Mon cher Thomassy – j’étais sorti pour aller chercher mon manuscript de Wann-Chlore dont on m’offre devinez quoi! 600 Fr!... j’aimerais mieux aller labourer la terre avec mes ongles que de consentir à une pareille infamie…

(My dear Thomassy – I went out to search for my manuscript of Wann-Chlore, for which someone has offered me – guess what! – 600 Francs… I would rather till the soil with my bare hands than to agree to such an insult…)

Protective of his manuscripts, which would often involve more than ten stages of revision, Honoré de Balzac clearly did not want to let go of this manuscript even at this relatively early stage in his prolific career. This letter, to his friend Jean Thomassy (1795-1874), is part of the British Library’s Stefan Zweig Collection of Musical and Literary Manuscripts (Zweig MS 134) and complements the enormous bound corrected proofs of Une ténébreuse affaire (Zweig MS 133).

Two further items, both fragments of a draft to La Monographie de la Presse Parisienne (Zweig MS 135 [below], and Zweig MS 216) signal the importance of Balzac to Zweig in this prestigious collection.

A letter that shows a writer’s passion for manuscripts and the work in progress suited Zweig’s ideas behind the collection perfectly, so much so that he would acquire this item in 1940 during the time of his exile and periodic depression, when he frequently expressed a loss of interest towards collecting.

Pardaad Chamsaz, Collaborative Doctoral Student, British Library/University of Bristol
With thanks to Pam Porter for bibliographic research into this item.

As we begin the Semaine de la Francophonie, we may reflect on how far language teaching has progressed in recent years with the introduction of Duolingo, the Michel Thomas method, and similar schemes. Back in the 1960s, as one of a group of 35 semi-hypnotized collégiennes, I endured the Tavor audio-visual course, gazing at a strip cartoon film while repeatedly chanting ‘Je suis le fantôme de la maison… Je suis mort en 1033…’, and we certainly sounded like it.

70 years earlier, in 1895, a classic textbook appeared whose title became legendary and provided Terence Rattigan for that of his play French without Tears. Written by ‘Mrs. Hugh Bell’ (Florence, later Lady, Bell), it was intended as ‘an elementary French reading book for the nursery and kindergarten’.

Florence Bell (Photograph from the National Portrait Gallery, CC-BY-NC-ND)

Mrs. Bell was certainly well equipped to understand how to engage their attention; as well as three children of her own, she had two stepchildren from her husband’s first marriage, one of whom grew up to be the writer and traveller Gertrude Bell. Florence herself was a prolific author whose works included a companion volume, German without Tears, and an English course for young French readers, L’Anglais sans peine (1917; 12984.df.20) , in addition to plays, conversation manuals and At the Works: study of a manufacturing town, Middlesborough (1907; 08276.a.18). In 1918 she was created a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire.

Cover of volume 3 of French without Tears

The three volumes of French without Tears (1895-97; 012200.gg.1/5), carefully graded according to difficulty, begin with a preface in which the author explains that she aims at ‘the greatest simplicity both of expression and idea’ to give her pupils ‘that feeling of zest and encouragement’ which proceeds from being able to understand and respond at a comparatively early stage. She is also strongly convinced that at this point ‘it is not necessary, or even advisable, that French grammar should be taught’. Instead, she gradually introduces the young student to a growing range of vocabulary and ideas through lively stories such as those of Marguerite’s misadventures when she attempts to surprise her parents with a cake after scornfully rejecting the help of the long-suffering cook Suzon, or the seaside exploits of Jean and his Scottish cousin Jacques ‘aux pays de Galles’. Far from being model children, they get up to all kinds of misdeeds, illustrated with lively drawings, and although the language might seem quaintly stilted nowadays (‘Voyons, mon enfant, ne te chagrine pas pour cela,’ dit le père…), the books provide a far more entertaining introduction to the French language than those of another famous (or notorious) author.

 

Marguerite’s culinary disaster (above) and Jean and Jacques at the seaside (below), from French without Tears)

In her autobiography The King of the Barbareens (1966; 11769.h.1/59) Janet Hitchman recalls studying French at a Barnardo’s Home in Essex in the 1930s with a Belgian Mademoiselle who taught it using the books of M. Chardenal, one of which, she claimed, really did contain the phrase ‘the pen of my aunt is in the pocket of the gardener’. The British Library possesses several of these, including his Standard French Primer (1877; 12204.c.20/44) and First French Course (1869; 12954.aa.36), although I have so far been unable to locate that precise sentence. Like Mrs. (later Lady) Ford, M. Chardenal (described as ‘bachelier ès lettres de l’Université de France’ and ‘French master in the University of Glasgow’) proclaimed his intentions in a preface where he stated that, having ‘taught French during [sic] many years by Dr. Ahn’s method’ he had ‘resolved to compile a Grammar … with rules at the head of each chapter, to which pupils might refer when in doubt’, and claiming that it could be ‘understood even by young children’.

The more sober method of M. Chardenal, from his First French Course

By modern standards his expectations were far from modest. He confidently proclaims that ‘a good knowledge of the auxiliary verbs être and avoir, of the four regular conjugations, and the principal irregular verbs’ may easily be acquired ‘in two sessions by young ladies and boys at school, and in one by young men in business’ . Otherwise, he declares roundly, ‘if a pupil does not acquire a perfect knowledge of them, let him give up French at once, for he will lose his time and money’. This is far sterner stuff than the stories and playlets offered by Lady Bell; drill is the order of the day, with endless repetition of constructions and rules in sometimes bizarre sentences. The student is required to translate phrases such as ‘A lawyer is less useful than a doctor’ (sure to have the Law Society up in arms) and ‘Nous avons vendu nos maisons et nos jardins au fils du prince’ (does one detect a sinister note of compulsion?). And never mind la plume de ma tante; instead the nonplussed pupil is asked to translate the barked command ‘Bring me my pears and those of your aunt’.

The happier world of Lady Bell: Chantez, mes enfants (London, 1920) F.464, a collection of songs for children learning French

There is no smoke without fire, and one suspects that Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle’s Molesworth would never have come up with his excoriating exposé of French lessons at prep schools in the 1950s without such manuals and the tradition which they represented. Thinking back to How to be Topp (1954; 12315.p.34) and its sequels, featuring Armand,‘the weed in the fr book who sa the elephants are pigs’ and his adventures au bord de la mer (‘Houp-la, he sa, I see the sea. Is the sea wet? Non, armand, but you are’...) we may think ourselves lucky that for those embarking on the study of French nowadays, the road, though still winding, is not as stony as it might have been under M. Chardenal’s guidance.

Susan Halstead, Content Specialist (Humanities and Social Sciences) Research Engagement

Join British Library Collaborative PhD students and curators on 21 March in the British Library’s Conference Centre for a one-day symposium (10.00-17.30) exploring new research drawing on the library’s archives and collections.

Speakers will explore the theme of ‘translation’ – both in a literal sense, investigating the hidden lives and work of translators and interpreters as revealed in the archive, and more broadly in terms of how languages, values, beliefs, histories and narratives are communicated and understood within, between, and across different cultures and contexts. The keynote speaker is Dr Tom Overton, addressing the theme of migration in the archive as explored in the first chapter of his forthcoming book, The Good Archivist. Currently Writer in Residence at Jerwood Visual Arts, Tom completed a British Library/King’s College London collaborative PhD on the writer, critic and painter John Berger in 2014. In 2015 he published an edited collection of Berger’s essays (British Library YC.2015.a.14125).

Subsequent panels, chaired by British Library curators, including head of the European and Americas Collections Janet Zmroczek, will feature collaborative PhD students at various stages of their research at the Library, as well as early-career postdoctoral researchers. Exploring themes of translation and migration, two PhD students attached to European Collections, Pardaad Chamsaz and Katie McElvanney, will present their work on the Library’s Stefan Zweig Collection and H. W. Williams Papers, a collection of documents relating to the Russian Civil War, respectively.

Manuscript of a collection of poems by Émile Verhaeren entitled ‘Admirez vous les uns les autres’, 1906. From the Stefan Zweig collection of literary Manuscripts, British Library Zweig MS 193, f.2.

Further papers will discuss European material, including the recently acquired archive of Michael Meyer, known for his translations of Ibsen and Strindberg in the 1950s and 60s, and documents belonging to the controversial Venetian art dealer Luigi Celotti (1759-1843).

Find out more and register online at: http://www.bl.uk/events/bl-phd-research-spring-symposium-global-voices-in-the-archive

 

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

Among the many accounts written by foreigners who witnessed Serbia’s stoic retreat in 1915 were quite a number by women. Most of them were there in some medical capacity, including Cora Josephine “Jo” Gordon, who arrived in Serbia as an assistant to a Red Cross unit, along with her husband. In their “day jobs”, they were actually artists. Jo Gordon seems to have been tomboyish and highly resourceful. She learned Serbian quickly, outwitted exploitative inn owners during their hard journey to the coast, visited the frontline, and washed her adventures down with large shots of Rakiya.

Flora Sandes followed a course that was more unusual again. Having first served as a nurse, she joined the Serbian Army for her own safety during the retreat, and became the only British woman officially enlisted as a soldier in the First World War. (There were also Russian, Serbian and [Austro-Hungarian] Ukrainian women who served on different sides of the conflict). Flora’s own book is An English woman-sergeant in the Serbian Army, written in 1916 to rally support for the small country.

Flora Sandes in Serbian Army Uniform (image from Wikimedia Commons)

When the retreat across the mountains began, Flora was as fussy as anyone from her well-heeled background, and must have been quite alarming. In her memoir, she recounts that she threw the furniture out of a scruffy hotel room and set about scrubbing the floor before erecting her own camp-bed. Later, she would distance herself from the male soldiers when they camped in the open air, relenting finally when she realised that her doing so constituted a security risk, as an ambush party might spot her.

Flora Sandes (top left), attending a traditional Serbian wedding. Photograph from her second book The Autobiography of a Woman Soldier (London, 1927) 9084.df.40

Following an injury incurred in combat in 1916, Sandes returned to medical work, but was not officially demobilised until 1922. She went on to marry a Russian émigré, Yuri Yudenitch, and the pair lived in France and then in Belgrade – where many White Russian exiles found sanctuary after the Revolution – until the Second World War. In German-occupied Belgrade, her husband died of a heart condition, and Flora spent almost three years living in poverty. After the liberation of the city, she returned to the UK, still a forceful character who chain-smoked and ploughed her own furrow.

Flora Sandes as a Lieutenant of the Serbian Army in Belgrade. Frontispiece from The Autobiography of a Woman Soldier

She spent her final years living near her family in Rhodesia and Surrey, and died in 1956 at the age of 82 after making a final visit to Serbia for a reunion of her old comrades of 1915. In addition to her two autobiographies (one now translated into Serbian), she is the subject of two full biographies and a Radio 4 documentary from 1971, which can be found and listened to among the Library’s sound recordings.

In commemoration of the war’s centenary, Serbia Post and the British Embassy in Belgrade have recently issued a set of six  stamps featuring British women who worked in Serbia between 1914 and 1918. A set has been donated to the Library, as Milan Grba explained in a recent blog post. Flora Sandes (right) is among the women honoured, a redoubtable pioneer of equality alongside those whose medical and humanitarian work did so much to gain recognition for women in fields once reserved for men.

Janet Ashton, Western European Languages Cataloguing Team Manager

References/further reading

Jan and Cora Gordon, The Luck of Thirteen: wanderings and flight through Montenegro and Serbia (London, 1916) 9083.ff.3

Alan Burgess, The lovely sergeant: the life of Flora Sandes. (London, 1965). X.639/721

Louise Miller, A fine brother: the life of Captain Flora Sandes (Richmond, 2012) YC.2013.a.2462

Flora Sandes, An English woman-sergeant in the Serbian Army (London, 1916) 09082.aa.25. (Serbian translation by Spiro Radojčić, Engleskinja u srpskoj vojsci Flora Sandes (New York, 1995). YF.2005.a.27142)

‘What’s in a name?’ asked Shakespeare’s Juliet. A lot, when the choice of name implies a political or ideological statement; at the time of the Czech National Revival, young patriots whose parents had had them christened plain František or Karel added more resonantly Slavonic names such as Ladislav or Jaromír to proclaim their solidarity with the nation’s glorious past and with Slavs of other countries.

However, members of a much smaller nation surrounded by alien territory faced particular problems; to adopt an outlandishly Slavonic name would cause all kinds of trouble with the authorities and neighbours who did not share their enthusiasm or even the ability to pronounce such words. In the case of the Sorbs of Lusatia, living in an area of Germany around Bautzen, the solution which they generally adopted was to use their given names but in a distinctively Sorbian form – and so Johann Ernst Schmaler grew up to become Jan Arnošt Smoler.

 Jan Arnošt Smoler, reproduced in Peter Kunze, Jan Arnošt Smoler: ein Leben für sein Volk (Bautzen, 1995) YF.2005.a.19362

He was born in 1816 in Merzdorf, a village in Boxberg, Saxony, as the son of a village schoolmaster, Jan Korla Smoler, and was educated at the Bautzen Gymnasium with the aim of entering the Church. The family later moved to Łaz (Lohsa) in Prussia, where in 1835 a new pastor was appointed and stayed there for the remaining 38 years of his life. This was the poet Handrij Zejler, the leading figure in the Sorbian Romantic movement and one of the great figures of Sorbian literary history. A former pupil of the Gymnasium, he visited the schoolmaster and his 19-year-old son, who for the previous three years had been firing his fellow students with enthusiasm for the Sorbian language and the concept of Sorbian nationhood.

Map of Lusatia from L. Haupt and J.A. Smoler,  Pjesnički hornych a delnych Łužiskich Serbow = Volkslieder der Wenden in der Ober- und Nieder-Lausitz (Grimma, 1841-1843). 1461.k.1.  

The following year the young Smoler went to study at the University of Breslau, and while still a student published collections of folk-songs, Pjesnički hornych a delnych Łužiskich Serbow = Volkslieder der Wenden in der Ober- und Niederlausitz, a Sorbian phrasebook entitled Mały Serb (‘The little Sorb’), and a German-Upper Sorbian dictionary. Like other Slavonic collectors of folk material such as Karel Jaromír Erben and Božena Nemcová, he gathered a huge fund of songs and stories, such as the charming ‘Wolf’s Ill-Fated Attempt at Fishing’, in which the greedy but dim-witted wolf is tricked by the wily fox into dangling his tail into a pond as bait and ends up losing it when he is trapped as the water freezes.

Parallel title-pages in Sorbian and German of Pjesnički hornych a delnych Łužiskich Serbow (Grimma, 1841-43) 1461.k.1. (Also available online)

Unlike Zejler, who became a close friend despite a 12-year difference in age, he was not notable for his literary activities, but made a considerable contribution to the development of the Upper Sorbian literary language and to the Sorbian-language periodicals Jutrnička (‘Morning Star’; P.P.4881.b.) and Tydźenska Nowina (‘Weekly News’). He became editor of the latter in 1849, a post which he retained until his death in 1884.

At Easter 1845 Smoler called a meeting at the Winica (Vineyard), an inn near Bautzen, to discuss the foundation of a Sorbian scientific and cultural body similar to those established in other Slavonic countries on the model of the Matica Srpska, set up in Serbia in 1826. He had already drawn up a provisional constitution, but as it needed the approval of the German authorities the association did not begin its official existence until 7 April 1847. In the next seven years its membership grew from 64 to 220 so that separate sections had to be organized for various branches of Sorbian studies, including literature, national history, pedagogics, demography, music and economics.

The first issue of Časopis Maćicy Serbskeje (Bautzen, 1848) Ac.8954

Its main activity, however, was the publication of Sorbian literature and its own journal, the Časopis Maćicy Serbskeje, which appeared regularly from 1848 onwards. By 1923 its membership numbered 413, including foreigners as well as Sorbs – mainly Slavs, though with one British exception, William Morfill, Oxford’s first professor of Russian and other Slavonic languages. In 1873 the enterprising Smoler purchased, on his own initiative, a site in Bautzen for a ‘Serbski Dom’ (Sorbian House), as the Maćica Serbska’s headquarters, which finally opened its doors on 26 September 1904.

Although Smoler did not live to see this day, having died 20 years earlier, he had the satisfaction of knowing that he had strengthened the position of the Sorbian language and helped to preserve its culture at a time when, with the unification of Germany in 1871, the Sorbian minority in Prussia was subject to the increasing threat of Germanization. He achieved this through his tireless work to raise awareness of the Sorbian heritage and ensure, by acquiring his own publishing house and bookselling business in 1850, that the printing and publishing of Sorbian material rested in Sorbian rather than German hands. 200 years after his birth, he would be gratified to witness the activities of the Ludowe nakładnistwo Domowina (Domowina People’s Press), founded in 1947, in continuing his work and promoting knowledge and understanding of the Sorbs and their language and culture.

Susan Halstead, Content Specialist (Humanities & Social Sciences) Research Engagement

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.

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

In the poem Razzia (‘Manhunt’) the narrator is awake at night. He listens to the sounds around him, thinking about his family lying asleep in the house. Suddenly he hears a lorry driving down the street and coming to a halt.  Listening intently, his heart racing, he tries to gauge where the lorry has stopped. Then, the lorry moves on and they are safe- for now.  We do not get to know the fate of a neighbouring family who may not have been so lucky. The British Library’s copy of this poem is one of only 25 made, clandestinely printed by Fokke Timmermans and donated to the Library in 1969 by Mr. Timmermans himself.

Razzia, anonymous poem. (The Hague, 1944) Cup.406.d.9

Manhunts happened up and down occupied countries, as a way to arrest and deport Jewish citizens.

When, on 22 and 23 of February 1941 the German Ordnungspolizei  sealed off part of the Jewish quarter in Amsterdam and rounded up 425 Jewish men, aged between 20 and 35, in the first major manhunt on Dutch occupied territory during the war, the people of Amsterdam sprang into action.

Plan, showing the sealed off area in the Jewish quarter in Amsterdam, with the Jonas Daniël Meijerplein.  Reproduced in:  B. A. Sijes, De Februaristaking. (Amsterdam, 1978) X:702/3672

Jewish men held by Ordnungspolizei on the Jonas Daniel Meijerplein. Photos taken by a German onlooker, of which the developer made extra copies. Reproduced in Gerard Maas, Kroniek van de Februari-staking 1941. (Amsterdam, 1961) 9105.ee.47.

On Monday 24 February members of the clandestine Communist Party Netherlands held a public meeting at the Jonas Daniël Meijer Plein. This was where the Jewish men had been brought together to be transported to the camps Buchenwald and Mauthausen, via the oldest transit camp on Dutch soil, Schoorl. Most did not return. 

The Communists called all workers in Amsterdam to a general strike, to begin on the following day, 25 February.

Pamphlet calling a strike. Reproduced in: Gerard Maas, 1941 bloeiden de rozen in februari. (Amsterdam, 1991) YA.1994.a.8919.

Tram drivers from the municipal transport company were the first to answer this call, so when no trams were running Amsterdam citizens knew the strike was on. Workers from the dockyards soon followed.

Civil servants were not allowed to strike, but at least 4,400 employees of the Amsterdam city council defied this rule.  Surrounding cities as far as Utrecht joined in.

Once the Germans had recovered from their surprise they declared that anyone who would continue to strike would face the death penalty. Still, the following day the strike went on. The Ordnungspolizei mercilessly struck down the strike. Nine people were shot dead, more than 40 were wounded and 200 people, some strikers, some not, were arrested and many mistreated whilst under arrest. By 27 February the strike was over.

Both individuals and institutions were severely punished for their actions. Amsterdam civil servants suffered a pay-cut and city councils were fined between 500,000 and 2,500,000 guilders.  Some paid the ultimate price, in particular the men commemorated in the most famous resistance poem of the war, De Achttien Dooden (‘The Eighteen Dead’), by Jan Campert, journalist and poet. These were the leaders and members of the resistance and the Communist Party who had called for the strike. They were arrested and executed by firing squad on 13 March 1941.

Jan Campert,  De Achttien Dooden, first published anonymously 1941/42. The British Library’s edition (Cup.406.d.28) dates from 1943 and has the illustration by Coen van Hart (‘Braveheart’), pseudonym of Fedde Weidema.

The February strike was the first, and some say only, open mass protest by non-Jewish people in Europe against the deportation of the Jews. 

In 1946 the first memorial for the victims of the February strike took place at the Jonas Daniël Meijer Plein, as it is still done.  In 1952 Queen Wilhelmina unveiled the memorial ‘The Dock worker’ by Mari Andriessen and tonight people will gather there for the 75th anniversary of the February strike. This will be broadcast live by the NPO. Lest we forget.

The Dock Worker (image from http://www.dedokwerker.nl/februaristaking.html)

Marja Kingma, Curator Germanic Collections.

References and further reading:

L. de Jong, De Bezetting, Tekst en beeldmateriaal van de uitzendingen van de Nederlandse Televisie-Stichting over het Koninkrijk der Nederlanden in de Tweede Wereldoorlog. 1940-1945  (Amsterdam, 1966). X.702/378.

O.C. A. van Lidth de Jeude, Londense dagboeken van Jhr.ir. O.C.A. van Lidth de Jeude januari 1940 - mei 1945, bewerkt door A.E. Kersten, met medewerking van Eric Th. Mos. (the Hague, 2001). 9405.p [Kleine Ser No.95-96] (A digital edition is freely available at: http://resources.huygens.knaw.nl/retroboeken/lidt/#source=1&page=392&view=imagePane)

J. Presser, Ondergang (The Hague, 1965) W.P.2258/10. (English translation by Arnold Pomerans : Ashes in the Wind (London, 1968).  X.709/7096.

B.A. Sijes, De februari-staking (Amsterdam, 1978). X:702/3672 (With English summary)

A. Simoni, Publish and be free:  a catalogue of clandestine books printed in the Netherlands, 1940-1945, in the British Library (London, 1975. 2725.aa.1

On the web:

On the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the February strike the National Institute for War-Holocaust and Genocide Studies ( NIOD ) is running a special website on the event: http://www.niod.knaw.nl/nl/nieuws/februaristaking-de-collecties-van-het-niod

The Amsterdam City Archives is calling for the general public to send in photographs of family members and friends who took part in the strike, to put faces to numbers: https://www.amsterdam.nl/stadsarchief/english/

The memorial De Dokwerker has its own website with a treasure trove of information (in Dutch only): http://www.dedokwerker.nl/februaristaking.html

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