou des demoiselles, of which there were several editions. (The British Library possesses three: [Paris, 1750?] (P.C.27.a.35), [Paris, 1775?] (P.C 27.a.39), and one with the false imprint Larnaca, [1881?]( P.C.17.b.15).

Title-page of Don Quichote. Poëme héroï-comique (Monatauban, 1782-3) RB.23.a.36964

The Poëme is divided into 5 chants or cantos, preceded by a prose introduction. It is composed in the classical French metre of rhyming alexandrine couplets. The narrative draws on Cervantes’ novel but it is not in any way a version of it. It opens with Don Quixote’s distress at Dulcinea’s transformation into a peasant girl by the sorcerer Malembrin who has also carried her off to the Underworld. Encouraged by la Folie (Folly), the knight and Sancho Panza do battle with Malembrin and his army, led by the giant Freston. To save his forces from certain defeat the sorcerer transforms them into windmills, which inflict great damage on both knight and squire. Transformations preserve his army in two subsequent engagements. Folly returns to encourage Quixote, promising the return of Dulcinea and urging him on to new adventures. Spurred on, Quixote rescues Queen Lucinda from a gang of robbers. Malembrin now conspires with l’Amour (the God of Love), to make the knight fall in love with Lucinda. The King of the gods, alarmed at Quixote’s lapse, complains to Folly who, in the guise of a wronged queen, seeks Quixote’s aid. He abandons Lucinda, who takes her own life. Quixote descends to the Underworld, guided by Folly, where with the aid of other knights errant he defeats Malembrin. Dulcinea is rescued and freed from the evil spell.

Quixote leaves his house, led by Folly and Love. From an edition of Francois Filleul de Saint-Martin’s French translation, Histoire de l’admirable Don Quichotte de la Manche (Paris, 1741) Cerv.131. vol. 1, facing p. 11.

Malembrin and Freston both occur in Cervantes’ novel. Malambruno is the giant and sorcerer in the elaborate charade that is the ‘Dueña Dolorida’ episode (Don Quijote, II: 38-41); Frestón is the enchanter whom Quixote blames for his failures. Queen Lucinda, however, is clearly not the beloved of Cardenio (DQ. I: 24-37), but the Duchesse de Médoc from the second continuation of François Filleul de Saint-Martin’s version of Don Quijote (Paris, 1713; Cerv.126.). In Livre III, ch. 42, Don Quixote and Sancho rescue the Duke and Duchess from a band of robbers, as in the Poëme. Sancho’s elevation to the status of knight-errant also derives from the continuations.

In addition to the windmills episode, other notable incidents from Cervantes’ novel appear in the Poëme in a new guise. Malembrin’s transformation of his army into sheep to save them in the second encounter with Don Quixote is adapted from the knight’s mistaking a flock of sheep for an army (DQ, I: 18). The motif of a damsel in distress employed as a ruse echoes the role of Dorotea as the Princess Micomicona (DQ, I, 29-30) and the ‘Dueña dolorida’ episode.

As the opening lines suggest, however, what most characterizes Jouffreau de Lagerie’s work is its imitation of Virgil’s Aeneid. . The first line clearly echoes Virgil’s opening lines: ‘Arms and the man I sing who… exiled by fate’:

Je chante ce Héros qui loin de sa patrie
Fit revivre les lois de la chevalerie (Canto 1, p. 7)
(‘I sing of the Hero who, far from his native land,
revived the code of knight errantry’)

To the world of chivalry and evil sorcerers is added that of the Classical gods and goddesses. So we have Folly (Greek Atë), Love (i.e. Eros/Cupid) and a ‘Roi des Dieux’, fancifully named ‘Tulican’ who nonetheless has the role of Zeus/Jupiter. Narrative motifs involving the gods can be traced to Virgil. For example, Folly’s tearful plea to Tulican on behalf of Quixote after Malembrin’s magic saves Freston’s army (Canto 2) echoes Venus’s plea to Jupiter to spare the Aeneas and the Trojans (Aeneid, Book I, lines 229 ff). Earlier, Folly successfully pleads with the god for the recovery of her freedom from la Sagesse, goddess of Wisdom (Canto 1). More blatant still, the Queen Lucinda episode, specifically the boar hunt and Lucinda’s suicide, derives from Virgil’s account of the fatal love of Dido for Aeneas (Aeneid, Book IV).

Jouffreau also employs extended similes, so typical of Virgil. Examples include the unlikely description of Sancho in battle as a lion defending his cubs against a hunter (Canto 2, p. 28); the likening of the dust clouds stirred up by Freston’s army to snow whipped up by the North wind (Canto 3, p. 4); and the comparison of the fall of the giant Morgan at Quixote’s hand to the felling of a pine tree (Canto 3, p. 9).

Unlike his Jouffreau’s anthology of erotic verse, this work was not a success to judge by the existence apparently of just one edition. Evidently drawing on the version of Filleul de Saint-Martin and its two continuations, Don Quichote emerges as a scholarly exercise in re-creating Classical Latin verse in French hexameters. Jouffreau’s Sancho is transformed from savvy peasant to knightly hero, as indeed is Quixote himself. He is worlds away from the comedic, but essentially human would-be knight-errant whose bookish ideals clash with the reality of Golden Age Spain. And surely it is only Cupid’s arrow that would have rendered Cervantes’ Don Quixote unfaithful to Dulcinea?

Geoff West, formerly Lead Curator Hispanic Collections

 

The roaring success of the BBC’s television adaptation of War and Peace earlier this year  got me thinking about Tolstoy’s history with English-speaking audiences.

Back before television or radio, English speakers were introduced to Tolstoy’s work by two translators above all: Constance Garnett and Aylmer Maude. They, along with several cultural commentators and travel writers, have been more broadly credited with opening British eyes to Russian life and culture in the early 20th century. Maude, who I first encountered through an obscure book of his in the British Library’s collections, seems to be forever crossing paths with me, and he is my subject here.

  Aylmer and Louise Maude

The son of an Ipswich clergyman, he went to Russia, aged 16, in 1874, with no previous ties to the country. He studied at the Moscow Lyceum and worked as an English-language tutor before marrying the daughter of a British jeweller in the city and pursuing his own career in business. Maude’s company was Muir and Mirrielees, the largest department store in Russia, and he easily made enough money to retire before he was 40 in order to take up his real, literary interests. His wife, Louise Shanks, born and raised bilingual in Moscow, was the scion of a family  whose significant artistic and literary interests were as notable as their business success. Her sisters Emily and Mary were both artists; Mary was Tolstoy’s illustrator. Louise herself was also an acolyte of Tolstoy’s in youth, and during the 1890s she and Aylmer set to work translating his books into English. Louise concentrated on Tolstoy’s literary output, while Aylmer dealt more with philosophy and politics.

A radical activist who was later a leading light in the Fabian Society and co-operative movement in Britain, Maude also produced his own books, including a slim volume on the coronation of Nicholas II. This was published pseudonymously as The Tsar’s Coronation, as seen by De Monte Alto. As a committed Christian of a puritanical bent, he spared few words describing what he saw as the excesses, hypocrisy and incompetence involved in the Coronation.

 Cover of The Tsar’s Coronation, as seen by De Monte Alto (London, 1896) 9930.b.26

Where other memoirists and journalists lapped up propaganda or sought to ingratiate themselves with high society, Maude portrayed the pageantry in the most banal light, as a welter of vulgarity centered upon an unworthy subject at the expense of the majority of the Russian people. This harsh, deflationary, often very funny, little book is the means by which I first encountered him, before I was aware of his fame as a translator.

Aylmer Maude’s cynical take on the Tsar’s Coronation festivities, from The Tsar’s Coronation

From translation, Maude proceeded to biographies and critiques of Tolstoy, which he defended as the most accurate available, since “Countess Tolstoy…most kindly rendered me the very valuable assistance of reading and correcting.” He stayed with the Tolstoys frequently at Yasnaia Poliana and Moscow, and accompanied the religious dissidents, the Dukhobors, to Canada at Tolstoy’s request. This led to a certain disillusionment with the practicality of the great writer’s principles. “I have aimed at explaining Tolstoy’s views clearly and sympathetically,” he wrote, “but when necessary I have not shrunk from frankly expressing dissent; and in doing so I have but trodden in his footsteps, for he never forgot the duty of frankness and sincerity which an author owes to his readers.

 Title-page of Aylmer Maude’s The Life of Tolstoy: the first fifty years. (London, 1908). 010790.ee.32

In response, one reviewer accused him of a “dense lack of understanding” of Tolstoy and of whitewashing everyone BUT Tolstoy! Maude also engaged in some notable intellectual feuds with Max Beerbohm and with Leo Wiener of Harvard University. His defenders included fellow Fabian George Bernard Shaw.

The Maudes settled in Essex in 1897, but returned to Russia frequently until after the Revolution, in which his wife’s family lost their businesses, their homes and a great deal of money. Russia, Aylmer said sadly, had simply replaced its “devotion to God and the Tsar”, a theocratic system he regarded as a perversion of real faith, with “devotion to a dictatorship which abolished God”.

In the UK, he became involved as a trustee of the Whiteway Colony, which is close to where I grew up. I also visit Chelmsford regularly, where the museum holds a picture he and Louise once owned, a work by his sister-in-law, Emily Shanks, a member of the Peredvizhniki (“Wanderers”) group of artists. Hence my feeling that wherever I go in life I seem to stumble across him! The British Library holds many papers of his, including his correspondence with the Society of Authors (Add MS 56746-56749), and with Marie Stopes (Add MS 58487-58490).

Janet Ashton, WEL Cataloguing Team Manager

References:

Louise Collier Willcox, ‘Tolstoi’s religion’, North American Review, Vol. 193, No. 663 (Feb. 1911), pp. 242-255. PP.6320

Anonymous review of Tolstoi by Romain Rolland, North American Review, Vol. 195, No. 674 (Jan., 1912), pp. 135-136. PP.6320

Aylmer Maude, The Life of Tolstoy: the later years. (London, 1911). W25/7539

Aylmer and Louise Maude (translators) Family views of Tolstoy. (London, 1926). 010790.f.65

Greg King and Janet Ashton. “A programme for the reign: press, propaganda and public opinion at Russia’s last coronation.” Electronic British Library Journal, (2012), art. 9, pp.1-27. 

Dr Johnson opened his ‘The vanity of Human Wishes’ in 1749 with the memorable:

Let Observation with extensive View,
Survey Mankind, from China to Peru;

Donald Greene argues that Johnson didn’t mean just the eastern and western extremes of the map but that for him Peru signified the atrocities wrought by the Spaniards on the Indians while China represented wisdom and culture.

What possibly underlay Johnson’s view was the synthetic proverb literature, exemplified by this recently-acquired little book, which showed Chinese wisdom to be comparable with European. (There was no such bibliography for Peru.)

Marc-Antoine Eidous, Proverbes et apophthegmes chinois, comparés avec les proverbes des autres peuples; pour faire suite aux Moralistes Anciens (Paris, [1796/7])  RB.23.a.36863

The proverbs first appeared in Marc-Antoine Eidous’s Hau kiou choaan, ou Histoire Chinoise traduite du Chinois (1765).  Or  rather, that’s what it says here in the ‘Avertissement’.  In fact, it was ‘traduit du chinois en anglais’ by James Wilkinson, edited by Thomas Percy (he of the Percy Ballads), and put into French by Monsieur Eidous. By the way, this was a ‘pleasing history’ story rather than hard history.

Frontispiece and title-page of Hau kiou choaan or the pleasing history. A translation from the Chinese language. To which are added, I. The argument or story of a Chinese play, ... III. Fragments of Chinese poetry. (London, 1774) 243.i.30-31.

Proverbes et apophthegmes prints all the proverbs, but trims some of the notes.

There really is nothing here that an 18th-century French reader wouldn’t recognise:

A boat whose planks are affixed with but bird-lime does not long resist the violence of the waves.

One may remove a blemish from a diamond by polishing it: but that of a prince who does not keep his word is never effaced.

And as an example of the comparative method:

Il est important de bien commencer en toutes choses: la faute la plus légère peut avor des suites funestes.
    Ce proverbe est le même dans plusieurs langues: En latin: Dimidium facti, qui bene coepit habet.  En français: De bon commencement bonne fin.

 Two pages of proverbs from Proverbes et apophthegmes chinois

Barry Taylor, Curator Romance Studies

In a composing career spanning more than five decades, Giuseppe Verdi considered more than 100 works, including novels and plays by French, Italian, Spanish and German writers, as sources for potential operatic projects. Among them were several plays by Shakespeare, one of his favourite writers. Although he did complete three operas based on Shakespeare plays, several others – Hamlet, Cymbeline, Antony and Cleopatra, The Tempest and Romeo and Juliet – were discussed at various times but never materialised. Of these unwritten operas, however, it was King Lear that held the greatest significance for Verdi and came closest to creation.

Portrait of Verdi, from Verdi e Otello. Numero unico pubblicato dalla Illustrazione Italiana (Milan, [1887]) 1872.c.15

Verdi successively approached three potential librettists for Lear: in 1845 he first mentioned the play to Francesco Maria Piave, the librettist of his Ernani, I Due Foscari and Macbeth. It was, perhaps, Verdi’s dissatisfaction with the last of these (he enlisted another writer, Francesco Maffei, to revise parts of the text) that made him commission, in 1850, a Re Lear from Salvadore Cammarano, another regular collaborator of his. 

After Cammarano’s untimely death in 1852, Verdi approached Antonio Somma. Recognising the difficulty of turning such a complex play into an opera, he kept advising Somma to reduce the number of scenes and principal characters (Gloucester and his sons were eventually removed). He also reiterated the need to avoid too many scene changes and to keep his text short. The extensive correspondence between the two men was first published in 1913 and, more recently, in a 2002 edition by the Istituto nazionale di studi verdiani which includes facsimiles of Somma’s manuscripts of his first and second drafts of the libretto (1853 and 1855), and of Verdi’s own transcription of the first version, with variants inserted in their proper place. The volume additionally includes a facsimile of Verdi’s letter of 28 February 1850 to Cammarano which contains a detailed outline of the plot. Transcriptions of all these facsimiles are also included.

The end of Antonio Somma’s second version of his libretto of Re Lear, showing Cordelia’s death. Reproduced in Giuseppe Verdi, Antonio Somma, Per il “Re Lear”. Edited by Gabriella Carrara Verdi (Parma, 2002). LC.31.b.1041 

Verdi’s continuing reservations about the libretto meant that the project was abandoned and there is no evidence that music for the opera was ever composed. This is all the more regrettable as some of the most poignant scenes in Verdi’s operas are those between fathers and daughters - Luisa Miller, Rigoletto, Aida, and above all, Simon Boccanegra are the most notable examples - and, judging from the final scene of the libretto of Re Lear, the death of Cordelia (‘Delia’ in the libretto) would have been a notable addition to the canon.

Verdi’s autograph of the first version of the final scene of the libretto of of Re Lear, reproduced in Per il  “Re Lear”

The three Shakespeare operas Verdi did complete – Macbeth, Otello, Falstaff – are all great masterpieces.

Macbeth (1847), one of his greatest early works, typically full of Risorgimento connotations (the fall of a tyrant and the liberation of the country under his rule), was extensively revised for the Paris Opéra in 1865, and it is this version, which is usually performed today. As well as a magnificent banquet scene at the end of Act 2, the opera also has one of Verdi’s greatest final scenes (the death of Macbeth and triumph of Macduff), and Lady Macbeth’s haunting and eerie sleepwalking scene. 

By the time he began composing Otello in the 1880s, Verdi had become the grand old man of Italian opera – a ‘national treasure’ in today’s parlance. The fact that he had not composed a new opera since Aida, over a decade earlier, added to the public anticipation for the new work. There was, consequently, extensive press coverage both before and after its premiere, including a special Otello issue of the popular weekly illustrated magazine L’Illustrazione italiana which discussed not only the subject of opera and scenes from its first production but also looked at Verdi’s life and works, including his collaboration with his librettist, Arrigo Boito.

Cover (above) and image of Otello's opening storm scene (below), from Verdi e Otello. Numero unico pubblicato dalla Illustrazione Italiana, e compilato da U. Pesci ed E. Ximenes (Milan, [1887]) 1872.c.15.

A poet, critic and composer (his opera Mefistofele, for which he wrote the text and the music, is sometimes performed today), Boito first collaborated with Verdi on Inno delle nazioni, a cantata commisssioned to represent Italy at the 1862 International Exhibition in London, and, in 1881, on a revision of Simon Boccanegra.

Verdi and Boito. Illustration from Verdi e Otello. 

Otello was Verdi’s and Boito’s first collaboration on a new opera and they were to work together again on Falstaff (drawn from The Merry Wives of Windsor, with insertions from Henry IV and Henry V). Premiered in 1893, when the composer was 80, and unusually for Verdi, a comedy, the opera was greeted with the same enthusiasm as Otello six years earlier, including another special issue of L’Illustrazione italiana. Falstaff was Verdi’s glorious and astonishing swansong, its final joyous fugue beginning with ‘Tutto nel mondo è burla’ (‘Everything in the world is a jest’).  

Cover of the special issue of L’Illustrazione italiana, Verdi e il Falstaff (Milan, [1893]). Hirsch 5213

Chris Michaelides, Curator, Romance Collections

References

Re Lear e Ballo in maschera. Lettere di Giuseppe Verdi ad Antonio Somma, publicate da Alessandro Pascolato. (Città di Castello, 1913). X.439/1592.

Julian Budden, The Operas of Verdi (London, 1973-82) X.0431/75

Gary Schmidgall, ‘Verdi’s King Lear Project’, in 19th-Century Music, Vol. 9, No. 2 (Autumn 1985), pp. 83-101. P.431/268

Philip Gossett. ‘The Hot and the Cold: Verdi writes to Antonio Somma about Re Lear’, in Variations on the Canon: Essays on Music from Bach to Boulez in Honor of Charles Rosen on His Eightieth Birthday. (Rochester NY, 2008). YC.2009.a.6153.

Roberta Montemorra Marvin (ed.), The Cambridge Verdi Encyclopedia (Cambridge, 2013). YC.2014.a.2360.

Recordings:

Otello, complete 1976 live recording from La Scala, Milan, conducted by Carlos Kleiber, with Placido Domingo (Otello), Mirella Freni (Desdemona), and Piero Cappuccilli (Iago).

Falstaff,  a complete 1965 live recording from the Opéra de Paris of Franco Zeffirelli’s production of Falstaff, with Tito Gobbi as Falstaff.

Our exhibition Shakespeare in Ten Acts is open until  6 September, and you can continue to find out more about all aspects of Shakespeare's life and work on our dedicated Shakespeare webpages.

In the summer of 1887, Lazar Ludwik Zamenhof published a 40-page brochure in Russian entitled Mezhdunarodnyi iazyk: predislovie i polnyi uchebnik  (‘International Language.  Foreword and Complete Textbook’), under the pseudonym  Dr. Esperanto, meaning “One Who Hopes” in his new language. Soon “Dr. Esperanto’s language” became known simply as “Esperanto”. This obscure, self-published booklet by an unknown author achieved a remarkable success in a surprisingly short period of time.  Over the next three years it was translated into Polish, French, German, Hebrew, English, Swedish and Yiddish, and very quickly Zamenhof began to receive letters from enthusiasts written in the new language. In 1888 he published a second book with further discussion of his language project and a number of short reading passages.

D^ro Esperanto, Dua Libro de l’Lingvo Internacia (Warsaw, 1888) 12906.aa.48.

Literary translations, as well as original poetry, played an important role in Esperanto from the start. What better way for the author to test the limits of his new language, and to develop it where it was found lacking? But in addition, Zamenhof wanted to prove that Esperanto was not merely a convenient tool for business and tourism, but a complete language capable of translating the most exalted masterpieces of world literature. In his first two booklets he concentrated on short and relatively simple texts: the Lord’s Prayer, a passage from Genesis, proverbs, a fairy tale by Hans Andersen, a short poem by Heine.

In the literary traditions that Zamenhof knew best – Russian and German – Shakespeare was a dominating presence. His works were admired by Pushkin and Turgenev, Goethe and Schiller, and in 1875-77 three volumes of Shakespeare’s complete plays appeared in Polish translation, edited by Józef Ignacy Kraszewski . Zamenhof may also have seen Polish performances of Hamlet in Warsaw, where he lived as a student and later as a struggling ophthalmologist.

A Polish translation of Shakespeare  such as Zamanhof might have encountered, Dzieła Dramatyczne Williama Shakespeare (Szekspira), translated by J. I. Kraszewski (Warsaw,1875-1877). 11765.g.3. Tom II. Hamlet. p. 393

Humphrey Tonkin, in his essay “Hamlet in Esperanto” (2006) points out that: “Shakespeare and Shakespeare translation played a special part in the national revivals of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: for several languages of central Europe, translations of his plays marked their emergence as fully credentialed literary languages – Macbeth in Czech (1786), Hamlet in Hungarian (1790), for example.” Under these circumstances, it was inevitable that Zamenhof should feel his new language could not be considered fully mature until it had shown itself capable of translating the complex language of Shakespeare. Hamleto, reĝido de Danujo  came out only seven years after the publication of Zamenhof’s first brochure – no longer at his own expense, but as No. 71 in the series “Biblioteko de la lingvo internacia Esperanto”, printed by W. Tümmel in Nuremberg. The second edition, in 1902, was brought out by the prestigious French publishing house Hachette.

Cover page of Zamenhof’s translation of Hamlet (Paris,1902). 011765.ee.13.

“As early as 1894, Zamenhof published a complete translation of Hamlet,” writes the Esperanto poet William Auld  in the journal Monda Kulturo. “It was his first extensive literary translation and among other things it served to prove incontestably the elasticity and power of expression of this merely seven-year-old language. It rooted the iambic pentameter firmly in Esperanto, and established criteria allowing us to measure and assess the success and poetic qualities of all subsequent translations.”

In her biography Zamenhof, creator of Esperanto (London, 1960; 10667.m.13.), Marjorie Boulton  points out that Esperanto was already sufficiently developed to rise to the challenge of translating Shakespeare’s work without the need to coin a significant amount of new vocabulary for the purpose. Zamenhof’s Hamlet according to Boulton is “perhaps competent rather than brilliant, but it is a good translation – readable, speakable, actable, generally a fair rendering of the original.” Seventy years later, L. N. M. Newell (1902-1968) made a new translation of the play. His Hamleto, princo de Danujo, published in 1964, is more faithful to the original, but less successful at reproducing the spirit of the work. As Tonkin says in his essay, “Newell is for reading, Zamenhof is for acting.”

 William Shakespeare, Hamleto: princo de Danujo; traduko de L. N. M. Newell. (La Laguna, 1964). YF.2007.a.1982

Zamenhof’s translation of Hamlet  was only the first of many translations which were to follow. 21 out of Shakespeare’s 38 plays have been translated into Esperanto over the decades, some of them more than once, while his complete Sonnets were translated by William Auld, one of Esperanto’s most outstanding original poets, besides being a prolific translator, essayist, and candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Sonnet 18 in parallel English and Esperanto, from William Shakespeare, The sonnets = La sonetoj , el la angla tradukis William Auld. (Pizo, 1981). YF.2007.a.2014. 

Particularly notable are Otelo, la maŭro de Venecio translated by Reto Rossetti (La Laguna, 1960), Somermeznokta sonĝo (A Midsummer Night’s Dream) by Kálmán Kalocsay (1967; YF.2007.a.2023), and most recently two translations by Humphrey Tonkin: La vivo de Henriko Kvina (Henry V; 2003;  YF.2008.a.28552) and La vintra fabelo (The Winter’s Tale;  Rotterdam, 2006; YF.2008.a.28551).

 Translations by Humphrey Tonkin from the British Library’s collections

Anna Lowenstein, writer and journalist, author of the historical novel The Stone City,  a member of the Academy of Esperanto

References

William Auld, ‘La enigmo pri Hamleto’, Pajleroj kaj stoploj (Rotterdam, 1997), pp. 235-249. [Reprinted from Monda Kulturo 13. 1965]. YF.2006.a.30902

 The translator as mediator of cultures, edited by Humphrey Tonkin, Maria Esposito Frank (Amsterdam, c2010) YC.2011.a.8838

The first Russian adaptation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet was made by the founder of the Russian classical theatre Alexander Petrovich Sumarokov (1717-1777). The play was written in 1748 by the ambitious 31-year old statesman and poet.

Rossiiskii teatr" ili Polnoe sobranie vsiekh' rossiiskikh' teatralnykh' sochinenii. Ch. 1. (Sankt-Petersburg, 1786).  1343.h.1. The first page of Gamlet' by Aleksandr Sumarokov 

Some researchers suggest that this work was commissioned to legitimise the power of Peter the Great’s daughter Elizabeth through cultural discourse. Elizabeth took the Russian throne as a result of a court coup against an infant great grandson of Peter’s elder brother. Ivan VI was barely two months old when he became Russian Emperor and “reigned” for eleven months. For the rest of his short life he lived in exile and, from the age of 16, in solitary confinement. Elizabeth’s actions might be seen as avenging her father by returning power to his successors.

Elizabeth of Russia (portrait by Ivan Vishniakov, State Tretyakov Gallery)

Translated from French, Shakespeare in Sumarokov’s version was also turned into a classist play, where people represented functions, such as order and chaos, good and evil, wisdom and stupidity. According to this pattern, the state could not be left without a legitimate ruler. Therefore, Sumarokov wrote a happy end with Claudius and Polonius punished by death and Hamlet, Ophelia and Gertrude victorious and content.

Although this version was rarely staged, the image of an outcast prince was often referred to. For example, Catherine the Great’s son and heir Paul tried on this role – his father was assassinated and overthrown by his mother’s lover to get her the throne.

Grand Duke Pavel Petrovich (the future Tsar Paul I) in 1782 (portrait by Pompeo Girolamo Batoni)

There is no evidence that Paul read the tragedy, as Hamlet was unofficially banned during Catherine’s reign, but when he  was abroad on a grand tour in 1781-1782, the Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II cancelled a performance of Hamlet as part of Paul’s reception, apparently because the actor who played the Danish prince hinted that there would be two Hamlets in the theatre. 20 years later Emperor Paul I was strangled in his bedroom to make way for his son Alexander I.

New attempts to translate the play resumed in the second decade of the 19th century, about ten years into Alexander’s reign, but really kicked off in the 1820s, under the rule of Nicholas I, when coups d'état went slightly out of fashion. Many critics think that before the Nobel Prize laureate and the author of Doctor Zhivago Boris Pasternak translated the tragedy (the first version was  published  in 1940 and the final one in 1968), the best translation into Russian was by Emperor Nicholas I’s grandson Grand Duke Konstantin Konstantinovich, or “poet KR (Konstantin Romanov)” – the name he signed his works with. Although trained as a naval officer, Grand Duke Konstantin was more inclined to the arts. He played the piano, wrote lyrics, and translated from English and German. His translation of Hamlet was created after Emperor Alexander III told his cousin Grand Duke Konstantin about his visit to Helsingør, where the play is set.

Helsingør  (Photo by Katya Rogatchevskaia)

The visit to Denmark prompted Alexander to re-read the play and he found that its translations were lacking the true “feel  of the time”. KR’s was the 14th translation into Russian. This time the translator used the American edition of 1877 as his source. KR was proud of his work, when it was published in 1901 with extensive commentaries.

               Tragediia o Gamletie printsie Datskom' (Sankt-Peterburg, 1901)  011765.gg.41

The play was performed several times and Grand Duke Konstantin himself played Hamlet in an amateur production (below).

In the 20th century the story of Russian Hamlet continued. As the Russian poet of the Silver Age Maksimilian Voloshin put it, “Hamlet – is a tragedy of conscience,  and in this sense it is a prototype of those tragedies that are experienced by the “Slavonic soul” when it lives through disintegration of will, senses and consciousness”.

Katya Rogatchevskaia, Lead Curator East European Collections

“To beguile the time, look like the time. Bear welcome in your eye, your hand, your tongue…” (Macbeth, Act 1, Scene 5)

The British Library’s collections contain a remarkable Shakespeare item from the Soviet Caucasus: the record of an Azerbaijani production of Macbeth in 1936. It consists of black-and-white photographs of the production, by the Baku State Theatre, directed by Alexander Tuganov and with impressive sets and costumes by Mikhail Tikhomirov. Articles about the production and a copy of the programme are bound in the same volume. Two of the photographs are displayed in the Library’s current exhibition “Shakespeare in Ten Acts”.

Cover of Maqbet V. Seqspir (Baku, 1936) British Library N.Tab.2022/3

Very little is known about the director or the performance itself. Soviet theatre created many memorable productions, including of Shakespeare’s plays, but the Baku theatre production – no matter how professional – was not one of them. Nonetheless it does have a particular significance, being staged in 1936, a time of terror in the Soviet Union when artists, poets, and musicians were sent into exile or even murdered as enemies of the Party and people.

Shakespeare was extremely popular in the Soviet Union and the most highly regarded foreign dramatist. He was rendered acceptable on the Soviet stage by Marx and Engels, who had great esteem for and a solid knowledge of the Elizabethan dramatist and his works. The theatre was always recognised as a political weapon by Soviet leaders. Having insisted on Shakespeare’s role as a proto-revolutionary writer and appropriated his works as evidence of the inevitability of the October Revolution, Soviet ideologists had by the 1930s fully re-launched Shakespeare and his legacy.

Article about Macbeth by A.M. Sharifov, who played the role in Tuganov’s production

The republics of the Caucasus – Georgia, Azerbaijan and Armenia – each had a separate history of Shakespearean productions and scholarship, but in the Soviet period there was an intensive effort to create a new Soviet culture. The Baku National Theatre had 30 years of experience performing Shakespeare, having performed Othello, Hamlet, The Taming of the Shrew and King Lear. These productions attempted to be creative and innovative. However, the 1936 production of Macbeth was different, as the principal aim was to be realistic. The articles in our volume show that the production team studied the text and the historical background of Macbeth in depth. Both Soviet historicism and Soviet realism were key ideological requirements in art.

Images from Tuganov’s production of Macbeth 

The articles consist of accounts of the performance by the actors, directors and journalists. Personal experiences are described as far as ideological pressures allowed. It appears that they all were seeking ways of bringing their production close to a safe political standpoint and tuned carefully into the latest news spread by the Party press.

Sharifov in the title role of Macbeth

In his article “For genuine Shakespeare”, Tuganov discusses realistic interpretations of Shakespeare and the importance of the text and translation. A new translation was used for the 1936 production. As a result the Baku State Theatre’s Macbeth was well received. Tuganov was made a People’s Artist of Azerbaijan, the highest honour in the Soviet Union for outstanding achievement in the theatre. However, these things were not permanent and circumstances could change, as in the case of Shostakovich and his opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District. At its 1934 premiere it was immediately successful at both popular and official levels. It was described as “the result of the general success of Socialist construction, of the correct policy of the Party”, and as an opera that “could have been written only by a Soviet composer brought up in the best tradition of Soviet culture”. A few months later an article in Pravda, “Muddle Instead of Music”, condemned it as “formalist, coarse, primitive and vulgar".

Artists had to skilfully create works that could co-exist with the Communist Party’s ideology and yet be regarded as aesthetically creative. They were not judged solely on their artistic achievements, but rather on how well those achievements matched the Party’s agenda of the day. Works of art were banned, while their creators were exiled or murdered if the Party, or Stalin personally, objected to them:

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more… (Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 5)

Anna Chelidze, Georgian Curator

24 August 2016 marks the 25th anniversary of the day when the Verkhovna Rada (Parliament) of the then Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR) declared Ukraine’s independence and the creation of today’s sovereign state of Ukraine. This decision was endorsed in a referendum held in Ukraine on 1 December 1991. The United Kingdom officially recognised Ukraine at the end of the year, and on 10 January 1992 diplomatic relations between Ukraine and the UK were formally established. Later in the year the Ukrainian Embassy in London began to function. This was not, however, the first time that diplomatic representatives of an independent Ukrainian state were based in London.

In the years 1919-1921 there was a semi-official diplomatic mission in London representing the government of the Ukrainska Narodna Respublika, or UNR (variously translated as Ukrainian People’s Republic or Ukrainian National Republic), established in the revolutionary period after the fall of the Russian Empire. A law providing for the dispatch of a ten-member mission to England was passed on 23 January 1919. Part of the text of this law is shown in the following image from a collection of laws and resolutions concerning Ukrainian government institutions abroad, published unofficially in 1919 in Vienna.

From Zbirnyk zakoniv i postanov Ukrainskoho Pravytelstva vidnosno zakordonnykh instytutsii, compiled by Ivan Khrapko (Vienna, 1919) 5759.aa.17.

The mission was not officially recognised by the British government and initially had difficulties in obtaining clearance to enter the UK. It finally arrived in London, via Vienna, Stockholm and Copenhagen, in May 1919. The first head of the mission was Mykola Stakhovsky, a practising doctor and, from May 1917, administrator of the Podillia region of Ukraine. In September 1919 he resigned owing to ill health. To succeed him the UNR government appointed Arnold Margolin, a prominent Ukrainian-Jewish political leader who was the UNR government’s deputy minister of foreign affairs from January to March 1919. Margolin headed the London mission from November 1919 until his resignation in August 1920. His successor was Jaroslav Olesnitsky, a lawyer from Western Ukraine, who was already on the staff of the mission.

Members of the initial staff of the London mission. From Istorychnyi kaliendar-almanakh “Chervonoi Kalyny” na 1939 rik (Lviv, 1938)

The mission’s two main tasks were to urge the British government to recognise the Ukrainian republic and to provide information on the state of affairs in Ukraine. The mission also appealed for moral support for Ukraine in its struggle against Soviet forces, and sought to establish commercial relations between Ukraine and the UK.

Shortly after arriving in London, the mission established a Ukrainian Press Bureau which published a weekly bulletin entitled The Ukraine. This covered topics such as events in Ukraine, activities of the UNR government and its delegation at the 1919-1920 Paris Peace Conference, and opportunities for trade with Ukraine. 35 issues in total were published, between July 1919 and February 1920, before it was discontinued, probably owing to a lack of funds. A complete set of The Ukraine is held by the British Library (LOU.LON 628 [1919] and LOU.LON 580 [1920]).

 Page 1 of the first issue of The Ukraine (London, 1919) 

The British Library also holds a copy of a 64-page booklet, published by the mission, entitled Ukrainian Problems. A Collection of Notes and Memoirs Etc. This contains the texts of various letters and memoranda addressed to British officials between March 1919 (when the mission was still seeking permission to enter the UK) and September of that year.

Cover of Ukrainian Problems  (London, 1919). 8095.g.35.

In the second half of 1920 members of the London mission were closely involved in an unsuccessful attempt by the UNR government to gain the admission of Ukraine to membership of the newly-formed League of Nations. In November 1920 the UNR government, having suffered military defeat, was forced to leave Ukraine for exile in Poland. This, and the increasing consolidation of Soviet power in Ukraine, made it ever more difficult for the mission to fulfil its purpose. Its head, Jaroslav Olesnitsky, returned to Ukraine in 1921.

Although Ukraine’s struggle for independence in 1917-1920  was short-lived, it played a pivotal role in the formation of the modern Ukrainian nation. It was also a key reason why the Ukrainian SSR was initially established as a nominally independent state, even though in reality it was controlled by Moscow. Ukraine’s distinctiveness was emphasised again in 1945, when the Ukrainian SSR, along with the Soviet Union as a whole and the Belarusian SSR, became a founding member of the United Nations, the successor of the League of Nations. In this story, which culminates in Ukraine’s declaration of independence 25 years ago, it is worth remembering the part, albeit small, played by the London diplomatic mission of the UNR.

Roman Krawec, editor of Ukrainians in the United Kingdom: Online encyclopaedia 

Further reading

Dyplomatiia UNR ta Ukrainskoi Derzhavy v dokumentakh i spohadakh suchasnykiv, ed. by I. Hnatyshyn, O. Kucheruk and O. Mavrin, 2 vols (Kyiv, 2008). ZF.9.a.7417

Arnold Margolin,  From a Political Diary: Russia, the Ukraine, and America (New York, 1946). 9011.g.15.

D. Saunders, ‘Britain and the Ukrainian Question (1912-1920)’, The English Historical Review, vol. CIII, no. 406 (January 1988), pp. 40-68. P.P.3408.

In 1914, when the First World War broke out, the Ukrainian lands were split between the Austro-Hungarian and Russian Empires. Ukrainian soldiers fought on both sides of the conflict; 4,500,000 Ukrainians fought in the Russian armies and 250,000-300,000 in the Austro-Hungarian armies.

In August 1914, while the global conflict was beginning to take shape, a small group of political exiles from the Russian-ruled area of Ukraine, who were living in Vienna, began an independence movement. It was founded on 4 August 1914 by six men who called themselves the ‘Union for the Liberation of Ukraine’ (Soiuz Vyzvolennia Ukrainy): Oleksander Skoropys-Yoltukhovsky, Marian Melenevsky, Andrii Zhuk, Volodymyr Doroshenko, Dmytro Dontsov and Mykola Zalizniak.

The Union’s first attempt to reach out to the West is held in a collection of printed ephemera at the British Library. The four page leaflet is entitled ‘To the Public Opinion of Europe’ and details their views on the need for Ukraine to be liberated from the rule of both the Russian and Austro-Hungarian governments.

 D. Donzow [et al.] To the public opinion of Europe: on behalf of the ‘Bond for the Freeing of Ukraine’. ([Vienna], 1914) Tab.11748.aa.4.(15).)

The leaflet was dated 25 August 1914 and it appears that the Union began to distribute them immediately. The New York Times commented on this, saying:

The Ruthenian inhabitants of Galicia, one-half the population of the country, founded a League for the Release of Ukraine and flooded Europe from the 25th of August with notifications and descriptions hostile to Russia.

In actual fact this report is a little misleading, there were not very many employees of the Union (only 42) and it was not particularly well supported by the public. What it does indicate is that the Union, and its publication, reached the ears of far-flung America.

Although this foray into printing was successful, their next attempt, a manifesto that was to be signed by the rulers of both Germany and Austro-Hungary was rejected by both countries, and the half a million pre-printed copies they had made to distribute among the public had to be destroyed. Neither Germany nor Austro-Hungary wanted to support an independent Ukraine openly, at the risk of making the political situation with Russia worse. Although the countries would not sign the manifesto, both sent the Union money to help spread the message about an independent Ukraine. After this failure to be officially recognised by the two countries, the Union moved to Berlin, and the members limited themselves to printing propaganda leaflets and distributing them along the Eastern Front. The Union had offices in neutral Switzerland, as well as Romania, Sweden, Norway, Britain and the United States, to help pass along information about their cause.

Title page of Oleksander Skoropys-Ioltukhovskyi, Znachinnie samostiinoi Ukrainy dlia ievropeiskoi rivnovahy [The Importance of independent Ukraine for European stability]  (Vienna, 1916). 8095.ff.86.

In 1915 the Union began to fight for the rights of Ukrainian prisoners of war. Originally these prisoners were detained with people from other countries, but the Union fought for separate, Ukrainian, camps. These Ukrainian prisoner of war camps were established, and captured soldiers could choose whether they wanted to move into these special camps with their countrymen. The Union went around the camps delivering citizenship classes, in order to try and win sceptical soldiers over to support for an independent Ukraine.

From: Sim pisen’. Hostynets dlia ukrainskykh voiakiv vid “Soiuza vyzvolennia Ukrainy [‘Seven Songs. A Present for Ukrainian soldiers from Union of Liberation of Ukraine’], with the stamp of the Union on the left-hand page (Vienna, 1915) 011586.aaa.10, and available online.

But in March 1917 the Ukrainian Revolution began. It was begun in Ukraine, by people who lived there, and the Union (still in Berlin) had no connection to the revolution. In actuality the Union had little, if any, connections in Ukraine during the years 1914-1917. Despite the Union fostering national pride among prisoners of war, and gaining some (financial) recognition from the Austrian and German governments, the revolution has overshadowed their efforts, and they have largely been forgotten in the history of Ukrainian independence.

Ann-Marie Foster, PhD Placement Student in the British Library

Further reading:

Oleh S. Fedyshyn, Germany’s Drive to the East and the Ukrainian Revolution, 1917-1918 (New Jersey, 1971) X.800/7830.

Georg Brandes, “Fate of the Jews in Poland” (From The Day, Nov 29, 1914) in The New York Times Current History: the European War, February, 1915, by Various. ([New York], 1915). PP.4048.bd. (Available online via Project Gutenberg)

Ivan Pater, Soiuz vyzvolennia Ukraïny: problemy derzhavnosti i sobornosti.  (Lʹviv, 2000). YA.2002.a.27084

Soiuz vyzvolennia Ukraïny 1914-1918 Videnʹ (New York, 1979). YA.1987.a.2971

Orest Subtelny, Ukraine: a history.  (Toronto, 1994).  95/11578

Ann-Marie Foster is a PhD placement student at the British Library cataloguing the First World War Ephemera collection. Her research examines the ways in which families used ephemera and memorial objects to remember loved ones who died during war or in a disaster.