The recently acquired journal Il Pellegrino: giornale istruttivo, morale e piacevole ad uso della Scuola Italiana Gratuita di Greville Street, Hatton Garden, represents a remarkable and unique addition to the British Library’s Italian collections. Launched on 4 June 1842 with a clear pedagogical intent, the journal was an initiative of the Italian exile Giuseppe Mazzini. It became the official publication of the Free Italian School set up by Mazzini in the previous year in the heart of London’s Little Italy.

                        The first issue of Il Pellegrino, London, 4 June 1842. British Library RB.23.b.7515.

Mazzini first arrived in London on 12 January 1837. To the Italian patriot, England offered the opportunity to leave behind a life spent in hiding and on the run, whilst still remaining actively involved in revolutionary and conspiratorial activities. Although he died in Pisa, Mazzini spent most of his adult life in London, moving from one cheap boarding house to another. In England he acquired several eminent admirers who appreciated his moral principles and unfaltering dedication to the cause of Italian unity. Dickens, George Meredith and Swinburne openly declared their esteem. Mazzini became a personal acquaintance of the Carlyles and was welcomed as a honoured guest by John Stuart Mill.

               Giuseppe Mazzini, portrait from vol. XVI of Scritti editi ed inediti di Giuseppe Mazzini (Imola, 1913). 012226.d.1.

Mazzini first mentioned his idea of setting up a school for the many illiterate Italian immigrants in London in a letter to his mother, dated 3 September 1841. The school would be free and open to “workers, young organ-grinders, those selling plaster figurines, etc.” The daily classes would be held in the evening to encourage attendance. Subjects taught included Italian grammar, history, geography, arithmetic, geometry, mechanics and, at the students’ request, English, with general lectures on moral principles or Italian history every Sunday. Students would be provided with all necessary materials, including paper and ink.

Mazzini at first remained prudently in the shadows to avoid any possible association between the School and the revolutionary political organisation of which he was the leader. The teachers were unpaid volunteers. Among them were such prominent figures as Antonio Gallega, Carlo Pepoli, Gabriele Rossetti, and Joseph and George Toynbee. The famous American writer and journalist Margaret Fuller addressed the students on more than one occasion. Mazzini himself did a share of teaching, primarily history and geography, which he considered vital in cementing and reinforcing the students’ feeling of being Italian.

 Mazzini teaching at the Free Italian School, image from Jessie White Mario, Della vita di Giuseppe Mazzini. (Milan, 1886) 10630.i.5.

The popularity and success of the school surpassed all expectations. 51 students enrolled on the first evening, rising to 65 on the second. Mazzini was struck by this enthusiasm; he acknowledged that for “[these] poor souls [who] work or carry street-organs about all day  … it cost a lot to devote two hours to studying”, adding that “if they come of their own will, this shows their typically good Italian character”. The number of students increased to 230 in the following year, including a few female pupils. Following the example of the Free Italian School, similar institutes were established by Italian exiles in Boston, New York and Montevideo.

The School in London, however, had many opponents and detractors too. Antonio Panizzi expressed his disapproval and grave concern. Thomas Carlyle cautioned his wife not to get involved with what he called “a nest of young conspirators”. Many saw the School and the courses it provided as an excuse to teach children the ‘four Rs’: reading,’riting,’rithmetic, and revolution. Even stronger opposition came, as Mazzini had foreseen, from the students’ employers,  the Piedmontese authorities in London and the Catholic Church. In Mazzini’s mind, however, the School never had a political agenda. Its primary purpose was to educate and ameliorate the conditions of Italian immigrants in London.

Edited and published by Luigi Bucalossi at 5 Greville Street, Hatton Garden, Il Pellegrino (‘The Pilgrim’) was printed by H. Court of 14 Brooke Street, in Holborn, and appeared every Saturday. The price was set at ‘three half pennies’, but the journal was distributed free of charge to pupils attending the school. Each issue consisted of four pages, printed in double columns; the pagination was continuous from issue to issue. The journal survived for just over a year, with the last issue, no. 52, published on 17 June 1843.

                                                   Issue 24 of Il Pellegrino (10 November 1842)
 
The content of Il Pellegrino – the title refers both to the journey of learning and to the exiled condition of many Italian émigrés – is inspired by pedagogical motives. Various subjects are covered, including scientific ones, but the emphasis is on Italian history and literature. The paucity of details relating to the journal’s administration makes it difficult to establish how many copies were printed of each issue and how widely they were distributed. It is, however, probable that just enough copies were printed to cover the number of students in the school. This would explain the extreme rarity of the British Library’s copy, so far the only one known to have survived.

Il Pellegrino and the other journals that Mazzini published in London, the Italian School, and the Union of Italian Working Men (which he set up in 1840), were all part of a single moral, educational and philanthropic project. Though not a systematic thinker, Mazzini, was a brilliant and acute interpreter of his times and of the political passions which eventually led to a unified Italy, although as a monarchy rather than the republic he had fought for. He saw education for the lower classes as an inalienable right and a way – perhaps the only way – to achieve emancipation and acquire full consciousness of belonging to a spiritual community, transcending geographical borders – a Nation.

The discovery of this apparently unique run of Il Pellegrino casts additional light on Mazzini’s ideas about schooling and education for the ‘prezioso elemento’ (‘precious element’), as he described the Italian working classes, who were to be the cornerstone of a future nation. Now available for consultation at the British Library, it should prove of singular importance to scholars and historians and to anyone interested in Victorian newspapers and foreign-language or foreign-edited journalism in London.

Andrea Del Cornò, The London Library

Further reading

Andrea Del Cornò, ‘Un ritrovato giornale mazziniano: “Il Pellegrino”’, in Le fusa del gatto: libri, librai e molto altro (Torrita di Siena, 2013)

Franco Della Peruta, Il giornalismo italiano del Risorgimento (Milan, 2011) YF.2011.a.12906

Michele Finelli, Il prezioso elemento: Giuseppe Mazzini e gli emigrati italiani nell’esperienza della Scuola italiana di Londra (Verrucchio, 1999) YA.2000.a.10829

Denis Mack Smith , Mazzini (New Haven, 1994) YC.1994.b.4150

Lucio Sponza, Italian Immigrants in Nineteenth-century Britain: Realities and Images (Leicester, 1988) YC.1988.b.8035

Margaret Campbell Walker Wicks, The Italian Exiles in London, 1816-1848 (Manchester, 1937) Ac.2671/35.


The blue plaque commemorating Mazzini at 183 Gower Street, London

The Sonia Delaunay exhibition which opened this week at Tate Modern shows her prodigious output over some seven decades. Sonia Delaunay (1885-1979) worked in a variety of media – paintings, drawings, prints, fashion and fabric designs, posters, mosaics, bookbindings, and book illustrations. She is best known as the creator, with Blaise Cendrars, of one of the greatest livres d’artiste, La Prose du Transsibérien et de la Petite Jehanne de France, for which she provided pochoir illustrations to Cendrars’ poem.

This famous book, published in 1913, has tended, however, to overshadow similar collaborations with other poets, especially the two books she produced with Tristan Tzara, the founder of Dadaism.

Tzara moved to Paris from Zurich in 1919 and it was apparently one of his manifestos that made Sonia and Robert Delaunay, who had lived in Spain and then Portugal since 1914, aware of the renewed artistic vitality of Paris after the end of the war and determined their return to France. Tzara first met the Delaunays soon after their return to Paris in 1921. Their apartment at 19 Boulevard Malesherbes quickly became a fashionable gathering point for the literary and artistic avant garde, its walls covered with multi-coloured poems and other works of art by Philippe Soupault, Vladimir Mayakovsky, André Breton, Louis Aragon, Jean  Cocteau, and René Crevel. As well as embroidering waistcoats for her friends, Sonia also decorated the interior of Au Sans Pareil, the Dadaist and Surrealist bookshop.

Tzara soon became a close friend of the couple and in 1923 Robert painted his portrait in which he is wearing a scarf designed by Sonia A monocled Tzara also features in one of Robert Delaunay’s best-known paintings, Le Manège aux cochons, painted in 1922. 

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

The collaboration between Sonia Delaunay and Tzara took various forms. It included robes poèmes, dresses with texts from Tzara’s poems woven into their fabric, all made in 1922, and Sonia’s bookbinding for Tzara’s De nos oiseaux in 1923. Sonia had by then become well known for her textile designs, the main focus of her work over the next 15 years, and it was in that year that Tzara asked her to design the costumes for his play Le Cœur à gaz, a three-act absurdist provocation described by its author as “la plus grande escroquerie en trois actes” (“the biggest swindle in three acts”).

The play had already had a single, disastrous performance during a soirée dada in 1921 with a cast that included Louis Aragon, Benjamin Péret, Philippe Soupault, and Tzara himself. It gained lasting notoriety, however, by the circumstances of this 1923 revival, when it was included in Le Cœur à barbe (“The Bearded Heart”), another soirée dada organised by Tzara and Iliadz. The evening marked the culmination of the ongoing conflict between Tzara and Breton and finally split the Dadaists and led to the foundation of Surrealism by Breton and his followers. It also included first performances of new compositions by Georges Auric, Darius Milhaud, Erik Satie, and Igor Stravinsky, as well as films by Charles Sheeler and Hans Richter. The two groups came to blows during the performance of the play. Several people were injured and the actors, encased in Sonia’s heavy cardboard costumes, found themselves unable to move. A photograph showing René Crevel (Oeil) and Jacqueline Chaumont (Bouche) has survived, and their costumes can be compared to Sonia’s original designs.

 
Sonia Delaunay, Costume designs for Le Cœur à barbe, 1923: Left, Bouche; right, Oeil (British Library  C.108 aaa.14.). A copy of the photograph can be seen here.

The text of the play had been first published in Der Sturm on 5 March 1922 but did not appear together with Sonia’s costume designs until 1977, when they were published in association with the exhibition La Rencontre: Sonia Delaunay, Tristan Tzara at the Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris  by the art critic and publisher Jacques Damase, a close friend of Sonia who promoted her work in the last 16 years of her life. The volume includes ten lithographs, seven of which are full-page, colour reproductions of the gouaches of the 1923 costume designs; the others comprise an additional title-page and two decorations in the text. 125 copies were printed, all signed by the artist. An additional set of the full-page lithographs, individually signed by the artist, was issued with each of the first 25 copies.

Additional title page of  Tristan Tzara Le Cœur à barbe (Paris, 1977) C.108.aaa.14

The friendship between Sonia Delaunay and Tzara lasted until Tzara’s death in 1963, although they grew apart in the 1930s, when Tzara joined the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War and Sonia was for several years busy with the mural paintings commission for the 1937 International Exhibition. They were next brought together, with other ‘undesirables’, in Toulouse in 1944, three years after the death of Robert Delaunay. After the war Tzara once again became an habitué of Sonia’s studio, now at Rue Saint-Simon on the Left Bank.

Like Sonia, Tzara had a strong interest in illustrated books and worked with numerous artists – including Matisse, Kandinsky, Léger, Mirò, Arp, Giacometti, Villon, Klee and Ernst – on illustrated editions of his poems. There were two collaborations with Sonia: for Le Fruit permis (1956), her first book since La Prose du Transsibérien, Sonia contributed four pochoir compositions, and for Juste présent (1961), a collection of 11 poems written between 1947 and 1950, she made eight full-page colour etchings  and an additional colour etching for the slipcase, printed in the right sense on the front and upside down on the back cover.

Above: Two of Sonia Delaunay’s etchings for  Juste présent ([Paris], 1961). C.108.aaa.11; Below: etching for slipcase cover of Juste présent

 

140 copies of Juste présent  were printed, all signed by the poet and the artist. The British Library’s copy is no. 124. In both publications Sonia’s colours are strong and pure, with a predominance of vermilion, indigo and black. The compositions, with their interplay between flat colour and black, hatched areas, are typical of her post-1945 output (for example, her various Rythme-couleur paintings).

Jacques Damase, who did so much to promote Sonia Delaunay’s art, did not live to see her final consecration: he was tragically killed in an accident in July 2014, just three months before the opening in Paris of this major exhibition of her work, now at Tate Modern. Perhaps the exhibition should be dedicated to his memory? 

Chris Michaelides, Curator Romance collections

References

Tristan Tzara, Juste présent  [Poèmes]. Eaux-fortes de Sonia Delaunay. ([Paris], 1961). C.108.aaa.11

Tristan Tzara, Le cœur à gaz; costumes de Sonia Delaunay. ([Paris], 1977). C.108 aaa.14

La Rencontre: Sonia Delaunay, Tristan Tzara. Musée d'art moderne de la ville de Paris, avril-juin 1977 / [commissaire: Danielle Molinari].  (Paris, [1977]).  YV.1987.a.344

Annabelle Melzer, Dada and Surrealist Performance. (Baltimore & London, 1994) YC.1994.a.3134 & 98/01171

Sonia & Robert Delaunay [the catalogue of the Delaunay donation to the Bibliothèque nationalede France]. (Paris, 1977). j/X.415/2418. 

Sonia Delaunay, Nous irons jusqu’au soleil.  (Paris, 1977).  X.429/7809

Sherry A. Buckberrough, Susan Krane, Sonia Delaunay: a retrospective. (Buffalo, NY, 1980) f80/8227.

Sonia Delaunay [the catalogue of the exhibition at Tate Modern].  London, 2015.

Chris Michaelides, ‘Robert and Sonia Delaunay’, review of the exhibition at the Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris, The Burlington Magazine,  February 2015.  P.P.1931.pcs.    

 Cécile Godefroy, Sonia Delaunay : sa mode, ses tableaux, ses tissus (Paris, 2014) YF.2015.a.8284.

Günter Grass, who died this week aged 87, is best known for his first novel Die Blechtrommel (The Tin Drum), published in 1959, never out of print since, and memorably filmed by Volker Schlöndorff in 1979. When Grass was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999, the Nobel Foundation described the novel’s narrator and chief protagonist Oskar Matzerath as “an intellectual whose critical approach is childishness, a one-man carnival, dadaism in action.”

Günter Grass in 2006. (Picture from Blaues Sofa on Wikimedia Commons) 

Much of the action of Die Blechtrommel takes place in Grass’s native Danzig, then part of Germany, now Gdansk in Poland. The city remained central to his imagination: two further novels Katz und Maus (Cat and Mouse) and Hundejahre (Dog Years) make up what is known as the ‘Danzig Trilogy’, while his 1992 novel Unkenrufe (The Call of the Toad) revisits the city after the fall of Communism. Visitors to Gdansk today can follow guided tours around sites from his life and work.

Although he was best known as a novelist, Grass was a man of many parts: poet, playwright, artist, political activist and occasional jazz musician. He initially studied sculpture and graphic arts, and his work in these genres continued throughout his life, alongside his writing. A catalogue rasionné of his etchings and lithographs, published in 2007, runs to two hefty volumes and lists nearly 40 exhibitions of his work. His pictures often reflect themes and symbols from his literary works, and certain subjects and images recur over the years (most enduringly fish, especially the flounder that gives its name to his novel Der Butt).

Sculpture by Grass in Göttingen, showing a hand holding a flounder (photo: Susan Reed)

Grass always drew the cover illustrations for his novels, and also produced illustrated collections of  poetry. His poetry is less well-known (and more uneven) than his novels, but his first published work was a collection of poems and pictures, Die Vorzüge der Windhühner (‘The advantages of the weathercocks’) and he continued to write poetry throughout his life, in particular causing controversy in 2012 with the long poem ‘Was gesagt werden muß’ (‘What must be said’) which was highly critical of the Israeli government.

The title of the poem also reflects an earlier controversy over politics in Grass’s work. In 1995 the magazine Der Spiegel published a highly critical review by the influential critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki of Grass’s novel Ein weites Feld (Too Far Afield), entitled ‘... und es muß gesagt werden’ (‘... and it must be said’). The novel voiced Grass’s criticism of German reunification, which he thought had been entirely driven by the agenda of a West Germany keen to grab what he called ‘ein Schnäppchen namens DDR’  (‘a bargain called the GDR’). The magazine’s cover fuelled the controversy by showing Reich-Ranicki apparently tearing apart a copy of the book.

Some of Grass’s works, includng his cover illustrations, from the British Library's collection

Controversy was in fact another constant in Grass’s life, most notoriously in 2006 when he admitted in his memoir Beim häuten der Zwiebel (Peeling the Onion) that he had been a teenage volunteer in the Waffen-SS rather than a conscript as he had previously implied. This belated confession from an author considered by many as the conscience of the nation, renowned for confronting the past and encouraging others to do so, struck many as hypocritical, and there were even calls for him to be stripped of his Nobel Prize and his honorary citizenship of Gdansk.

But, as many obituarists have pointed out, it is in the end for his novels rather than his political stance or personal failings (or indeed for his poetry or art) that Grass will be remembered. His often exuberant style and his fertile and original imagination were a rich addition to German letters and have impressed readers and influenced authors all over the world. In Die Blechtrommel he created what the Nobel Committee rightly predicted would be “one of the enduring literary works of the 20th century.”

To finish, an odd, and perhaps rather trivial, example of Grass’s cultural reach: I believe that he is the only German novelist (or Nobel laureate) ever to be affectionately plagiarised in the long running BBC Radio serial The Archers. In a 2002 episode, a visiting Eastern European student told the story of how his grandparents met – in fact a somewhat bowdlerised version of the first encounter between Oskar’s grandparents in Die Blechtrommel where Agnes  hides Joseph from the police under her voluminous skirts.  Archers fans who knew their German literature were no doubt relieved when, in a later episode, the student gave Grass his due and admitted that he had borrowed the story to amuse one of the Archer children.

Perhaps not quite what the Nobel Foundation had in mind, but nonetheless it may have won Grass a few more English readers.

Susan Reed, Lead Curator Germanic collections

Works by Grass referred to in the text:

Die Blechtrommel (Darmstadt, 1959) British Library 011421.p.86. (English translation by Ralph Mannheim, The Tin Drum (London, 1962) X.909/2060.)

Katz und Maus (Neuwied am Rhein, 1961) 12520.pp.14.  (English translation by Ralph Mannheim, Cat and Mouse (London, 1963) 11769.w.5.)

Hundejahre (Neuwied am Rhein, 1963) 12521.m.12. (English translation by Ralph Mannheim, Dog Years (London, 1965) X.909/5610.)

Unkenrufe (Göttingen, 1992) YA.1994.a.4374. (English translation by Ralph Mannheim, The Call of the Toad (London, 1992) Nov.1992/1350.)

Günter Grass : catalogue raisonné / herausgegeben von Hilke Ohsoling (Göttingen, 2007). LF.31.b.6661.

Der Butt (Darmstadt, 1977) X.989/71159. (English translation by Ralph Mannheim, The Flounder (London, 1978) X.989/76027.)

Die Vorzüge der Windhühner (Berlin, 1956) X.909/1713.

Ein weites Feld (Göttingen, 1995) YA.2000.a.1568 (English translation by Krishna Winston, Too Far Afield (London, 2000) Nov.2001/1203.)

Beim häuten der Zwiebel (Göttingen, 2006) YF.2007.a.1517. (English translation by Michael Henry Heim, Peeling the Onion (London, 2007) YC.2007.a.14122.)

15 April marks the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi concentration camp Bergen-Belsen by British forces. Today the British Library commemorates this event, in collaboration with The Anne Frank Trust’s #notsilent campaign, with public readings from Anne Frank’s diary. Anne and her sister Margot had died of typhus in Bergen-Belsen, only a few weeks before the camp was liberated.

Annelies Marie Frank (12 June 1929 - March 1945), known as Anne, became world famous for the wartime diary she kept while living in hiding from the rampant Nazi persecution of the Jews in the Netherlands.  From July 1942 until August 1944 the Frank family, the van Pels family and Dr. Pfeffer lived in the annex behind Otto Frank’s offices on the Prinsengracht in Amsterdam, now the Anne Frank House.

Photograph of Anne Frank in May 1942. Image from Wikimedia Commons

On her 13th birthday Anne had been given a diary, which she filled with her thoughts and musings over a period of two years, from 12 June 1942 up to 1 August 1944.  Three days after the last diary entry the annex was stormed and those living there were arrested and deported. Only Otto Frank survived the war.

The diary reveals a strange normality within the horrific world Anne inhabited. Her observations on events ‘outside’ and the treatment of her community, as well as on events ‘inside’ - the people that surround her and her own emotions and feelings, her hopes for peace and her ambition to become a writer and publish her diary after the war are of a remarkable depth for a teenager.

Two secretaries at Otto Frank’s business, Hermine Santruschitz, better known as Miep Gies as she is called in Anne’s diary, and Elisabeth (Bep) Voskuijl saved the diary and most of Anne’s other papers  from the Germans and handed them to Otto Frank on the day he received the news that Anne and Margot were not coming back. The papers reveal that Anne had started writing a second version and Otto used both to compile Het Achterhuis: Dagboekbrieven 14 June 1942 -1 Augustus 1944 [‘The Annex: Diary notes 14 June 1942-1 August 1944’], published in 1947 in a run of only 1,500 copies. The British Library’s copy of this first editi0n is even more special, because of the inserted newspaper clippings relating to the people around Anne Frank.

Above: Dustjacket of the first edition of Het Achterhuis (Amsterdam, 1957) British Library Cup.408.pp.29; below: some of the newspaper cuttings inserted in the book

Anne Frank’s diary remains one of the most widely-read books in the world; to-date more than 30 million copies in 73 languages have been sold.  It has been adapted for theatre, television and cinema and has maintained its status as an international best-seller and the most famous diary of modern times. 

The British Library holds copies of Anne Frank’s diary in various editions and languages, as well as scholarly material about the diary and its compiler, dramatizations, journal articles and musical scores.  The first English language edition, in the translation of Barbara Mooyaart-Doubleday appeared in 1952 (012584.o.11),  followed by a second in 1954.  One of the British Library’s two copies of this (12585.a.47)  was conserved under the ‘Adopt a Book Appeal’  by Lakenheath Middle School in May 2009 (see below).

 

Translated from the Dutch by Shmuel Schnitzer, the first Hebrew edition of Anne’s diary, Yomanah shel ne’arah [Diary of a young girl], was published in Jerusalem in 1953, whereas the first Yiddish translation titled Tagbukh fon a Meidel [Diary of a young girl] appeared in 1958  in Tel Aviv  in the translation of Yehoshua HaShiloni.  No copies of these editions are held in our collections, but we do hold a copy of a 1961 Yiddish edition which was  published in Bucharest  under the title Dos Togbukh fun Ana Frank (17108.b.43; below).

One of the early dramatizations, by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, was first published in 1956 (11791.t.1/1355). In a German edition of 1958, entitled Das Tagebuch der Anne Frank  (F10/1197; above) the play is supplemented by photographs of performances in Berlin, New York, Rome, Tel Aviv, Tokyo, and elsewhere.

Allegations that the diary was a hoax started in the early 1950s and continued until the early 80s, when the Netherlands State Institute for War Documentation  commissioned a thorough forensic study of the original manuscripts. The resulting 250-page report concluded with ‘high probability, bordering on certainty’ that the diary was genuine. This research formed the basis for the Critical Edition, compiling all known writings by Anne and an extract from the report. The Library holds the English translation from 1989, published by Penguin. (YC.1989.b.6954)

One of the latest scholarly  studies to appear is Anne Frank’s Diary of Anne Frank, edited by Harold Bloom, Professor at Yale University and published in 2010 (YC.2011.a.7024 ), proof of the unwavering interest in this talented young writer and her diary. 

Apart from the nearly 400 books, magazine articles, music scores and websites about Anne Frank in the British Library’s collections, there is the bust of Anne. Commissioned by Mr and Mrs Sherrington on the occasion of Anne’s 70th birthday and sculpted by Doreen Kern, it is a tribute to a remarkable Jewish girl and her diary. When you visit the British Library’s site at St. Pancras in London you will find her at the entrance to our Learning Centre.

Marja Kingma, Curator Low Countries Collections & Ilana Tahan, Curator Hebrew  Collections

 

Doreen Kern’s bust of Anne Frank in the British Library

Some of the most disturbing scenes in literature have been evoked through imagery of the eyes. They mirror the soul, they express love and loathing, joy and sadness, courage and fear, and encompass so much of what is human in us. Yet with their precious complexity comes a dreadful vulnerability. King Lear has one of the most shocking scenes in drama when Gloucester’s eyes are gouged out by Cornwall. In the Japanese ghost story, The Eyes! The Eyes! a young man dares to stay the night in a derelict temple with a decaying Shoji screen believed to be impregnated with the eyes of evil spirits. The next morning only his eyes are found wrapped in a dirty rag. The blue eyes of Dracula in Bram Stoker’s novel flame red with a horrible vindictive look, and in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre Rochester’s violently insane wife Bertha is “like a foul German spectre, a vampire, with fiery red eyes”.

I recently came across a short story by E.T.A. Hoffmann, the German writer, composer and painter, who was an early exponent of this kind of imagery. In Der Sandmann of 1816 he portrayed a folkloric figure who sprinkled sand in the eyes of mischievous children to make them sleep when they wouldn’t go to bed. Nathanael, a child and the main protagonist, associates the Sandman with a mysterious character called Coppelius who regularly visits his father to conduct alchemical experiments. The essence of the story is Nathanael’s progression into mental illness, born of a naturally unstable mind and exacerbated by the stories of the Sandman as a child.

E.T.A. Hoffmann, based on a self-portrait reproduced in Ludwig Zacharias Werner, Aus Hoffmann’s Leben und Nachlass (Berlin, 1823). 10706.b.41.

While the other examples I have given relied on graphic scenes for their effect, apart from one such description at the start of the story the threat to the eyes is maintained by Hoffmann more obliquely, and competes with other strong motifs such as mechanical devices and laughing. For example, when Nathanael is discovered hiding in the room where Coppelius is carrying out an experiment, he is referred to by Coppelius as ‘eyes’ rather than a boy: “‘Augen her, Augen her!’ rief Coppelius mit dumpfer dröhnender Stimme … ‘Nun haben wir Augen – Augen – ein schön Paar Kinderaugen’.” (‘”Eyes here! Eyes here!” cried Coppelius with dark roaring voice … “Now we have eyes – eyes – a beautiful pair of children’s eyes.”’)

Nathanael hiding during Coppelius’s experiment; drawing by Hoffmann, reproduced in Ludwig Zacharias Werner, Aus Hoffmann’s Leben und Nachlass

But his one explicit example is strikingly frightening, particularly as it involves children, whose only half-formed minds struggle to rationalise the fear they experience. Their nanny tells them that if they won't go to bed the Sandman will come and throw sand in their eyes. Their eyes will bulge, drip blood and fall out. They will be taken away to the Sandman’s own children who live in a nest and have curved beaks like owls which they use to peck at and eat children's eyes. The hard vowels in German reinforce the image – “damit picken sie der unartigen Menschenkindlein Augen auf”.

The eyes motif is sustained throughout the story. Clara, Nathanael’s fiancée, has eyes that “springen in Nathanaels Brust wie blutige Funken sengend und brennend” (“spring into Nathanael’s breast, burning and sizzling like bloody sparks”) and, when their love fails and Nathanael becomes infatuated with Olimpia, whom he has only seen at a distance through a telescope, she is finally revealed as merely a mechanical doll which ends up shattered on the floor, its eyes lying randomly amongst the remnants of the wooden corpse: “Nun sah Nathanael, wie ein Paar blutige Augen auf dem Boden liegend ihn anstarrten, die ergriff Spalanzi … und warf sie nach ihm, daß sie seine Brust trafen”. (“Now Nathanael saw a pair of bloody eyes lying on the floor staring at him, which Spalanzi seized and threw at him, hitting him in the chest.”)

Hoffmann’s use of eye imagery creates powerful pictures in the reader’s mind and helps to sustain the brooding menace of the Sandman throughout the story. Sigmund Freud was so impressed by it that he wrote an essay, Das Unheimliche (‘The Uncanny’), wherein he interpreted it as a fear of castration. The story has become an important work as an early 19th century example of the horror short story genre.

Trevor Willimott, former Cataloguer, West European Languages

We live in an age of increasing demagogery and gesture politics; but like most features of our over-excited media culture this too has its predecessors.

Antonio de Guevara is a forgotten best-seller.  His Libro aureo del emperador Marco Aurelio / Golden Book of Marcus Aurelius (1528), rewritten by him as Relox de principes / Diall of princes  (1529) is a fictionalised life of the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius (ruled 161 to 180 AD), best known nowadays for his Meditations, written in Greek and rediscovered in 1558: thus Guevara’s work predates by thirty years the princeps of the Meditations, edited by Xylander in Greek and Latin.

Title-page of an early edition of Guevara’s Libro aureo del emperador Marco Aurelio (Venice, 1532). C.53.b.9.

So speaks the true Marcus:

The art of true living in this world is more like a wrestler’s than a dancer’s practice.  For in this they both agree, to teach a man whatsoever falls on him, that he may be ready for it, and that nothing may cast him down.  (Meditations VII.33)

The historical Marcus was responsible for fighting a campaign on the Danube. In Guevara’s account he is visited by a ‘Villayn of the Danube’, who tells the Emperor like it is:

The first year that I was consul, [Marcus recalls] there came a poor villayn from the river of Danubie, to ask justice of the senate, against a censure, who did divers extortions to the people.  And he had a small face, and great lips, and hollow eyes, his hair curled, bare headed, his shoes of a porkepes [hedgehog] skin, his coat of goat’s hair, his girdle of bullrushes, and a wild eglantine in his hand.  It was a strange thing to see him so monstrous, and marvel to hear his purpose [speech].  Ceratainly, when I saw him come into the senate, I wende it had been some beast in the figure of a man and after I had herad him, I judged him one of the gods, if there be gods among men. [...]

The peasant of the Danube addresses Marcus Aurelius. Illustration by Gustave Doré from Jean de La Fontaine, Fables … (Paris, 1867) 1872.b.29.

The Villayn’s oration runs as follows:

“An infallible rule it is that he that taketh wrongfully another man’s good shall lese the right of his own.  Regard ye romans, though I be a villain, yet I know who is just and right wise, in holding his own; and who a tyrant in possessing others’.  There is a rule, that whatsoever they that be ill have gathered in any days, the gods taketh from them in one day [...]

All ye Romans in your devices about your arms bear these words: Romanorum est debellare superbos, et parcere subjectis.  That is it pertaineth to Romans to subdue them that be proud and to forgive subjects.  But certainly ye may better say: it pertaineth to Romans to expel innocents and to trouble and vex wrongfully peaceable people for ye Romans are but destroyers of peaceable people and thieves to rob from other that they sweat for.

If my tongue hath offended you in any thing, I am here ready to make recompense with my throat.  [the Spanish says: he aqui me tiendo en este suelo para que lo pague mi garganta: see I prostern myself here on the ground so that my throat may pay the price] for in good sooth, I had rather to win honour, offering myself to the death than ye should have it in taking my life from me [...]”

The Villayn wins the day: he is made  a patrician and given a government pension.

Carlo Pincin has revealed the villayn’s debt to Marcolfus: both are unbowed in the face of authority and empire.

Barry Taylor, Curator Hispanic Studies 

References

The Golden Boke of Marcus Aurelius, tr. Lord Berners (London, 1546), chapters xxxi-xxxii, sigs N5v-O4r.  C.71.a.31.

Carlo Pincin, ‘Due note su temi spagnoli: Guevara lettore di Salomon et Marcolfus’, in Studi in onore di Remo Martini (Milan, 2008-2009), III, 153-66. Awaiting shelfmark; part of the article is available here

 

 

The autumn of 1900 was a productive season for the 51-year-old August Strindberg, returning to his native Sweden and to the theatre after a long absence. Within the space of three weeks he had written two full-length plays: Påsk (Easter) and Dödsdansen (The Dance of Death). The second, a pitiless study of a couple trapped in a poisonous marriage, is in accord with the popular image of Strindberg as a nihilistic woman-hater, and the contrast with the message of redemption and reconciliation conveyed by Easter is thus all the more striking. The British Library holds a copy of the first edition (Stockholm, 1901) at 011755.ff.12 (picture below).

Strindberg set the play in Lund, a university town in southern Sweden where he had lived while recovering from a protracted nervous breakdown. Born and brought up in Stockholm, he found the atmosphere of Lund deeply uncongenial, provincial and suffocating, and constricting for one used to the fresh sea air of the archipelago and Lake Mälaren. Worse still, he was not the only member of his family undergoing mental suffering at that time; his sister Elisabeth was committed to an asylum during his period in Lund. Brother and sister had been especially close, and it was with Elisabeth in mind that he created the figure of the ‘Easter girl’ Eleanora at the centre of his play, and gave her the name of his mother.

There was a third woman in Strindberg’s life who can be glimpsed in this character – his future wife, the young Norwegian actress Harriet Bosse, for whom he visualised the role. She had moved to Stockholm and been engaged to play Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Dramaten in 1899, and the other-worldly quality which she possessed led her to be cast as the Lady in the premiere of Strindberg’s To Damascus (picture left from Wikimedia Commons). Strindberg’s diary account of the dress rehearsal in November 1900 describes his growing infatuation with Harriet after a dream in which she was married to him and appeared dressed as Puck, and on 6 May 1901 the couple, aged 52 and 22, embarked on a marriage (his third) which would prove as ill-fated and tempestuous as any that he could have dreamed up.

There is no trace of foreboding in Easter, however; although the Heyst family has grave problems of its own, Eleanora’s freshness, honesty and spirituality have survived a spell in a mental asylum from which she has escaped to the home inhabited by her mother, her schoolmaster brother Elis, and their lodger Benjamin, a grammar-school pupil who is preparing for his examinations. Elis – touchy, bitter, suspicious and morbidly possessive of his fiancée Kristina – is a self-portrait, and the dark shadow which hangs over the household, like the sense of guilt and shame surrounding Strindberg’s father’s irregular union with the servant whom he belatedly married and his subsequent bankruptcy, is a result of Heyst senior’s actions. His dubious financial dealings have landed him in prison, and the family lives in dread of Lindkvist, the most threatening of their creditors.

The action, which spans the period from Maundy Thursday to Easter Eve and is accompanied by Haydn’s Seven Last Words of Christ, sees the tension increasing when Eleanora innocently takes a daffodil from a closed flower-shop and falls under suspicion of theft despite leaving payment for it. Yet in spite of the ominous atmosphere which grows stronger and stronger throughout the three acts, the play unfolds in a landscape full of signs of the approach of spring after a harsh Swedish winter – the removal of the double windows, the putting aside of heavy garments, the song of chaffinches, and the repainting of steamers in readiness for the new season. When the (literally) shadowy Lindkvist finally appears, the ogre actually reveals himself as a kindly figure prepared to renounce his claim.

There is no easy resolution; as Lindkvist says, he cannot help Heyst to escape his punishment or Benjamin to pass his Latin examination: ‘Life won’t give us everything – and nothing gratis’. But the play ends in the sunlight of Easter Day as the family gathers with a new sense of forgiveness and hope, which, although there are constant Scriptural references, is equally applicable in humanist terms as a comment on the transformations which can be achieved through reconciliation and generosity of spirit. Appropriately, the British Library holds a translation by Stellan Engholm (Stockholm, 1935; YF.2012.a.23780) into Esperanto, a language conceived to promote international unity and mutual understanding.

Following its premiere at Stockholm’s Intima Teatern the play received many more performances, including a production in 2013 in New York, transposing the action to 1950s Harlem with an Afro-American cast.

And so, let us look forward with Elis, to ‘the Easter Holiday – five glorious days to make the most of!’

Susan Halstead, Curator Czech & Slovak studies      

Today being the first of April someone is probably going to try and make a fool of you, whether by making you act foolishly (trying to pick up the coin glued to the floor, bending to tie your perfectly-fastened shoelace) or by playing on your credulity with spoof news stories like the BBC’s famous spaghetti harvest – or the BL’s own unicorn cookbook.

A successful April Fool’s Day trick makes both joker and victims laugh; the victims are only temporarily fooled and appreciate the joker’s skill in catching them out. But in the late mediaeval literary genre of ‘Narrenliteratur’ (fool literature) the authors depict folly not as a brief moment but as a part of the human condition, identifying many different kinds of fools and folly in contemporary society.

One of the best known works of this kind, and an early modern European bestseller, is  Das Narrenschiff (‘The Ship of Fools’) by the German humanist Sebastian Brant. Originally published in Basel in 1494, by 1500 it had already gone through 13 German editions. A Latin translation formed the basis for French, Dutch and English editions in the late 15th and early 16th centuries.

Fools sailing to Narragonia, from a 1499 Basel edition of Sebastian Brandt’s Narrenschiff  (British Library IA.37957)

Brant describes various kinds of fools who fill the eponymous ship on its journey to ‘Narragonia’, a land of fools. First among them is the pseudo-scholar who surrounds himself with books that he can neither read nor understand. His picture is one of the most famous in the book, and very popular with bibliographers (one hopes with a degree of self-deprecation!). Others include slavish followers of fashion, those consumed by self-love or pride, believers in astrology, and those who eat, drink or pursue sports and games to excess.

The book collector with his useless library

Some of the book’s instances of folly are still the subject of complaints (just or unjust) today: students who should be working hard but instead spend their time in dissolute pursuits, parents who set their children an bad example, people who waste time pursuing long, complex and futile legal cases. I always think that the fool who takes all the world’s troubles on his shoulders and falls under the weight [below] is a salutary example for todays’s overstretched workers.

 

Other examples are more firmly of Brant’s own time. He castigates those who mock God, fail to observe holy days or bring their hounds and falcons to church. He classes all non-Christians (and Christian ‘heretics’) as fools. And one of his earliest examples of a fool is the parent or teacher who spares the rod and spoils the child; the woodcut shows his children turning on each other as he sits blindly by:

 
If Brant’s book has a moral and didactic purpose, the pill is sweetened by his lively rhymes in ‘knittelvers’ form and the woodcut illustrations. Many readers no doubt simply enjoyed the book as an entertainment and, rather than seeing themselves in Brant’s ‘mirror of fools’  and mending their ways, identified the follies of their neighbours and felt smug.

 

The foolish parents who set their child a bad example

But like the successful April Fool’s joke, Brant’s examples can make us wise by making us appreciate our own gullibility. As he states his introduction, “Wer sich für eyn narren acht / Der ist bald zů eym wisen gemacht” (“He who recognises himself as a fool will soon become a wise man”).

So  if anyone catches you out today, just accept that it’s made you a little bit wiser.

Susan Reed, Lead Curator Germanic Collections

 

On 28 March 1914 Tamara Karsavina, a legend of the Russian ballet, celebrated her birthday by dancing at The Stray Dog Café  at Number 5, Mikhailovskaia Square (today Ploshchad’ iskusstv,  ‘Square of the Arts’)  in St Petersburg. Also called an art-cellar, the café was in operation between  31 December  1911 and 3 March 1915. Its name was drawn from the romantic and at the same time ironic image of a poet or artist as a stray dog, created by one of the founders of the enterprise Mstislav  Dobuzhinzky.

The logo of the Stray Dog Café, from the cover of a tribute volume to Tamara Karsavina

The idea of a cabaret-club came from the actor and theatre director Boris Pronin (1875-1946), one of the noteworthy figures of the Russian Silver Age in art and literature. The founders of the Stray Dog Café (including writer Alexey Tolstoy, artists Nikolay Sapunov (1880-1912) and Sergey Sudeikin (1882-1946), and  theatre director and dramatist Nikolai Evreinov) aimed to synthesise visual and performing arts with literature and create a playful  atmosphere for participants and the audience.

The programme of the Stray Dog Café included poetry readings by such famous Russian authors as  Anna Akhmatova, Nikolai Gumilev, Mikhail Kuzmin and Vladimir Mayakovsky as well as foreign guests like Paul Fort. The founder of the Futurist movement Filippo Tommaso Marinetti gave a lecture there.  The audience was divided into two categories:  “artists” and “pharmacists” (those who didn’t belong to the bohemian world of creativity) and the price for an entrance ticket for the latter category was several times higher than for “artists-bohemians”.

The celebration of Tamara Karsavina’s birthday was documented in a number of memoirs. For example, Sergey Sudeikin recollected how this “goddess of air” moved around the stage in the middle of the hall between authentic  18th-century wooden sculptures of Eros placed on a wonderful blue carpet. Carefully selected musicians played old musical instruments. The intimacy of the performance was shared by fifty dance-lovers who paid 50 roubles per ticket.  At the end of evening, the heroine was presented with a memorable book made for her that included drawings, poems and dedications to the admired ballerina. Beautifully designed, this gentle book (held by the British Library at shelfmark Cup.410.f.519) is a unique artefact of the time, as the images below illustrate.

The title page of the book

Sargent’s portrait of Karsavina

Poem by Mikhail Kuzmin

Drawing by Sergey Sudeikin

A letter of congratulation from Nikolai Evreinov

Katya Rogatchevskaia, Lead East European Curator (Russian)

All the media assure us we are living in a new age of the beard.

A landmark in pogonology is the pioneer study A Barba em Portugal. Estudo de etnografia comparativa [The Beard in Portugal.  A Study in Comparative Ethnography] (Lisbon, 1925; British Library 10009.t.29) by  José Leite de Vasconcellos  (1858-1941).

                          José Leite de Vasconcellos (with beard). Image from Wikimedia Commons

      Title-page of Leite’s A barba em Portugal.

Leite (1858-1941) was a distinguished professor of Latin and Medieval French at the University of Lisbon and editor of the journal Revista Lusitana, but the bulk of his publications are ethnographic studies of topics such as the “figa” gesture: in this respect his work prefigured much 20th and 21st-century research on the body.  The figa’s opposite number in British culture is the V-sign, now sadly depleted to the single finger.

José Leite de Vasconcellos,  A Figa : estudo de etnografia comparativa, precedido de algumas palavras a respeito do ”sobrenatural” na medicina popular portuguesa. (Porto, 1925). Ac.3709.d.

Like many Portuguese men of letters (Júlio Dinis and Trindade Coelho  among them), Leite studied medicine although he practised for  only a year on account of his own ill health.

The chapters of A Barba em Portugal cover: The beard anthropologically, the making of the beard, beard forms and cuts, the beard through the centuries, the symbolism of the beard, and the beard in vocabulary and literature; in an appendix Leite edits the ordenances of the guild of barbers from the 16th century.

A selection of historical Portuguese beards from A Barba em Portugal

A habit which 21st-century hipsters seem not to have adopted is swearing on the beard.  The Cid did it, and Leite was told by an old man of A Beira that he had heard in his youth that in olden times the oath was “Juro por estas minhas barbas” [I swear by these my beards], accompanied by the appropiate gesture.  

Perhaps its time has come again, by my beard!

Barry Taylor, Curator Hispanic Studies

                                
Ancient beard ideas for the hipsters of today? King Herod (left) and an Bronze Age figurine (right) from A barba em Portugal