Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918) moved to Paris and started publishing poems, articles and art reviews in the 1900s. He was close to artists like Pablo Picasso, André Derain, Maurice de Vlaminck or le Douanier Rousseau. In 1911, he published a deluxe edition of his Bestiaire, in 120 copies, composed of 30 poems illustrated with engravings by Raoul Dufy. 18 of these poems had previously appeared in 1908 in the journal La Phalange, under the title ‘La marchande des quatre saisons ou le Bestiaire mondain’.

Mediaeval interest in bestiaries often resided less in the naturalistic and physical descriptions of the animals and their behaviour, often fanciful, than on their symbolic and allegorical level. Although Apollinaire does not put the emphasis on the didactic aspect of the bestiary, his work is infused with both Classical and Biblical or religious references. The poet, who chose his pseudonym after Apollo, God of Music and Poetry, gave his 1911 Bestiary, the subtitle ‘Cortege d’Orphée’. The collection of poems is introduced and guided by the character of Orpheus, emblem of the poet himself, who addresses directly the reader, drawing his attention to the text, the images, and the animals, in four poems introducing and accompanying the collection. The poet plays on the concept of the animal series and on the combination of text and engravings. He accentuates the brevity of each entry, as each poem is only formed of a quatrain.

The Hare, from Guillaume Apollinaire, Le bestiaire, ou Cortège d’Orphée, illustrated with woodcuts by Raoul Dufy (New York, 1977) LR.430.e.10

In medieval bestiaries, and at least since Isidore of Seville, the hare is characterised by its velocity, associated with timidity and fearfulness, while the rabbit is known both for its fertility and the fact that it is hunted by dogs. In Raoul Dufy’s engraving, a hare bouncing in an open field appears encircled in a medallion formed by a horn, while the frame is completed with gun and whip and with two hunting dogs. In Apollinaire’s poem, both the hare and the rabbit are associated with love, sexual intercourse and fertility. The poem is formulated as an advice to the reader, who should not be like the hare and the lover, both ‘lascif[s] et peureux’, but should aim to reach the fertility and productivity of the doe, transposed in the field of imagination and intellectual creativity: ‘Mais que toujours ton cerveau soit / La hase pleine qui concoit’.

As for the rabbit, it is presented by Apollinaire as a symbol for the beloved, and the archaic or literary use of the French word  ‘connin’ for rabbit, reminds us of the medieval association of the animal with the female organ (‘con’), in the context of the love chase, an aspect often playfully illustrated in manuscript marginalia (as in this example).

François Chauveau, ‘Carte du Tendre’,  from Madeleine de Scudéry, Clélie, Histoire romaine, première partie (Paris 1654) Paris, BNF, Cartes et Plans, GE F PIECE- 11777

The use of allegory in the bestiary is reinforced in ‘Le Lapin’ by Apollinaire’s reference to the 17th century engraving of the ‘Carte du Tendre’. In La Clélie, a romantic novel by Madame de Scudéry, this allegorical map provides a topographical representation of the country or journey of love with all its delights and pitfalls. In the 1911 Bestiaire, Dufy’s engraving shows the rabbit in front of a peaceful hilly countryside with plants and trees and a church in the background (below).

The only imaginary creature retained by Apollinaire is the siren, actually presented as a group: ‘les Sirènes’. They are preceded by a representation of Orpheus accompanied by a warning against flying Sirens (‘volantes Sirènes’, ‘oiseaux maudits’) and their deadly songs. In antiquity, they were half women half birds, reputed to charm sailors with their songs and lull them into sleep before killing them, but in the middle ages, sirens also started to be depicted and pictured as women with a fish tail.

 
Mediaeval Siren and Onocentaur (man/donkey hybrid), Bestiary,  British Library MS Sloane 278. f. 147

The chant of Apollinaire’s Sirens can be contrasted with that of the poet, whose love and song has the power to raise Eurydice from the dead, or that of the pure and sexless angels in Paradise.  In both the Orpheus and the Sirens’ engravings, the sirens bear female heads and breasts, but also wings and lion arms, their body ending in a tripartite fish tail in the second engraving. This maritime aspect is highlighted in the corresponding poem, where the enticing song of the temptresses gives way to wails founded in tediousness (‘ennui’).

 

Sirens from Apollinaire’s Bestiaire

The position of the poet himself becomes ambiguous when his identification with Orpheus leads to an association with the sirens, as he depicts himself as the sea, full of ‘vaissaux chantants’ and ‘voix machinées’, in a curious conflagration of the tricky and enticing sirens and the ships and crews which become their victims. While in Orpheus’ poem, death was associated with the sirens’ songs, in the sirens’ verses, age may account for the voices haunting the poet’s mind, and his experience may be related to the use and mastery of crafty devices in the range of his poetical work.

 

Orpheus from Apollinaire’s Bestiaire

After the First World War, without consultation, both Louis Durey  and Francis Poulenc, members of the Groupe des six  (a group of composers close to the poetic avant-garde circles, Jean Cocteau in particular) set Apollinaire’s Bestiaire  to music. In 1919, Durey produced melodies for song and piano for the 26 animal poems of the Bestiaire (Music Collections G.1270.b.(16.)), while the four Orpheus sections remained spoken. A later version, produced in 1958, is set for voice and orchestra. Poulenc set 12 of Apollinaire’s poems to music, although following Georges Auric’s advice, he finally retained only six of them: Le Dromadaire, La Chèvre du Tibet, La Sauterelle, Le Dauphin, L’Ecrevisse and La Carpe, a work which gave him notoriety and had a long lasting success (Music Collections H.1846.kk.(2.)).

Record sleeve showing Le groupe des six (Le chant du monde, 1968); the recording includes Poulenc’s Bestiaire, sung by Irène Joachim

Later musical adaptations include Claude Ballif’s  30 poems for soprano or baritone and piano (1945-1948), Jean Absil’s Cinq petites pièces pour quatuor vocal mixte (1964), Alan Mills’ 6 poems for baritone and piano (1985) , John Carbon’s 3 poems for soprano, horn, cello and piano (2002), and Régis Campo’s 11 poems for soprano and orchestra (2008). The British Library Sound Archive holds many audio recordings of Poulenc’s songs (from the ‘Groupe des six’ to contemporary adaptations), several recordings of Durey’s Bestiaire and one of Absil’s, recorded by the Chorale universitaire de Grenoble, which can be listened to in the British Library Reading Rooms.

Irène Fabry-Tehranchi, Curator, Romance Collections

References / further reading

Francis Steegmuller, Apollinaire: Poet among the Painters (London, 1963).

David Badke, The Medieval Bestiary: Animals in the Middle Ages  (online resource)

Debra Hassig, Medieval Bestiaries: Text, Image, Ideology (Cambridge, 1995). YC.1996.b.2164

Christian Heck and Cordonnier Rémy. Le bestiaire médiéval : l'animal dans les manuscrits enluminés (Paris, 2011) LF.31.b.9154

Francis Klingender, Animals in Art and Thought to the End of the Middle Ages, ed. by Evelyn Antal and John Harthan (London, 1971). X.322/1206.

L'humain et l'animal dans la France médiévale (XIIe-XVe s.) = Human and animal in medieval France (12th-15th c.), sous la direction d'Irène Fabry-Tehranchi et Anna Russakoff. (Amsterdam, 2014)  YF.2014.a.22449

 

When the French philosopher André Glucksmann died on 10th November 2015, the news perhaps received less attention in the United Kingdom than elsewhere in Europe. Glucksmann was indeed a European in the widest sense of the word, both in terms of his origins and his range of influence. Born in 1937 in Boulogne-Billancourt, he was the son of an Ashkenazi Jewish couple from the heart of Europe; his father originally came from Bukovina (now Romania) and his mother from Prague. His education, too, followed the classic French model; after graduating from the Ecole normale supérieure de Saint-Cloud, he published his first book, Le Discours de la Guerre (Paris, 1967; British Library X.700/21738), which fittingly appeared in 1968, the year of the Paris student uprisings.

                   André Glucksmann in 2012 (©Stephan Röhl. Photo from Wikimedia Commons)

Although his allegiances were initially Marxist, Glucksmann gradually developed a critical outlook which led him in 1975 to publish La Cuisinière et le Mangeur d’hommes  (Paris, 1975; X.708/17739), an essay on the relationship between the State, Marxism and concentration camps which drew comparisons between the rise of Nazism and Communism and the atrocities committed in the name of both. It appeared in a Russian translation by Nina Staviskaya (Kukharka i liudoed; London, 1980; X.908/43770). He went on to explore the subject of totalitarianism and its origins in the thought of Fichte, Hegel, Marx and Nietzsche in Les maîtres penseurs (Paris, 1977; X.510/10207).

A close associate of Jean-Paul Sartre, Glucksmann traced the Existentialist strands in the writings of Dostoevsky in the wake of the 2001 New York bombings in Dostoïevski  à Manhattan (Paris, 2002; YF.2006.a.28133). He declared that his interest in philosophy and the moral basis of human rights stemmed from his experiences as a member of a Jewish family in Nazi-occupied France and the conviction which he developed in consequence of the vital importance of intervention.  With notable impartiality, he spoke up for the Muslim victims of Islamic terrorism, the Nicaraguan Contras, the independence of Chechnya and the Vietnamese boat people, but also advocated the use of nuclear power.

Together with Bernard-Henri Lévy, another former Marxist thinker, he was a member of the Nouveaux Philosophes; his Czech heritage and his rejection of Communism  naturally drew him to Václav Havel, resulting in the publication of a volume (YA.1990.a.14197) in 1989 pairing a translation of one of Havel’s texts (Quelques mots sur la parole) with Glucksmann’s Sortir du communisme, c’est rentrer dans l’histoire.  Glucksmann joined Havel, Desmond Tutu and Wei Jingsheng in signing an appeal in August 2008 urging the Chinese authorities to respect human rights at the time of the Beijing Olympics, and was also a signatory of the Prague Declaration on European Conscience and Communism.

The complex power structures within the former Soviet Union also attracted Glucksmann’s attention, and won him a particularly strong reputation in Ukraine, where Galina Akkerman published Na zakhysti svobody (Kyïv, 2013; YF.2014.a.14241), a collection of Elena Bonner's conversations with him. He recognized the importance of Georgia’s oil and gas reserves in maintaining the European Union’s independence from Gazprom, and thus opposed attempts by Abkhazia and South Ossetia to achieve autonomy.

Books by André Glucksmann from our collections

Glucksmann supported Nicolas Sarkozy in the April-May 2007 French presidential elections, and together with his son Raphaël Glucksmann (b.1979) he published Mai 68 expliqué à Nicolas Sarkozy (Paris, 2008; YF.2009.a.20084), examining the philosophical revolutions and counter-revolutions behind the events of that year and concluding with ‘praise of permanent subversion’ to counter the violent diatribe launched on 29 April 2007 by Sarkozy against the Sorbonne uprising. The breadth of Glucksmann’s intellectual compass, from Montaigne and Shakespeare to Stendhal and Daniel Cohn-Bendit, is typical of the daring and expansive approach and the skilled and incisive arguments of a philosopher who was prepared to apply them in the service of humanity in its fullest sense.

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

Despite being considered the more nurturing and caring sex, and having an age-old role as healers and nurses in families and communities, women were for centuries largely excluded from professional medicine, seen as the preserve of university-educated men.

One of the pioneering exceptions to this rule was Dorothea Christiane Erxleben, the first German woman to qualify as a doctor. She was born on 13 November  1715 in Quedlinburg to the physician Christian Polycarp Leporin and his wife Anna Sophia. Dorothea was bright and a quick learner, and her father was determined that she should share the same education as her younger brother, Christian. Both children studied Latin with a local schoolmaster and learned science and medicine from their father.

A contemporary portrait of Dorothea Erxleben (image from Wikimedia Commons)

However, childhood education was one thing, formal adult training quite another. While Christian might be expected to take over his father’s practice in due course, a medical career for Dorothea was impossible by contemporary standards. Nonetheless, the siblings planned to study medicine together and, with her father’s encouragement, Dorothea petitioned Fredrick II of Prussia for permission to enter the University of Halle with her brother. This was granted in 1741, but Dorothea did not actually attend the university. Accounts and chronology  vary between sources, but it seems that there was some problem involving Christian’s military service which left him unable to take up his own place at Halle and that Dorothea did not want (or was not able) to study there without his company.

Instead, Dorothea took what might seem like the complete opposite path: in 1742 she married Johann Christian Erxleben, a widowed clergyman with five children (she would have four more children of her own). But she clearly embarked  on matrimony and domestic life very much on her own terms and continued to study and practice medicine. In the year of her marriage she published a book describing and arguing against the factors that prevented women from studying. Again, her father was instrumental in encouraging her to publish, and provided a preface to the book, but Dorothea speaks clearly and firmly in her own voice.  She condemns familiar assertions that women’s education is a waste of time, goes against religious teaching, damages their health and strength, or prevents them from carrying out their ‘proper’ domestic duties. All of these beliefs she disproved in her own life, successfully combining the role of clergy wife and mother to nine children with her work in medicine.

 

Dorothea Erxleben (as Dorothea Leporin), Gründliche Untersuchung der Ursachen, die das weibliche Geschlecht vom Studieren abhalten (Berlin, 1742), British Library 8416.de.59 (and in digital form) 

On her father’s death in 1747, Dorothea took over his practice, effectively becoming a doctor in all but name. This made her enemies among other local physicians, and the death of one of Dorothea’s patients gave them the opportunity to accuse her formally of ‘quackery’ and of practising without qualifications.  In order to clear her name and be able to continue working, Dorothea volunteered to submit a medical dissertation for examination. The civic and university authorities debated for some time whether a woman could in fact qualify as a doctor: did the university statutes allow for female students, and if medicine was a public profession, were doctors public officials, a role from which women were barred?

Finally, on 12 June 1754, Dorothea was allowed  to present and defend her dissertation before the medical faculty in Halle – in Latin, as was usual at the time. Her argument was that swift and pleasant cures were often deleterious to a patient’s health in the longer term. She impressed the examiners both with her medical knowledge and her Latin and was awarded her doctorate. The published version of the dissertation includes a number of tributes in both Latin and German by her supporters, including her old Latin teacher, Tobias Eckhard.

Dorothea Erxleben, Dissertatio inauguralis, exponens quod nimis cito ac jucunde curare sæpius fiat caussa minus tutæ curationis. (Halle, 1754) T.600.(33.). The dissertation which gained Dorothea the official title of doctor.

Dorothea would continue to practise medicine unhindered until her death in 1762. Sadly, however, she remained an exception in German medical history for nearly 150 years. Only at the start of the 20th century would women be admitted to German medical schools. However, Dorothea is still remembered as a pioneer. Various clinics and foundations have been named after her, a commemorative stamp bearing her image appeared in the 1980s, and on the 200th anniversary of her birth she has been the subject of the day’s ‘doodle’ on the German Google site, bringing this 18th-century pioneer into the 21st century.

Susan Reed, Lead Curator Germanic Studies

 

From the flint axe to the electric washine machine, human beings have generally tried to lighten the physical load in their lives and increase comfort and pleasure. In 18th-century Europe, new technologies burgeoned for ever more purposes. From Jethro Tull’s seed drill to increasingly sophisticated mechanical clocks, new inventions were both discussed in learned journals and sold at various metropolitan and provincial fairs throughout France and England. That science and technology were servants of a wider humanity was an idea that Revolutionary France extensively explored and implemented. The imposition of the kilometre and kilogram brought order, uniformity and mutual understanding and, indeed, the guillotine itself replaced protracted, labour-intensive methods of execution with an instantaneous and humane one.

This idea also explored in the literature of the Revolution and a curious example of it is the novella Le miroir des événemens actuels, ou La belle au plus offrant, histoire à deux visages by François-Félix Nogaret (1740-1831). The British Library has recently acquired a copy of this extremely rare work. Combining shades of the Gothic, Romantic and erotic, it is science fiction aspiring to be science fact. It evolves into a political tract advocating an alliance between applied science and rational thought in order to enhance human well-being and happiness.

Title-page of  François-Félix Nogaret, Le miroir des événemens actuels, ou La belle au plus offrant, histoire à deux visages (Paris, 1790) British Library C.188.b.98

The story develops through the person of Aglaonice – a young, intelligent woman – who offers to marry the man who will create the most ingenious machine to win her heart. Six suitors then come forward. The first two discredit themselves by the scientific incompetence and pointlessness of their inventions. The third and fourth suitors reveal themselves as fraudsters intent only on swindling the gullible. The fifth suitor is named Frankestein, as comely in person as he is in character. He offers a self-locomoting statue which plays a range of music of exquisite beauty. Understandably, Aglaonice desires him but accepts his advice to see the sixth suitor before making her decision. This final suitor’s machine is also an automaton which manufactures jewels. Since his invention combines superior technological ingenuity with financial stability and wealth generation, Aglaonice chooses him as her husband. Her sister marries Frankestein.

The mechanism to make these automata function is not described but Aglaonice’s examination of each invention is strictly rational and scientific. If it fails against its scientific claims, she rejects it. Her criteria are also ethical, requiring the betterment and greater happiness of human beings and not just simple scientific achievement without social purpose. Therefore, only that which brings wealth and beauty into the world wins Aglaonice’s heart. Frankestein’s ethics match Aglaonice’s. By not pressing his initial advantage but wanting the sixth suitor’s invention to be seen, he ensures the greatest good of the greatest number. He thus exemplifies the “new man” advocated by so much Revolutionary rhetoric - devoted to the general welfare rather than to private benefit and reflecting the social optimism which was so strong in the first phase of the Revolution.

In the text, both the fictional and factual interweave rather awkwardly but are humorous and serious by turns with occasionally the texture of journalism. The French reading public of 1790 would have immediately understood the social and political events and technological developments to which the many puns, leitmotifs and wordplays refer. The author also supports his purpose with frequent digressions into science and natural history. The story ends with an unsurprising attack on the obscurantism and authoritarianism of the Catholic Church and a demand for its exclusion from all social and political power.

Since 1818 and the first publication of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, there is also the teasing question of the relationship, if any, between her novel and Nogaret’s novella. Certainly, the name of  Frankestein echoes in Frankenstein and unnamed beings are artificially created in both cases. Otherwise, these two works mirror each other only in their points of opposition.

The creatures made by Frankestein and the sixth suitor serve what La Mettrie believed to be the purpose of human nature which is the search for and creation of hedonism and delight in life. These automata are made to bring exclusively these things to human beings. They cannot do otherwise. The medical scientist Dr Victor Frankenstein, however, assembles and reanimates a human corpse just because he can. The scientific achievement is justification enough for his actions.  The being that he creates inherits the fullness of human nature. It demands love but is physically unlovable and Dr Frankenstein denies it any possibility of love. In return and of its own free will, it chooses to destroy the loving relationships of others.

 Frontispiece from Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus (London, 1831). 1153.a.9.

There have been suggestions that Shelley’s Frankenstein may be a story describing how the French revolutionaries lost control of the Revolution which became a deadly behemoth and that Nogaret’s novella was a possible source for her story. Without firmer evidence, these must remain suggestions.

Des McTernan, Former Curator, French Collections

 

One day in June 1935, a traveller waiting on the small Worcestershire station of Malvern Link was startled to be approached by a cropped-haired young woman in a mannish tweed jacket. Smiling, she advanced on him with the words, ‘How very good of you to marry me!’ There had been a double misunderstanding: in her eagerness she had alighted too early instead of at Great Malvern, and had mistaken him for the bridegroom she had never met – the poet W. H. Auden.

 
Erika Mann and W.H. Auden, reproduced in Hans Wißkirchen, Die Familie Mann (Reinbek, 1999) British Library YA.2001.a.2394.

Erika Mann had arrived at that quiet provincial station by a complicated and unlikely journey. She was born in Munich on 9th November 1905, the first child of the writer Thomas Mann and his wife Katia, née Pringsheim, and baptized Erika Julia Hedwig in honour of her mother’s late brother Erik and her two grandmothers (Hedwig Dohm, her great-grandmother, had been a noted feminist author of Jewish descent). Perhaps her father also recalled Erika Grünlich, a character in his novel Buddenbrooks (1901) which had established his reputation as an author. He wrote to his brother Heinrich that he was initially disappointed that his first-born was not a son, but this was remedied the following year by the birth of Erika’s brother Klaus. Four more brothers and sisters followed, but Thomas Mann always professed a special affection for the two oldest and his youngest daughter Elisabeth.

The six Mann children with their mother, ca. 1919. Erika is on the far right, holding Elisabeth, with Klaus next to her (reproduced in Hans Wißkirchen, Die Familie Mann) 

With a family heritage rich in literary and dramatic talent (her aunt Julia Mann was an actress), it was not surprising that young Erika soon began to show gifts in these directions, and become something of a trial to her parents. It was obvious that the strongly academic German Gymnasium tradition had little appeal for her, and while still attending the Luisengymnasium in Munich she and Klaus, who were inseparable, set up their own theatre group, the Laienbund Deutscher Mimiker. She was also engaged by Max Reinhardt  to make her debut with the Deutsches Theater, Berlin. In his novella Unordnung und frühes Leid (Disorder and Early Sorrow; Berlin, 1926: 12552.p.11) Thomas Mann paints a lively picture of his family’s colourful and sometimes chaotic life; the pranks played by the adolescents Bert and Ingrid are only too close to the antics which led their father to send Erika and Klaus to the progressive Bergschule Hochwaldhausen for some months in 1922.

Back at the Luisengymnasium Erika managed to scrape through her Abitur before embarking on her training for the stage. Through this she met the actor Gustav Gründgens (portrayed in Klaus Mann’s novel Mephisto (1936) as the opportunist Nazi sympathizer Hendrik Höfgen), whom she married in 1926. The marriage ended in divorce in 1929, increasingly strained by the couple’s very different sexual and political orientations, and in 1933 Erika founded the cabaret Die Pfeffermühle (The Pepper-mill) with Klaus and the actress Therese Giehse, writing its pronouncedly anti-fascist material herself.

With the rise of Hitler, the Mann family came under increasing scrutiny; Heinrich Mann was among the first to be stripped of his German citizenship and fled to France, while Thomas, Katia and their children left for Zurich, subsequently taking first Czechoslovak and then American citizenship. Erika, the last to leave, rescued many of her father’s papers before joining her parents in Switzerland, where her cabaret became a focal point for exiles but also caused difficulties with the renewal of her permits to live and work there. It was for this reason that she sought a marriage of convenience with the British author Christopher Isherwood, whom she knew from Berlin; he suggested that his friend Auden might oblige, and the ceremony duly took place in June 1935 at Ledbury Register Office. Secure in her possession of British citizenship, the bride left immediately afterwards on the London train and never saw Auden again, but they remained on good terms, and after Erika’s death Auden always  gave his civil status as ‘widower’. 

Erika Mann in American exile (Image from the Library of Congress New York World-Telegram & Sun Collection)

Her British passport enabled Erika to travel to New York in 1938 to rejoin her brother, Therese Giehse and other artists exiled from Nazi Germany and to relaunch Die Pfeffermühle in a new setting. However, despite a distinguished career as an author and journalist, she came under investigation by the FBI, as did Klaus. She had been one of the few women to report on the Spanish Civil War and the Nuremberg Trials, and had published a trenchant account of the Nazi educational system, School for Barbarians, but nevertheless both siblings’ political and sexual identities brought them under suspicion. In 1949, despairing of finding a place in the post-war world, Klaus took his own life.

Erika Mann, School for Barbarians (New York, 1938)  8359.a.7.

The growing paranoia of the McCarthy era made life in the USA intolerable to the Mann family, and in 1952 they returned to Zurich. Erika became her father’s and brother’s literary executor, preparing an edition of Thomas Mann’s letters and writing a sensitive memoir of his final months, Das letzte Jahr  (The last year: Frankfurt am Main, 1968; X.989/24331.) published in the year before her own death. Readers who admire her scrupulous editorial skills and incisive political comment may be surprised to learn that her earliest writings included a series of children’s books, among which the British Library holds copies of Muck, der Zauberonkel (Magic Uncle Muck; Basle, 1934; X.990/5963.) and of Štofek letí přes moře (Prague, 1934; X.990/4256), a Czech translation of her first book Stoffel fliegt übers Meer (Stoffel flies across the sea) issued by her father’s Prague publisher Melantrich. The variety of her works in the Library’s catalogue testifies to Erika Mann’s vivid and highly original approach to life and to the integrity and loyalty which she showed to the people and causes fortunate enough to win them.

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

 

Erika Mann, Muck der Zauberonkel (Basel, 1934) X.990/5963

 

 

100 years ago, during the First World War, an extraordinary mélange of intellectuals converged in the one safe haven left in a self-destructing continent. In 1915, Switzerland – and Zürich in particular – hosted the likes of James Joyce, Tristan Tzara and Lenin, which quickly made the neutral state one of the most fertile grounds for avant-garde ideas in literature, art and politics.

Hugo Ball brought together the band of artists including Richard Huelsenbeck and Tristan Tzara that went on to collaborate under the banner of ‘Dada’ – a movement, which Annemarie Goodridge, in the catalogue of the British Library’s 2007 ‘Breaking the Rules’ exhibition, describes as acting out of the ‘desire to use new art forms to express opposition to the perceived spiritual bankruptcy of the age’ . In their minds, the war was a consequence of a ‘failing enlightenment project’ with an uncritical faith in scientific and technological “progress”’ (Stephen Foster, Dada: The Coordinates of Cultural Politics). Dada represented an attempt at a clean break from previous culture, a ‘tabula rasa’ in the words of Paul Dermée.

Robert Delaunay, Portrait of Tristan Tzara (1923). Madrid, Museo nacional centro de arte Reina Sofia (image from Wikimedia Commons)

One striking example of Dada creativity is first volume of the Collection Dada series published by Tristan Tzara between 1916 and 1919 containing the play by the same author, La première aventure celeste de Mr Antipyrine, illustrated with coloured woodcuts by Marcel Janco. Characters’ names like Mr Bleubleu and Mr Cricri set the tone for what is an exploration into sound as much as anything else, with speeches developing into nonsensical noise.

Cover (above) and opening (below) from Tristan Tzara, La première aventure celeste de Mr Antipyrine (Zürich, 1915)  Cup.408.u.39. 

In 1916, the same year as the Dada artists exploded convention into fragments of spontaneity, absurdity and illogicality in their new home of the Cabaret Voltaire in Zürich, the Nobel Prize for Literature (the belated award for 1915) was conferred upon a writer based not far away in Geneva, Romain Rolland. The writer of the ten-volume bildungsroman Jean-Christophe (the complete manuscript of the tenth volume is part of the British Library’s Stefan Zweig Collection) and biographies of key figures in culture like Michelangelo, Beethoven and Tolstoy, a humanist and pacifist, might seem worlds apart from the tenets of Dada but this is not necessarily the case.

 
The preface to vol. 10 of Romain Rolland’s Jean-Christophe, British Library Zweig MS 184-186

Rolland’s 1915 collection of essays Au-dessus de la mêlée, even in its title, suggests a position beyond dogmatism, ‘above the battle’, as the English rendering has it. Rolland writes in the title essay:

The spirit is the light. It is our duty to lift it above tempests, and thrust aside the clouds which threaten to obscure it; to build higher and stronger, dominating the injustice and hatred of nations, the walls of that city wherein the souls of the whole world may assemble.  

Romain Rolland in 1915 (image from Wikimedia Commons)

We might call Rolland’s words a manifesto against manifestos in the sense of Tzara’s famous 1918 Dada manifesto, in which he writes, ‘je suis par principe contre les manifestes, comme je suis aussi contre les principes’ , where ‘principles’  are the same fixed truths that give way to  ‘tempests’ of dogmatic belief, the same truths that Rolland cannot tolerate. Clearly, Rolland draws upon a continuous notion of  ‘spirit’, something Dada renounced, yet their divergent approaches still led both to the same geographical and anti-establishment space.

A little late to the Swiss party, Stefan Zweig, Rolland’s close friend and intellectual ally, moved to Zürich in 1917. It is testament to the tolerance of the city and its commingling cultural movements that Zweig’s serious anti-war play Jeremias could open there, no doubt a short distance from the riotous events at the Cabaret Voltaire. Zweig, initially unconvinced by Switzerland, writes in his diary that ‘despite the chocolate and the leather boots, one feels this country to be torture’. Yet, in a diary entry 20 years after his time in Zürich, he reminisces, ‘how different was it in those times in Austria and Switzerland, where I could speak my own language and encourage others’.

Indeed, Zweig’s writing was influenced permanently by the humanist spiritual  ‘brotherhood’ in Switzerland, with his later biography of Erasmus the height of his humanist line of thought. Erasmus, for Zweig, embodies ‘Überparteilickeit’, that is a certain non-partisanship, linguistically akin to Rolland’s formulation for Au-dessus de la mêlée, where both reside ‘above’ something. In a letter to René Schickele in 1934, Zweig writes, ‘I do not connect myself to any party, to no group, […] but whatever I do, I try to do silently and would rather be attacked for it than celebrated.’ Tristan Tzara’s famous 1918 manifesto also asserts that the author is against action and for continual contradiction, for affirmation. He continues ‘I am neither for nor against and I won’t explain since I hate reason (bon sens)’.The only difference might then be expressed, adapting Zweig’s words, Tzara does not connect himself to anything and everything he tried to do, he tried to do it loudly.

Above and beyond the normality and madness of world war, the contrasting figures of the avant-garde and humanism co-existed in neutral Switzerland. In June 1919, Zweig was one of the signatories of Rolland’s ‘Declaration of the Independence of the Mind’. Rolland writes that the role of these guardians of spirit is to be the fixed point in the ‘centre of the whirlwind of passions, in the night’. Switzerland was precisely that centre – a continuous and varied productive culture out of which spiralled many more movements. What was common to all these movements, to Dada and Rolland, was their shared desire to ‘not only change art but also life by means of art’ (Roy Allen, ‘Aesthetic transformations: Origins of Dada’, in Foster op. cit.).

Pardaad Chamsaz, Collaborative Doctoral Student

References/further reading:

Breaking the Rules: The Printed Face of the European Avant Garde 1900-1937, edited by. Stephen Bury (London, 2007), YC.2008.b.251

Dada: The Coordinates of Cultural Politics, edited by Stephen Foster (New York, 1996) YC.1997.b.488 v.1

Tristan Tzara, La première aventure céléste de Mr Antipyrine (Zürich, 1916) Cup.408.u.39 

Tristan Tzara, Dada 3, (Zürich, 1918) W18/5841

Romain Rolland, Au-dessus de la mêlée, (Paris, 1915) W18/5841

Stefan Zweig, Jeremias : eine dramatische Dichtung in neun Bildern (Leipzig, 1922) 11747.h.31.

Stefan Zweig, Tagebücher (Frankfurt am Main, 1984), X3-0904

Stefan Zweig, Triumph und Tragik des Erasmus von Rotterdam (Vienna, 1935), 2214.a.9

The name of the Russian literature and art critic and playwright Professor Nikolai Isidorovich Misheev (1878-1947) is well known in the academic circles of art historians and specialists in the Russian émigré press.  Misheev was born in Kyiv and graduated first from the Seminary and then  from the Faculty of History and Philology of Warsaw University. In St Petersburg he taught at women’s colleges, including the famous Smolnyi finishing school for young noblewomen. 

Misheev left Soviet Russia in 1925 and for the first four years lived in Riga, but settled in Paris in 1929. Not attempting to give a full survey of his works, I would just mention Misheev’s books held at the British Library: Noveishaia russkaia literatura (‘Essays on Modern Russian Literature’), the play Na rassvete (‘At dawn’) and Bylina (‘Russian Folk Tale’). In 1935, his essay on Russian folk-tales was translated into English under the title A Heroic Legend by Gleb Struve, (a Russian literary historian and later  author of the most influential book of its time on Russian émigré literature, Russkaia literatura v izgnanii ), and the founder of the School of Slavonic Studies, Bernard Pares. 

Photographs of an exhibition of Russian émigré periodicals in Prague, from Perezvony, N18, 1926.

While living in Riga, Misheev actively contributed to one of the  Russian émigré magazines, Perezvony (‘The Chimes’), published between 1925 and 1929 (British Library PP.1931.pml). The magazine was meant to continue the pre-revolutionary tradition of illustrated weekly or monthly editions for the whole family. The first issue came out on 8 November 1925 and until February 1926 it appeared weekly. From Number 14 it became a bi-monthly publication; in 1927 it became a monthly and in 1928-29 the frequency diminished to two issues per year. Among its contributors were Boris Zaitsev (also editor of the literature section), Ivan Bunin, Konstantin Balmont, and  Marina Tsvetaeva.

The editorial board paid a lot of attention to the artistic appearance of the magazine. The cover, with a tree growing in a foreign soil covered with bells that create the familiar chimes of Russian churches in the background, was designed by Mstislav Dobuzhinsky, and the influence of the “World of  Art” movement on the entire concept of the periodical is obvious.

Cover of the first issue of Perezvony (1925)

Misheev took responsibility for the art section of the magazine and contributed to every issue (sometimes more than one item, in which case he use his pseudonyms, e.g. ‘Pritisskii’). A great number of issues were topical and presented essays on important Russian and world artists. Misheev wrote about  the Academicians Sergey Vinogradov (1869-1938), Nikolai Bogdanov-Bel’skii (1868-1945), Mikhail Nesterov (1862-1942),  Mstislav Dobuzhinsky, Vilhelms Purvītis (1872– 1945) and many more.

S.Vinogradov. To the Reverend

 

Nikolai Bogdanov-Bel’skii. A Defender of the Motherland.

 

M.Nesterov. Two sisters

 

M. Dobuzhinsky. Dr Aibolit and Barmaley

 

V. Purvītis. In the country.

Misheev contributed essays on Russian architecture, folklore and culture. As K. Pritisskii he wrote an article entitled  ‘Russkaia literatura, kak ‘nakaz’ russkogo naroda’ (‘Russian Literature as a mandate from the Russian people’) (No. 19, 1926, pp. 605-609). His accessible and popular style combined with profound knowledge of the history of art and Russian culture make Misheev’s essays an enjoyable read. 

Katya Rogatchevskaia, Lead Curator East European Collections

References:

Nikolai Misheev, Noveishaia russkaia literatura (St Petersburg, 1905) 1865.c.3.(83.); (Moscow, 1914) RB.23.b.6297

Nikolai Misheev, Na rassvete (St Petersburg, 1920) 11758.dd.27.

Nikolai Misheev, Bylina (Vladimirova, 1938)  YA.1996.b.7845 ; English translation by Gleb Struve and Bernard Pares:  A Heroic Legend: how the holy mountains let out of their deep caves the mighty heroes of Russia. (London, 1935) 20019.ee.33.

Gleb Struve, Russkaia literatura v izgnanii (New York, 1956) 11872.g.8.

Perezvony  (Riga, 1925-1929) PP.1931.pml; several issues are available online via Sait-arkhiv emigrantkoi pressy (The Website-archive of Russian émigré press).

 

The current Animal Tales exhibition includes a copy of the Esbatement moral, Des animaux (British Library C.125.d.23), an anonymous French verse adaptation of Aesop’s fables in sonnet form. It was published in Antwerp in 1578 by the engraver Philippe Galle (1537-1612). Little can be inferred about the identity of the anonymous author, who claims to be ‘tout nouveau en la langue Françoise’, apart from the dedication to Charles de Croÿ and his connections with Philippe Galle himself  and Pierre Heyns, writer of the verse preface, and part of the community of Antwerp humanists. Heyns’s preface refers to ‘des Heroiques vers / En Sonets bien troussez... / A Londres entonnez et finiz en Anvers’, pointing to a cultural relation between Flanders and England, which is also relevant to the illustrator, Marcus Gheeraerts the Elder.

 
Esbatement moral des animaux (Antwerp, 1578); image from a copy in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, RES P-YE-550, available online via Gallica

This work shows the interest in Aesopian fables within Flemish humanistic circles in the Renaissance. It expresses the desire to combine classical wisdom with the Christian message, using text and images to support this didactic purpose.

The title of the collection, ‘Esbatement moral’, or ‘moral entertainment’, covers the double ambition of the fables, docere et placere, to instruct and to please. Staging animals to represent human behaviours, foibles and virtues, is part of the appeal of these short didactic tales. The preface immediately plays on this double register, as man is characterised first by religion and second by the Aristotelian category of animal rationabile, as opposed to that of bestia. Interestingly, no reference is made to Aesop, either in the title or in the introduction: at the bottom of the frontispiece, a quotation from Psalm 148 exhorts animals to praise the Lord. The purpose of the book is clearly the didactic dissemination of a Christian moral.

The frontispiece shows animals on a theatrical stage in front of a curtain while men and women are attending the performance. Although the animals are represented in a naturalistic manner, the cushion used as seat by the lion, king of the animals and the fool’s outfit worn by the monkey contribute to their anthropomorphism. Animals are privileged actors on the stage of the theatrum mundi: a century later, Jean de La Fontaine presents his collection of fables as ‘Une ample comédie à cent actes divers, / Et dont la scène est l’univers’ (Fables, V, 1, 1668).

Around the central illustration, medallions containing portraits of individual animals are interspersed with Latin inscriptions allowing the reader to identify the protagonists of specific biblical or classical stories (Eve and the serpent, Balaam’s ass, the speaking dog of Tarquin the Proud...). This sets up a biblical and classical cultural horizon for this collection of fables, even if the core language of the collection is not Latin but French.

Dedication of the Esbatement moral des animaux, f. A2.

The Esbatement is dedicated to Charles III de Croÿ, prince de Chimay (1560-1612), a keen collector of books and artworks. The author highlights his religious and educational purpose: in his dedication, the expected association of fables with oral tales and classical fiction, gives way to references to the Gospel and the Holy Writ, mentioning ‘figures’, ‘similitudes’ and ‘paraboles’ as means to access the truth, ‘vive verite’.

The Aesopian sonnets are introduced by Pierre Heyns (1537-1598), who wrote and translated several didactic and pedagogical works. His  preface is directed to the ‘Spectateur et Lecteur’, highlighting the essential combination of the visual and textual aspects of the book.

Verse preface by Pierre Heyns, from Esbatement moral des animaux, f. A2v

The author also considers the images as essential: his dedication mentions ‘plusieurs nouvelles figures... et divers passages de l’Escriture Sainte, accommodés aux figures et sonets...’. For the author, the biblical quotations seem as important as the fable itself.

Edewaerd de Dene, De warachtighe fabulen der dieren (Bruges, 1567). Image from the Bibliothèque nationale de France copy , RES-YI-19, via Gallica

The artist, Marcus Gheeraerts the Elder, had illustrated a collection of Aesopian fables, De warachtighe fabulen der dieren (‘True animal fables’), translated into Dutch by Edewaerd de Dene (British Library 640.l.22 is a collection of engravings from this edition). The Dutch edition has a different frontispiece (above) and is introduced by the engraver and printer Hubert Goltz.

A preface to De warachtighe fabulen… by Lucas d’Heere, a Flemish painter, poet and writer was used as model for Pierre Heyns’s foreword to the French edition. The 1578 Esbatement des animaux also reused 107 etchings from this edition, with 18 additional illustrations, also by Gheeraerts.

Dutch version of   ‘The Lion and the Mouse’, from De warachtighe fabulen der dieren, ff. 202-203.

In the Flemish copy (above), the illustration of ‘The Lion and the Mouse’ features on the left page, preceded by a motto and followed by two Bible quotations: one from Proverbs 27, and the other from Ecclesiastes 3 (the choice of quotations in the French version is different). The Dutch fable is also versified, but in alexandrines, and is longer. The moral is set distinctively from the narration by the use of an indented paragraph and of italics, and it is preceded by a pointing hand, a manicula.

French version of  ‘The Lion and the Mouse’, from Esbatement moral des animaux, ff. 11v-12.

In ‘Du Lion et le Rat’, the verse fable, placed on the left page, faces an etching on the right page, framed by a devise on top (‘Chascun peut faire recompense’) and a Bible quotation at the bottom (Ecclus. 12:1,2). In the illustration of ‘the Lion and the Mouse’, the lion is depicted with a lot of movement and vivacity, at the forefront of the image: he is trying to untangle himself from the net wrapped around him. He stands on his back legs, tail up, head contorted and expressing anguish, with an open jaw which reveals his tongue and teeth, and an aggrieved look. His confusion contrasts with the calm of the mouse in the bottom left of the image, who starts biting into the thread.

The sonnets follow the rhyme scheme set up by the French poet Clément Marot (1496-1544): two quatrains of alexandrines in enclosed rhymes (abba) followed by a couplet (cc) and a last quatrain of enclosed rhymes (deed). However, visually and syntactically, the poem appears as a sequence of two quatrains and two tercets, in the tradition of the Italian or Petrarchan sonnet. The last tercet is an ideal location for the moral of the fable, which echoes the two sentential statements on the facing page.

This collection of Aesopian fables in French can appeal to different kinds of audience: readers will enjoy this poetical rewriting of the fables in the short sonnet form, but the author first puts the emphasis on the moral and Christian instruction they provide, along with the lively illustrations which will appeal to both younger and older readers.

Irène Fabry-Tehranchi, Curator, Romance Collections

References / further reading:

Edward Hodnett, Marcus Gheeraerts the Elder of Bruges, London, and Antwerp (Utrecht, 1971) X.421/5858.

Hollstein’s Dutch & Flemish etchings, engravings and woodcuts (1450 - 1700) (Rotterdam;  Amsterdam, 1949-2001) L.R.419.bb.2  

Manfred Stefan Sellink, Philips Galle (1537-1612) : engraver and print publisher in Haarlem and Antwerp (Rotterdam, 2000) YA.1999.b.4195

 

 

The Panizzi Lectures, based upon the original researches of eminent scholars of the book, have been delivered annually since 1985. They cover a wide and international subject range within the overall umbrella of historical bibliography. In this year’s series of three lectures, on Monday 2, Thursday 5 and Monday 9 November 2015, Professor David McKitterick will look at the printing revolution in 15th-century Europe which brought unprecedented quantities of books into the world.  

It quickly became clear that some selection was necessary if readers were not to drown in a sea of paper. But how to select? What was worth keeping, and what could be ignored? Different groups of people had different ideas, whether based on religious, political or other principles.

These lectures will consider how some kinds of books became marked out as being curious in some sense, and as rarities. The criteria established in the 16th century gradually developed into our ideas today of rare book collections, and rare book libraries.

 Lecture 1  A seventeenth-century revolution

                               Sutton Nicholls The Compleat Auctioner. Etching c. 1700 ©The Trustees of the British Museum

The beginnings of an idea. How were different copies of books to be compared? How could rarity be established? How far was rarity to be equalled with a scale of financial values? By the end of the 17th century the foundations were in place for a newly organized world of trade and collecting.

Lecture 2. Selling the Harleian Library

 Edward Harley, 2nd Earl of Oxford. c. 1725; attributed toJonathan Richardson the elder. © National Portrait Gallery, London

The Harleian manuscripts are famous as one of the foundation collections of the British Museum in the mid-18th century. The vast Harleian collection of printed books, dispersed at auction, has been less studied for their part in a bibliographical and social revolution in Britain and on the continent.

Lecture 3. Private interest and public responsibility

Spiridione Gambardella Portrait of Sir Anthony Panizzi (1797-1879). Painting on canvas.©The Trustees of the British Museum

The generation and dispersal of major private libraries in 18th-century France proved to be the groundwork for fresh approaches to collecting both among individuals and in the creation of national libraries, with their new priorities and responsibilities. Amidst new levels of competition and jealousy, bibliophily grew institutionally as well as amongst private collectors.

David McKitterick FBA, Honorary Professor of Historical Bibliography in the University of Cambridge, retired earlier this year as Librarian of Trinity College, Cambridge. He has written widely about the history of printing and of libraries, and is one of the general editors of The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain. His books include a three-volume History of Cambridge University Press (1992-2004), and Print, manuscript and the search for order, 1450-1830 (2003). In his most recent book, Old books, new technologies (2013), he explored the ways that books have been treated, conserved and changed since the 15th century.

The lectures are held at 6.15 pm in the Auditorium of the British Library Conference Centre. Admission is free, and seats will be allocated on a first come first served basis. The last lecture will be followed by a drinks reception to which all are welcome.

  University Library at Leiden. Engraving by Willem Swanenburch, after a drawing by Jan Cornelisz Woudanus. 1610. Het Scheepvaartmuseum, Amsterdam

 

 

28th October is celebrated annually in the Czech Republic as a national holiday commemorating the establishment on that day in 1918 of the independent state of Czechoslovakia under its first president Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk. With the ‘Velvet Divorce’ of 1993, the peaceful dissolution of the union between the Czech Republic and Slovakia, it is no longer a holiday in the latter, although many Slovaks continue to feel that it should be. Instead, Slovakia remembers 1st January 1993, the first day of the existence of a separate Slovak state. However, in 2015 the Slovaks have an additional reason to celebrate on 28th October – the bicentenary of the birth of the man without whom the Slovak language as spoken nowadays might never have existed.

                   Portrait of Ľudovít Štúr by Jozef Božetech Klemens (From Wikimedia Commons)

Ľudovít Štúr (1815-1856) was born in Uhrovec (in the same house, incidentally, which was later the birthplace of Alexander Dubček) as the second child of the schoolmaster Samuel Štúr and his wife Anna. The area was strongly Lutheran, and the religious tradition into which he was baptized would exercise a powerful influence on him throughout his life. After receiving a good grounding in Latin and other subjects from his father, the young Ĺudovít was educated at the Lutheran Lyceum in Bratislava (then known as Pressburg), where he became acquainted with the writings of Slavonic patriots including Ján Kollár, Pavel Jozef Šafarík and Josef Dobrovský, and joined the Czech-Slav Society. Rising to become its vice-president, in 1836 he approached the well-known Czech historian František Palacký, appealing for his support in the creation of a unified Czechoslovak language and claiming that the Czech spoken by Slovaks in Upper Hungary was no longer intelligible to their countrymen elsewhere. In the interests of Slavonic unity and impartiality, he proposed the acceptance on both sides of a number of Czech and Slovak words, but this proved unacceptable to the Czechs, leading Štúr and his circle to mount a campaign for a new standard Slovak language. They travelled through Upper Hungary to canvass on behalf of this after a meeting on 24 April 1836 at the ruined castle of Devín (Dévény, near Bratislava) where they not only swore an oath of loyalty to their cause but chose new Slavonic names, with Štúr himself adding Velislav to his own.

        Castle Devín, Bratislava (Devín village), Slovak Republic (Photo by Radovan Bahna from Wikimedia Commons)

The Slovak language movement might have seemed to be doomed from the outset because of the threefold opposition which it faced. Not only had it experienced a rebuff from the Czechs, but as part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire the territory in which Štúr grew up had had German imposed on it as the language of bureaucracy and officialdom, and there was also an increasingly vocal movement in promotion of the Hungarian language.  Štúr was fluent in German, and studied from 1838-1840 at the Protestant University of Halle, while continuing to maintain contacts with Czech patriots and, in 1839, publishing an account of his journey to Lusatia, the ‘smallest Slavonic nation’ centred around Bautzen.

While teaching grammar and Slavonic history at his old school, Štúr acted as co-editor of the literary journal Tatranka (Pressburg, 1832-45; British Library PP.4874.bbh), and planned to start a Slovak political journal. However, his application for a licence to do so was rejected in 1842, when he also launched a petition against the persecution of Slovaks by Hungarians in Upper Hungary. The following year he was compelled to leave his Lyceum post after an investigation into the activities of its Institute of Czechoslovak Language, and to publish his summary of the Slovaks’ grievances against the Hungarians, which no Hungarian publishing house would touch. At the same time, however, he and his followers were working on the codification of a new Slovak language, which gradually came into literary use in 1844. Advocating the Slovaks’ right to their own language, schools and political independence within Hungary, he was chosen in 1847 as a deputy in the Hungarian Diet in Bratislava, representing Zvolen (Zólyom), two months after the formal adoption by both Roman Catholics and Protestants of the new standard Slovak language.

The events of 1848, however, interrupted his political career, as the Diet ceased to meet after April. Instead Štúr visited Prague to establish Slovanská Lipa, an organization to foster cooperation between Slavs, and took part in the first Slavic Congress there. His involvement in the presentation of the petition Žiadosti slovanského národa (Requests of the Slovak Nation) in May 1848, including calls for the abolition of serfdom, universal suffrage and freedom of the press, led to a Hungarian warrant for his arrest, and in September he and the other members of the Slovak National Council proclaimed independence from Hungary. After organizing the Slovak military volunteer campaign, Štúr headed a delegation which on 20 March 1849 formally presented the Slovak nation’s demands to Franz Josef II at Olomouc, but when, after lengthy negotiations, the Slovak volunteers were disbanded in November he returned to Uhrovec. His spirit remained unquenched despite further obstacles and tragedies (he was placed under police surveillance in Modra, where he moved to care for his seven nephews and nieces following his brother Karol’s death in 1851) which did not prevent him from publishing several more important works on Slavonic songs, myths and culture, including O národných povestiach a piesňach plemien slovanských (On the national songs and myths of the Slavonic races; 1852: YA.2002.a.21123) and Das Slawenthum und die Welt der Zukunft (Slavdom and the world of the future; Bratislava, 1931; X.800/2232).

Ironically, having survived the armed uprising of 1848-49, Ľudovít Štúr met his end through a gunshot – but one which he accidentally inflicted on himself during a hunting expedition on 22 December 1855. He lingered for three weeks, dying on 12 January 1856, and was honoured with a national funeral in Modra. In his forty years of life, this man from an obscure town in Slovakia had given his people the gift of a versatile and expressive language, as suited to poetry as to political debate, and fought tirelessly for its place in the world, in keeping with his creed: ‘My country is my being, and every hour of my life shall be devoted to it.’

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