12-6

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/centenary-aleksandr-solzhenitsyn-1918-2008/"></div>Had he died during the 1960s, instead of living until 2008, to die of heart failure in Moscow at the age of 89, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the 1970 Nobel Laureate for Literature, would have been remembered as a hero, a prophet, and, above all, a great writer from a country of great writers.
But he made one crucial mistake; he survived. And not only did he survive World War II, Stalin’s labor camps, and stomach cancer, he outlived communism.
By the time Solzhenitsyn had settled in Vermont in 1976, where he lived in a high-security compound, the West had already discovered a far more attractive Soviet dissident — the poet Joseph Brodsky, who openly performed the role of artist, played to the gallery, and would eventually, in 1987, also be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Solzhenitsyn, reclusive and taciturn by nature, was very different. His soldier father, having returned from World War I, died in a hunting accident six months before the future writer’s birth. Some suggest the death was a suicide, but whatever the truth, Solzhenitsyn was born in the shadow of a family tragedy and was left with relatives while his mother went to work in a nearby town. He was also born into revolution; his birth on December 11, 1918, in Kislovodsk, a Russian spa town in the Caucasus Mountains, occurred just over a month after the first anniversary of the Bolshevik takeover, and in the midst of the ensuing Civil War.
The young “Sanya” Solzhenitsyn was clever, securing a first-class honors degree in math and physics while pursuing his interest in the arts, particularly literature. Soon after, he was called up. Already something of an intellectual, he proved an arrogant soldier, keeping himself aloof from his comrades while serving as a gunner. Twice decorated, he quickly progressed to captain. Then he made a mistake; when writing a letter to a friend, he included “derogatory” comments about Stalin. The irony was cruel, but not unusual: having served his country heroically, Solzhenitsyn was arrested as an Enemy of the People in early 1945. He served his eight-year sentence in the hell of the Gulag labor camps, where political prisoners lived alongside criminals.
These experiences inspired a masterful debut, the short novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Initially published in the November 1962 issue of the Russian literary journal Novy Mir, it made his name and remains, perhaps, his finest artistic achievement. One Day sent shock waves around the West, confirming fears that what had happened in Stalin’s Soviet Union was analogous to what had happened in the Nazi death camps. In reality, millions of Soviet citizens had perished in the Gulag system, suffering a fate even worse than that of Solzhenitsyn’s central character.
Written in a laconic, bleakly lyrical third person voice that is both heartrending and, at times, deeply witty, Solzhenitsyn’s masterpiece is a human document like no other. Having retained his sense of honor, Ivan Denisevich survives, at least for one long day, the biting cold, the hunger, and the dictates of an inhuman, often farcical system. Each time one reads the novel — like Albert Camus’s The Stranger or Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, it demands rereading — its narrative power resonates. One touching scene hints at the sources of Ivan Denisovich’s resilience. When speaking to a doggedly rational fellow prisoner, Captain Buinovsky, who has been imprisoned for the “crime” of having been liberated by American forces, our hero asks him where the old moon goes after dawn? Buinovsky thinks the question ridiculous. So Ivan Denisovich educates him:  “In our village, folk say God crumbles up the old moon into stars.” These new stars then fill gaps left by stars that have fallen, exhausted, from the heavens. It is this magical thinking, this imaginative view of the world that sustains the exhausted man.
On his release from the camps in 1953, Solzhenitsyn was sent into internal exile in a village in Kazakhstan, where he faced another ordeal, cancer. A late diagnosis left him close to death. Eventually allowed treatment, he travelled to a hospital in Tashkent, where he went into remission. This experience would later inspire another compelling narrative, Cancer Ward, and at the same time he completed a larger novel of the camps, The First Circle, which focused on the life of imprisoned scientists and academics. Both were published 1968, but only abroad, not in the Soviet Union. This did not please the authorities, and his next move proved even more provocative.
Solzhenitsyn the artist was fast becoming Solzhenitsyn the campaigner. Setting out to expose the horrors of the Soviet system he began his monumental work, The Gulag Archipelago, the defining history of the political oppression that destroyed millions of Russians. Its three volumes are testimony to his personal courage, as well as his love of his country. The entire text, which runs to more than 1,500 pages, was completed by 1968 and smuggled out of the country. In retribution, Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the Soviet Writers’ Union in 1969. The next year, he was awarded the Nobel Prize. Retribution for that may have come in the form of an attempted assassination by the KGB; in August 1971, Solzhenitsyn was fell seriously ill, after a possible poisoning.
His conflict with the Soviet leadership eventually led his expulsion from the state. In February 1974, he was arrested and deported, arriving in Frankfurt, his first safe harbor, and then moved to Cologne, where he lived in the home of fellow Nobel Laureate Heinrich Böll. Solzhenitsyn later moved on to Zurich and, finally, to the United States, where he was to remain, without ever assimilating, for almost 20 years.
There is no disputing his contribution towards the collapse of Soviet communism: he had exposed the system’s murderous cruelty and hypocrisy. And while his fiction and documentary writing were being read all over the world, he was grimly devoting himself to the story of Russia. The witness, the writer, had become an historian. No longer regarded as a persecuted prophet, he was increasingly dismissed as a polemicist and a crank. His personality did not help: he was notably cantankerous. Years of hardship, constant pressure, and ill health had left him wary, even suspicious, and difficult to approach on a personal level. His severe manner and straggly monk-like beard combined to make him look like a medieval figure, straight out of central casting.
In 1994, three years after the fall of the Soviet regime, he decided to return home — to a changed country, which greeted him with indifference rather than affection. Younger people regarded him as a dinosaur. Solzhenitsyn had outlived his time, yet his achievement remains. The prophet may have been forgotten, the historian overtaken, but the novelist will endure, thanks to a short novel that strikes deep at the very heart of what it means to be human.
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A version of this tribute first appeared in Eileen Battersby’s Second Readings: From Beckett to Black Beauty (Liberties Press, 2015).
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Centenary: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008)

turgenev

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/melancholic-narratives-bicentennial-ivan-turgenev/"></div>Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev is probably the most European of the great 19th-century Russian novelists. He was born 200 years ago, on November 9, 1818, on his mother’s vast estate in Oryol, some 300 miles southwest of Moscow. His father was a handsome young cavalry officer who had arrived quite by chance at the estate, which appears to have been a self-contained kingdom with a private orchestra — and five thousand serfs.
The unsuspecting officer, himself an impoverished member of a once great family tracing its origins back to the 15th century, had been scouting horses for his regiment. Instead of finding additional mounts, the future writer’s father married the charmless heiress, six years his senior and lacking any obvious suitor. There were reasons: Turgenev’s mother was a feudal tyrant who beat her children with much the same abandon she applied when disciplining her serfs. Even so, his country childhood left Turgenev with an abiding love of nature. This was matched by an avowed hatred of serfdom, which his writings would eventually help abolish. He was fond of his weak, socially-misplaced father, who, aware that Russian aristocrats favored French for conversation and correspondence, urged his children to practice writing in Russian at least twice a week and, most particularly, when writing to him.
In the interests of the young Turgenev’s further education, the family moved to Moscow when he was nine. Already fluent in German, English, and French — thanks to a succession of foreign governesses — as well as Russian, he entered university in St. Petersburg at 16 to read philosophy. Within three years, his first poems were published. It was then that Turgenev made the move that not only set him apart from his peers, but which would also shape his fiction.
Intent on further study, he went to Berlin, where he absorbed German idealism and the writings of Goethe; he would continue to visit Germany, particularly Baden-Baden, throughout his life. Not surprisingly, Turgenev’s fiction often features disaffected, foreign-educated intellectuals. After two years in Berlin, he returned to Russia and completed a master’s degree in philosophy at the University of Moscow. Tall, attractive, languid, and surprisingly soft-spoken, Turgenev first achieved fame with his realist stories, Notes of a Hunter (first translated as A Sportsman’s Sketches), which were serialized between 1847 and 1851 and afterwards collected in a handsome single volume.
Eleven years earlier, in 1843, while out hunting on his 25th birthday, he met a middle-aged man, and, a few days later, was presented to his new acquaintance’s wife. Pauline Viardot was a famous — and reportedly plain — Paris-born opera singer of Spanish descent. He fell in love; Viardot and her husband appeared to accept this devotion. Turgenev and Viardot may or may not have been lovers, but they shared an intense bond. He learnt Spanish, resigned his post at the Ministry of the Interior, and travelled through Europe as part of her entourage. He sent his daughter, whom he had had with a seamstress, one of his mother’s peasants, to Paris, to be raised with Viardot’s children.
Close friends with Flaubert, Turgenev, who never married, became a familiar figure in the literary circles of France, where he died on September 3, 1883, near Paris, after a year battling spinal cancer. He was 64. His love of Russia had endured and his body was sent to St Petersburg for burial in the Volkovo cemetery, a non-Orthodox public graveyard.
How did the restless man about town, famous for his sketches and his extensive travels, turn to fiction? An obituary he wrote on the death of Nikolai Gogol in 1852, the same year that saw the publication of his collected Notes of a Hunter, proved so contentious that it was banned and resulted in Turgenev being exiled for two years to his estate of Spasskoye-Lutovinovo. There he wrote four extraordinary novels — Rudin, Home of the Gentry, On the Eve, and Fathers and Sons — as well as the novella First Love.
In Rudin, published in 1856, the eponymous hero personifies the new Russian consciousness, the desire to take action and liberalize a country crippled by conservatism. Full of long, dramatic conversations, the novel reads as a theater piece. By then, Turgenev had already written A Month in the Country, his only full-length work for the stage. Years ahead of its time, with its clever use of comic farce in exposing of human foibles, it had been banned in Russia, undermining Turgenev’s confidence in his dramatic talents. At long last produced in 1872, A Month in the Country pre-empts Anton Chekhov’s plays and would, in tandem with Chekhov, revolutionize Russian theater.
Home of the Gentry was completed on the eve of Turgenev’s 40th birthday. In this mid-life novel of a homecoming, the central character, Lavretsky, seeks comfort in his country estate after his marriage collapses. Not the most sophisticated of individuals, he has been betrayed by his wife, the first woman he had ever encountered, and is deeply wounded. In his despair, he finds himself by chance being drawn to Liza, the quiet, deeply religious daughter of a highly irritating female relative. The situation is complicated by the interaction of a brilliantly drawn set of characters. Social observation came naturally to Turgenev, and it is interesting to compare him with Jane Austen, who died the year before he was born. Home of the Gentry is personal, but it also looks to the wider experiences of a generation of Russians who had sampled the West, only to return home. Turgenev, a cosmopolitan revolutionary as well as a conservative traditionalist, studied both the old and new faces of his motherland. Home of the Gentry reveals Turgenev at his sharpest, yet for all the caustic observation it is an elegiac variation of a conflict that would also dominate his masterwork, Fathers and Sons.That novel introduces the complex presence of Bazarov, the “nihilist,” one of world literature’s most enduring creations. Self-assured and relentless, Bazarov represents a Russia even more bent on change than it was in the time of Rudin.
Published in 1861 to a poor critical response in Russia, the emotionally ambivalent Fathers and Sons is among the towering achievements of the 19th-century Russian novel and of world literature as a whole. It explores the distinctions between friendship and affection, passion and mere sexual curiosity, as well as the limits of loyalty, the power of a father’s love for his son, and, most of all, the tension between the values and traditions of old Russia and a new world order about to announce itself in a bloody revolution.
Written in between Home of the Gentry, Fathers and Sons, and Turgenev’s third novel, On the Eve (1859), a near operatic tale featuring Elena, a self-sacrificing, fearless heroine — is the exquisite novella First Love, in which a man is asked over supper to recount his earliest romance. He agrees, but insists on first writing it all down. In the narrative, he recalls how his younger self idealized a slightly older girl only to find a rival in none other than his unhappy father. A work of devastating beauty, First Love pits a boy’s infatuation against an older man’s tormented passion. Turgenev is known to have drawn upon memories of his own dead father, who had married for money, to his shame and regret.
An instinctive stylist who created his characters by infiltrating their psyches and, crucially, examining their behavior, Turgenev, whose interest in Western European culture outraged Dostoyevsky, would become an inspiration for Henry James, who referred to Turgenev as “the beautiful genius.” Turgenev’s influence on Chekhov is obvious; more intriguingly, one feels his presence in the work of the Irish playwright Brian Friel and the Irish novelist and master of the short story William Trevor. And if one were asked to nominate a work that immediately suggests the Russian master, a reflex reaction may well be to suggest The Great Gatsby. Nick Carraway could easily be a character created by Turgenev.
He remains revered — an artist capable of dissecting human emotions with a delicate, candid brutality. For Ivan Turgenev, the artist can only hope to teach “by giving the world images of beauty,” which he did in melancholic narratives which achieve the profundity of a Beethoven piano sonata.
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Melancholic Narratives: On the Bicentennial of Ivan Turgenev

bronte

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/emily-bronte/"></div>The face is that of a young girl; delicate with brown hair framing small, rather pinched features. There is not even the hint of a smile, although she knew the artist very well. She is pale; the eyes may be a light green or gray. Her gaze seems intense and, significantly, is directed away into the distance — not the conventional direct pose for a portrait. It is only a profile, permitting minimum engagement. The sitter appears remote because in life, she was detached. This is a solitary, taciturn individual no one really knew, not even her siblings with whom she lived. Her closest relationships were with birds, dogs, and cats; she collected stray animals and had no friends; she left few letters, only dramatic, self-revelatory poems. Emily Brontë was about 15 years old when she sat for the ghostly study, possibly a fragment of a larger work, painted by her brother Patrick Branwell, the one person she would always forgive, and she was known to be most unforgiving.
The image hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in London, where millions of visitors have peered closely at it over the years, wondering at this singular visionary, whose complex and contentious only novel, in which English Gothic meets German Romanticism, exudes such terrifying imaginative energy.
Why did this girl, the fifth child of six — five daughters and one son — born on July 30th, 1818 — to an Irish clergyman, whose wife Maria’s death resulted in all the children being raised by his sister, Elizabeth, a staunch Methodist, why did she write such a powerful, quasi-Shakespearean tale, a savage yet spiritual tract, about exasperated, dangerous, and supernatural passion?
Growing up in an isolated parsonage with her sisters and brother, all of whom were sickly — the two eldest sisters had died as schoolgirls — what made her think of evoking domestic tension spanning the generations? How did she conjure up a Heathcliff, with his “half-civilized ferocity” “and eyes full of black fire,” a character who makes the merely handsome Mr. Darcy appear somewhat petulant?
Where could Heathcliff, such a tormented soul, driven by revenge, have come from? What experience could have possibly helped the wary, introspective Emily Brontë — whose mother had died when the future writer was three years old and gathered at the deathbed together with the other children, all watching on and waiting — grasp the frenetic, emotional turmoil that sustains Wuthering Heights?
Aside from a brief stint as a child at the Clergy Daughter’s School; some months when she was 17 enrolled at a school where Charlotte was teaching; a stay a few years later in Brussels, where she discovered German literature; and her unhappy four month period as a student-teacher, giving piano lessons to terrified pupils, Brontë lived her short life at the Haworth parsonage, on Yorkshire’s moors, a harsh, demanding environment exposed to relentless winds, a place where winter seems to last longer than it does elsewhere.
By 30, one year after the publication of Wuthering Heights, she was dead, dying of tuberculosis, joining Branwell at whose funeral three months earlier she had contracted a chill. Only on her last day of life did she agree to see a doctor. It was too late.
Her sister, Charlotte, who famously feared, disliked, and did not understand Wuthering Heights, recorded Emily’s final hours: “She sank rapidly. She made haste to leave us. Yet, while physically she perished, mentally, she grew stronger than we had yet known her… I have seen nothing like it: but, indeed, I have never seen her parallel in anything. Stronger than a man, simpler than a child, her nature stood alone.” It is a beautiful elegy. Even so, Emily Brontë was not a naïve, inspired rustic; she was a sophisticated and deliberate artist.
Ravaged by consumption, she fought death like a warrior of old. On the evening before the day she died, Brontë collapsed while feeding the dogs. The next morning, she insisted on her habitual seven o’clock rising and combed her hair by the hearth in her bedroom. The wooden implement slipped from her fingers. She was too weak to pick it up. She dressed and made her way downstairs, gasping for breath.
By noon, she could barely speak. She was carried upstairs. In Charlotte’s words, “turning her dying eyes reluctantly from the pleasant sun,” Emily Jane Brontë, poet and loner, died at two o’clock in the afternoon of December 19, 1848. Her dog, Keeper, had kept vigil by the bedside. If Brontë’s belief in life after death was as strong as her defiant masterpiece suggests, her spirit no doubt continues to patrol the moors.
How to explain the unearthly bond between Catherine and Heathcliff in a novel in which — despite the underlying violence, and the wealth of talk about nature, passion, and eternity — as mundane a concern as social aspiration is one of the major themes? It is Catherine, admittedly tempted by the genteel world Edgar Linton represents, who endeavors to explain her feelings to the central narrator, staunch, candid Ellen &#8220;Nelly&#8221; Dean, the ever-present, talkative, and almost unshockable housekeeper whose interest in the anguished players helps piece together the story.
In one of her milder moments Catherine, although speaking to Nelly, appears to be unraveling her thoughts and feelings aloud; perhaps she may be addressing humanity in general when she says: “I cannot express it; but surely you and everybody have a notion that there is or should be an existence of yours beyond you. What were the use of my creation, if I were entirely contained here? My great miseries in this world have been Heathcliff’s miseries, and I watched and felt each from the beginning: my great thought in living is himself. If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger: I should not seem a part of it. My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods; time will change it, I’m well aware, as winter changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I am Heathcliff! He’s always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being.”
Poets and singers, painters and musicians have striven to articulate the elevating, tormenting, and destructive sensation known as passion. Emily Brontë conferred this fierce eloquence on a character named Catherine Earnshaw. The choice of the name Earnshaw, with &#8220;earnest&#8221; as its root, could be debated. Yet Catherine is not her creator’s alter-ego. The reality is far more devastating: Emily Brontë is Heathcliff. Only through his rage, grief, and obsessive, despairing need to right wrongs done to him and by him — to defy existence itself — do we begin to approach some understanding of what it was to be her.
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<h6 class="title">Image: Emily Brontë, by Patrick Branwell Brontë. Oil on canvas, arched top, circa 1833. 21 1/2 in. x 13 3/4 in. National Portrait Gallery, purchased 1914.</h6>
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Who Was Emily Brontë?

The Beggar and Other Stories

Born in California, Eileen Battersby holds a Masters Degree in English literature from University College Dublin. An Irish Times staff arts journalist and literary reviewer, she has won the National Arts Journalist of the Year award four times and was National Critic of the Year in 2012. Second Readings: From Beckett to Black Beauty was published in 2009. Ordinary Dogs — A Story of Two Lives was published by Faber in 2011.&nbsp;Teethmarks on My Tongue,&nbsp;her first novel, was published in the United States by Dalkey Archive in 2016, and in the United Kingdom by Apollo, Head of Zeus, in 2018.

Eileen Battersby

The Boy Who Stared Death in the Eye: On Gaito Gazdanov’s “The Beggar and Other Stories”

"For a long time now I haven't been I."
— Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

Around the World

"Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn't." — Mark Twain

Fiction

Flights

Complex Harmonies: On Olga Tokarczuk’s “Flights”

The House of Remembering and Forgetting

Always the Haunting Sound of a Train: On Filip David’s “The House of Remembering and Forgetting”

Belladonna

The Triumph of Memory: On Daša Drndić’s “Belladonna”

Born in California, Eileen Battersby holds a Masters Degree in English literature from University College Dublin. An Irish Times staff arts journalist and literary reviewer, she has won the National Arts Journalist of the Year award four times and was National Critic of the Year in 2012. Second Readings: From Beckett to Black Beauty was published in 2009. Ordinary Dogs — A Story of Two Lives was published by Faber in 2011.&nbsp;Teethmarks on My Tongue,&nbsp;her first novel, was published in the United States by Dalkey Archive in 2016, and in the United Kingdom by Apollo, Head of Zeus, in 2018.