When a friend recently commented that he thought it strange and amusing to see foreign house names in a traditional-looking Yorkshire village, he was assuming that such names were given in pretention, or in sentimental memory of a holiday abroad. It seems natural to think of cities attracting migrants and refugees, but not of villages as distinctly conservative, even insular, in their Olde Worlde Englishness.

In reality, of course, the picture is more complicated.  On the very outskirts of Leeds, not far from where I live, is one grey stone village whose origins are every bit as cosmopolitan as an inner-city area. Its name is Fulneck, and it shares its name with a settlement in the eastern part of the Czech Republic: Fulnek, Moravian Silesia. The Yorkshire village was established in 1743 by refugees from the Counter-Reformation in Bohemia and other Habsburg lands. They were members of the Moravian Church, one of the earliest Protestant Churches of all and the oldest Protestant denomination in the Czech lands, which had its roots in the Hussite movement   of the 15th century.

By 1600, a majority of the inhabitants of the provinces of Moravia and Bohemia (the present-day Czech Republic) were under the influence of Hussite churches or schools, and might be said to have become Protestant. The churches established printing presses, and held services in Czech and German in preference to Latin. For a long time, the imperial court tolerated this, and was even sympathetic, but the arrival of the Jesuits and election of the vengefully Catholic Ferdinand II as King of Bohemia and Holy Roman Emperor changed things. The events that followed are some of the most evocative in Czech history. The Second Defenestration of Prague, when representatives of the Protestant estates threw the Emperor’s envoys from the window of the Bohemian Chancellery, sparked the Thirty Years War. Its first battle was the disastrous White Mountain, which wiped out the Protestant nobility and would become a powerful symbol of the Habsburgs’ destruction of the nation and suppression of the Czech language. In creating a national mythos for the Czechoslovak state, Tomas Masaryk would constantly refer back to this period of history.

The Battle of White Mountain, November 1620, detail from an illustration by Matthäus Merian in Johann Philipp Abelin, Theatrum Europaeum (Frankfurt am Main, 1643)  800.m.3-5.

The survivors of White Mountain went into hiding in caves and crevices around the borders. Some of these hiding places are marked today, often as detours from the innumerable well-marked hiking routes that criss-cross the country. The Moravian Brethren  – originally of Bohemian origin  – took their name from the fact that they continued to live in hiding in Moravia worshipping illegally for almost a century. Many other groups went abroad, firstly to other states in the Holy Roman Empire where the Counter-Reformation was less entrenched, and then later overseas, to Britain, France, the Netherlands or North America. In due course, the Moravians followed, moving first to Herrnhut in Saxony, where they were protected by Nikolaus von Zinzendorf, and then to England. This is the origin of the Fulneck Moravian Settlement.

The Fulneck Settlement originally consisted of separate houses for men and women, both of which are still standing on either side of the Moravian Chapel, as well as some married accommodation. Possibly the most famous of the children born in eighteenth-century Fulneck was Henry Benjamin Latrobe, architect of the Capitol building in Washington DC. His father was a Moravian minister.

The old Moravian Chapel in Fulneck. (Photograph J.Ashton/C.Martyn)

Benjamin Latrobe was educated in Upper Lusatia, Saxony, from where his community had emigrated, but Fulneck itself has a school, established in 1753, which went on to become a mainstream independent school. Its pupils have included the future Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith (born in Morley, which is now also part of Leeds) and Dame Diana Rigg. Asquith hated his time there and refused to come back as a famous old boy to give prizes, a fact not everyone with an interest in Fulneck is eager to advertise!

Fulneck school, overlooking the valley (Photograph J.Ashton/C.Martyn)

Modern Fulneck still consists of just one street, built on a ridge above a green valley. Many of the people living there are Moravians still, and they run a small museum of  their history in England and Europe. The volunteer staff are very knowledgeable, and truly bring the eclectic little collection to life. Links to Herrnhut and other Moravian communities are also maintained.

The Museum in Fulneck; the building is typical of those in the village. (Photograph J.Ashton/C.Martyn)

Among the British Library’s collections are various locally-produced histories of the Settlement, as well as a copy of The Brotherly Agreement and Declaration concerning the Rules and Orders of the Brethren's Congregation at Fulneck, published in 1777 (4661.b.4.), and a cantata composed by Edward Sewell to celebrate its centenary (Cantata, composed in commemoration of the Fulneck Centenary Jubilee, April 19th 1855. London, 1855; R.M.14.e.27.). Small but persistent, this little community of exiles used its own corner of a foreign field to maintain the Reformation ideals on which Masaryk would found the Czechoslovak state.

Janet Ashton, WEL Cataloguing Team Manager

In 1914 the Russian theatre director Vlesovod Meyerhold  set up a theatre magazine which he called Liubov’ k trem apel’sinam (The Love for Three Oranges). At this time Meyerhold was interested in the traditions of the Commedia dell'arte, rethinking them for contemporary theatrical reality. His theoretical concepts of the “conditional theatre” were elaborated in his book O teatre (On Theatre; shelfmark 11795.p.12) in 1913. The new magazine was named after Carlo Gozzi’s  play Amore delle tre melarance (1761) which he created as a polemic against the then extremely popular Italian playwright Carlo Goldoni. It started a tradition of Italian plays called fiabe – improvisations loosely based on a fairy-tale plot where the conflict between good and evil is shown by means of Commedia dell'arte. The publication Liubov’ k trem apel’sinam had the subtitle Zhurnal doktora Dapertutto (‘Dr Dapertutto’s magazine’).

 

Meyerhold – cartoon portrait by A.Liubimov from N.D.Volkov. Meierkhol’d. T.1. 1874-1908. (Leningrad, 1929). British Library 10797.a.13

Dr Dapertutto was Meyerhold’s pseudonym, suggested to him by the poet and composer Mikhail Kuzmin with whom Meyehold worked on one of the Komisarzhevskaia theatre productions in St Petersburg.  Cover designs were made by the theatre designers and artists Iurii Bondi (see more of his works here) and Aleksandr Golovin.

Cover design by Bondi for Liubov’ k trem apel’sinam (St Petersburg, 1914)

Cover design by Golovin for Liubov’ k trem apel’sinam (St Petersburg, 1915)

Between 1914 and 1916 nine issues of the magazine were published. The print run was very small, between 300 and 500 copies and the first and prime subscribers were family members and friends. Aleksandr Blok, one of the most influential among Russian Symbolist poets, was responsible for the poetry section. In the articles published in the magazine, Meyerhold and his like-minded friends and colleagues discussed new approaches to the history and theory of theatre and promoted their new Theatre-Studio where Meyerhold taught his bio-mechanical system of acting. A full digital archive of this rare magazine is now freely available online.

In the first issue of the magazine Meyerhold published a theatre scenario Liubov’ k trem apel’sinam (‘The Love for Three Oranges’) based on Carlo Gozzi’s fiabe. Meyerhold’s co-authors were the poet Konstantin Vogak (1887-1938), who was at some point in correspondence with Blok, knew Anna Akhmatova and Nikolay Gumilev and later emigrated and died in Nice, and Vladimir Nikolaevich Solov’ev, one of the leading and most popular theatre directors in Leningrad in the 1920s, who died in 1941 during the siege of Leningrad.

When in April 1918 Sergey Prokofiev was commissioned to write an opera, he mentioned it to Meyerhold who immediately gave him the first issue of the magazine. In his diaries Prokofiev wrote: “Read The Love for Three Oranges. It is wonderful! Something could really be done with it, except that the plot would need to be completely rewritten. The music should be clear, lively, and as simple as it can be made” (Prokofiev, 2006. p. 273).

In the Prokofiev family archives there is a photograph taken in 1919 that shows Sergey Prokofiev, Boris Anisfeld who designed the sets for the first performance of the opera in Chicago, and Adolph Bolm, a Russian-born dancer and choreographer, a one-time member of  Diaghilev’s company, who was helping Prokofiev while he was on his first trip to America. The photograph is reproduced in the edition of Prokofiev’s diaries published in Paris in 2002 (YF.2012.a.11414; p. 27)

To see this image and many more rare and fascinating items from the British Library collections on Russian music theatre and art, join us on 19th March at a private view at the British Library organised in cooperation with the London Jewish Cultural Centre.

Katya Rogatchevskaia, Lead East European Curator (Russian)

Literature:  

Sergey Prokofiev, Diaries / translated and annotated by Anthony Phillips. (London; Ithaca, N.Y., 2006- ). YC.2007.a.1259 (vol. 1); YC.2009.a.11249 (vol. 2); YC.2013.a.14822 (vol. 3).

Meyerhold on theatre. Translated and edited with a critical commentary by Edward Braun. (London, 1969) X.900/4423

One of the “myths” of the 1917 October Revolution and Bolshevik takeover of power is that it was the turning point for women’s equality in Russia. In fact, women gained some rights, such as the right to vote and to run for public office, following the February 1917 Revolution. The February Revolution actually began on International Women’s Day, when masses of female workers and soldiers’ wives took to the streets in Petrograd.

The campaign for women’s suffrage and equality in Russia, and indeed across much of the world, was gathering momentum by the early 20th century. In Russia this fight is documented in the various women’s journals that emerged during this period, particularly after the 1905 Revolution, from the “bourgeois” to the working class.

Continuing with the European Studies blog’s women theme this week in honour of last Sunday’s International Women’s Day, this post highlights a few of the journals we hold here at the British Library and the various women’s groups and parties they were affiliated with.

 Photo of Russian women demonstrating in February 1917  (From Wikimedia Commons )

Inspired by her work with the poor, children and prostitutes, in 1904 Dr Mariia Pokrovskaia  founded a journal, Zhenskii vestnik (The Women’s Messenger), to highlight the problem of women’s inequality. Zhenskii vestnik was the first Russian journal dedicated exclusively to the woman question and it ran until 1917. True to her medical background, the journal even contained a health section. Although Zhenskii vestnik was still deemed bourgeois by Bolshevik activists such as Alexandra Kollontai, Pokrovskaia sought to bridge the gap between educated and working class women.

One of Zhenskii vestnik’s main rivals was the journal Soiuz zhenshchin (Union of Women). Established by the Russian Union for Women’s Equality, the largest and arguably most militant feminist group operating in 1905, Soiuz Zhenshchin (PP.3554.exg) ran from 1907 until 1909 and was under the editorship of feminist journalist Mariia Chekhova. The journal included a wide range of articles, stories and information, from news of women’s movements abroad to a translation of Oscar Wilde’s short story The Nightingale and the Rose. Among its contributors was the journalist and politician Ariadna Tyrkova-Williams, introduced in my last blog post as the school friend of Lenin’s wife Nadezhda Krupskaia.

After Soiuz Zhenshchin collapsed in 1909, Zhenskii vestnik once again became the only “feminist” journal. A number of journals with a feminist slant did however emerge in the years leading up to the 1917 revolutions, the most successful of these being Zhenskoe delo (The Women’s Cause). These journals tended to include the odd article addressing women’s issues but took the form of more traditional women’s magazines.

Title page of January 1923 issue of Rabotnitsa. (From Wikimedia Commons) BL copies at Mic.F.866 and Mic.A.20186

As briefly mentioned above, Bolshevik revolutionaries were critical of what they saw as the “bourgeois” women’s groups which were mainly run by women from privileged backgrounds. On Women’s Day 1914, Lenin and a group of Bolshevik women published the first Russian socialist women’s journal, Rabotnitsa (The Woman Worker). However as historian Rochelle Goldberg Ruthchild points out, although it was addressed to women the journal “took pains to deny any links to feminism” (An Improper Profession; p. 183).  Rabotnitsa was revived in 1917 and became one of the main Bolshevik publications.

Katie McElvanney, CDA PhD student

References and Further Reading

Zhenskii vestnik. (St Petersburg, 1904-1917) 0057.710000  

Soiuz zhenshchin. (St Petersburg, 1907-1909) PP.3554.exg

Zhenskoe delo. (St Petersburg, 1910-1917) 0057.720000

Rabotnitsa (St Petersburg, 1914; Petrograd and Moscow, 1917-). Mic.F.866 and Mic.A.20186

Barbara T. Norton and Jehanne M. Gheith (eds.), An Improper Profession: Women, Gender, and Journalism in Late Imperial Russia (Durham, NC; 2001). YA.2002.a.8786

Richard Stites, The Women’s Liberation Movement in Russia: Feminism, Nihilism, and Bolshevism, 1860-1930 (Princeton, NJ; 1991). 94/07838

Rochelle Goldberg Ruthchild, Equality and Revolution: women’s rights in the Russian Empire, 1905-1917 (Pittsburg, PA; 2010). YC.2010.a.11154 and m10/.21688

CDA PhD student

 

Attempts to regulate the sex trade are almost as old as the trade itself. Most cultures and societies, while openly deploring prostitution, have nonetheless tolerated it and, increasingly, tried to bring it under some form of governmental control. A recent British Library acquisition sheds light on one such attempt in 19th-century Hamburg: 

Regulativ für die Bordell-Wirthe und eingezeichneten Mädchen in der Vorstadt St. Pauli ([Hamburg], 1853) RB.23.a.36389.

Like many port cities, Hamburg had a long history of prostitution and the city authorities had been issuing regulations for brothels and their employees since at least the 15th century. By the mid-19th century a set of regulations dating from 1834 were in force, but in 1847 some additional rules were issued by Dr A. Meier, ‘Patron’ of the suburb of St Pauli, then as now home to Hamburg’s main red light district.  Our recently-acquired copy of these rules was printed in 1853, and each ‘girl’ (as they are always referred to here) in a brothel was to be given a copy. A label on the front wrapper shows that ours belonged to one Johanna Maria Friederica Wendland who worked “bei Brackert” (presumably the name of the brothel-keeper).

 

The wrapper of our copy of the Regulativ with the names of Johanna Wendland and  “Brackert”

The 22 short paragraphs set out various rights and responsibilities. Brothel-keepers must provide a heated communal room in the winter (§13) and “simple, good food” (§15; specifically there must be no stinting on the morning coffee!). The women must be allowed free time to go out at least once a week (§17) although they must not wear “conspicuous” clothing that draws attention to their profession on these outings. Importantly, paragraph 18 states that “No girl may be forced to sleep with a man who is not acceptable to her.”

Many of the regulations are concerned with finances. Brothel-keepers may not advance more than 150 marks in credit to the women (§1). They can take up to half of a woman’s earnings (§2), but if she earns more than 50 marks in a week she need only hand over 25 (§3). Brothel-keepers cannot lay claim to gifts given to the women by clients (§9), and must not accept or demand gifts from the women (§10). The women must pay a monthly fee for such luxuries as a sofa (§8) or individual heating (§14) in their own rooms. A central kitty is to be maintained to help with extra expenses, such as clothing and travel costs for women who leave the brothel to return home, marry or take up another job (§19-20). 

The seven pages of regulations are followed by 16 blank account-book pages. Paragraph 5 requires each woman’s copy to be filled in regularly by the brothel-keeper with a note of each month’s expenses. Paragraph 6 adds that a doctor must also sign each month’s page to certify that the woman is in good health.

An anonymous study of prostitution in Hamburg, first published in 1858 and reissued in a much enlarged edition in 1860, sheds light on some of the reasons behind these regulations. The author states that brothel-keepers regularly advance huge amounts of credit for clothing and other expenses (including gifts for themselves) to the women in their establishments, thus keeping the women effectively trapped in debt and unable to leave the brothel. Over a decade after the first publication of Dr Maier’s regulations, this commentator is clearly cynical about their effectiveness. He also doubts that many doctors have time for the regular health checks required.

However, a doctor did authorize our copy. Either Johanna Wendland herself or Brackert filled in two pages of accounts for September and October 1855, noting purchases including collars, a pair of boots and a velvet dress. The doctor signed it with the brief note “gesehen” on 6 October and 2 November.

The first page of Johanna Wendland's accounts and medical certification for September/October 1855

After this the entries cease and we can only speculate what happened. Did Johanna leave the brothel, and if so was it for another brothel, for the streets, or for a different employment or even marriage? Did she fall victim to disease, or to a violent client? Or did she or Brackert simply fall out of the habit of keeping the records while the authorities failed to enforce their well-meaning regulations, proving the cynic right? Whatever the case, Johanna’s brief accounts leave a slight but intriguing trace of a real woman working in the 19th-century sex trade.

References/further reading:

Die Hamburger Prostitution, oder die Gehemnisse des Dammthorwalles und der Schwiegerstrasse (Altona, 1858) 08282.f.20. (Zweite, vielfach ergänzte und durch Zusätze vermehrte Auflage (Altona, 1860) 12553.c.39.)

Jürgen Kahmann / Hubert Lanzerath, Weibliche Prostitution in Hamburg (Hamburg, 1981) X.529/61878

Ariane Barth, Die Reeperbahn: der Kampf um Hamburgs sündige Meile (Hamburg, 1999) YA.2001.a.41623

Susan Reed, Lead Curator Germanic Studies

We all have in our hearts some lines of poetry which struck us like lightning when read for the first time. For me such lines were the beginning of Taras Shevchenko’s poem Maryna: “Nenache tsviashok v sertse vbytyi / otsiu Marynu ia noshu” (“Like a nail driven in the heart, / I carry this Maryna with me” [translated by Peter Fedynsky])

As a teenage girl in Ukraine I could not stop thinking about Maryna and her tragic fate. Shevchenko wrote this poem in 1848 –  his second year of exile as a private soldier near the Aral Sea.  Memories and stories from his childhood and two recent visits to Ukraine (before his arrest, imprisonment, trial and condemnation to 10 years of soldiering) flooded his imagination.

  Shevchenko. Self-portrait as a soldier, 1847 (From Wikimedia Commons)

The tragic story of Maryna, a newly-married young woman, who was spotted by a lusty landowner during her wedding and consequently made one of his many mistresses, would not leave him day or night and so it needed to be told, as well as stories of other women, usually serfs, by whose fate he was touched and with whom he empathised so much. In fact it is very hard to find in the whole of world literature another poet who would express his empathy for women so warmly and in such a passionate way as Shevchenko. As we have just celebrated International Women’s Day  and now are commemorating Shevchenko Days (9-10 March) it is appropriate to say something more about the women in his poetry.

As the literary critic Myroslav Shkandrij noted in his blog “Shevchenko’s Relevance Today” :  

[…] perhaps no other great poet has been so woman-centred. The fate of his female characters dominates his poems and stories. The deceived and abandoned girl, the enslaved, wronged or suffering woman are recurrent images, and their stories provide the basic narrative of many works. Yes, this feature of his poetry can be interpreted as a trope – a metaphor for the situation of the Ukrainian people -- but it is also a metaphor for the situation of all the vulnerable, voiceless, and subaltern.

The best known and most translated poem by Shevchenko is Kateryna (the British Library holds translations into many languages, including one into Esperanto: Katerino, Paris, 1912; RB.23.b.6700). Shevchenko dedicated it to Vasily Zhukovsky, the famous Russian poet who contributed so much towards Shevchenko’s own emancipation from serfdom in 1838. The heroine of the poem, Kateryna, is a village girl who fell in love/was seduced by a Russian officer when soldiers of the Russian imperial army stayed in her Ukrainian village. The officer leaves. Kateryna gives a birth to a boy and is ostracised in the village. Her strict conservative parents throw her and the baby out of their house. Kateryna tries to find the officer and commits suicide after his rejection.  Generations of Ukrainian women, many of whom could not read and write themselves, shed tears about the fate of Kateryna and knew many lines from this poem by heart. Shevchenko, being a very gifted painter,  also painted his heroine.

Kateryna. Oil painting by Taras Shevchenko 1842 (From Wikimedia Commons)

Shevchenko was orphaned very early: his mother died when he was nine years old and his father when he was twelve. As an orphan and a serf in the estate of the rich land-owner Pavel Engelhardt  he was separated from the rest of his family at the age of thirteen and  taken to St Petersburg.  Yet the fate of women serfs was often even harder. In St Petersburg Shevchenko composed his first ballads based on the rich Ukrainian folklore: Prychynna (‘Bewitched’, 1838), Dumka (‘A Thought’, beginning  “What good are my dark brows to me…”, 1838), Topolia (‘The Poplar’, 1839) and others. In Topolia a young girl in love, whose "dearly cherished"  Cossack  "went away and perished", is transformed into a poplar by the depth of her sorrow. Her story is well-known, so "the chumak on his journey sees it,/ Bows his head before it; /The shepherd with his reed-pipe sits / On the gravemound on the morning, / Sees it and his heart is aching..." (translated by Vera Rich). 

After writing a lot about Zaporozhians and the great Cossack past of Ukraine Shevchenko returned to the fate of women during his two journeys to Ukraine (1843 and 1845-1847), when he, already a free man himself, observed the fate of servant women in his  poems Naimychka (The Hireling, 1845), Malen'kii Mar’iani (To little Maryanne,  (1845) and others.

He continued to write and paint in exile. Here is one of a few works by Shevchenko depicting Kazakh girls:

                      Shevchenko. Katya, a Kazakh Girl. Fort Novopetrovsk, 1856-1857. Sepia on paper (© The National Museum of Taras Shevchenko)

One of the best- loved  of Shevchenko’s poems in Ukraine is his Son (The Dream), written after he returned from exile.  It describes the dream of a serf-woman in summer: 

She reaped the wheat in serfdom’s labour;
Worn–out;   for the rest she did not come
To the sheaf - she made her way there
To feed Ivan, her little son….

She falls asleep, and in her dream she can see:

She saw, in dreams, her son Ivan
Grown up, of handsome, manly carriage,
Wealthy, betrothed, and now his marriage
To a free bride – he a free man,
No more the lord’s, they lived in freedom…
                                               (Translated by Vera Rich)

This poem was dedicated to the  bright young Ukrainian writer Marko Vovchok, whose debut (the publication of  Narodni opovidannia  [ ‘Folk stories’]  in 1858; we hold the second edition from 1861; 12590.g.2) Shevchenko greeted with great enthusiasm.

  Portrait of Marko Vovchok  (stamp of Ukraine) From Wikimedia Commons

The poem was written in 1858. The Emancipation reform  in the Russian empire happened a few years later.  Shevchenko did not live to see it.  On 17 February 1859 he dedicated another poem “To Marko Vovchok” in which he called her “My light, / You are my holy star in truth / You are for me the strength of youth.” Marko Vovchok lived a long life and became one of the classic writers of Ukrainian literature, many of whom are women. They all acknowledge Shevchenko’s poetical skills and his profound humanity which makes him a poet so much loved by every new generation in Ukraine.   

Olga Kerziouk, Curator Ukrainian studies

References

The Complete Kobzar. The Poetry of Taras Shevchenko, translated from the Ukrainian by Peter Fedynsky.  (London, 2013). YK.2014.a.17425

Shevchenko, Taras. Kobzar. [Translated by Vera Rich] (Kyiv, 2013). YF.2014.b.264

Shevchenko, Taras. Songs out of Darkness. Selected poems translated from the Ukrainian by Vera Rich. (London, 1961). 11303.bb.3 and W60/0682


 

Thanks to the championing of his work by Charles Baudelaire and  later by Stéphane Mallarmé who, respectively, translated his prose works and poems, the reputation of Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) in France has always been high, and his influence on the Symbolist generation of writers, artists and composers enormous. Though Baudelaire largely avoided translating Poe’s poetry, he did translate, in 1853, ‘The Raven’ which thus has the distinction of having been translated by two of the greatest poets of the 19th century. Mallarmé’s translation, Le Corbeau, was, moreover, published in a de luxe edition in 1875 with illustrations by Édouard Manet, a volume which is generally considered to be one of the first and greatest examples of the modern French livre d’artiste. 

Mallarmé first met Manet in 1873 and the two men soon became close friends. Manet’s portrait of Mallarmé in his study, now in the Musée d’Orsay, was painted in 1876, the year L'Après-midi d'un faune, their second book collaboration, appeared.

The publisher of  Le Corbeau was Richard Lesclide (1825-1892) who had also published another book illustrated by Manet – Charles Cros’s Le Fleuve (1874). The commercial failure of the two books meant the abandonment of another Poe project, a similarly translated and illustrated publication of ‘The City in the Sea’.

Le Corbeau, a bilingual, illustrated, large folio edition, was published in a limited edition of 240 copies (the British Library copy (shelfmark C.70.i.1) is no. 53) signed by Manet and Mallarmé. Manet’s illustrations were transfer lithographs (i.e. brushed with transfer ink on sheets of paper then transferred to zinc plates for printing); they were printed on laid paper (as in our copy) or on China paper. There were four full-page illustrations inserted between the double pages of Poe’s English text and, on opposite pages, Mallarmé’s translation, and also a head of a raven in profile (below left),  also used for the poster advertising the publication, and a flying  raven for the ex-libris (below right).

When the book was published Mallarmé was still an obscure poet but Manet was already an established, albeit controversial, artist. Accordingly, the title page gives greater prominence to Manet (whose name is in larger characters and printed in red, like Poe’s) than Mallarmé. Perhaps as a friendly gesture Manet, gave the narrator/poet Mallarmé’s features.  

Title-page of Edgar Allan Poe  Le Corbeau = The Raven

In Poe’s narrative poem, first published 30 years earlier, the poet, tormented by the death of his beloved Lenore, is visited by a raven, a bird of ill omen, but also the poet’s alter ego. It perches on a bust of Pallas Athene, the goddess of wisdom, and its repeated answer to the poet’s questions about his dead love is a relentless ‘Nevermore’ reminding him of his irrevocable loss. Manet’s four full-page illustrations show  the poet in his study (a claustrophobic, Nabi-like interior) [plate 1], opening the window shutters to let in the raven (revealing, in the process, a Parisian cityscape) [plate 2], staring up from his ‘cushioned seat’ to the raven [plate 3]. In the last illustration [plate 4] the poet has disappeared or, perhaps, been assimilated into the shadow of  the raven which can be seen on the floor, from which his soul ‘shall be lifted-nevermore’.

Plate 1 of Le Corbeau, “Once upon a Midnight Dreary (Sous la lampe)” 

Plate 2 of Le Corbeau, “Open here I flung the shutter (A la fenêtre)”.

Plate 3 of Le Corbeau, “Perched upon a bust of Pallas (Sur le buste)”.

 
 Plate 4 of Le Corbeau, “That shadow that lies floating on the floor (La chaise)”

The modernity and originality of Manet’s interpretation is best appreciated when compared to the steel engravings after Gustave Doré, his exact contemporary, in his last work, published in 1883. Doré’s engravings hark back to the work of earlier illustrators of the Romantic generation as well as to his own earlier works, emphasizing the supernatural atmosphere of the poem, showing, for example, the ‘Seraphim whose foot-falls tinkled on the tufted floor’, which Manet omits, or the body of the poet in the shadow of the raven.

 
Gustave Doré “Till I scarcely more than muttered ‘Other friends have flown before’”

Gustave Doré “ And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor shall be lifted – nevermore” - the poet’s body in the raven’s shadow

Doré’s illustrations, though published eight years after Manet’s, are closer to those of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s four unpublished drawings (which were produced nearly 40 years earlier and are among his earliest works). Rossetti also shows the poet surrounded by angels and spirits, and his drawings range in style from a Faust-like unbridled Gothic composition to more ethereal depictions of angels that look forward to Pre-Raphaelitism.   

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, “The Raven: Angel  Footfalls” (above, ca. 1846; below, ca. 1848) 

In 1881 Rossetti wrote to Jane Morris that he had been given a copy of ‘…a huge folio of lithographed sketches from the Raven, by a French idiot called Manet, who certainly must be the greatest and most conceited ass who ever lived. A copy should be bought for every hypochondriacal ward in lunatic asylums. To view it without a guffaw is impossible’. Was this extreme reaction due to Rossetti’s general dislike of the ‘new French School’ (Impressionism) or to professional jealousy?

Chris Michaelides, Curator  Italian and Modern Greek

 References:

Paris à l'Eau-Forte. Redacteur en chef: R. Lesclide. Directeur des Eaux-Fortes: F. Regamey. vol. 1-3. (Paris, 1873-74). P.P.1932.g.

Edgar Allan Poe, Le Corbeau. The Raven. Poëme ... Traduction française de S. Mallarmé avec illustrations par E. Manet  Paris, 1875. (C.70.i.1.)

Edgar Allan Poe, The Raven. Illustrated by G. Doré, with a comment upon the poem by E. C. Stedman. (London, 1883) 1870.b.5.

Patrick F.Quinn, The French face of Edgar Poe. (Carbondale, 1957). 11874.ppp.15.

Baudelaire and Poe: an exhibition in conjunction with the inauguration of The Center for Baudelaire Studies, Furman Hall, Vanderbilt University, April Nineth to Thirtieth, 1969.  ([Nashville], 1969). W17/7609.

Alastair I. Grieve, “Rossetti’s illustrations to Poe”, Apollo Magazine 97 (1973), p.142 -45. P.P.1931.uf.

Frances Carey and Antony Griffiths, From Manet to Toulouse-Lautrec: French lithographs, 1860-1900: catalogue of an exhibition at the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum. (London, 1978). X.421/10785.

Manet, 1832-1883 [catalogue of the exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York]. (New York, 1983).  YA.1995.b.6128

Juliet Wilson-Bareau, Breon Mitchell, “Tales of a Raven. The Origins and Fate of Le Corbeau  by Mallarmé and Manet”, Print Quarterly, VI, no 3, Sept. 1989, p.258-307. P.423/617

Le Corbeau / Edgar Poe ; traduction de Stéphane Mallarmé ; illustré par Edouard Manet ; dossier réalisé par Michaël Pakenham. (Paris,1994) YF.2013.a.5982

James H. Rubin, Manet’s silence and the poetics of bouquets. (London, 1994). YC.1994.b.5598.

Mallarmé, 1842-1898: un destin d’écriture [Published on the occasion of the centenary exhibition "Stéphane Mallarmé, 1842-1898" at the Musée d'Orsay].  (Paris, 1998) LB.31. b.17750.

Lois Davis Vines (ed.)  Poe abroad: influence, reputation, affinities. (Iowa City, 1999). 99/40530.

The 1926 book Once I Had a Home purports to be the memoir of émigrée Russian aristocrat ‘Nadejda’, including diary extracts and remembrances. ‘Nadejda’ recounts her childhood in Tsarist Russia, and her early adulthood through the First World War, the February Revolution, the October Revolution, the Russian Civil War and her eventual escape aboard HMS Marlborough in 1920, alongside the dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna. Apparently, in order to protect the identities of those suffering persecution under the continued Bolshevik rule, most names have been changed. The narrative is explicitly addressed  ‘to the men and women of the British Empire’, a warning to take the dangers of socialist agitation seriously from one who had suffered it first-hand.

Or had she? The British Library catalogue lists Once I Had a Home under the authorship not of ‘Nadejda’, but of Phyllis M. Gotch, the daughter of Pre-Raphaelite artist Thomas Cooper Gotch. She was the model for some of his most successful paintings, most importantly The Child Enthroned, and had a number of books published. These ranged from illustrated ‘Boo-Bird’ children’s books in the 1900s under her own name (British Library 012803.a.49) to the novel Golden Hair in 1938, now in the guise of ‘Felise, Marquise de Verdieres’ (NN.28863), a title conferred from an ex-husband. In this work, 12 years later, Once I Had a Home is listed as the only other book ‘by the same Author’.

The Child Enthroned, Thomas Cooper Gotch’s portrait of his daughter (image from Wikimedia Commons)

Once I Had a Home was published in the wake of a number of successful memoirs of the revolution by White Russian émigrés, such as The Real Tsaritsa, Lili Dehn’s defense of the Empress, and Anna Vyrubova’s Memories of the Russian Court. Material about Russia had high market value in the years after the revolution, and as Ben Yagoda writes of the memoir form, ‘in any society where a particular currency has high value and is fairly easily fashioned, counterfeiters will quickly and inevitably emerge’ (p. 243). There is little evidence whether the audience would have related to the bookas fact or fiction, despite its advertisements clearly labelling it as fact. The book itself is consistent in its claim that ‘a Russian voice is speaking to you’, and nothing in its publishing information betrays its secret.

Title-page of Once I had a Home by ‘Nadejda’

So why would she write about the Russian revolution? As Phyllis Gotch related in a letter to a family member in 1960:

My Mother told me that perhaps their most outstanding visit was to Russia. They had many letters of introduction and were received by the Tsar’s Court. There were two court balls while they were there. My Mother went to them with the Embassy party, but her father could not make the effort. A special entertainment of gypsy songs and dances was given to both of them however, and the Tsar presented my Mother with a set of beautiful Russian dessert mats, all hand made and worked in gold, silver and fine silk. I have them carefully packed away at home. My Mother met many distinguished Russian authors and musicians while they were in St. Petersburg and she was actually given a manuscript copy of Tchaikovsky’s ‘Chanson Triste’. (Christopher Gotch, 2011. p. 196)

Possibly, her inspiration for ‘Nadejda’ came from her mother’s stories about the Tsarist court and its ‘mad, gipsy music’ (p.70). Equally, this could be an invented story used to bolster Gotch’s claims to aristocratic status – after her divorce she claimed to have inherited the Verdieres title. I have so far been unable to find any references to this trip elsewhere.

Judging from the book’s warnings against revolution, there may be another reason why it was written. Published in 1926, the first advertisement for Once I Had a Home in The Times came on the 22nd of October, some five months after the end of the General Strike in Britain and a month before many of the miners ceased their action. In its propaganda around the General Strike the government consistently played on fears of a British revolution, and the middle and upper classes responded to the call in force, volunteering in various ways to combat the strike. Writing such an anti-socialist book as Once I Had a Home may have been one of these ways.

Michael Carey, CDA PhD student 

References:

Phyllis M. Gotch, Once I Had a Home: The Diary and Narrative of Nadejda, Lady of Honour to Their Imperial Majesties the late Empress Alexandra Feodorovna and the Empress Maria Feodorovna of Russia. (London, 1926). Copies at 010795.ee.49, W30/1037 and 947.08 *2905*

Ben Yagoda, Memoir: A History. (New York, 2009). m10/.10045

Christopher Gotch, The Gotch Family of Kettering 1755-1964 (2000), updated by Adam Robin Gotch.  ([Kettering, 2011). YK.2012.b.12504

Keith Laybourn, The General Strike Day by Day (Gloucestershire, 1996) YC.1996.b.9218

Rachelle H. Saltzman, ‘Folklore as Politics in Great Britain: Working-Class Critiques of Upper-Class Strike Breakers in the 1926 General Strike’, Anthropological Quarterly 67, 3 (July, 1994) Ac.2692.y/37.

Lili Dehn, The Real Tsaritsa (London, 1922) 010795.c.23

Anna Vyrubova,  Memories of the Russian Court.  (London, 1923) 010795.aaa.30

A minor by-product of the Charlie Hebdo controversy has been the realisation that even in their less controversial cartoons the cartoonists made sure the figures they were lampooning were recognised because they were clearly identified in a caption.

A labelled caricature of a seven-headed Martin Luther, from the title-page of J. Cochlaeus, Sieben Köpffe M. Luthers vom Hochwirdigen Sacrament des Altars (Leipzig, 1529)  3905.f.81.(1.)

Classical and medieval rhetoricians distinguished simile (which makes clear what is being likened to what) and metaphor (which doesn’t). Quintilian says:

In general terms, Metaphor is a shortened form of Simile; the difference is that in Simile something is [overtly] compared with the thing we wish to describe, while in metaphor one thing is substituted for the other.—Institutio Oratoria, 8.6, 8–9.

The same distinction obtained at a higher level between “full allegory” and “mixed” (Quintilian 8.6.44-53): full allegory doesn’t tell you what it means (El espíritu de la colmena or The Prisoner being modern examples which have perplexed me over the years) while mixed prefers labels and personifications (like Pilgrim’s Progress, with Mr Worldly Wiseman and the Slough of Despond).  Calderón wrote two versions of La vida es sueño: a comedia with characters called Segismundo, Clotaldo et al., and an allegorical auto sacramental, where these become Man and Wisdom.

My granny had a hat which my mother used to say made her look like the poster “Keep death off the roads” (I have to point out in filial piety that the resemblance was limited to the hat.) The relationship between image and word here is a subtle one:  we understand easily that the spooky lady is Death with a capital D, but we also need the prompt from the text.

In modern (and early modern) times it’s seen as bad form to use words to explain an image: as Cervantes has it:

“Thou art right, Sancho,” said Don Quixote, “for this painter is like Orbaneja, a painter there was at Ubeda, who when they asked him what he was painting, used to say, ‘Whatever it may turn out’; and if he chanced to paint a cock he would write under it, ‘This is a cock,’ for fear they might think it was a fox.” (Don Quixote, II, lxxi).

A common exchange from my childhood was:

“What are YOU looking at?”
Dunno: the label’s dropped off.”

Doubtless an allusion to Quintilian.

Barry Taylor, Curator Hispanic Studies

References:

Cervantes, Miguel de, The ingenious gentleman: Don Quixote of La Mancha: a translation with introduction and notes by John Ormsby. (London, 1885). 12489.k.4. (Available online at http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Don_Quixote)

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

http://genius.com/William-shakespeare-the-seven-ages-of-man-annotated

Pedro Calderón de la Barca, La vida es sueño: edición crítica de las dos versiones del auto y de la loa, ed. Fernando Plata Parga (Pamplona, 2012) YF.2014.a.11638

 

Michel Eyquem de Montaigne was born on 28th February 1533, and by the time of his death 59 years later had enriched French literature with a new genre – the essay. Brought up by his father to speak Latin as his first language, he rapidly lost his mastery of it when at the age of six he was despatched to the Collège de Guyenne  in Bordeaux so that, by the time that he left, he claimed that he knew less than when he arrived. However, throughout his life he retained a love and reverence for classical authors including Cicero, Plutarch and Seneca, which shaped not only his philosophy but his chosen form of literary expression, and ultimately made him one of the most beloved and accessible authors to readers outside his native land.

The title-page of the first edition of Montaigne’s Essais (Paris, 1580) British Library G.2344.

Witty and aphoristic, the collection of essays, first published in 1580, comprises three books divided into one hundred and seven chapters on topics ranging from coaches, cruelty and cannibalism to thumbs and smells. Their discursive nature reveals many details about their author and his milieu, drawn from his experiences as a Gascon landowner and official who rose to become mayor of Bordeaux, his travels through Italy, Germany and Switzerland, the turbulent years of the Wars of Religion, and his family life, in which we catch glimpses of his masterful mother, his wife Françoise, and his only surviving child Léonor – a household of women from which, at times, he would retreat to the peace and solitude of his tower, fitted with curving shelves to accommodate his library, to enjoy the company of his cat – another female – who has achieved immortality through his observations of her at play.

Marginal picture of a man with a cat, drawn by Pieter van Veen in his copy of Montaigne’s Essais (Paris, 1602) British Library C.28.g.7.

The Essais rapidly achieved wide popularity, and not only in France. They ran into five editions in eight years, and in 1603 an English translation appeared, the work of John Florio. Florio, born in 1533 as the son of an Italian father and an English mother, had left England as a small child when the accession of Mary Tudor to the throne had sent his family into exile, and as they wandered around Europe he acquired a knowledge of languages which equipped him to earn his living on returning to England as a teacher of French and Italian and the author of an English-Italian dictionary (London, 1578; 627.d.36).

It was at the behest of his patroness, the Countess of Bedford, that he set about translating the Essais, assisted by a multitude of collaborators who, through the Countess’s offices, tracked down quotations and publicized his work, earning fulsome dedications by doing so. His lively and spirited version contains colourful turns of phrase which sometimes expand the original, as when, in Book 1, chapter xviii, ‘des Loups-garous, des Lutins et des chimeres’ emerge as  ‘Larves, Hobgoblins, Robbin-good-fellowes, and other such Bug-bears and Chimeraes’ – a catalogue which, as Sarah Bakewell points out in her How to Live: a life of Montaigne in one question and twenty attempts at an answer  (Bath, 2011; LT.2011.x.3266) is  ‘a piece of pure Midsummer Night’s Dream’.

Shakespeare did in fact know Florio, and Bakewell speculates that he may have been one of the first readers of the Essaies, possibly even in manuscript form. Scholars have taken pains to detect echoes of Montaigne in Hamlet, which was written before the published translation appeared, and frequently cite a passage from his last play, The Tempest, which, as Gonzalo evokes a vision of civilization in a perfect state of nature, is strikingly close to Montaigne’s account of the Tupinambá, an indigenous people from South America whom he encountered when a group of them visited Rouen.

Letters should not be known; riches, poverty,
And use of service, none; contract, succession,
Bourn, bound of land, tilth, vineyard, none;
No use of metal, corn or wine, or oil;
No occupation, all men idle, all.

Montaigne remarks of the Tupinambá that they have ‘no kind of traffike, no knowledge of Letters, no intelligence of numbers, no name of magistrate, nor of politike superioritie; no use of service, of riches or of povertie; no contracts, no successions, no partitions, no occupation but idle; no respect of kindred, but common, no apparel but natural, no manuring of lands, no use of wine, corn or mettle’.

Such passages were eagerly seized upon in the controversy in the 18th and 19th centuries about the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays, and in 1901 Francis P. Gervais published his Shakespeare not Bacon: some arguments from Shakespeare’s copy of Florio’s Montaigne in the British Museum (London, 1901; 11765.i.18.). However, Edward Maunde Thompson countered with Two pretended autographs of Shakespeare (London, 1917; 11763.i.37), which argued that not only the signature ‘William Shakespere’ in an edition of the Essaies in the British Museum Library (but also that in a volume of Ovid in the Bodleian Library) was false, subjecting both to rigorous calligraphic analysis.

Alleged signature of William Shakespeare on the flyleaf of The Essayes, or Morall, Politike, and Millitarie Discourses of Lo: Michaell de Montaigne ... Now done into English by ... John Florio. (London, 1603) C.21.e.17

Whatever the truth of the matter may be, we can make an educated guess at Montaigne’s response. An even-handed and balanced man who needed all his reserves of philosophy and Stoicism to confront the horrors of a century which saw the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre and decades of conflict springing from religious extremism, he would no doubt have advocated a similar perspective on the resurgence of similar dangers in the 21st. And to those who argued about the authenticity or otherwise of these notorious signatures, he would certainly have recommended the phrase from the Greek philosopher Pyrrho which became his motto, engraved on his medallion:  ‘Epekhō – I suspend judgement’.

Susan Halstead Curator Czech & Slovak

Nadezhda Krupskaia, the Russian Bolshevik activist and politician, is perhaps best known as the wife of Vladimir Lenin from 1898 until his death in 1924. In 1902, the young couple moved to London to publish Iskra (‘The Spark’), the newspaper of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP).

Krupskaia wrote about their time in London in her memoirs Vospominania o Lenine (‘Reminiscences of Lenin’). As this week sees the anniversary of not only Krupskaia’s birth but also her death, it seems a perfect opportunity to re-visit her time in London and, in particular, her connections to the British Library. 

Nadezhda Krupskaia, photograph dated before 1910. (Image from Wikimedia Commons)

Arriving in London in April 1902, Krupskaia and Lenin were immediately overwhelmed by the city, or, in her own words, “citadel of capitalism”. She later described their first impressions and struggles as they battled with the “filthy” weather, incomprehensible language and “indigestible” British food:

When we arrived in London we found we could not understand a thing, nor could anybody understand us. It got us into comical situations at first.

While Krupskaia unfortunately doesn’t expand on the “situations” she and Lenin found themselves in, she does give a fascinating and detailed account of the year they spent in London between 1902 and 1903. In between attending meetings and revolutionary activities, Lenin and Krupskaia found time to explore London, with Primrose Hill being their spot of choice. The pair were also regular visitors to the British Museum, where, Krupskaia notes, Lenin spent half his time in the library.

Lenin’s application (under the pseudonym Jacob Richter) for a reader’s ticket for the British Museum Library. British Library MS Add 54579

While there is no record of Krupskaia holding a reader’s ticket during her time in London, the British Library does hold a rare pamphlet autographed by Krupskaia in 1923. Written for the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic publication Put’ prosveshchenia (‘The Path of Education’, P.P.1213.ce.), the pamphlet discusses the Faculty of Social Education at the Kharkiv Institute of Continuing Education.  Although the exact details are unknown, Krupskaia appears to recommend the pamphlet to a fellow comrade, most likely in her capacity as head of the government’s Adult Education Division.

Offprint from Put’ prosveshchenia (Kharkiv, 1922) with Krupskaia’s autograph inscription. RB.23.a.36382.

Another thread linking Krupskaia to the British Library is her early friendship with Ariadna Tyrkova-Williams, a Russian politician and journalist who was active in the anti-Bolshevik campaign during the Civil War. The British Library holds a unique collection of letters and papers of Tyrkova-Williams and her husband Harold Williams relating to the activities of the Russian Liberation Committee in London.

Tyrkova-Williams and Krupskaia studied together at the gymnasiia in St Petersburg as girls and remained friends throughout their teenage years. Tyrkova-Williams describes her friendship with Krupskaia, as well as Krupskaia’s early life, in her memoirs and letters, noting that it was Krupskaia who first introduced her to Marx’s work at the age of seventeen. The two women went on to choose politically opposing paths, with Tyrkova-Williams joining the Constitutional Democratic Party (Kadets), a liberal Russian political party, and Krupskaia becoming a Bolshevik revolutionary.

In a letter dated May 1931, Tyrkova-Williams refers to her friendship with Krupskaia. Responding to a flattering description of Krupskaia’s appearance, Tyrkova-Williams somewhat unkindly writes that she “did not have a single beautiful feature”, instead resembling a “piglet”. Krupskaia is believed to have suffered from Graves’ disease, which caused her eyes to bulge. Despite her somewhat cruel response to Krupskaia’s looks, Tyrkova-Williams declares in her letter that she loved her and, to a certain extent, still does.

Katie McElvanney, CDA PhD student

References:

Krupskaya, Nadezhda, Vospominania o Lenine, Parts 1 and 2, (Moscow, 1932). 10797.ee.110.

Krupskaya, Nadezhda, Reminiscences of Lenin. Translated by Bernard Isaacs. (Moscow, 1959). 010600.c.43.

Tyrkova-Williams, Ariadna, Nasledie Ariadny Vladimirovny Tyrkovoi: dnevniki, pisʹma, ed. N. I. Kanishcheva, (Moscow, 2012). YF.2014.a.894.

Tyrkova-Williams, Ariadna, To chego bol’she ne budet: vospominaniia izvestnoi pisatel’nitsy i obshchestvennoi deiatel’nitsy A.V. Tyrkovoi-Vil’iams, 1869-1962 (Moscow, 1998). YF.2006.a.5200.