The Jetsam

essays

by

Lara Biyuts


To Jocelyn Lindenridge-Blanche

Debris Fields For Ever

 

Time. Time is the he only of your valuables that cannot be returned. Fourth dimension, where we’ve not learnt to be at ease, unless being like algae slowly drifting. Stream of Time degrades the past. Your past. The past is the only of your valuables that cannot be taken away. The past is tarnished by time -- the scaled golds, dust, beyond curtains, but -- the more painful remembrance of the vain and sinful days, the more powerful is our longing for gaining knowledge. The past is seen like a golden age, like better than the present, like the unrealizable, but -- don’t touch the ashes of memory. It seems to me that a little hand alone can cure the dissonance and ache -- the hand and my friend’s eye -- the shining beacon of hope from the unforgiving void of space.

This book is collection of essays, published in 2005-2009 on the Internet (this writer’s DeviantArt page, my blog and so on). Gleanings from fields of history and literature, summed up and sorted out, for the last several years, according to this writer’s tastes, interests and bias. Two of the essays (this writer’s view of the story of Hadrian and Antinous) are a part of the novel La Lune Blanche and its sequel.

 

“I Saw the Night…”

(fantasy)

 

I saw the night that walked along the slopes of the forested hills of Arcadia.

With the star-spangled blue cloak the night covered the weary earth

that emitted the heat of the sunset.

Creeping noiselessly the shadow enveloped the venerable trees

that were entwined with ivy.

The sad, pensive moon floated slowly in the sky in search of its Endymion,

la lune blanche,

and the keen stars twinkled in the incomprehensible depth of Space.

While walking over the carpet of fragrant forest grass

I moved towards the old olive grove.

Here and there, flocks of fireflies frisked, lightening mysteriously the forest

that was bewitched as it was.

Timid white moths flew from one night flower to the other

bringing the stellar duster and fragrant pollen.

“Something wonderful is waiting for me!” I thought here,

in the very heart of the great mystery of life I desired to comprehend.

Attracted to the dusk and coolness

greenish dryads frisked in the blooming May forest;

along with the goat-legged fauns and bluish nymphs

they plaited wreaths and garlands of the wild flowers.

They didn’t seem to see me and without confusion they continued

to play and dance in a ring under the crowns of the sleeping forest.

It was a pleasure watching their irrepressible passion for life itself.

It was impossible neither to bridle nor to overcome their ardor

because it came from the very bowels of their being, rooting deep in the murk.

giving neither sword nor word.

Only life, a moment, a powerful impulse was of importance to these primeval creatures

who happily have not lost links with the irrational side of being.

Because everything we call a reality today

is essentially a simple illusion and the empty fantasy of our far ancestors

who nearly lost, irretrievably,

a link to the depth of the true subconscious, intuitive being.

Like the fauns, I call you, my reader, to belaud that great skill to live;

the skill to feel, imbibe, be glad and filled like a flower in the rain,

and to wait till the drought is over, to lie in shape of a tiny seed that hides

and is detached from the hostile Universe.

Good Heavens! What a lot of mysteries are waiting for me on my way!

What a lot of them have I passed and gone round

out of my carelessness or unwillingness to live…

However that may be, I was so far onward of my way, and the uncertain forest pathway led me further, towards the old olive grove. Weak lights glimmered somewhere in the grove’s depth. Carried by the lights, I hastened to go onwards, forgetting cares, and I dived into the thicket of dark heady foliage. While walking through the high dusky arches of the closed crowns of trees, I peered at the darkness ahead of me seeking to forestall my predestined future. Ancient marble slabs underfoot covered the way to something significant and tremendous, and I tried to bridle my curiosity and did not hasten to meet the Great, remembering of my former failures. And now, very soon, the trees parted revealing a large grotto with an ancient altar to an unknown deity.

The moonlit and torch-lit marble told of many centuries or millennia of serving to the Celestial. In front of the simple altar there was a throne for the only priest endued with great power and mightiness judging by the large crowd of inquiring people around the sacred place.

The priest’s bare body was entwined with vines; he had a silver mask over his face and his lips moved in the slit of the mask as he spoke; there were no attributes of his outstanding status that associated him with the Deity. The pilgrims were different. In their faces one could read all misfortunes and calamities that brought them here. The dusty varicolored clothes, odd features, strange dialects, all this told about the long journey which the desperate ones had gone on in search of salvation. They seemed to be exhausted with pains and tiredness but they went on standing at the altar. While waiting for their turn, they had a rest with their simple baggage on the ground. Some of them slumbered, some, apparently countrymen, talked… Now, a sudden agitation like a cold windfall stirred the crowd: those who slept woke; those who talked became silent.

A clatter of horses’ hooves was heard low at a distance. The people turned their heads to the darkness from where a cavalcade appeared presently.

The equestrians and horses seemed grey, for some obscure reason, either it was dust or it was the play of light and shades. The newcomers dismounted; two men of the group came forward unsheathing their short swords on the move and began to work their way through the crowd. The frightened pilgrims parted quickly before them. The two had glittering helmets with red plumes on their heads, a military uniform was visible from under their dark tabards -- everyone could see now that the men were officers of the Praetorian cohort. The group of about dozen their fellow-travellers came after them; these were bareheaded young and middle-aged men wearing travel clothes and short purple cloaks; in each of their gold belts, jeweled hilts of their daggers glittered in the moonlight. Reaching quickly the ground at the throne, the officers parted and mingled with the group. The group of the newcomers parted too, and a tall solitary figure appeared from its middle and stood motionless. All the others stepped back and stood still.

The man standing at the throne now was tall and stooping. Wearing a long grey cloak, with hooded head, with his face in the shade, he looked like a ghost. A minute passed and then the tall man’s legs gave way under him and he fell on his knees to the Priest sitting in the throne. At the same instant, a clear young voice said, “Stand up, my good Spaniard!”

The man in grey rose from his knees and took the hood off his head. His curly grey hair was disheveled. He had a short beard, grey too; grief and disappointment furrowed his large face. He locked his hands together and began to speak, looking at the silver mask shining in the moonlight, “Hail, o holiest! Yes, I am an old ill Spaniard. I’ve come a long way and I must have help.”

The silver mask nodded the old man to continue.

The old man took breath and went on, “I lost my friend seven months ago. That was the youth I loved, as a son for me. During our journey through Egypt he died, drowning in the Nile. My grief is boundless. I still bemoan him. A new star came into being after his death, and I realized that he was divine. But mystery veils his death. I still don’t know how and why he died, whether he sacrificed himself voluntarily, or he was a victim of an accident? What if he was killed? I ask myself these questions day and night and I’ve forgotten the meaning of mental peace.” The old man drooped his eye trying to collect his thoughts and gather himself up.

The Priest’s voice rang in the silence, “And you? What do you think of the death of your beloved?”

The tall old man answered without hesitation, “I think he committed suicide.”

The silver mask nodded and the Priest asked the next question, “Was the youth ill?”

“No, he wasn’t,” the old man answered.

“Was he unhappy, disappointed, subjected to fits of melancholy? Did he suffer from unshared love?”

“No. All pleasures of the world were at his disposal. And I loved him…” the old man paused and finished, his voice broke with emotion: “… maybe too much.”

“Maybe,” the silver mask said, but did not nod.

The fragrant night wind blew. The flame of torches flickered; the invisible foliage soughed.

Then the next question from the silver mask ensued, “Was the youth inclined to meditations?”

“Yes, he meditated. And every time he asked advice of me. We read, talked and meditated together.”

“Did visions visit him? Did he hear calls of Gods?”

“N-no,” the old man said hesitatingly and then he said again firmly, “No.”

The Priest said, “Maybe, he loved his death more than he loved you. Did he want to part with you, to never see you again?”

“No! He loved me!” the old man exclaimed, his clenched hands trembling.

“He was thankful for you,” the silver mask paused before saying, “He loved you. He was young and he loved life. So, why do you think he killed himself?”

The old man shook his disheveled head, “It’s an opinion of the wisest priests and magicians I talked with.”

“Had you help in Egypt? Did the magicians help you to solve your problem?”

“Only partly. I accepted the fact of his death, but my mind never found peace.”

The reply, which the old man heard, stunned him, because the Priest said, “You cannot find peace, because you must not find it, and you’ll never find it. For ever and ever.”

The retainers were standing motionless like shadows. The Priest and the tall old man seemed to be alone in the whole world. The old man drooped his eye for a moment and then he began talking again, “I desired a revelation. But in vain. Tonight, I am waiting for your revelation as a pronouncement of sentence.”

“Revelation…” the Priest said, “Revelation may visit any mortal at least once. While thinking of her child, a mother is capable of revelation and can foresee the future. While thinking of his friend, a friend is capable of this too. It happens like this: a sensitive person is reading or working and then suddenly stands up, goes to the door and opens it. The friend is coming, but the person who opened the door, has already shaken off his absentmindedness and is surprised at the correctness of his action. Do you remember?”

“Yes, it happened to me many times”, the old man said, “I was always a sensitive person. But my bereavement… I seem to have lost this capability after the death of my boy. I spent many hours saying prayers in the Egyptian temples, but nothing happened. He rose in my mind’s eye, I saw him as though he was alive. I loved him so much, I besought the Gods to give a revelation to me, but in vain. The mystery of his death has not been unveiled to me.”

“It may be your illness. Or it’s a will of gods.”

Seeing the shining silver mask, the old man drooped his head.

Complete silence fell in the grove for some time. Both men and nature stood motionless. Here the Priest’s hands on the arms of the throne moved and he lightly stood up. One could see now that the young man was well-knit; his vine-covered body was a body of an athlete. A dear image rose before the mind of the old man for a moment. The young Priest lifted his silver masked face up to the stars, his broad chest heaved and he said, “I’ll try to help you, good man.”

Behind the throne, several broad marble steps led to the altar -- the Priest went upstairs, and paused. All those present could see now his beauty, and the old man saw only the Priest’s rich wavy hair, which the silver mask didn’t cover. The Priest knelt, and silence fell for several minutes. The tall old man put his hands together as though for a prayer. Nobody dared neither move nor utter a sound. And now, the Priest rose from his knees and faced all those present.

Solemn and impassive, he lifted his arms as though embracing the people and the entire olive grove. His eyes in the slits of the mask were turned somewhere to the darkness over the heads of the men. His lips moved and he began to speak in a loud voice, “I can see a boat… It moves slowly on a green turbid expanse of a river. A man is standing in the boat. He is young and beautiful, but I can’t discern his features, because he emits radiance. An even radiance. No, he is not dead, he is alive. The radiance is his Will to Live. The radiance is so intensive that it penetrates all around, the twilight air, dark water, the banks of the river. This radiance overcomes the darkness of Cosmos. It can overcome Time… The boat reaches the bank and moors. The youth steps lightly upon the land. His radiance has become blinding to everyone who can see it. It blinds my eyes. The youth steps forward, on the dry land, and now… A dark star! Its black light strikes upon and hides him!.. Darkness… I try… but can see nothing more… Nothing.”

The Priest staggered and lowered his arms; breath escaped his throat noiselessly. His perspired chest glittered.

The old man stood stunned. A minute passed -- the Priest started, turned away and knelt at the altar again. The old man rose from his torpor. His lips moved and he said to himself in a whisper, “A boat… twilight… a dark star…” The light breeze touched his hair.

For several minutes nothing moved in the still of the night. Kneeling, the Priest was saying prayers -- then he rose from his knees and turned round.

The old man tried to make out the eyes in the slits of the mask, but in vain. Then he apparently remembered of something, because his long grey cloak suddenly shook, he turned round and found his companions with his eyes.

Several shadows came to life again and stepped forward -- vessels and caskets with the expensive eastern incense appeared from under the fine short cloaks, the gold belts and jeweled hilts of daggers glittered in the moonlight -- the old man’s retainers placed the vessels and caskets on the marble floor at the throne.

The old man said, “I thank you. You’ve spared me time and you saw him.”

“Sorry…” The Priest’s shapely feet wearing sandals of goatskin stepped lightly downstairs. “I’ve not been able to help you. And I know why.”

“So do I…” the old man said.

“For he himself, your boy doesn’t want me to be able to.”

“I know… It’s because I am guilty towards him.” The old man’s voice was low and tuneless.

The Priest said nothing. A violet translucent cloud veiled the moon.

“Vale!” The tall stooping old man put the hood on his grey-haired head.

 “May you be warm and safe on your way home. Farwell!”

The figure in grey turned away. His younger companions quickly parted before him as the old man walked and an aisle opened up as he passed through the pilgrims. The noble travelers were quick following their sovereign, one after another. The two officers wearing black cloaks, swords sheathed now, brought up the rear.

The group of the noble men went slowly away to the darkness. Several minutes more, and the clatter of horses’ hooves was heard for some time and then faded away.

Only now I dared move from the spot in my shelter of dark foliage. I breathed deeply twice and looked at the grotto again.

The beautiful hands resting on the throne arms; the dark-haired head up; the silver mask reflecting the moonlight; the young Priest was motionless as statue. The quiet crowd of pilgrims stood before him as usual. The old olive grove seemed to sigh:

“Night in Arcadia, night in Rome,

you are an eternal companion of lost souls,

savior of fugitives, an eternal ally of lovers.

You bring the fairy starlit world to the earth.

Hearing your light pace, Man goes out to meet you.

Obeying his own heartbeat, he sinks into your depth

to set off in search of a truth

again and again,

till he gets exhausted,

drops out of the game

and smiles

bitter

at the face of his dream.”

I felt sad.

The torch-lit grotto attracted eyes.

Meanwhile the night continued the walk.

 

2006

 

Mysteries of Antinous

 

“The death carried by an unknown hand.”

(Marconi)

 

Mysteries of Antinous. The mystery of his death.

This essay should be titled “The Mystery of the Murder of Antinous”, since the Author is a votary of the less popular explanation of Antinous’ death, that he was assassinated. Instead, Author has titled the essay this way to represent the slightly differing explanation to previous theorists of the death in the Nile, realizing that the Author’s theory is far less probable. The two theories are to each other approximately as ninety to ten. Author’s principle theory is that of assassination. The second arose more recently, and Author is fascinated with it far less.

Antinous: the Divinized Boy of Bithynia, the youngest and most beautiful of ancient gods. The mystery of his death is not the only mystery surrounding his name. Indeed, his entire life seems shrouded in mystery. Time has fostered this mystery, time and humans, who have passed the tales of Antinous down, through generations. But his birth and boyhood, his adolescence and his entire life could not be entirely mysterious, of course not, for it was merely one boy’s life.

Antinous and we, his devotees. We strive to keep the case open, can find little evidence surrounding his mysterious demise. All we have are his images and the quote: “He fell into the Nile.” Ancient historians, speak of the death as ambiguously as we have here.

 

Dio Cassius:

“Antinous died either by falling into the Nile, as Hadrian writes, or, as the truth is, by being offered in sacrifice. For Hadrian… was always very curious and employed divinations and incarnations of all kinds. Accordingly, he honoured Antinous either because of his love for him or because the youth had voluntarily undertaken to die for him (it being necessary that a life should be surrendered freely for the accomplishment of the ends Hadrian had in view) by building a city on the spot where he had suffered this fate.”

 

‘Historia Augusta’:

“He lost his Antinous while sailing along the Nile and wept for him like a woman. Concerning this (de quo), there are various reports: some assert that he sacrificed himself for Hadrian, others what both his beauty and Hadrian’s excessive sensuality make obvious.”

 

Sextus Aurelius Victor:

“Others see his motives as pious and religious: for when Hadrian was desiring to prolong his life by any means, the magician proposed that someone should die voluntary on his behalf; everyone refused, Antinous alone offered himself: from that all the homage rendered to his memory.”

 

There is no proof for any of these theories. Dio Cassius, the earliest of the historians, wrote his history eighty years after the events on the Nile. All the mentions on Antinous’ death are either indirect or malevolent towards him, and to Hadrian; the mentions are either founded on rumour or slander the Emperor. In this regard all we have is allegations and educated guesses. The only reference to Antinous, which I love, comes, not from a historian, but the poet Pancrates. Here it is:

 

 “The thyme with its wooly tufts, the white lily, the purple hyacinth, the flowers of blue celandine, yes, and the rose which unfolds to the zephyrs of spring, but not before, surely, has the earth brought to bloom the flower named for Antinous.”

 

The poet Pancrates wrote it. Athenaeus wrote down such a story on the theme in 192:

 “Speaking of Alexandria, I k now that in that fair city there is a wreath called Antinoeios made from the lotus bearing that name there. This grows in marshes in the summer season; there are two colours, one resembling the rose; it is from this that the wreath properly called Antinoeios is twined; the other is called lotus, and its colour is blue. Pancrates, a poet of those regions whom we knew, showed the Emperor Hadrian when he visited Alexandria the rosy lotus as a great wonder, alleging that it was the one which should be called Antinoeios, since it sprang, so he said, from the earth when it received the blood of the Mauritanian lion which Hadrian had killed when hunting in the part of Libya near Alexandria; it was a huge creature that for a long time had ravaged the whole of Libya, of which this lion had made many places uninhabitable. Hadrian, therefore, pleased at the originality and novelty of his thought, granted him the favour of maintenance in the temple of the Muses…” (Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae, Book XV).

 

Another mention, which in my opinion is worth our attention:

“I revere, Narcissus, your shadowy reflection; I shed a tear for Hyacinthus, who grasped the cruel discus; I pity your hunting of the wild beast, Adonis. Yet the meadow of Antinous and his lovely new flower envy not pool, not fatal discus, not boar. The nymphs began to crown their tresses with the flower named after Antinous, which to this day preserves the mighty spear of the hunter…” (It is the passage from the poem on Antinous, which was found in the 1990s in the ever-expanding corpus of the Oxyrhynchus Papyri and seems to date from the reign of Diocletian, c. 285 CE; Diocletian’s accession. It is possible that the whole composition, of which the beginning is about Antinous and later praises the new Emperor, was written for a poetic competition associated with the Capitoline Games.)

 

The above-mentioned historical evidence is insufficient as evidence, it is as if all we have is the statuary. These images, serving as dumb witnesses can still tell us something. For example, his downcast eye and the capricious curve of his lips suggest that yes, he could be at once pensive and yet capricious. What about his contemplative look? Maybe the boy was just bored by posing for the artist? On the sunny day, when all pleasures of the world were waiting for him, he had to stay in and model. Really, any boy would prefer training at the palestra rather than modelling, standing before a sculptor for several hours. The slightly bowed head suggests a latent vehemence. The new reverie, which we see in portraits of Antinous as a young man, his posthumous imagery, could be regarded as a reverie of a god of his posthumous imagery. What, then, about his lifetime images? Was this new reverie a common expression of the maturing youth in his lifetime? I would suggest that it was not depicting the sad thought that his time as ephebe was over; it was not even about his mystic predestination, far from it -- that was a reverie on his new, more serious role: as heir to the Emperor’s throne. From his role as a beautiful ephebe, he was preparing for his new role or passing to the new career. This is the mystery of Antinous’ contemplative expression seen in his late portraits. His rise to imperial favourite was swift and splendid; his status was prominent and steady. He had no reasons to kill himself.

The child, taken away from his parents because of his beauty, Antinous lived at the court of the Emperor of Rome for a long while, and most probably, he was a gem of the harem of boys of the Emperor. From his childhood he knew everything of carnal love. Being together with his lover, he experienced much -- with a man like Hadrian one had to experience much -- the boy was the Emperor’s beautiful toy, with who Hadrian could do whatever he wanted. And the boy had a power over his lord’s body. The length of his hair in his portraits as a child, tells about the power. Usually, the boys in ancient Greece and Rome did not have their hair cut at such a tender age, but the hair of Antinous-child was short or rather too short for a Greek boy. To cut their long locks Greek boys asked a permission of their patrons. Undoubtedly, they made their request at minutes of intimacy, and if their request was timeless, they got their own way at the cost of a thousand of caresses. Antinous got his own way, and this proves the supposition that he had a power over his lord. What did surround the boy at the court? Strangers, schoolmates, teachers; frequent conjugations with the ageing lover; royal sex relationship. But he enjoyed royally too. He had learnt of his own price early or rather he had learnt that he was above price. He knew the luxury, well-being, carnal enjoyments. He knew and he had to accept and imbibe the whole cynicism of the life, with the life at the court, like life at any royal court, being cynicism-saturated. He was reared and fostered for giving carnal pleasures, and he learnt to take the pleasures. And then he made his choice. He got reserved in the realm of his pleasures; if it were not so, then he would aspire to reach a prominency at the politics of the Emperor, but the boy did nothing of the kind. In her book, Madame Yourcenar noted this his trait, and it’s absolutely right, in my opinion, but her unexpected, inconsequent conclusion concerning the supposition that such a healthy, self-sufficient young thing could suffer so much that he killed himself is absolutely fallacious. He was not reared for suicide; he was nursed for pleasure. Hadrian would not let the boy commit suicide. The death of the boy was an awful unexpectedness to Hadrian (“He fell into the Nile”). The boy was the thing next his heart, and if the boy was a beautiful, well-groomed animal and if we dislike this fact, then this, like any other imperfectness of his behaviour, which we did not expect, must be as dear to us as an irregularity imperfectness of beloved features. Hadrian made him a person of the kind. A god must be a person of the kind. A pagan god. My god. From pleasures of his age he was passing to pleasures of the next age. And then he was killed.

Antinous’ posthumous image as a mystic-minded person, as a person inclined to suicide, living for the benefit of the Emperor or for executing the will of the gods, belongs to Hadrian, his patron, ageing lover and first admirer, the man who deified him. “He fell into the Nile” -- that was all the man could inscribe, that was all a grief-stricken man could inscribe -- either grief-stricken or scared of enticing suspicion. “He fell into the Nile” with these words, Hadrian gave himself away completely, is how I rationalize the death, considering the next interpretation, one of murder. An ill unbalanced man, sophisticated but mighty, powerful enough to order the murder of Antinous; such a person was Hadrian. Except for the account that Hadrian “wept for him like a woman”, I do not sense a sneer or anything mocking in these words, they read as real tragedy.

On the other hand, these words could be left for us at Hadrian’s behest; even though his bemoaning took place, it might mean a tardy repentance of the murder. But Hadrian’s words appear like those of a grief-stricken man; he seems unable to write anything more. Either unable or did not dare? Was Hadrian a murderer or a man who knew who was the murderer -- in the light of the love story, this possibility is blasphemous, yet not outrageous. Indeed, there would be nothing obscure in the supposition that Hadrian could kill Antinous, if it were not for the Emperor’s sequent behaviour. In the boy’s lifetime, Hadrian worshipped him -- worshipping if not the boy himself then the boy’s images, for the images were always divinely beautiful: “What Ganymede was more fair?” The boy could serve him as a lovely living toy, whom Hadrian dressed in silks, gold, flowers and jewellery -- or undressed as he pleased. But the boy’s image, as though automatically becoming sacred and cultivated as early as in his own lifetime in virtue of Hadrian’s views and tastes of a Greek admirer. And then, after the boy’s death Hadrian’s behaviour looked defiant. He not only displayed his grief bidding defiance to Rome, but he deified his beloved. This does not appear to be a cover up. His persistent honoring of the boy ruined Hadrian’s reputation to his contemporaries, and he was not afraid of doing so for posterity. Nothing could stop him; he was not afraid of anything, even ridicule itself. As we know, even the one, who is afraid of nothing, is afraid of ridicule, but Hadrian acted as though he did not notice it. It looked like obsession, as if he were going mad, and his madness was beautiful. Defiant to everyone who was against him, he was not afraid to look ridiculous-such homage takes away my suspicion.

Hadrian could have grieved briefly and then carried on. But he did not stop: “His grief has echoed down the ages,” which testifies in his favour and relieves him of such accusations. However it could also be proposed that such dedication confirms the accusation, and suggested that Hadrian killed the boy in order to deify Antinous. His affection for the boy, and his unstable behaviour make this idea plausible. What if the boy could not bear Hadrian’s affections any longer? What if the boy had no other way to free himself from the clutches of his ill, ageing lover but suicide? “His beauty and Hadrian’s excessive sensuality” could be the very motive for suicide. The explanation of suicide out of despair is another version, which I am willing to admit as feasible, though with far less probability.

Madame Yourcenar notes the boy’s aversion to death and his willingness for such pleasures, which I regard as speculative, and yet she draws a fallacious conclusion on his suicide. Some ascribe decadent feelings to him, the healthy beautiful young thing. Was Antinous decadent? There were decadent men in his time; Hadrian was decadent in a way. But the boy was not one of them -- “a healthy nature [Antinous’] was pushed into intercourse with a diseased one” -- he would enjoy decadence living near Hadrian, but it never became him, because of his premature demise. Madame Yourcenar adduces one episode, which could have serve as an inducement to murder the boy. It was the ceremony of the consecration of the temple of Venus in Rome when Hadrian put his purple robe on Antinous’ shoulders in public. This gesture seems plausible, and at such a time this gesture could have doomed Antinous. Perhaps his love was assassinated, the Emperor remembered this act and blamed himself: “Could the whole apotheosis and the cult around it be solely guilty remorse?” The boy’s devotees always ascribed sublime or decadent feelings to him in order to elevate his personality in the eyes of all others, to raise him under the opinion of their contemporaries, to make him not only a pagan deity but also a darling and idol of intellectual society. A comprehensible and perfectly natural wish, but it steers us away from the truth of Antinous’ personality. The boy was neither an intellectual nor a devotee of spirituality. He was a mere boy. He had everything he wanted, and he never experienced what his devotees describe. Yes, his portraits show him in deep thought, which we can see in the agonizingly beautiful curve of his eyebrows, and we can see the shades of care in his face. As I’ve suggested already, this thought was towards his new duties and the ensuing pleasures he had ahead of him: the new role of a prince and successor, for it was a difficult role, and this new care was imprinted on the face of the maturing boy.

“He foresaw the decline of his star, he suffered the loss of his adolescent beauty”. “He was more than ever insecure and anxious about his own future”! “He gave a way to the new star” (to the more mature man who was 12 yours older than Antinous, and who was adopted only in 136!) Pure nonsense! “His days of an ephebe were numbered therefore his days at the court were numbered too”. Yes, his days of an ephebe were numbered, but his days in Hadrian’s heart were not numbered, and the boy knew of that. His child, his consort, Antinous had become Hadrian’s own child by the autumn of 130. The boy had no reason to kill himself. All the consequences of the death and the subsequent apotheosis testify in favour of my words and refute the conclusion of Royston Lambert. Lambert’s reasoning stems from some very scanty sources, left by the ancient historians and writers decades and centuries after the death of Antinous. All the mentions of Antinous and his death are either malevolent or founded on rumour and indirect mentions are mostly benevolent. There were probably other mentions, benevolent, verbose, direct -- sure, and there were the real memoirs of Hadrian, but nothing of these have survived. Nearly all of what related to a benevolent response to Antinous and his royal patron has been destroyed. With gross confidence Lambert speaks about the future dismissal and Hadrian’s displeasure of the inevitable advance of age and changes in Antinous’ physique and look. There is no evidence to the murder, but there is no evidence that Antinous had a dismissal ahead of him, either, and that Hadrian disliked the changes in his physique is not enough. One never bemoans an ex-favourite in the way Hadrian did so. I can’t understand the logic behind Lambert’s theory.

A point I have yet to address concerning the death on the Nile is: how could a strong young swimmer be drowned in a river? He could do it himself, having fastened a load to his body. There is no suggestion that this was the case (“He fell into the Nile.”) But that was not necessary in the Nile with its treacherous currents. If it were a suicide, the proficient swimmer would have had to dip in waters and to swim excessively in the hope that the tireless eddies and currents of the stream would devour him sooner or later. But how could he be sure that his body would be found? Why did the young strong swimmer commit suicide in a river? What for? To be deified after his death. There is no evidence that the boy was superstitious enough or obsessed by the idea of the deification. Besides, one does not sacrifice stealthily. Especially when it is a sacrifice for the life of the Emperor, for the event is too significant. What’s more: could the boy have been illiterate and unable to write? Why did he not leave a short or verbose note explaining his actions? How could he feel sure that his body would be found and his sacrifice would be appreciated? He who lived the life of a prince, could he not have called upon menservants -- his favourites -- to go to the place of his future sacrifice? The menservants could witness his heroic action. He did not do this, for he was killed.

Madame Yourcenar describes the Antinous’ last evening, spent with Hadrian on board the barge of Lucius Ceionius Commodus. It makes sense that someone with a view to killing Antinous would set the date for the barge trip, in a solitary place on the bank of the Nile, where the hirelings-assassins could be lurking in wait for him. What took place there, in a solitary setting could be an imitation of suicide.

I agree with Royston Lambert on the matter that the explanation of the death of Antinous as a voluntary victim for searching of his entrails to ascertain omens won’t hold water. Lambert convincingly refutes the accidental explanation. Indeed, it was unlikely that the boy was unguarded at the Nile festival, and it was unlikely that the accident could be so isolated and mysterious. Sure for an accident to occur, but for nobody to notice it at the feast, there be no witnesses implies a deliberate isolation. The deliberate isolation, at first glance, implies suicide, that is if Antinous had a reason to kill himself. But he had not.

The date of Antinous’ death seems speculative, also. It was in late October of the year 130, which fell during the days of the Nile festival. This is the date defined by votaries of the explanation of a heroic self-sacrifice. What if the death took place after the festival or not long before it? In this case, the theory of an accidental death becomes more probable. As for the theory of murder, for the hirelings-assassins it was more convenient to create the idea of suicide within the period of the Nile festival and the commemoration of the death of Osiris, which was the traditional period for sacrifices in the river. I beg to differ with Lambert that the festival was joyless that year. True, the Nile flood for two years had been debilitative, but natives had a reason to be joyous. The Emperor of Rome, who had come along with his vast entourage and received a rapturous welcome, was with them that year. Surely this is sufficient reason for the festival to be as joyous and noisy as it usually was. Now, among the festive fracas there was the inexplicable isolation of Antinous, when he shook of the company of his attendants, menservants or friends for a while and disappeared. Why? There is no answer, or the answer indicates a trap. It shouldn’t have been hard to lure the young man; for example, an evildoer could have been involved in a secret tryst with him. What if the young man was as excessively sensual as his royal patron? What if the life of Antinous at the court was a continuing saga of romantic adventures and secret rendezvous? His age, his privileged status and perhaps his latent mettle spurred on such a sordid life. Antinous’ known enemies were far away, in Rome, at the festival he was surrounded by his courtiers, but assassins could have been contracted for the occasion. Hadrian’s entourage was numerous, so vast that hirelings could find their place in it. As a votary of the unpopular theory, I can repeat: all we have is his images and the phrase “He fell into the Nile”. What can we extract from the phrase? There is a great probability of an accidental fall, suggestive that the body was dressed when it was found. An approximate probability of this assertion is 90%. What does it give to us? Either an accident or a murder -- the approximate correlation is 50 to 50. On the accidental explanation: if it arose then, with the probability 50 to 50, we can believe that there was a sign of a blow on the head of the corpse. An overturned boat as well as a hand of a murderer could cause the sign. The correlation between the two probabilities is 50 - 50.

The theory of the self-sacrifice seems to be unsound, in my view. This theory was held dear to starry-eyed Victorian historians, experts and devotees of Antinous.

The most ardent admirer of Antinous, Hadrian, was the first to exalt the boy’s personality. Doing so, Hadrian seemed to justify himself, as though it was not his lust for young flesh that attracted him to the beautiful child, not his desire for the divine body of Antinous, but a platonic love for the boy’s sublime soul and divine essence, which Hadrian recognized earlier than anyone else, a view seemingly confirmed after the death in the Nile. Thanks to Hadrian we know little of Antinous in human form, this is also somewhat owed to the worst enemies of Antinous’ memory, the Christian zealots.

Hadrian’s fervor in his exaltations of the boy’s personality is not surprising if we admit his innocence concerning the death and his sincere belief in Antinous’ suicide. Believing that, he considered himself guilty of inciting the act -- which is understandable given those suggested circumstances. The sense of guilt made his grief yet harder. He believed in the boy’s suicide and forced the opinion onto his people. What he believed should be what we all believe.

After Antinous’ death the Emperor’s behavior was frenzied. He forbade defiance of him amongst his contemporaries; when justifying his passion for the boy. He considered he was guilty. What of? Perhaps he had not loved Antinous enough, perhaps he loved Antinous too much -- however that may be, he was the guardian of the young boy therefore he was guilty of the boy’s death, directly or indirectly, as he had been negligent. His beloved boy who served him as a toy, died through Hadrian’s fault in any case, whether it was suicide or not. But Antinous was killed. He was killed because Hadrian had no mind to removing the young man from his court, even after Antinous’ time as an ephebe was over, which was imminent.

I hold the opinion that Antinous was a friend and lover to Hadrian. Their affair was unusual; this pederastic affair cannot be regarded in the light of other such affairs that occurred during the same time period, since Hadrian could not be regarded as an ordinary man. He was the emperor of Rome; their love affair did not keep within the framework of the traditional pederastic relationship of the time, or the classical time of ancient Greece. Besides, Hadrian was old; by the time of the great eastern tour, his age of erastes, conditioned by the Greece tradition, had long since past. True, the Emperor was a great devotee of Greek traditions (nicknamed “Greekling”,) but he was old and ill. Obviously, he did not consider a substitution of Antinous for another, younger ethebe. By 130, Antinous had become more than a playmate, but also an heir to the childless emperor, acting as both child and consort. Their affair was extraordinary; it was out of the generally accepted framework. Personally I believe that Hadrian was about to declare Antinous as his successor. Perhaps, in the future, by the will of Hadrian, there were to be two co-rulers: Antinous for the eastern half of the Empire, and a counterpart for the western half. This other co-ruler might have been Lucius Ceionius Commodus. As a ruler Lucius suited many, notably his kinsmen in the Senate, while Antinous suited nobody; nobody and someone in particular.

The main question of any investigation: Cui bono? To whose advantage? Who derived benefit from the murder? We know the answer, the man who would become the adopted son of Hadrian, finally, in 136. Other than that man, the death of Antinous suited several others moreso, Sabina, for instance. It is said that the woman was like a mother to Antinous. What else was Hadrian to say about his wife in public? Again the images of Antinous serve as clues. Royston Lambert tells that “visitors to the Villa Adriana would have been confronted by images of him [Antinous] everywhere but would have had to search hard for portraits of her [Sabina]: twenty-two sculptures of the favourite have been unearthed there but only two of the Empress”. Two to twenty-two, we can assume these numbers correlated with the quantity of their images there, in the boy’s lifetime. We can imagine how the woman felt every time she considered the proportion of Antinous’ images to her own. I’d wager that her feelings were not maternal when she considered these quantities, far from it. She loved and hated her husband, and she wished to strike at Hadrian’s heart, once again, having already refused to birth a child for the Emperor. She may have orchestrated or taken part in the plot against Antinous, and taken secret joy from the boy’s death.

She may have been privy to the details of the plot, but she was not at the head of it. “A jealous murder” on the part of Sabina, it sounds plausible and enticing for me, but even I never considered the theory in earnest. Though I could understand the state of possessive jealousy, especially of a woman like the wife of the emperor, and I always regarded her wish to kill Antinous as perfectly natural under such circumstances. But the circumstances of her personal life suggest less malevolence. Her conjugal life was distressful and disappointing from the beginning, but it was not seemingly essential to her thanks to good friends who formed a warm circle around her. This could be quite enough to make her life more than bearable, and could appease her bloodlust, unlike those female characters from the Greek tragedies. She could commit the murder because she felt jealous; on the other hand, she could not commit a murder because she was either one of most enlightened persons of her time or an ordinary Roman matron easy to get calmed down and satisfied with the small pleasures of welfare.

The next suspect is Hadrian's brother-in-law, jealous old Julius Servianus. Both Hadrian and he always harboured a grudge against each other. Next, Julius’ grandson, Hadrian’s great-nephew, the only male blood relative of the Emperor, Pedanius Fuscus, who seemed to Hadrian’s jaundiced mind unsuitable as a successor. I suspect both of being involved in a plot to kill Antinous. However, as addressed, there might not have been a plot. Perhaps such accusations were attempts to sully the reputations of those seeking succession. The old man was sophisticated and mighty. But the crime may have been an early experiment of a talented tyro, the 32-year-old man who wished to take the place of Antinous. Or the old man and the talented tyro united for the common cause. They were in positions to prompt the explanation that was to satisfy Hadrian completely, in the time of his mourning, the version of self-sacrifice for his life. Suppose, the conspirators succeeded in that, with Hadrian vehement of his own guilt; no wonder the talented tyro or the mighty senator succeeded in fooling their contemporaries. It does, though, seem surprising that they could have fooled historians for millennia since.

The paranoia of Hadrian’s last years, when he lost his favourite: “This was a final blow.” “His innocent ninety-year-old brother-in-low Servianus”… Obeying to the Emperor’s order, Servianus made away with himself -- yes, he did it, because there was nothing left for him but to die. He wanted to die, because he had lost his beloved grandson, the young man for whom he killed for, perhaps on several occasions.

Lucius Ceionius Commodus, Aelius Caesar by the time of Hadrian’s last years. The young (though not so young) man was Caesar only for a year; he died of a violent and intentional, in my opinion, overdose of his medicine. Lucius Ceionius Commodus had become seriously ill, exhausted with various pleasures. There are several potential explanations for his death, all of them connected with his illness. One of those was an intentionally administered medicine overdose, the most fantastic and unnatural, but plausible, explanation, in my view. His murderer could invent nothing better, for time pressed. This aptly timed overdose happened shortly before his speech of thanks that he was to deliver to the Emperor and Senate, in regards to his adoption. The overdose was not accidental and was carried out by an unknown assailan. In my view, Commodus was another victim of this “innocent old man” Servianus, who acted in favour of his grandson. “Incoherent threats and wild penalties”, “a reign of terror” followed the death of Hadrian’s favourite. Shortly after Commodus’ death, the plot of Pedanius Fuscus to secure the throne was revealed. His grandfather decided that Fuscus would not, again, be passed-over. After the plot was revealed, there was an investigation, featuring interrogations and torture. Here the Emperor could learn the truth of his beloved Antinous’ demise. Fuscus surely knew much about his grandfather’s devious plan, and the Emperor could have learned his deceased lover was in fact a victim of assassins sent by Servianus. Hadrian executed his great-nephew and ordered Servianus to commit suicide. But instead he kept silent of what he had learnt. Antinous’ was now a deity, the alleged suicide of the boy was accepted by believers -- to save the Emperor’s life the boy carried out a will of gods -- if Hadrian was to keep his lover’s new reputation, it was too late to change anything. Hadrian had learnt that the New Greek god, his loved-one did not commit the heroic self-sacrifice but was killed, and it would be Hadrian’s greatest secret. He told nobody about the truth he had learnt, for Hadrian wished to honor Antinous by deifying him. The final blow was not the death of Lucius; the final blow in Hadrian’s life was what he had learnt of the murder of Antinous. His immortal pedestal would be removed if people learned that he was murdered. Following this, Hadrian’s “reign of terror” eclipsed the “times of felicity” in Rome. The so-called reign of terror supports my theory.

Antinous the God. Antinous had been deified by the wisest men of his time, through proper ceremony, acting on Hadrian’s order. Hadrian was ahead of his times, in every period of history there are men like this. Leonardo Da Vinci, for example. The ancient Romans in general were advanced people. The Roman empire consisted of many intellectuals: scholars, writers, artists, rhetorician and architects, all inadvertently contributing to this race of man, advanced for their time. Hadrian was one of those men. He was an artist who founded a new religion; without him, we would not have the beautiful cultus.

The way Hadrian endeared people to his deceased lover strikes us for its grandiose scale of romantic gesture, but at the same time it portrays the man as helpless and vulnerable. Hadrian was not alone, he was surrounded by a team of starry-eyed intellectuals and aesthetes like he, and their attitude emasculated the image of Antinous—through the commissioning of marble sculptures full of voluptuousness and provoking ecstasy. We know much of Antinous, the god; we know little of Antinous, the boy. The Emperor himself volunteered to be Antinous’ historian, but this results in slight knowledge, heaped in speculation. Apparently, there was something to keep secret. Aside from the ecstatic veneration, there was also the real everyday life.

And so, he had been reared at the imperial court. He gave himself to his lord at any time of day or night. He received fondling and delights of a much older man, and he perfected himself in the art of love. Boys like he surrounded him, and the turbulent life of the court surrounded them. A life at any court does not distinguish with a great spirituality. The senators of ancient Rome, noblemen, courtiers, men of the Emperor, who himself was “the cunning and vulgar politician”, those were worldly persons, so the young boy could not acquire spirituality there. The pursuit of pleasure, cynicism, intrigues -- such are the distinctive characteristics of life at any royal court.

Hadrian had other boys at his disposal. But he chose Antinous alone. The reasons for the Emperor’s choice might be weighty, but we can only make suppositions.

Primarily, it was the boy’s physique and beauty that improved with age which drew Hadrian in. In ancient times, Greek boys did not cut their hair short till their first facial hair appeared; then, and only then, would they ask their father or patron to allow him to cut his hair. But there is no one portrait of Antinous with long hair. That rich, wavy hair that made him look like a lovely girl! Hadrian loved to play with it so much! But Hadrian permitted Antinous to cut his hair early, permitting at first request, and we can suppose that the boy’s request was met for the cost of a thousand caresses, proving the power he held over his lord.

It seems the boy could have what he wanted, having attracted the constancy of the Emperor? There, in the paedagogium, all the boys were good-looking; they knew how to love too. There must have been something special in the character of Antinous to have attracted Hadrian permanently. Maybe it was the special combination of a mental and physical health that makes a young boy a bearer of mystery and endows him with a magnetism -- to attract enkindling imagination, and to encourage the lust of men like Hadrian? Really, one’s attractive physique and attractiveness is much rarer than one’s wit, therefore it is more precious. Because everyone is clever in their own way, but not everyone is sexually attractive by nature.

It was not the “great road” which helped them to meet each other. They met by design rather than by chance. Within the Greek city of Claudiopolis, Antinous was considered one of the most beautiful boys, the most beautiful in Hadrian’s view it would seem. Transported to the Greek city Nicomedia, and to it’s the main district of Bithynia, Antinous would be one of the most beautiful boys of that city too. He was intended for Hadrian, knowing the Emperor’s tastes, the wealthy civic elders of the city chose the boy for his beauty was considered worthy of Caesar’s chambers. On the first day of Hadrian’s stay in Claudiopolis, the elders brought him to the Emperor. Probably, the young Antinous served as a cupbearer at Hadrian’s first dinner in the city. Though the boy may have caught Hadrian’s eye accidentally, it seems unlikely; his attention to the boy was, more likely, drawn deliberately. The boy was brought to him by hand, as a present. Antinous knew how he was to behave in the Emperor’s presence. How their first meeting went, one can only guess. Was there first meeting at a meal or in an organized meeting? The boy, who spoke Greek with an eastern pronunciation, would not have wowed the Emperor with dialogue, but rather beauty. What was first, a kiss or an eye? On first encounter did Hadrian suggest a half-playful request to undress? Antinous would have carried it out readily; without a false shame removing his tunic. Antinous was dazzled by the man beforehand; either by Hadrian himself or the splendor of his name and rank, regardless of why: both of them were dazzled by one another. It is my firm belief that before their romance fell into place, Hadrian spent some time contemplating the lithe well-groomed body of the 12-year-old boy, and most probably a part of the time he spent kneeling. The boy took this enamoring effect for love and left his home voluntary. This new found passion rarely stands the test of time, and what was considered love passes away. Perhaps later, in Rome, it happened to Antinous, but by then would have been too late. Sophistication and habit took the place of the passion; the knowledge he obtained, living at the imperial court and taught in the paedagogium, helped him mature. How his adolescence would be spent decided from the first time they saw each other: a kiss and eye, the love and enamoring.

Bedazzled by an emperor’s grandeur, such love hardly ever lasts. However, by the time their love affair tragically ended, the beautiful boy had turned into a beautiful young man with thoughts and interests concentrated upon the realm of his own pleasures -- Madame Yourcenar notes this in her book, and devotees of the Divine Boy should not see this as a shame. Such was the time; such was the setting. The boy had become an instrument for entertaining his lord, who in turn pampered Antinous, wishing to thank him for the enjoyment garnered from his young body. Hadrian hid the true nature of the boy in his usual passionate manner. That was the mystery of Antinous, which the grief-stricken Hadrian created. The mystery was the fact that the real Antinous could not commit suicide. What Hadrian hid was the mental and physical health of the boy. But in Madame Yourcenar’s text, the boy does commit suicide. As he is described above, we can understand this. The outstanding writer paints a vivid portrait of his character, in soft yet explicit tones, and then suddenly, she writes of this young person performing the uncharacteristic action of taking his own life. Antinous could not commit suicide, and his personality isn’t affected by that. Through this fact he has not ceased to be a god. Someone needs to right the fallacious points of this god. Write the story as the boy was, the boy who was unable to kill himself, because he was too young and loving life too much to die voluntarily. He wouldn’t have been drawn to death; he was in love with life. We have this god who used to be in love with carnal pleasures during his lifetime, the new and most beautiful of ancient gods. He must be written like this, the god of the Greeks and Romans during their period of decline. It has already been addressed that I do not consider Antinous decadent by virtue of his origins and young nature. Maybe if he was born in a palace, but he was not, he knew the difference between an ordinary citizenry life and a life of luxury, in the Emperor’s court. He did not want to die. He was a martyr, like any god who was killed. This conclusion rouses a whirl of responsive emotions and feelings in our minds, a desire to understand the truth, by means of rational guesswork, at least.

One more mystery of Antinous is his origin. Hadrian did not hide the origin, mentioning it in the epitaph on the obelisk, which he erected for his late lover, but, agonizingly, the place of birth is chipped off the stone. The original admittance suggests that the origin of Antinous was respectable. His enemies, who undoubtedly were much more numerous than his friends in his lifetime, who got more and more numerous and unappeasable after his death, and who no doubt damaged the obelisk, made his origin secret -- and the worst enemies of Antinous were the people who had come centuries after his death, Christian bigots.

The uncertainty of his origins leads in to another mystery surrounding the boy-god, was Antinous Hadrian’s illegitimate son? Shocking at first, it may seem, but it isn’t a ridiculous suggestion. The resemblance of the boy and the man supports the idea. Indeed, Hadrian could have illegitimately impregnated a woman, and then returned the boy to his father’s household, where Hadrian could give into his irrepressible inclination and form to develop an incestuous connection with his illegitimate son -- nothing here is out of the realm of plausibility. He could admire his boy, could dress the boy with silks, gold, flowers and jewellery, yet I have come to the conclusion that Antinous was not a son of Hadrian.

Hadrian’s demise was horrible. His mental and physical suffering was immeasurable. Yet I do not agree that there were only “a few moments of lucidity of his final months”. On the contrary, his mind was quite clear for he could compose such a chef-d’oeuvre as his last poem:

Animula vagula, blandula,

hospes comesque corporis,

quae nunc abibis in loca

pallidula, rigida, nudula,

nec, ut soles, dabis iocos. (Little spirit, gentle and wandering, companion and guest of the body, in what place will you now abide, pale, stark and bare, unable as you used, to play?)

I won’t sum up my conclusions, since this essay is not a scholarly study, it is rather a splash of emotions of one of the devotees of this Divinized Boy, an emotional monologue, and a slightly dramatized account that describes my theory of what happened during the life of Hadrian and Antinous’ love affair, one that reconstructs the real chain of events from beginning to end. What I will offer in conclusion, is one more hypothesis concerning one of the sculptures of Antinous. It is one of the sculptures in the Egyptian style that was carved in Italy for the Villa Adriana. It depicts Antinous wearing the calantica, headdress of a Pharaoh-deity, and a pleated loincloth. This image seems most unsuccessful; having less resemblance to other sculptures of the boy, and is divinely repulsive to me. It looks as though the image was created in an attempt to plunge a believer into awe. Here in this sculpture, Antinous possesses a cold, thin face, this is what repulses me. We have got used to the plumpness of his cheeks and chin. Neither appears in this particular sculpture, because in my view this is a copy of the posthumous mask of solid gold created for Antinous, which has since disappeared, owed to being made of gold. There may have been several masks made, all have disappeared, though one may remain in the unfound grave of Antinous. As for the copy of the mask, we can see it, since it was a form for the face of the statue of Antinous-Osiris. The body of the statue differs dramatically from other depictions of the boy’s body. I do not mean that Antinous-Osiris is taller than the real Antinous was, or that the sculpture is in the Egyptian style. Something odd is in the form of the shoulders of the half naked body. The shoulders are thrown far back, they are straighter than usual, even bonier, and the shoulders differ from those we have got used to seeing in other statues. That’s what I think: if the face of the statue is a mould or a copy of a posthumous mask then why the whole body could not be a copy of a mould? There was not only a posthumous mask of his face but also a mould of his body. In this statue, one of his feet is flat before the other and yet the pose of the body is one lying down. That’s what causes the oddness of the statue with the cold features of a god.

My theory is simple: Antinous didn’t have to die. My reasoning is simple: I believe and try to prove that Antinous had no reason to kill himself. I agree with those who believe that an accident with no witnesses was scarcely possible. What have we then? A murder. Antinous didn’t have to die. There was the apotheosis -- all right -- I have deified him in my heart too, but instead of the apotheosis, I would prefer the boy to have lived for longer. Alive at all costs, alive by right or wrong, and in that event I would learn of him and deify him in my heart, anyway.

 

2005

 

SALVE, STORIA!

(scholia)

 

…For me, the god Thoth-Hermes as a god of written language and magic is a most important deity of Pantheon of Great Gods. The ancients reckoned written language to be a magic. “Grimoire” (a book of spells) is just old French for “grammar”. I agree with them to a certain extent: writing and reading are a kind of magic for me, still a magic, though I began reading when aged six. La magie blanche. Really, when you come to think of it, thanks to written language, we can know what people said, thought and did centuries ago, in the old and distant past, when there were neither cinematograph nor dictaphones.

…My beloved Emperor is Hadrian, and not the Emperor Elagabalus, but after I read the book The Life of Antoninus Heliogabalus by Aelius Lampridius (which I liked in general, though I’d argue with the author of the book) I’ve written the poem with a working title of “Heliogabalus and Others”. The following text is a word for word translation of the poem:

 

The quill paused.

Everyone expected a sequel. Take courage, beloved Emperor!

They shouted, “Let’s kill him again!”

His silhouette deepening --

the candle-end of consciousness decreasing.

“There he is! He who acts.” Cassocks dance in a ring again.

Footmen change portraits. “That’s the very one who helped!”

We mint his silhouettes.

Laurels, triumphs, victory robes. New syllables of insight.

Those who were in raptures

changed the object of adoration -- the former fell into disuse.

The diadem doesn’t fit? We’ll adapt the head!

A moment of grandeur evanescent.

Eternity is humans’ oblivion, and the lowest of the dead know

the awakening in the land of the living.

Everyone expected a sequel, but

the quill paused.

 

…My favorite Roman Emperor in Suetonius’s The Lives of the Twelve Caesars is the Emperor Vitellius. I like the completeness of Vitellius’s image and the wholeness of his nature, and also there was the interesting story of his lover Asiaticus. The story may be a wonderful plot of an entertaining novel. In Suetonius’s book there is one emperor, who I dislike and even hate. It’s Tiberius. The old man was said to kill the children who gave him pleasure. It’s mean.

…Talking of literature again, while reading ancient authors (Plato, Martial, Suetonius, Petronius) I realized the manner of their writing was so close to me, to the frame of my mind, to my apprehension. Or perhaps that was a matter of the good translation of their works? Maybe. Sometimes, I feel like arguing with the ancient authors as though they are my contemporaries. Reading as transcendence. First reading The Life of Heliogabalus by Aelius Lampridius, I thought: a new book should be written. An American writer should write a book of comments to Lampridius’s book, the comments written by the Emperor Elagabalus himself or more truly by his luminous immortal spirit. Imagine: the Emperor Elagabalus’s spirit reads Lampridius's book and he dislikes it; he has had patience for a long while silently, and now he can't stand that any loner and he comes to a decision that he has to write a refutation, a dementi as it were; maybe he is about to do it with the help of a modern day mortal writer, who should do it, taking a dry historical fact and fleshing it out with colour and drama. He comments and we learn what is true, what is exaggerations, and what is outrageous lies in the book, which we know. The reader will have much to think about. For, as I think, here and there Lampridius’s book seems exactly what’s needed in the current politics conjecture of his time, a kind of blackening reputation of the person who could not reply. Note: the “bloodthirsty beast of antiquity”, young Elagabalus seems quite tolerant to ideological opponents of paganism. As Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848–1907) says in his book A Rebours, Tertullian “lived in stormy times, at a period of fearful stress and strain, under Caracalla, under Macrinus, under that amazing personage, the High-Priest of Emessa, Elagabalus; and he had gone on calmly and quietly writing his sermons, composing his dogmatic treatises, preparing his apologies and homilies, while the Roman Empire was tottering to its foundations, while the frantic follies of Asia and the foul vices of Paganism were at their worst; he was preaching with an air of perfect self-possession carnal abstinence, frugality of diet, sobriety of dress at the very moment when, treading on powder of silver and sand of gold, his head crowned with a tiara, his robes studded with precious stones, Elagabalus was at work, among his eunuchs, at women s tasks, calling himself by the title of Empress and every night lying with a new Emperor, selecting him for choice from the ranks of the Court barbers and scullions, or the charioteers from the Circus.” The later followers, sympathizers and Christian brothers of Tertullian hardly ever could show a tolerance like that of the High-Priest of Emessa. No doubt, as a hotheaded crown-bearing boy, the Emperor Elagabalus was could commit some effusive acts -- but there are the ridiculously numerous follies, which Lampridius and others clumsily impute him, which makes shrug shoulders. Personally I can explain in a positive way at least two of the follies, and an American well-educated author can do it hundredfold better than me. There should be much humor, irony, self-irony and even bed scenes in the future narration. A delicious concoction. The luminous immortal spirit of the Emperor Elagabalus along with his modern day author should hold Lampridius and others up to ridicule. The best example (or a paragon?) of a novel as a book of comments is Nabokov’s greatest novel Pale Fire. A new Pale Fire should be written by an American or a British writer. A British writer is better because the British authors’ sarcasm is killing sometimes.

…Epitaph: “He knew how death hunts at distance; dug his own grave with both hands and heart scornful of mortal childishness. May the Sun of such wisdom shine long beneath the Sun.”

 

2007

 

The Winged Man-Lion

 

Seeing the bronze statue of David by Andrea del Verrocchio (1435–1488) and musing. It is claimed that Verrocchio modeled the statue after one handsome pupil in his workshop, namely, young Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519). As far as we know, Verrocchio was an artist who strictly followed nature in his works, so in the exterior of David, we can see now a portrait of Leonardo who was going on 18. Leon-ardo. His eye, his smile… Awesome. As a red-haired young man, most likely he had a milky-white skin and perhaps some golden freckles over the bridge of his nose and beneath his lower eyelids. Taking into consideration his enormous inborn curiosity, I would call his face study-wearied. Obviously, he sleeps few hours a day and his life of an apprentice was hard. But he smiles -- smiling the astute smile, looking vigorous and delightful. Perhaps at the years of apprenticeship, he begins to follow contrapposto in his art. As his biographers say, his manner of standing at a moment of repose was like the statue, mentioned above, shows, right according to contrapposto, an Italian term meaning “counterpoise”, used in the visual arts to describe “a human figure standing with most of its weight on one foot so that its shoulders and arms twist, off-axis from the hips and legs.” This graceful pose is simply most comfortable, as we can see or feel if we strike the attitude. The only inexact detail is the sword in the statue’s right hand, for Leonardo was a left-hander. Once, Verrocchio painted a group and he gave Leonardo the task of drawing in one figure. Leonardo painted an angel whose grace and subtle beauty stands out, even today. The story runs that good old Verrocchio wept on first seeing it, wept unselfish tears of joy for the fact that his pupil, the talented student had far surpassed him, and he attempted to paint never again. This is but a legend. Along with the famous early Renaissance Italian artist and sculptor from Florence Donatello (c.1386-1466) Leonardo revived contrapposto, which was followed by Michelangelo, Raphael and other artists of the High Renaissance. Later he invented his “sfumato”. An inventor and artist without peer, Leonardo was a strong man in his lifetime. “He could twist horseshoes between his fingers, bend bars of iron across his knees, disarm every adversary, and in wrestling, running, vaulting, and swimming he had no equals. He was especially fond of horses, and in the joust often rode animals that had never before been ridden, winning prizes from the most daring.” These achievements were possible by means of training from his young age, so the image of the young warrior and hero became Leonardo in his lifetime ever so much. In love with the bronze David by Verrocchio, in love with young gold-haired violet-eyed Leonardo, I shall end with my prose poem:

 

The artist with the cat-like perfect body,

the graceful snake, the wise nocturnal bird,

whose procreations have the subtle smell

of hemlock, belladonna, myrrh and nard.

The bard, he used to enamour Dream Weaver.

The mage, he fostered every mystery of life.

His name was Leonardo -- Winged Man-Lion.

His keen violet eyes perceived so much.

The transient below could never stop

his flight to other heights -- in streams of humans

he saw himself as adorable model.

 

2009

 

Writing in the Margins

(essay)

 

Oscar Wilde and Anton Chekhov. I don’t know whether anybody tried to compare them. On the face of it, there is no need to do it -- but I’ll try to, because, when you come to think of it, the biographies of these two great writers have at least several attributes in common. First and most, both of them lived at the same historical period. Confer: Wilde (1854-1900), Chekhov (1860-1904). Wilde’s essays, dedicated to Dostoevsky’s novels are known, and most likely he heard of other Russian writers, and of the new writer of the name of Anton Chekhov. Undoubtedly, Chekhov knew of Oscar Wilde, though we can’t find any mentions of Wilde in his letters. But the Wilde trial had reverberations at some levels of Russian society, especially at the literary set and in the midst of intellectuals. According to Professor of Russian literature at Princeton Nina Berberova (co-author of the article Death of Tchaikivsky), the most part of the Russian civic newspapers regarded the trial as an “example of a hypocritical persecution”, and reading the newspapers Chekhov thought of the writer of the name of Oscar Wilde, though he never shared his thoughts on the subject with his younger brothers and sister, therefore they could not leave their evidence of that. Both of them were tall and handsome men. Looking narrowly at their photos, we can see the eye of Chekhov and Wilde eyes bear resemblance, just Chekhov’s eyes, these screwing up, myopic eyes are smaller that Wilde’s, yet the same all-understanding and all-forgiving. Both of them succeeded in the career of a writer; both of them wrote plays; both of them mingled in the theater circles; both of them lived a life of a super-star. Anton Chekhov was my first literary love. I read his all works and his Letters (if I did not want, nobody in the world could make me do it), and I don’t believe his stories or plays are boring -- if my reader read his early writings, all the humorous stories of his early period, then the reader would understand Chekhov’s attitude towards life, his views and tastes much better, as much as I know him. Soon after I read his all works, I had got access to the works by other great writer, Vladimir Nabokov, and Nabokov had become my supreme authority of good literary taste, true, slightly snobbish. Then I learned of the works and life of Oscar Wilde, and Wilde still is my idol -- one of my idols, godfather and holy patron of all of us, the aesthetes. My reader knows all about Wilde’s life and death, therefore let’s talk of the life of Anton Chekhov. With all my acceptance of his person, I’d like to ask the question that I don’t believe to be detractive or improper: does my reader know that Chekhov was a morphine addict for the last four years of his life? He was seriously ill; it was consumption. Morphine could be prescribed by a doctor, since the doctors diagnosed tuberculosis on the upper part of his lungs, but Chekhov was a doctor himself. He took morphine to sleep and to relive pain (he suffered a major haemorrhage of the lungs). Fairly soon he became a drug addict. Without morphine he could neither sleep, nor eat nor breathe. His last portraits that show him as a well-dressed gentleman and famous writer at his mature age were portraits of a morphine addict. In regard to his sexual orientation, it is obvious, and yet something odd I find in his relationship with women. As a super-star he had many friends, men and women; sexually, he preferred swift liaisons, and one day, he turned down the love of one uncommonly beautiful and well-educated young women of noble birth. Her name was Lyka. The young lady was his sister’s friend. His sister introduced her to the Chekhovs. His brothers and parents dearly loved Lyka, and all his friends and relatives intended her as his wife. As a representative of the new generation of women, who wanted to continue their study, to work and to live independently, she was Chekhov’s ideal, if we come to think of it. Was she too sublime? Not enough sublime? Too sexy? Too much exaltation? I don’t know. Her heart was broken by Anton’s frigidness to her love, and shortly soon she went abroad along with other writer, other handsome man who was married and who broke his heart too. After she buried her dead baby, in Paris, she began taking lessons of singing being about to start a career of opera singer. As for Chekhov, the story of the young woman, who loved him to distraction, had become a small plot for his new play The Seagull, no more. That’s an oddest episode of his sexual life in my view. He settled down to married life much later, 2 years before his death. Once he wrote in a letter to his older friend: “I shall get married, if you wish. But on the following conditions: everything must be as it has been hitherto -- that is, she must live in Moscow while I live in the countryside, and I will come to see her… Give me a wife who, like the moon, won't appear in my sky every day.” In 1901 he married Olga Knipper -- quietly, owing to his horror of weddings -- she was the young actress and rising star, whom he had first met at rehearsals for The Seagull, and the letter cited above proved to be prophetic of Chekhov's marital arrangements with Olga: he lived largely at Yalta, she in Moscow, pursuing her acting career. The more I am looking at her photos now, the more I am surprised how much she looks like Wilde’s wife Constance. The same boyish features, the same slender, boyish body. Amazing. In 1902, Olga suffered a miscarriage; and Donald Rayfield has offered evidence, based on the couple's letters, that conception may have occurred when Chekhov and Olga were apart. There is no evidence and nobody suspected he was homosexual, but he was a doctor and a man of letters who was able to understand and understood much as well as homosexuals and other victims of nineteenth-century materialism and moral self-righteousness, therefore, I submit, he was straight but not narrow-minded. Like Wilde, he was an aesthete, true, at heart. “A human must be beautiful…” -- these words is his small timid bow to aestheticism -- timid and perhaps the only, because he did not dare to declare himself as an aesthete openly; he feared to do it. What or who did he fear? The contemporary Russian newspapers and public opinion that accused him and his writings of lacking both principles and ideas. “The more refined one is, the more unhappy,” he said, and it sounds as though he told about himself. The undiscovered Chekhov could say it. Wilde wrote the essay The Soul of Man under Socialism -- Chekhov wrote: “Aristocrats? The same ugly bodies and physical uncleanliness, the same toothless old age and disgusting death as market-women’s…” -- and so forth, and so forth. In short (this will be brief and to the point, for “brevity is the sister of talent”, as my reader knows) everyone can find yet more evidence for the fact that Anton Chekhov has essentially a lot in common with Oscar Wilde and other fin-de-siecle aesthetes, at least in some respects.

And more about the similarity. Chekhov’s books were and are loved by British readers -- in his turn Wilde, soon after he was sentenced, had become most popular in Russia, and event more: he had become a national Russian writer in a way. How so? Because he had become a martyr, a true martyr in the view of Russian writers, and they in old Russia loved martyrs. Thus, the epoch-making literary exchange took place: Britain gave as a present Oscar Wilde -- Russia gave as a present Chekhov. For, really, Tchaikovsky’s music and Chekhov’s stories and plays is all that Russia has to take pride in (we won’t mention of Nabokov’s brilliant works in this regard, because they belong rather to the whole world, rather it’s a cosmopolitan phenomenon, and Nabokov is a great American writer).

 

2007

 

Your Favourite Oscar Wilde Quotes

 

 “I don’t regret for a single moment having lived for pleasure. I did it to the full, as one should do everything that one does. There was no pleasure I did not experience. I threw the pearl of my soul into a cup of wine. I went down the primrose path to the sound of flutes. I lived on honeycomb.” (De Profundis)

 “…that while Metaphysics had but little real interest for me, and Morality absolutely none…” (De Profundis)

“Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.” (De Profundis)

 “… and the love of children and flowers -- for both of which, indeed, in classical art there was but little place, hardly enough for them to grow or play in, but which, from the twelfth century down to our own day, have been continually making their appearances in art, under various modes and at various times, coming fitfully and willfully, as children, as flowers, are apt to do: spring always seeming to one as if the flowers had been in hiding, and only came out into the sun because they were afraid that grown up people would grow tired of looking for them and give up the search; and the life of a child being no more than an April day on which there is both rain and sun for the narcissus.” (De Profundis)

 “To get back one's youth one has merely to repeat one's follies.”

 “The world is changed because you are made of ivory and gold. The curves of your lips rewrite history.” (The Picture of Dorian Gray)

 “The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself.”

 “Either this paper goes or I do.”

“If the Socialism is Authoritarian; if there are Governments armed with economic power as they are now with political power; if, in a word, we are to have Industrial Tyrannies, then the last state of man will be worse than the first.” (The Soul of Man under Socialism)

 “Yes, the objective form is the most subjective in manner. Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask and he will tell you the truth.” (The Critic as Artist)

 “…At any rate, wherever he lay -- -whether in the little vineyard at the gate of the Gothic town, or in some dim London churchyard amidst the roar and bustle of our great city -- -no gorgeous monument marked his resting-place. His true tomb, as Shakespeare saw, was the poet's verse, his true monument the permanence of the drama. So had it been with others whose beauty had given a new creative impulse to their age. The ivory body of the Bithynian slave rots in the green ooze of the Nile, and on the yellow hills of the Cerameicus is strewn the dust of the young Athenian; but Antinous lives in sculpture, and Charmides in philosophy.” (The Portrait of Mr W. H.)

 “…Many curious stories were related about him at this period. It was said that a stout Burgomaster, who had come to deliver a florid oratorical address on behalf of the citizens of the town, had caught sight of him kneeling in real adoration before a great picture that had just been brought from Venice, and that seemed to herald the worship of some new gods. On another occasion he had been missed for several hours, and after a lengthened search had been discovered in a little chamber in one of the northern turrets of the palace gazing, as one in a trance, at a Greek gem carved with the figure of Adonis. He had been seen, so the tale ran, pressing his warm lips to the marble brow of an antique statue that had been discovered in the bed of the river on the occasion of the building of the stone bridge, and was inscribed with the name of the Bithynian slave of Hadrian. He had passed a whole night in noting the effect of the moonlight on a silver image of Endymion.” (The Young King)

 “There is no such thing as moral or immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.”

 

more quotes

 

For those who read the book A rebours (Against the Grain or Against Nature, 1884, the book, which Oscar Wilde loved) by Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848–1907).

With the aid of some quotes from the book I try to prove that the main character of the novel -- Des Esseintes “a slender, nervous young man of thirty, with hollow cheeks, cold, steel-blue eyes, a straight, thin nose and delicate hands” -- is a vampire or something of the kind as a person or entity that definitely lives a nocturnal life.

 

 

He lives a life of a nocturnal thing, after “a deep silence wrapped the little house that lay asleep in the darkness.” His first meal he has in the evening:

“At five o’clock in winter, after dusk had closed in, he ate an abstemious breakfast of two boiled eggs, toast and tea; then came dinner at eleven; he used to drink coffee, sometimes tea or wine, during the night, and finally played with a bit of supper about five in the morning, before turning in.”

 

The windows are designed in some odd way in order that the daylight could not penetrate the rooms freely:

“The dining-room in question resembled a ship’s cabin with its wooden ceiling of arched beams, its bulkheads and flooring of pitch-pine, its tiny window-opening cut through the woodwork as a porthole is in a vessel’s side.

Like those Japanese boxes that fit one inside the other, this room was inserted within a larger one,--the real dining-room as designed by the architect.

This latter apartment was provided with two windows; one of these was now invisible, being hidden by the bulkhead or partition wall, which could however be dropped by touching a spring, so that fresh air might be admitted to circulate freely around and within the pitch-pine enclosure; the other was visible, being situated right opposite the porthole contrived in the woodwork, but was masked in a peculiar way, a large aquarium filling in the whole space intervening between the porthole and the real window in the real house-wall. Thus the daylight that penetrated into the cabin had first to pass through the outer window, the panes of which had been replaced by a single sheet of plain mirror glass, then through the water and last of all through the glazing of the porthole, which was permanently fixed in its place.

At the hour when the steaming samovar stood on the table, the moment when in Autumn the sun would be setting in the west, the water in the aquarium, dull and opaque by daylight, would redden and throw out fiery flashes as if from a glowing furnace over the light-coloured walls.”

 

Even the moonlight cannot penetrate the rooms unless through the bottle-glass:

“Outside the snow was falling. In the lamplight, ice arabesques glittered on the dark windows and the hoar-frost sparkled like crystals of sugar on the bottle-glass panes speckled with gold.”

 

He hates how nature looks by daylight:

“As he used to say, Nature has had her day; she has definitely and finally tired out by the sickening monotony of her landscapes and skyscapes the patience of refined temperaments. When all is said and done, what a narrow, vulgar affair it all is, like a petty shopkeeper selling one article of goods to the exclusion of all others; what a tiresome store of green fields and leafy trees, what a wearisome commonplace collection of mountains and seas!”

 

which is absolutely wrong, if you ask me.

Thus, we can see that the hero’s habits, loathings and likings look much like a vampire’s.

If a vampire, then a vampire-aesthete:

 “…a single book, bound in sea-green morocco, the Adventures of Arthur Gordon Pym, specially printed for his behoof on pure linen-laid paper, hand picked, bearing a sea-gull for water mark.”

 

Des Esseintes’ conception of sunlight, his feelings about the sun, or maybe Huysmans’: “As though stirred by furious pokers, the sun showed like a kiln-hole, darting a light almost white-hot, burning one’s face.”

(from AGAINST THE GRAIN by JORIS-KARL HUYSMANS Tr. John Howard)

 

Vampires are different. Some of the known or renowned ones I like, some I dislike. To Vampire Des Esseintes, in case if he is such, I feel indifferent, for really, Author did not do much in his book to make us love his main character.

Any thoughts?

 

Autumn in Springtime, Springtime in Autumn

(essay)

 

I

 

In his lifetime, Anton Chekhov was often blamed for the “unnatural sin” of lack of ideas, which his contemporaries regarded as deadly, claiming that most of his works were “lacking both principles and ideas.” His readers, today, we can judge, whether it is true or not so. As I think, if his contemporaries are right, then that’s the beauty of his art. At the same time, this accusation sounds oddish for us, his compatriots, who knew from our school days of the fact that Chekhov was a lifelong bearer of most sublime ideals. However, for the Russian mass media of his time, which was largely “progressive,” that is “vaguely liberal,” he was a decadent.

That’s all right, we can say, let him be, but… even this blatant decadent, in 1892, when he read the book “My Diary” by Marie Bashkirtseff, never found any kind words in his review, but he expressed his negative attitude towards the book, which we can read in his published Letters, strangely forgetting mercy and humanism of his first profession and titling the author, who died young, “egocentric.”

Marie Bashkirtseff (November 11, 1858 - October 31, 1884) was Ukrainian-born Russian painter and sculptor, Oscar Wilde’s contemporary, one of those who shared his individualism and devotion to Art.

 

A piece of information from Wikipedia:

Born to a wealthy noble family, Marie Bashkirtseff (Maria Bashkirtseva) grew up abroad, traveling with her mother across most of Europe. From the age of 13, she began keeping a journal.

Titled, I Am the Most Interesting Book of All, her popular diary is still in print today. In Russian, published in 1892.

In 1881, using the nom de plume “Pauline Orrel,” she wrote several articles for Hubertine Auclert’s feminist newspaper, La Citoyenne.

Her letters, consisting of her correspondence with the writer Guy de Maupassant, were published in 1891.

Unfortunately, a large number of Bashkirtseff’s paintings were destroyed by the Nazis during World War II.

She died of tuberculosis at the age of 25.

There was some confusion concerning the date of her birth, and there is what she wrote about her real age in her Diary:

“It’s horrifying just to write this, but I console myself by thinking that I certainly will not have any age when you read me.” [translation is mine. -- L.B.]

Bibliography :

Bashkirtseff, Marie “Mon journal”

“I Am the Most Interesting Book of All: The Diary of Marie Bashkirtseff” (English translation by Phyllis Howard Kernberger, Katherine Kernberger)

 

II

 

“The autumn came untimely

like death of Maria Bashkirtseva.”

(from the Russian Silver Age poetry)

 

“She was the only Rose in my life, whose way I would strew with roses,

if I knew that the way was fated to be so short and bright.”

(Guy de Maupassant)

 

The girl, the young artist, who died young, whose legacy is paintings and volumes of her Diary, the book, which her contemporaries regarded as unique and which remains unique today, the book that gives an idea of mentality and aesthetic ideas of the late 19th century individuals that formed later the complicated and controversial aestheticism of decadence. As her contemporaries said, her Diary was like beautiful brocade turned inside out.

She had all in her life: wealth, luxury, adoration of her mother and grandfather. The estate of her family, located in Poltava Governorate, was famous with luxury and hospitality, with its area greatest after the estate of Count Kotchoubey. From her native Ukraine she had been taken abroad at the young age of 10. The reason behind it was in her ill health and the insistence on proper treatment by her grandfather -- aristocrat, anglophile, bibliophile and fine art connoisseur. The grandpa loved Marie unquestionably. She could not remember her father, since her parents got divorced, with her mother having won the court case, which was a rarest thing in Russia in those times.

Marie had spent her childhood enjoying fragrances of orchards in the South of France, and listening to the whisper of the sea-waves at Cote d’Azur. Many famous sites of the old Europe became very familiar to her. There were the numerous concerts, stage plays, museums and paintings which she saw, appreciated and described in her famous, sensational Diary. She lived seeing the Beautiful in many forms, every day, which could be a great inspiration to every human being. 

Some biographers say about her loneliness, about a golden cage of her home, and isolation, caused by the early diseases -- the chronic laryngitis, which stole her beautiful voice and unique ear to music, and later the tuberculosis, which led her to the untimely grave. Personally I can’t call her life isolated in Paris or Mentone, Rome, Nice or London, the cities and places of her contemporary European culture and tourism. From literature of the time, when tuberculosis was an incurable disease, we know that TB patients often had an extraordinary temperament verging on something mystical; the persons stood out against the general dull background, having the extraordinary ability to enamour the opposite sex; but they inevitably left their beloved ones, for ever, passing away, very soon. An inner force of the same nature could help Marie to emerge all that was kept undisturbed on the bottom of her heart.

Death and all its causes had fascinated and disturbed her imagination since her young age --

“…the soul feels, loves, hates, desires. The soul alone makes us alive. At the same time, a small wound on the perishable body, some inner disorder, some excess of wine or food, in some extraordinary way, is able to make the soul leave the body.”  [from her Diary, translation is mine. -- L.B.]

And yet, we cannot name her a “gothic Princess,” one of those known nowadays, in our contemporary pop-culture and in the past, because thoughts or musings about Death was not the point -- the very thought of going out without trace worried her mind much more –

“When I die, people will read about my life which I find most remarkable (which cannot be otherwise). If I die suddenly, being snatched away by some disease… Maybe I’ll never know that I am in danger, for they’ll keep this from me. After my death, they’ll find this diary in the drawers, my family will read it, and then they will destroy it, and soon no memory of me will remain -- nothing, nothing, nothing! That’s what always horrified me! To live, to have the ambition like mine, to suffer, to cry, to fight, and finally -- oblivion… oblivion -- as though you never existed…” [from her Diary, translation is mine .-- L.B.]

True, the desire to become respected and known and to develop her talents arose in the heart of the girl, when she was surrounded by doctors and their advices as well as the persistent guardianship of her relatives. The desire to develop gifts of music, singing, drawing and to go on a conquest with their help. To conquer what? The world? Why not?

In her lifetime, according to her contemporary writer Sergey Andreyevsky, she never had a real love affair, unless the only case of affection. Her Diary is free of even a slightest sensuality; in her book, she identified herself as a female merely “in appearance,” despite her unquestionable beauty as a child and her attractiveness and gracefulness in the rest of her life.

The famous French critic François Coppe emotionally describes the image of Marie B in the prime of her life and talent, several months before her death:

“At the moment, Mademoiselle Marie came in. I saw her only once in my life, for an hour or so, but I won’t forget her. Aged 23, she looked younger, of average stature, slim, with a perfect roundish face and golden hair. Her dark eyes were keen, shining with desire to see and know everything. Her lips expressed strength, looking kind and dreamy at the same time. Her nostrils moved like an untamed horse’s. Mademoiselle Bashkirtseff produced an uncommonly strong impression at first glance, impression of strength and tenderness, a latent energy and charm. All in the lovely girl revealed her sublime wit. Despite her female loveliness, one sensed her firm, purely masculine strength. To my congratulations, she replied in a melodious, pleasant voice, confessing, without prudery, in her grand designs, ambitions and desire for fame. We went upstairs to the studio to see other works. My curiosity led me to the darker part of the studio, where I could see volumes on long shelves. There were all creations of human spirit, and all of them were in originals -- French, English, German. Ancient Greeks, Russians and Italians. And the books were not for display. Those books were worn, read, reread and studied. The open grand piano was nearby. Marie’s beautiful hands played all musical authors…” [translation is mine. -- L.B.]

His essay sounds like anything but a description of a “blue stocking.”

 Next, he writes, “It was time to take a leave. Strangely, all of a sudden, I felt a latent alarm, a fear -- I don’t venture to say: a presentment. Seeing the pale, passionate girl, I imagined an uncommonly rich hothouse flower, uncommonly fragrant, and a secret inner voice as though whispered to me: ‘Too much at once!’ It was too much indeed.” [translation is mine. -- L.B.]

The heroine of his essay herself had time to describe her own life. Her Diary, first published in French, in 1887, in Paris, caused a sensation.

People became possessed by the Diary – some in raptures, some rejected it, some scorned it and even doubted its authenticity -- but nobody, who read it, remained indifferent. The ultimate candidness of the Diary may be a reason why the book was castigated so furiously. In my view, her book as documentary evidence of the epoch will forever remain of great importance, regardless of our judgment or the author’s personality itself. Worth remembering, in regard of criticism and the author’s homeland, the fact that in Russian her book has not been republished till 1999; not a single exhibition of her paintings, therefore, only a few people in Ukraine knew her as a talented artist.

“It seems to me that nobody can love everything more than I love, art, music, painting, books, noise, silence, laughter, sadness, languor, jokes, love, cold, the sun, any weather, all season […] and the mountains surrounding Naples, the snow in winter, autumn with the rains, springtime with its anxiety, the quiet bliss of summer days and the beautiful nights full of bright stars… I love it all, I adore it all. I want to see all, to embrace all, to have all, to merge with all!” [from her Diary, translation is mine. -- L.B.] For me, the optimistic intonation of the statement seems akin to that pivotal to the last monologue of Faust in the tragic play by Goethe.

Next, she writes, “I am like a candle, cut in four, with all ends burning.” 

As author and thinker, she was blamed for excessive evenness of temper in virtue of the fact that she never fell in love with a man but she loved Art, being determined to devote her entire life to Art. True, her famous motto: “Nothing before me. Nothing after me. Nothing but me” -- but without her devotion and labour, the number of her paintings, over 150, could not be created for the short period. The choice of this extraordinary girl was not mysticism, in life as well in art, but naturalism and labour. Her prolificacy is the big difference between her and Oscar Wide, who could have assiduity too, when a student.  

Those, who said that she had more masculine qualities than female ones, that her mind was cold as ice, never read her letters to Maupassant. We can’t do this either, for the correspondence remained only in fragments.

According to some biographers, she never looked for a meeting or a date with the 30-year-old famous writer, but her letters, emotional, brilliantly written, with references to the ancient and modern authors, latently sensual, feminine, witty, with a little bit of melancholy, touched Maupassant’s sophisticated mind, making his heart open to the new affection. Feeling charmed, he desired for new messages. Perhaps, in order to guard himself from the avalanche of tender feelings, which could overflow his mind, he wrote the cynically candid letter, which she decided to regard as offensive. Bashkirtseff replies him for the final time:

“You are not the one who I am looking for. However, I am looking for nobody, for I believe that men must be only accessories in the life of strong women. You and I scarcely were made for each other. You are not worth me, and I am so sorry for this. I’d love ever so much to see a man who I could talk with.” [translation is mine. -- L.B.]

The correspondence stopped as well as this odd epistolary love affair, and all Maupassant’s attempts to begin it again were in vain.

She was lonely again, but her isolation was that of a scholar, a young scholar; in her shell, in the shell of the bright young thing of her time, there were music, paintings and books. The book-fever possessed her. The thirst for new knowledge.

She began reading in Latin, French, English -- books and a dozen newspapers a day. Ignoring doctors’ advices, she played piano several hours a day – harmful to her health. Ignoring her own carnal weakness, never talking about her illness, she jested at her cough, and she agreed to take care of her coughing problem seriously, when it was too late. Paris was always a wrong place for TB patients. If Marie agreed to live a life of a plant in a high-mountain sanatorium, she could live longer or get better. But no; her dream was to give herself to painting entirely, as the art the only aim worth her effort; and in 1877, in Paris, she entered the Académie Julian.

According to memoires, Professor Julian said about her: “I thought that it’s only a caprice of a spoilt child, but I have to say that she does work, that she has willpower, and she is talented. If it lasts, then in three months her drawings may be submitted to le Salon.”

Her drawings were accepted, and the beautiful brocade of her Diary had got a new gaudy ornament, as the author began sounding as a true artist:

“The point is not that one must work as a machine; the point is that one should be always busy, thinking of one’s business. This is happiness… Then, everything looks differently; then, minor misfortunes cannot upset you. You feel above all minor; your entire being seems to hold something irradiant; you have a divine condescension to the pathetically mobbing people who cannot know the secret, disturbing and diverse reasons of your bliss – the bliss more perishable than any of most tender flowers… My eyes are opening little by little. In the past, I could see only a picture’s drawing and plot. Today… oh, today, I would do it as I see it – I would have talent! I view Landscape, I view and love Landscape – water, air, colours – yes, colours! I feel like I’ve entered a new phase. Everything seems insignificant and uninteresting, everything, with the exception of my work. Life could be wonderful, if it came down to this alone.” [translation is mine. -- L.B.]

At the Academy, she worked hard 12-14 hours a day, nearly spending whole nights at the easel and canvas. Looking at her works, the teachers kept asking her, a beginner, whether she painted the pictures herself or with somebody else’s aid. There was a rumor in the Academy that most of her pictures were made by the artist Bastien-Lepage, the master of realistic landscapes, with whom the “possessed Russian had a love affair.” Marie wrote in the Diary that as a teacher, Bastien-Lepage could not inspire for long, and that if she seemed to imitate Bastien-Lepage unwittingly in her art, then this impression was wrong. 

A votaress of naturalism in Art, she wrote about life, colours and hues that were “real and singing.” She won medals and prizes at exhibitions; she did know her lifetime Fame, but she never was tempted by it: 

“I don’t feel a victorious joy, because the travail is the cost of my victory, and nothing unexpected is in it. I feel I am on the way to something more sublime and perfect, so, all what have been created cannot satisfy me.” [translation is mine. -- L.B.]

True, she was on the way to the sublime, but it was to be out of the life. The advanced tuberculosis has sapped her last strength; she had to spend a lot of her time lying in bed which was greatly interrupting her studies -- but in her last, incomplete picture we can see a young woman sitting on the grass in the sunlit garden in springtime.

She died on the rainy 31 of October, 1884.

Le Figaro’s obituary reporting her death on 1.11.1884 sounds authentic and somewhat funny:

“We inform about death of the girl famous for some achievements in fine art […] Mlle Bashkirtseff passed away. At the latest exhibition of le Salon, her painting The Meeting attracted attention of many viewers. Her income was 200000 francs, at least. She was going to get married, but her fiancé disappeared. Consequently, with her broken heart, she tried to become famous for her talent. One morning, she caught a cold, when drawing sketches outdoors. She expired in two weeks, and her last breath was on the day when her aunt’s fund-raising amounted to 2 million francs for building a wonderful mansion-studio for her.” [translation is mine. -- L.B.]

Many wrote about Bashkirtseff’s strong self-adoration, ambition and pride, but I believe that there was something other in her nature and life and on her mind. Like every outstanding person, she quickly outgrew the level of the people, who surrounded her – however loving and devoted they were -- and she began to live her own life, realizing that she was fated to loneliness. “For of those to whom much is given, much is required” (Luke 12:48). Her life, short and bright like a falling star, proved this saying. Her talents and knowledge of literature, music, fine art and chemistry amazed her contemporaries, but her brilliant debut and the cascade of delightful expectations ended rather rapidly.

 Her legacy is the thousand page book and several canvases in art galleries of Paris and Nice. 

Her relatives took away the rest of her pictures which were largely destroyed afterwards, in the beginning of WWII, when a bombing of Kiev suburbs began. And yet her name did not pass into oblivion. French Government commissioned the statue of Immortality, and among names inscribed on the scroll in hands of Immortality there was her name.

The serious illness robbed her of her vocal ability; her paintings are mostly lost to viewers; the survived ones look somewhat unimpressive – but the name of the young lady, who lived in the 19th century and died young, still has a magical charm. Since her death, fires of 200 great and small wars snatched away 100 or 200 million humans, who remained mostly nameless. The name of Maria Bashkirtseff as an artist and diarist has survived for over a hundred years; her life story is on our mind just the way it haunted imagination of her contemporaries, and her pictures are available on Google Search.

 

2009

 

The Darling of Fortune

(love story)

 

“All the world’s a stage,

And all the men and women merely players.”

(Shakespeare. As You Like It Act 2, scene 7.)

 

“Voltaire, René Descartes -- for me,

the world is a pack of cards.

Life is faro; fate keeps the bank, I play,

and rules of games of chance

I use to people.”

(M. Lermontov. Masquerade)

 

I

 

However close to poetry any of French senators ever was, he scarcely could be closer than the hero of my essay, since my hero’s bounds were of blood, in the literary sense of the word, and he chanced to gain the hatred of one of the greatest world powers or rather creative powers of the name of Russian Literature, which hatred seems to be more lasting than the power.

Despite his later career as a senator under the Second French Empire, the name of d’Anthès is most famous because of the duel he fought with the poet Aleksandr Pushkin in February, 1837, and since then, d’Anthès is possibly the most cursed character in history of Russian literature. Pushkin was a Romantic author who is considered to be the greatest Russian poet and the founder of modern Russian literature; one of the not numerous writers who Vladimir Nabokov dearly loved. The poet Pushkin wrote wondrous prose, creating a style of storytelling, mixing drama, romance, and satire, which some biographers reckon to be adopted from Byron, and his rich vocabulary is reckoned to be the base for modern literary Russian. Both d’Anthès and Pushkin were equally worldly and biophilic persons, merely one of them was elder, and Pushkin was a straight man, and d’Anthès was definitely bisexual, as I’ve learnt later, much later than I first studied the story of the fatal duel as a Russian schoolgirl. Although d’Anthès was neither a great poet nor a writer, but personally I can call myself his fan, and when I was a schoolgirl, I loved his image, preferring to the image of Pushkin, because he was a tall handsome man, and his portraits with the curling blond hair and the beautiful white and golden uniform of an officer of the Tsar’s Horse Guard looked so impressive. Later, from the facts I learnt, I have formed the opinion that his life was worth being described in a novel.

 

II

 

Georges-Charles d’Anthès (February 5, 1812 - November 2, 1895) was born to a French royalist emigre family. First boy among six children, he was sent to Saint-Cyr, the prime French military academy. Shortly soon after graduation from the military academy Georges got the letter of introduction from Prince Wilhelm of Prussia and set off for Russia in search of fortune.

On the way, in Germany, he caught cold and took to his bed at an Inn in the town of Lübeck. His money was nearly up; the illness proved to be lingering. By chance, through of breakage of a carriage, the string of carriages of the Dutch Ambassador Baron de Heeckeren turned to the Inn. At dinner the innkeeper told de Heeckeren about the illness of the lonely French man; out of curiosity de Heeckeren came to Georges’s room and was stricken with the young man’s beauty.

The Baron kept vigil over the sick young man till Georges got better, and then he offered the young man to join his train. As some evidential facts testify, the relationship between d’Anthès and de Heeckeren was distinguished by uncommon care of each other and tenderness. In St Petersburg Heeckeren engaged best teachers for Georges, and soon the young man succeeded in entering the Knights Guards of the Empress -- Chevalier Guards’ -- as cornet.

Chevalier Guards’ life was full of fun. Georges wrote to Baron de Heeckeren:

“The next adventure in our regiment. Lately, Sergei Trubetskoy and my two mates began to break facades of buildings… During the show at the Alexandrinsky Theatre, from the box for our regiment officers, a condom stuffed with paper was thrown to an actress on the stage. Those poor things ruin their careers, merely for the tricks, which are neither funny nor witty, and the game is not worth it.”

D’Anthès had his own game – his career – fortunately, there’s help in his business. Two years later, in 1836, he became lieutenant. His views of the paternal care of the Baron, who was busy with the case of adoption, sounded cautiously, according to his letter:

“Nowadays, it’s difficult to find an outlander, who is ready to give his name and fortune, asking only friendship in return.” 

Coming from an old noble Protestant family, Jacob (a.k.a. Louis) Burchard van Heeckeren had begun his career in the Dutch navy, then he had served under Napoleon I for years; from that period, he had got a great attachment to France, a title of Empire baron and conversion to Catholicism. On his return to Netherlands he became a diplomat, and in 1826 -- the Dutch Ambassador to St Petersburg.

De Heeckeren was a highly educated man, “…his apartment was full of antiques, and there was no a replica among the works of art. He was smart, with his own view of truth; he took a broad view of things, but he did not let others get away with their sins. They at the diplomatic set were afraid of his tongue.” This most objective characteristic of his temper belongs to Baron Thornau -- all the rest ones are malevolence tinted.

So, the relationship between d’Anthès and de Heeckeren got stronger from day to day, and the Baron doted upon the young officer. According to Memoirs of A. Zlotnitskie, d’Anthès was “a stately, very beautiful, well-educated, smart man of fashion, highly appreciated in society.” The comrades in the regiment loved him, as Prince A. Trubetskoy wrote, “the stately, beautiful, more educated than we, witty French man.” After a lengthy correspondence and a journey to Alsace, Heeckeren proposed to d’Anthès’ father to adopt his son as his heir. And he got the permission, which, in my view, tells about his outstanding capacity to convince, or about his wealth.  D’Anthès’ was not wealthy, and the young man’s father “renounced the rights to Georges-Charles d’Anthès” giving is permission to adopt the young man. After the agreement of the King of the Netherlands by letters patent dated May 5, 1836, Georges-Charles d’Anthès took the name of Georges-Charles de Heeckeren d’Anthès. Thus, the “forbidden love” -- which is truism at the present day -- was registered and consecrated by the Law.

 

III

 

There are several mentions of the homosexual love affair of de Heeckeren and d’Anthès in the works by some authors who wrote about the life of Pushkin.

In the book “The Duel and Death of Pushkin” P. Shchegolev claims:

“…The ambassador was intimate to the young French man in a special way, by the perverse intimacy of a man to man.” [translation is mine. L.B.]

More distinct mention of the friendship of Heeckeren and d’Anthès we can find in the booklet by Prince A. Trubetskoy:

“…some pranks were usual to him, however all the pranks were quite inoffensive and usual to youths but one, of which we learnt much later. I don’t know what to say: whether he took Heeckeren or Heeckeren took him […] Judging by all […] in the intercourse with Heeckeren he was a passive partner.” [translation is mine. L.B.]

By P. Annenkov’s account, “Heeckeren was a homosexual, he was jealous of d’Anthès and he wanted to quarrel d’Anthès with the Pushkins.”

In Letters, A. Karamsin says:

“Being a wise man and the most refined debauchee in the world, Heeckeren possessed d’Anthès’ body as well as soul easily and entirely.” [translation is mine. L.B.]

Pushkin in his dairies writes:

“I was the first in society who has learnt that d’Anthès gives himself to Sodomite sin, and I enjoyed giving publicity to the news. I’ve learnt of that from the whores in the brothel, which he frequented. The girls said confidentially to me, their old friend, that d’Anthès paid them a lot of money so that they in turn licked his arse that was busted, bleeding like my sluts’ after they were buggered mercilessly. As Heeckeren adopted him there’s no doubt about that.” [translation is mine. L.B.]

This last could be a most interesting evidence, if we were entitled to believe in words of the man who was d’Anthès’ arch-enemy, who hated d’Anthès with all ardour of his African temper, and whose judgment well may be unfair, to put it mildly. However, there were several prostitutes as the witnesses who could confirm the bleeding alleged to be. But who did ask them? Pushkin again, that is, the one who could pay money for faking evidence like that. In reply, d’Anthès could equally well give publicity to the fact (generally known to us) that Pushkin had venereal diseases more than once when he was a young student.

De Heeckeren introduced d’Anthès to high society of St Petersburg where Georges met Natalie Pushkin, a beautiful flirtatious young woman, who had many admirers -- including the Tsar himself -- and he alleged to fall in love with her, and then he had to get married to Natalie’ own sister. Needless to say, Heeckeren was displeased and maybe jealous of Georges. After d’Anthès was deported he wrote in his letter from St Petersburg:

“…what a nice business you’ve left to me! It’s because you are lacking of trust to me. It upset me so much, my dear. I was unable to suppose that I’ve earned such a treatment.” [translation is mine. L.B.]

 

IV

 

The way out for the first conflict between Georges d’Anthès-Heeckeren and Pushkin in autumn 1836 had become the marriage to Natalie Pushkin’s own sister, Ekaterina Goncharova, who loved him to distraction. D’Anthès’ engagement and marriage to Natalie’s sister was devised to contradict society gossip that he was in pursuit of Natalie. Baron de Heeckeren had to agree to this marriage, because it saved his beloved one from the duel. But this was not enough for soothing the conflict between the two new brothers-in-law, especially after an anonymous letter went round, nominating Pushkin “Deputy Grand Master and Historiograph of the Order of Cuckolds.”

Pushkin’s furious jealousy made him write an insulting letter to d’Anthès’ adoptive father. Pushkin having refused to withdraw these abuses, a duel became inevitable. On the evening of 8 February, 1837, d’Anthès, as the offended, shot first, mortally wounding Pushkin in the stomach. Pushkin, who had fought several duels, managed to rise and shoot at d’Anthès, however, only slightly wounding him in the right arm.

After Pushkin’s death, Georges d’Anthès-Heeckeren was imprisoned at the Peter and Paul Fortress in St Petersburg. Dueling was illegal in Russia; d’Anthès came to court, but he was pardoned by the Emperor, considering the gravity of the abuses written by Pushkin. Stripped of his rank, the young man was escorted back to the frontier. In Berlin, Ekaterina, his wife, who never doubted him, joined him. Both returned to France, in his father’s region.

 

V

 

Female images in the story of the fatal duel as well as the contemporary strong and open supporters of Georges-Charles d’Anthès-Heeckeren were not numerous, that’s why the name of Idalia Poletika (1807-1889), nee Idalia Maria de Oberto, one of the most active figures among Pushkin’s enemies and persecutors of society, must be mentioned in this essay. 

Idalia was an illegitimate daughter of Count Grigori Stroganov (1770-1857) and la contessa da Ega, Juliana d’Oyengauzen (1782-1864) also known as Julia Stroganova. Finally, Count and la contessa were married, but the child remained illegitimate. In 1826, Idalia got married to the army-officer Alexander Poletika (1800-1857). Alexandra Smirnova-Rossette (1809-1882), Russian Imperial court lady-in-waiting, best remembered for her memoirs, writes about Idalia:

“The girl was lovely, smart, well-bred, with large blue eyes, which looked tender and playful. Countess married her to Monsieur Poletika, a man of noble birth, nice and wealthy.” [translation is mine. L.B.]

 According to the other contemporaries, Idalia was “known as a smart woman in society, but she was a spiteful talker, unlike her husband who was nicknamed ‘lamblike creature.’ Her wit made her a perfect charming woman, and not her lovely face alone. Her cheerfulness and liveliness gave her success wherever she went.”

Idalia Poletika with her husband and her parents the Stroganovs were the only men and women of society who visited Georges-Charles d’Anthès-Heeckeren, the lucky duelist and tireur d’élite, who was in disgrace after the fatal duel.

Idalia was a second cousin to Natalie Pushkin (wife of Alexander Pushkin). As a relative and friend, she frequented at the Pushkins’, and many recorded evidence say that Alexander was nice to her, but some time passed and they became enemies. According to contemporaries, the lady “nourished a strange feeling of an en exceptional hatred to the very memory of Alexander Pushkin.” Some biographers say that a reason was a nasty insult from Alexander Pushkin to her; Pushkin alleged to write a love poem in Idalia’s album dating the poem “the 1st of April.” According to Natalie Pushkin, Idalia pimped for Georges d’Anthès-Heeckeren when he wanted Natalie Pushkin (nee Goncharova), at least one time. Ekaterina d’Anthès (nee Goncharova) wrote to her husband Georges-Charles d’Anthès-Heeckeren, who had been exiled, after the duel:

“…Idalia and her husband dropped in. She’s in desperation with the very thought that she never said good bye to you. She said it’s Betancourt’s fault: when she got ready for going to us, he said that it’s too late and you probably had departed. She looked inconsolable, indulging in wild laments.” [translation is mine. L.B.]

Afterwards, the Stroganovs kept one heirloom, a goblet, which was a gift from Baron de Heeckeren to his good friend. And the family archive of d’Anthes has the letter, which says:

“…When your son Georges hears that this goblet is at mine, say him that his uncle Stroganov keeps it in memory of the noble and loyal behavior, which marked the last months of his stay in Russia.”

Apropos, Julia Stroganov, Idalia’s mother, kept vigil over the dying poet, and Idalia’s father assumed the funeral expenses.

 In society, Idalia Poletika was nicknamed “Mme Intrigue.” Intrigante. The alleged fatal intrigue, when she could arrange dating for Mme Pushkin and d’Anthès, giving her accommodation and leaving them alone there, could cause the fatal duel. The other theory claims that Idalia was in love with the poet Pushkin, and I happened to read about the other theory, namely, Idalia Poletika was in love with d’Anthès, not Pushkin, and d’Anthès saved her marriage and reputation. Seeing the famous portraits of Natalie, who of our contemporaries could suppose that d’Anthès could “lose his head” with passion for the other woman? Only few knew the truth, and one of them was Alexandra Smirnova-Rossette, author of memoires, which I happened to read:

“D’Anthès never was in love with Natalie; he found her silly and boring; he was in love with Idalia, and they dated at Natalie’s…” [translation is mine. L.B.]

What a special hatred to Pushkin we can talk about when talking of Idalia’s part in the affair of the fatal duel? No hatred from her, I’d say; she merely could take the side of d’Anthès in the confrontation. Idalia was one of the few who supported d’Anthès, against the numerous fans of the poet Pushkin. In the relationship between him and her, personally I can see nothing but solidarity, excessively emotional here and there. The French man and Frenchwoman, two comrades, two intriguers, two compatriots, no more. In case if he actually lost his head being in love with Idalia, if she actually was “the subject of his musings, his quill, tears and rhymes, et cetera,” then it’s quite verisimilar and comprehensible as well. Only take a look at her portraits.

However, her negative feelings towards the poet Pushkin she seemed to project onto the poet’s widow and children – a reason could be that her lover Pyotr Lanskoi got married to the widow and adopted the children – but Idalia herself refuted this supposition, saying that she loved her husband, that all her lovers were but rumors, that she always regarded Lanskoi as a mere mediocre person, and the fact that Lanskoi “moved from politic to poetry” had nothing to do with her life. As for the secret date between Mme Puskin and d’Anthès, arranged by Idalia, she afterwards said that it was arranged in order to persuade Mme Pushkin to spy on her husband on behalf of the secret service of the Russian Empire whose agent was Idalia’s husband as well as her herself.  [Mikhail Khariton, magazine Secret, velelens.livejournal.com]

 Her last years, Idalia Poletika spent in the city of Odessa, living at her brother’s, Governor-General Stroganov. One of biographers visited her for the purpose of questioning about her role in the intrigue that resulted in the fatal duel, but the lady refused in acute form. In 1880, when the memorial to A. Pushkin was erected in Odessa, Idalia Poletika said that she felt deeply insulted by the event and that she was about to go to the monument in order to spit upon the image of the one who was a “monster of cruelty.”

 

VI

 

Female images in the story. About the next strong supporters of Georges-Charles d’Anthès-Heeckeren in the Russian Empire. Deciphering one message.   

In the message written after the fatal duel to his foster-son Georges-Charles d’Anthès, who was under arrest, Baron de Heeckeren said:

“Madame N and Countess Sofie B will tell you about much. Both of them feel heartily interested in us.” [translation is mine. L.B.]

“Madame N” was Maria Nesselrode (1786-1849), Countess, lady-in-waiting.

The night after the duel, the spouses Nesselrode spent at de Heeckeren’s, leaving his house only an hour after midnight. When everyone in the city of St Petersburg turned back upon de Heeckeren, Countess Nesselrode invited him to her dinner party.

In the course of the intrigue, Countess Nesselrode totally supported d’Anthès, being “his confidante” and a proxy mother at his wedding.

According to Prince Pyotr Vyazemsky, “Pushkin’s hatred to this last representative of the cosmopolitan oligarchic Areopagus was nearly more than his hatred to Bulgarin.” Faddey Bulgarin (1789-1859), the Russian writer and journalist of Polish ancestry, was author of the first Russian bestseller and one of homosexuals of St Petersburg. In her turn, Countess Maria Nesselrode could not forgive Pushkin’s epigram to her father. She invited Baron de Heeckeren to join her circle. Ambassador of Württemberg reported:

“…In St Petersburg, he [ de Heeckeren  ] has lived about 13 years, standing high in the court’s favour, being patronized by Count and Countess Nesselrode.” [translation is mine. L.B.]

She also patronized Georges-Charles d’Anthès who was a far cousin to her husband.

According to Pavel Nashchyokin, it was Countess Nesselrode who brought Natalie Pushkin to the Palace in order to introduce the young woman to the Empress, without Alexander Pushkin’s knowledge. Hearing of that, Natalie’s husband “got wildly enraged, and he was rude to the Countess.” As a result of the introduction at the Palace, Pushkin was given the official title of gentleman of the monarch’s bed-chamber, which he regarded as the next insult to him.

 “Countess Sofie B” was Sophia Bobrinsky (1797-1866), lady-in-waiting, friend of the Empress.

Countess Sophia felt interested in both Pushkin and d’Anthès, caring about their fates and trying to understand as much as possible in the intrigue. During his trial, she used her connection, which helped d’Anthès’ to escape the common lot.

 

VII

 

In France, Georges-Charles d’Anthès-Heeckeren began a successful political career: president of the local assembly at first, then member of the National Constituent Assembly from 1848 to 1852, and, at last, senator from 1852 to 1870.

In 1852, he was assigned a secret mission by Napoleon III: he had to go to St Petersburg and approach the Emperor of Russia to know his feeling in case Napoleon III proclaimed himself emperor. This mission was undoubtedly successful, because he was appointed senator, on his return.

Leon Metman, one of grandsons of d’Anthès, wrote:

“Grandfather was highly satisfied with his fate, and afterwards, he would say that his splendid political career was possible only thanks to his enforced departure from Russia; but for that unfortunate duel, all he could expect was the unenviable fate of a regiment commander in a Russian province with his big family and need for money.”

His wife died on October 15, 1843, giving birth to their fourth child. He had daughter and son, with his daughter being found insane.

While living in Paris, being raised motherless, d’Anthès’ daughter learned Russian language unexpectedly quickly and to perfection. The girl turned her room into a shrine to Alexander Pushkin, with the poet’s large portrait in front of the altar and Pushkin’s other portraits on the walls. Possessed by mystic feelings, he girl said her prayers kneeling at the portraits of her uncle, to whom she felt a supernatural affection. At a family scene, she hysterically called her father “murderer of Pushkin.”

After Ekaterina Goncharova’s death, Heeckeren and d’Anthès reunited and parted never again. Their male union was long-term and surprisingly constant. Both of them lived till venerable age.

 

2007

 

Queer

(essay)

 

Chaadaev (1794-1856). Nobleman, intellectual, dandy. Ladies crowded around him, but “Flighty Venus” Chaadaev, as Pushkin called him, was indifferent to women. His sex life was mystery. I’ll try to unveil the mystery of the purity of “Russian Socrates” in this essay, at least slightly.

In annals of St Petersburg, we can meet the name “Demut’s Inn”. It was a hotel, one of the oldest (built in the 1770s) and most expensive (a room cost 150 gold rubles a month). The hotel’s name came from its first owner Philip-Jacob Demut from Strasburg. When Alexander Pushkin stayed in the hotel, he took Room 10. There was a funny story. Young Gogol, who had come to St Petersburg, plucked up courage to visit Pushkin at Demut’s. Now, Gogol asked the footman whether Pushkin was in. The footman said yes, his master was in, but sleeping. “Your master worked last night long?” Gogol ventured to suppose. “Yes, he did. Played cards last night long,” the answer was. One of the tenants of Demut’s Inn was Pyotr Chaadaev. He occupied Room 54 for six years.

Chaadaev, author of Philosophical Letters was a lonely and proud figure staying separately in the history of Russian ideas. Chaadaev wrote in French, believing that nobody in Europe would read in Russian—in Europe as well as in Russian well-educated society—but the first Letter’s Russian translation was published first, and it evoked such a tempest that it was not fit to talk of this work by Chaadaev till the revolution of 1905. The Letters were eight, and all of them were published in Russia only in 1989. Author began working on the first Letter in 1828, and its Russian translation appeared in 1836 in the Moscow magazine Telescope. As a result, the magazine’s editor was exiled to the Far North of Russia, and Chaadaev was declared a madman. In the Letters author revealed his historic and philosophic views. A main characteristic of historic fate of Russia he reckoned the “drab and gloomy existence, without strength and energy, which is enlivened with nothing but atrocities, softened with nothing but slavery. No captivating reminiscence, no graceful images in the people’s memory; no mighty teachings in the people’s legend […] We live only in the present, in the present’s tightest limits, without the past, without the future, among deadly stagnation […]” He believed that Russia had lagged behind Western countries and had contributed nothing to the world’s progress. He therefore concluded that Russia must start de novo. It must be said that the strikingly uncomplimentary views found its echo in the book Empire of the Czar: A Journey Through Eternal Russia by Marquis de Custine (1790–1857) written later, in 1839.

Resonance in society was enormous. Students of Moscow University came to the president of Censorship Committee Count Stroganoff and said that they were ready for standing up in arms for “Russia, insulted by Chaadaev”. Gendarme General Perfilyev reported to his chief Benkendorff about the general indignation, caused by Chaadaev’s article. Minister of Education Uovarov gave a proper paper to Nicholas I of Russia, and the Tsar put down the resolution, which declared the article a “daring nonsense, worthy of an insane man”. The magazine Telescope was shut down. After Chaadaev was officially declared insane, he had to live a life of a hermit in his house in Basmannaya Street, where the doctor visited him regularly and every month the doctor gave an account to the Tsar about Chaadaev’s health.

In this atmosphere, Chaadaev wrote his new article The Vindication of a Madman (1837). In this brilliant but uncompleted work he maintained that Russia must follow her inner lines of development if she was to be true to her historical mission. The Slavophiles at first mistook Chaadaev for one of them, but later, on realizing their mistake, bitterly denounced and disclaimed him. Chaadaev really fought Slavophilism all of his life. He wrote: “I’ve not learnt to love my homeland with my eyes closed, head bent, lips sealed. I find an individual may be of use to his native country only if he can see it clearly. I think the time of infatuations has passed […]”

Poet Alexander Pushkin wrote to Chaadaev till his own death in 1837. He dedicated to Chaadaev three poems. Chaadaev’s personality, Pushkin charactered in the famous poem To Portrait of Chaadaev:

“By supreme will of Heaven

he was born to serve to Tsar.

In Rome, he would be Brute. In Athens—Pericles.

And now, he is an army officer.”

And there is such a message of Pushkin to Chaadaev:

“Oh when on earth, my friend, our parting comes to an end?

When will we conjoin words of love and our hands?

When will I hear your warm welcome?

How I’ll hug you!..”

The reader may think whatever of this last poem, but in fact there are nothing in the poem but some conventional rhetoric turns of speech, usual for educated people of those times.

It was matter of course that Chaadaev impressed Pushkin (who was five years younger) as he impressed his all contemporaries. Born at Moscow, our hero and his brother became orphaned when aged three and five. The children inherited a 1, 000, 000 estate (in Russian gold rubles, in late 18th century). Aunt Princess Anna and her brother Prince Dmitry Shcherbatov raised young Pyotr. The boy was an uncommonly beautiful, remarkably educated, spoilt and willful child.

The cloudless childhood in the big house. Nannies, governeurs, tutors. In summer—countryside. In winter—visits to the innumerable noble relatives. In boyhood—lectures in Moscow University. Having wit, beautiful appearance, education, he was nice to deal with him. Perfect manners, brilliant French, reputation of the best dancer of the town. He was an army officer, served in the Napoleonic Wars, entered Paris with Russian Army. “Prince Fortune”, he should be a great success among women, and they crowded around him indeed encircling him wherever he came in society. But this was limited by a vivid flirtation only, and no natural consequences. We recognize Chaadaev in Chapter 1 of Pushkin’s Onegin, in which author calls the main character “Flighty Venus”. Onegin’s boudoir is copy of Chaadaev’s. Our hero was acknowledged and renowned dandy of his time. His entire life, our philosopher was a man of fashion; he needed society; he loved to mingle and shine. All was at his service, and if he refused something then he did not want it indeed.

The climax of friendship of Chaadaev and Pushkin was the countless talks at Demut’s Inn, where Chaadaev, being aide-de-camp of Commander of the Guards Unite, lived in bel-etage. Women loved Pushkin, and most probably he asked his elder friend about that. Judging by the text of Onegin, the answer was that Chaadaev’s “feelings have cooled too early”, that beauties interested him not long, and most probably the young poet was quite satisfied with the answer.

Now, clouds hiding the sun. The Emperor said that Pushkin flooded the Empire with his revolting poems, and the poet well might be exiled to the north, but thanks to his friends all the matter came to the well-known pleasure journey to the south. Afterwards, Chaadaev more than once emphasized that it was he who put in a word in behalf of the poet, at the supreme spheres. While Pushkin was travelling, Chaadaev reached the new promotion in his military and court career, but suddenly, in 1821, he left service. He entered the secret society of Decembrists, but he did not find any satisfaction to his needs there, and in 1823 he set forth for traveling through Europe—Britain, France, Germany, Switzerland, Italy.

In Germany, he met the philosopher Schelling and representatives of different religious streams, familiarizing himself with Catholic socialism, learning much new of cultures of European people.

After wandering abroad, he returned home, domiciled in Moscow (in Basmannaya Street), becoming a permanent member of the English Club. Neither the story of publishing the Philosophic Letter nor his reputation of a madman changed his life too much. He kept on living in Basmannaya Street and Tverskaya Street (where the English Club was), meeting as usual the Emperor at high society balls, when the Emperor visited Moscow. As one of his contemporaries said, “Chaadaev spent the rest of his social life standing at a pillar in ball-halls and contemplating.” In 1856, Chaadaev died in peace.

Apart from the ill-starred Letters, he published nothing. In this sense, we may compare him with Socrates, who left no one line of his works, and who is known by words of his pupils Xenophon and Plato (with the latter promoting his own ideas under the guise of Socrates’). Chaadaev had his own “Xenophon”—Mikhail Zhikharev, historically notable with nothing but the friendship with Pyotr Chaadaev. Mikhail was 18, Pyotr was 44, when they met. Judging by the biography written by Zhikharev, Chaadaev diminished his true age by two or three years, talking with his young friend, but his birthday was known to the biographer—May 27. We may be grateful to Zhikharev (who remained unmarried) and be glad for Chaadaev for the fact that his “sad sunset” was lit by the “parting smile of love”.

The Biography of Chaadaev written by Mikhail Zhikharev in the 1860s was published entirely only 120 years later. Some extracts of the book could explain what seemed incomprehensible to contemporaries of the great man.

“Chaadaev had a connection and innumerable female friends, but nobody ever heard he was a lover of any of the woman[…] He himself talked on the subject evasively, never defying anything, never refuting anything, letting imply of much, leaving freedom for any guess. Then I ventured to ask plainly the question of a very personal sort: ‘Is it true that you never in your life took a woman? If yes, then what was a reason? Was it out of chastity or in virtue of other reason?’ The answer ensued immediately: ‘You’ll know when I die.’ Eight years have passed after his death, but I’ve learnt of nothing he promised. Eventually, last year, one witness, trustworthy and only among the living, whose name I am not entitled to say, said that Chaadaev never, neither at his young age nor being mature, felt like coupling, that he was made like this by nature… Wishing to go deep into the subject, I questioned the witness more, but I did not get more information, and now I don’t dare claiming anything—however, from some hints and rumor, quite unfounded, I could permit myself some guesses.”

We permit ourselves to make doubt to the incredible supposition that living side by side with Pyotr for 17 years Mikhail suspected and guessed of nothing, at the same time being on intimate terms with the man, who was 25 years older. The following excerpt, which was placed by Zhikharev as a comment to other question, explains it all. Chaadaev had a valet by name Ivan.

“He was sooner a friend than a servant of his master, and they said that he was always well-dressed, had good manners and decent demeanour although he was simple by nature. He seemed to be so decent person that one lady, one of the splendid persons ever, greeted him every time being at Chaadaev’s, and Pushkin held his hand to him.”

Speaking about those times, we often omit the fact that noblemen moved, ate, slept, travelled being surrounded with lots of people. Servants helped them to dress, drew curtains open, served tea, made ready a carriage for masters, cleaned rooms. The numerous domestic moved around, enveloping and pleasing all alone. This mute background is usually ignored. But in Russia in particular, being bonds, the servants should do whatever their master wanted. No matter what kind of inclinations the master had. The lord-sybarite’s valet was wearing a tail-coat from the best tailor. What wonder? One day, Chaadaev had to go for audience at the Emperor’s. He was to be wearing a tail-coat, which Chaadaev had not at his household, at that moment. The valet Jean (Ivan) gave his one to his master. The valet’s appearance corresponded to his noble lord so much that he was taken for a nobleman sometimes. There was a funny story. In those times, like in Soviet Russia, Russians abroad reckoned necessary to put in an appearance at Russian Embassy. One day, on his arrival in Dresden, Chaadaev went to the Embassy. While talking with him, Ambassador remarked that one Russian nobleman apparently did not want to introduce himself. “There he is,” Ambassador exclaimed looking out of the window and pointing to a man wearing a tail-coat, who walked along the terrace, “Over there!” “What wonder?” said Chaadaev in reply, “It’s my valet.”

However great scandal the hero of this essay produced with his writings, he left so little for rumor about his personal life, which remained quiet and decent.

 

2009

 

One Winter Poem

(essay)

 

Winter holidays is a good time for mystery storytelling. This essay is not one of the stories, although it tells about some mysterious things. Insights. Revelation. Clairvoyance. A prophet who foretells his own death. Poet as prophet. History of literature.

It is known that some writers of past times, in their works, foretold some present day inventions and innovations that did not exist in their times and that are well-known at present. For example, in the Old Testament, we can see the description of a creature, which looks much like a submarine. And in Dostoyevsky’s novel The Devils, we can see something like the shameful phantasmagoria, which took place in Russian culture in the 1990s, and some ideas of fascism was foreseen by Dostoyevsky in the novel too. I am not about to discuss all or brightest examples of the writers’ insights; I am about to adduce only one, most controversial and less known. But first I’d like to say about some poets of the historical periods and country, best known to me.

 “Poet in Russia is more than a poet,” as one classic said. Murdering poets is an old good tradition in Russia. It is well-known that some Russian poets, in their works, foretold their own violent death. A most striking example is the poem The Dream by Mikhail Lermontov (1814-1841), who describes the hour of a day, the place in the Caucasus and himself lying dead, shot in his breast:

“At steaming noon in a valley in Dagestan

With a hole in my breast I lay motionless.

The wound still smoked foully

My blood flowed in a river of drops.

I lay alone on the sand of the valley;

The ledges of the crags crowded around,

And the sun burned their yellow peaks

And burned me, but I slept a dead sleep.” (translation found on the kiwix.org)

Stunning.

The poet of the Russian Silver Age Nikolay Gumilyov (1886-1921) foretold the fact that his death will be committed by hand of an executioner, in his The Tram That Lost Its Way (the poem, which is considered one of the greatest poems of the 20th century), and in another poem he foretold the fact that a bullet will cause his death saying that “a worker has cast the lead bullet which will kill me”. Indeed, the poet died in a courtyard of Cheka (the Bolshevik security service), being executed for participation in monarchist conspiracy. (One legend of his death says that at the ceremony of the upcoming shooting down, one of the Bolshevik commissars was literate enough to recognize Gumilyov among the convinced. The commissar stopped the executors and turned to Gumilyov: “Poet Gumilyov! Come forth!” Without leaving the rank of the condemned, the poet said in reply: “Here is not a poet Gumilyov. Here is an army officer Gumilyov.” Thus, he was killed among other army officers.) By the way, the poem The Tram That Lost Its Way first occurred to Gumilyov one early morning, on the way home, to his apartment in St Petersburg, where he walked after his next long night of playing cards at his friend’s.

As some biographers of one more poet of Silver Age Marina Tsvetayeva (1892–1941) say, she foretold her death of a stranglehold in her poem. Indeed, she dies in this way, with her suicide looking like a poor imitation, committed by security service.

In the 20th century, among Russian researchers and readers, the poet Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837) is a cult figure, acknowledged as an undoubted prophet. He never foretold a way that he would die, but in his young age, he heard the mystic warning from a gipsy fortuneteller, who told him to beware of a tall blond man wearing in white. Pushkin was said to keep it always in mind, and the gipsy proved to be right, he died shot in his stomach by the tall blond army officer whose full uniform was white. With his vivid temperament and worldly nature, a freethinker, Pushkin is a true man of genius in his writings with his genius akin Mozart’s. Pushkin has several beautiful poems, dedicated to a long way along a snow-clad road in winter. One of the poems, most impressive, in my view, is entitled Devils.

A long way through the steppe, by night. A blizzard in the steppe. And a vision of devils. What do the travelers see and hear overhead? Note: overhead, some spirits flying high in the night sky, in other words, in the ether. It’s the snow and sounds of the blizzard, on the face of it, overhead as well as around. Yes, and yet it’s something more. Every time I reread the poem, I feel more and more certain that in his vision of the blizzard, like in a prophetic dream, the author as though foresees the modern day wireless means of communication, radio, telephone and so forth, whose realm is nothing other but the ether or cosmos, and whose noise could seem terrific to a 19th century human and even to some of us, if we could hear all the radio and phone lines at once like it happens at times, when we happen to listen to radio short waves. Giving my imagination a bridle, I permit myself to say that the vision in the poem is that of the future inventions, which might look like something supernatural, like evil spirits in the author’s time, and which is seen through the alembic of his fancy. “What a crowd! Where are they carried?” asks the author, and I’d like to know an answer to the question along with him. Midsummer and a frosty winter are most weird periods of a year, when it is possible to see and foresee much. The sounds of the wireless means of communication and the essences of humans who serve and use them (advertizing, communing) are heard in the noise of the blizzard, though I am not sure concerning the Internet system, because personally I hardly ever listen to music on the Net, therefore the Internet is mostly silent to me -- all this is heard in the noise and seen by the author and maybe something else, much more supernatural. At least, I feel like this, when reading the text in Russian. Here is the text in English:

 

“Devils” (translated by Genia Gurarie)

 

Storm-clouds hurtle, storm-clouds hover;

Flying snow is set alight

By the moon whose form they cover;

Blurred the heavens, blurred the night.

On and on our coach advances,

Little bell goes din-din-din...

Round are vast, unknown expanses;

Terror, terror is within.

 -- Faster, coachman! "Can't, sir, sorry:

Horses, sir, are nearly dead.

I am blinded, all is blurry,

All snowed up; can't see ahead.

Sir, I tell you on the level:

We have strayed, we've lost the trail.

What can WE do, when a devil

Drives us, whirls us round the vale?

"There, look, there he's playing, jolly!

Huffing, puffing in my course;

There, you see, into the gully

Pushing the hysteric horse;

Now in front of me his figure

Looms up as a queer mile-mark --

Coming closer, growing bigger,

Sparking, melting in the dark."

Storm-clouds hurtle, storm-clouds hover;

Flying snow is set alight

By the moon whose form they cover;

Blurred the heavens, blurred the night.

We can't whirl so any longer!

Suddenly, the bell has ceased,

Horses halted... -- Hey, what's wrong there?

“Who can tell! -- a stump? a beast?..”

Blizzard's raging, blizzard’s crying,

Horses panting, seized by fear;

Far away his shape is flying;

Still in haze the eyeballs glare;

Horses pull us back in motion,

Little bell goes din-din-din...

I behold a strange commotion:

Evil spirits gather in --

Sundry, ugly devils, whirling

In the moonlight's milky haze:

Swaying, flittering and swirling

Like the leaves in autumn days...

What a crowd! Where are they carried?

What's the plaintive song I hear?

Is a goblin being buried,

Or a sorceress married there?

Storm-clouds hurtle, storm-clouds hover;

Flying snow is set alight

By the moon whose form they cover;

Blurred the heavens, blurred the night.

Swarms of devils come to rally,

Hurtle in the boundless height;

Howling fills the whitening valley,

Plaintive screeching rends my heart...

 

“Sundry, ugly devils, whirling” -- this line can be translated closer to the original text as “oh so endless; oh so ugly”. “Ugly” because “they” or rather “it” is alien to the narrator therefore frightening. “Endless” because “it” acts in the endless ether or cosmos.

Any thoughts?

 

2009

 

NABOKOV AND THE CULTURE OF HOMOSEXUALITY

 

As we know, Vladimir Nabokov succeeded in several kinds of sports when he was a young boy and then a young man. Going in for ports was a matter of course to his milieu and his family, and it was for the sake of his father’s love for him as well as it was the Russian doctors’ prescription. When VN was an elderly professor in the USA, he wrote that he was ready to admit that he looked much like a hippopotamus, and yet “my calves still look like a footballer’s.” Only we, nabocophiles can know how high was the scale of his narcissism, which as such could make a human believed queer – no? His narcissism plus his genius, which is always a sort of deviation, all together make him one of queerest people ever.

However much we feel certain of that, VN himself never believed so – or it only seemed to be.  

The great Russian-born writer Vladimir Nabokov was a confirmed homophobe. “It behooves his fans and admirers to admit it -- and also to regret it.” -- (Galya Diment, vice president of the Nabokov Society and a professor in the Slavic department at the University of Washington). Portraying his homosexual personages as shallow, intellectually trivial and ineffectual, he often uses the word “mincing”, introducing them with a nudge and a wink and a snigger. Aires and graces. However, in his writings he mocks at everyone in general, including the reader, which is his favorite attitude, and gays seem to be the favorite object of his irony -- in this regard it is interesting to note that, however bad and pitiful they are, they are in almost every his 17 novels, beginning with his first novel Mary.

Anti-Semites carry on conversations about the Jewish mafia; homophobes carry on conversations about a homosexual mafia. But VN has no such ideas -- he who was born to the family of the progressive politician and lawyer deeply involved in legislative debates over homosexuality, he whose wife was Jewish, and “among the writers he admired there were plenty of homosexuals, from Proust to Edmund White.” Perhaps his homophobia was a result of critiques by two gays, two his archenemies Georgy Adamovich and Georgy Ivanov? But he bore presence of two other homosexuals, successfully communing with them: his publisher Frank Taylor and professor Karlinsky who wrote book reviews, praising to VN’s books. This makes us recall other writer with the same attitude towards homosexuals and homosexuality, with the same abundance of bad gays in his works, Marcel Proust. The French writer often portrays homosexuals in grotesque manner, but his own outright homosexuality lurks behind this manner. It would probably be rather a crazy idea to suppose: what if Nabokov is a latent homosexual? Perhaps he is a Russian Proust, however unfounded the supposition is? VN adored Proust, especially when he was young, although later he was slightly disappointed, and yes they have something in common with each other, thought not without some differences. Nabokov novels main characters are always men, with women being only their pale reflections. As we know, psychologists suspect that inveterate homophobes are latent homosexuals, that the homophobes castigate publicly homosexuality merely because they feel it subconsciously in their mind, and with the fulminations and some open and aggressive actions they try to suppress it -- in their own mind first of all. That seems closer to Nabokov’s case. VN is known to regard homosexuality as a heritable phenomenon, and he had a reason to fear of activating the genes in his own nature.

His father had three brothers: Dmitri, Sergei and Konstantin; the latter was known as a man “indifferent to women”. Konstantin Nabokov was a thin, prim, rather melancholic bachelor “with anxious eyes”. He lived in London, in a club apartment with walls hung with photos of “some young English officers”. Charg d’affaires at the Russian Embassy, he had time to publish his Notes of a Diplomat. After the February Revolution he deputized for the Ambassador. The “indifference to women” is the euphemism that VN uses for more exact definition “homosexuality”, which comes out of the intimate relationship of Uncle Konstantin and Grand Duke Sergei Aleksandrovich who was a famous homosexual.

The portrayal of his maternal uncle Vasily Rukavishnikov is more explicit yet the same careful in Nabokov’s memoirs. It was a not tall, thin man with thick moustache and short brushed-up dark hair; he enjoyed wearing refined clothes and jewellery; a carnation was always in the buttonhole of his elegant suit; he belonged to the decadent circle of the fashionable dandies where Oscar Wilde was an icon; and he was a bachelor too. Uncle Vasily, “Ruka” (“Hand”), as his friends called him, stuttered at some consonants; he wrote good verses in French that he set to his own accompaniment -- I’ve translated two lines of one of his romances --

“A flock of doves shades the tender sky.

Chrysanthemums dress up for All Hallow’s Day…”

 -- but of all the Nabokovs his nephew Sergei was he who learned to play the music by heart. Uncle Vasily was a diplomat at the Russian Embassy in Rome, specializing at decipher. His white, pillared mansion bordered upon the Nabokov’s family estate of Vyra; nearly every day Uncle Vasily came to the Nabokovs at lunchtime. “When I was aged eight or nine,” VN writes in Speak, Memory, “he would invariably take me upon his knee after lunch and (while two young footmen were clearing the table in the empty dining room) fondle me, with crooning sounds and fancy endearments.” As VN writes, his uncle “walked mincing with his small feet wearing white shoes” -- right in this way he always describes homosexuals. When Vladimir was 11 or so, once his uncle came to Vyra, and after alighting and greeting he said to his nephew in French, “How yellow you’ve got. You’ve lost your good looks, my poor little thing.” Apparently, his nephew’s former good looks attracted him. Nevertheless, when his nephew was 15 he declared Vladimir as his heir; he bequeathed his favorite nephew approximately two million dollars and a large Russian estate, but his European real estate -- the Italian villa and Pyrenean castle -- he left by will to “an Italian” and his other lovers. Fairly soon, in 1916 he died of heart attack in France, but the young VN had been an owner of the large fortune and real estate only for a short while, because the October Revolution robbed his of everything, and his uncle’s European real estate belonged to others.

Thus, homosexual influences surrounded VN on both sides of the family community -- paternal and maternal. There was also one Mikhail Nabokov, a railway clerk who was mentioned as a covert queer in the police dossier in 1889 that is 10 years before the writer’s birth, and the man well may be Vladimir Nabokov’s far cousin of a less noble line. However, there was a homosexuality which was much closer to the writer. It was the brother who was carefully covered up in the memoirs.

His younger brother Sergei, who was born 11 months after him, seemed to be much closer to VN than the younger brother Kirill, Sergei should be Vladimir's best friend, but the deliberate estrangement, which the writer established in their adult life, is imaged on the period of their childhood so strangely that the writer mentions his brother in his memoir only briefly -- “no friendship was between us . . .” “. . . I could describe my whole youth in detail without recalling him.” Indeed, he dedicates only several lines to Sergei in his memoir written in Russian, but Sergei lurks in every corner of Speak, Memory, VN’s 1951 memoir. Shy, awkward and foppish, Sergei Nabokov was Vladimir’s direct opposite, a “shadow in the background”, as VN put it. Their sister, Helene Sikorski recalls that the brothers were never friends when they were children. Sergei loved music, particularly Richard Wagner, and he studied the piano seriously. Vladimir, by contrast, was almost pathologically insensitive to music. By virtue of the terrible stutter and love for music Sergei resembled Uncle Ruka, and apparently, some genes he had inherited by this genealogical line. When he was 15 and Vladimir 16, Vladimir found a letter on Sergei’s desk and read it. That was a letter from their English tutor-trainer to Sergei; from the letter one could draw a conclusion that there was a love affair between the trainer and Sergei. Having no life experience Vladimir did not understand the sense of the letter and brought it to his parents so that they would explain why the trainer wrote in this way. His father, an experienced lawyer understood all and dismissed the Englishman.

But at school Sergei had love affairs too. He fell in love with his heterosexual classmates who did not reciprocate. Revealed, his secret inclinations enforced him to leave the famously progressive Tenishev School.

In his family -- the extraordinarily wealthy aristocratic family of St Petersburg -- Sergei did not find sympathy though he did not meet a great indignation or family scenes. His parents’ attitude towards his homosexuality was calm at least outwardly. Nobody ever spoke about it to him; the family instituted a kind of “don't ask, don't tell” policy; they took Sergei’s revelation absolutely quietly, and he could do whatever he wanted. But he loved his mother and father and he realized that his homosexual inclinations did not make glad them. As for his father, Vladimir Nabokov the elder, a Russian outstanding criminologist, journalist, and liberal politician, the coming of the third gay in the family inspired him for studying the juridical aspects of the problem in general.

The Nabokov family left Russia in the wake of the 1917 February Revolution for a friend's estate in Crimea, where they remained for 18 months; then following the defeat of the White Army in Crimea in 1919, the Nabokovs traveled through Constantinople to England, where VN and his brother Sergei enrolled in Cambridge. Neither Vladimir nor Sergei would ever return to his motherland.

While studying Slavic and Romanic languages at Cambridge, the brothers played tennis and mingled in the circle of Russian emigrants; both of them made equal progress, but in other respects the brothers were utterly different. Their cousin, Nikolai Nabokov writes: “Rarely have I seen two brothers as different as Vladimir and Sergei. The older one, the writer and poet, was lean, dark, handsome, a sportsman, with a face resembling his mother's. Sergei... was not a sportsman. White-blond with a reddish tint to his face, he had an incurable stutter. But he was gay, a bit indolent, and highly sensitive (and therefore an easy butt for teasing sports)”. Nikolai Nabokov’s family recalled that Sergei was “the nicest of all the Nabokovs ... a sweet, funny man ... much nicer, much more dependable and much funnier than all the rest of them.”

In his young manhood he was tall and very thin, always well-dressed, a gentleman, kind and courteous. The dandy, an aesthete and balletomane, he attended at all premiers of Serge Diaghilev Ballets Russes being wearing a flowing black theater cape and carrying a pommeled cane.

After graduation from Cambridge, the brothers joined their family in Berlin -- that was in the year when their father was assassinated. Vladimir Nabokov the elder was attending a political conference when two Russian Monarchists approached the stage singing the Tsarist National Anthem and opened fire, with the intention of killing the publisher and politician, leader of the Constitutional Democratic Party-in-exile Pavel Miliukov. In response, Nabokov jumped off the stage and attempted to disarm one of the gunmen, but being shot twice, died instantly. Nabokov's demise was an ironic death for a lifelong democrat: he died defending one of his political opponents. This episode of mistaken, violent death would echo again and again in his eldest son’s fiction (in the novel Pale Fire, for example, the poet Shade is mistaken for a judge who resembles him and is murdered). In his diary VN the younger wrote about the last evening he spent with his father: “We talked through the open door -- talked about Sergei, about his strange, abnormal inclinations.”

Both brothers went to work at a bank, but the 9-to-5 routine did not suit them: Sergei quit after a week, Vladimir in a matter of hours. In Berlin, within the colony of Russian émigrés, Vladimir gained a reputation as a novelist and poet, writing under the pseudonym Vladimir Sirin. He met his Véra and married her. And Sergei fit easily into the growing gay community. However, soon he moved on to Paris. Here, in the big town that set the tone in modernism and avant-gardism he stayed for the next 20 years.

In the winter of 1923, his cousin, composer Nikolai Nabokov introduced him to painter Pavel Tchelitchev, who worked for Diaghilev and who was a homosexual too. Sergei Nabokov was invited to share an apartment of Tchelitchev and his lover Allan Tanner. The flat was so small that Tchelitchev called it “a doll’s house”; no electricity, no bath, and they had to wash themselves in a zinc tub using water heated on a gas stove. Sergei gave lessons in English and Russian for living. He was always in straitened circumstances but this was atoned with the society he mingled now. Sergei was good friends with Jean Cocteau, and he was also connected, through Tchelitchev and his cousin Nicolas, to Diaghilev, composer Virgil Thomson, to those aristocratic aesthetes the Sitwells and even the legendary salons conducted by Gertrude Stein and other outstanding intellectuals of Paris. He spoke fluently Russian, German, English and French, knew long poems by heart, and oddly enough, when he reciting poetry, he did not stutter at all. Stutterers are known to stop stuttering as they sing -- apparently, Sergei perceived poetry as music. He was also himself a poet -- his poems have not survived -- and those who knew his poems said they were good. A highly talented person, he might be equal to Vladimir in literature if he were not so timid and shy in everyday life. VN describes his brother as “drifting in a hedonistic haze, among the cosmopolitan Montparnassian crowd that has been so often depicted by a certain type of American writer. His linguistic and musical gifts dissolved in the indolence of his nature.”

In Paris, sometime in the late 1920s or early 1930s, Sergei met and fell in love with a wealthy aristocratic Austrian of the name of Hermann Thieme. “Charming, handsome, something of a dilettante, Thieme was the son of an insurance magnate. His family owned (and still owns) Schloss Weissenstein, a magnificent 12th century castle in the tiny Alpine village of Matrei im Osttirol near Innsbruck, Austria. During the 30s Hermann and Sergei often retreated to Schloss Weissenstein.” -- (Grossman). Hermann and Sergei traveled about the capitals of Europe returning every time to the castle Weissenstein, where they walked and played tennis and bridge with Herman’s relatives. In a letter that Sergei wrote to his mother, he said: “It all is such a strange story, sometimes even I don’t understand how it happened ... I’m just suffocating with happiness... There are people, who would not understand this, to whom such things are completely incomprehensible. They would prefer to see me in Paris, barely surviving by giving lessons, and in the end, a deeply unhappy thing. There is talk about my ‘reputation’ and so on. But I think that you will understand, taking that all those who do not accept and do not understand my happiness are strangers to me.”

By this time, Vladimir had been married for a long while, the brothers were “on quite good terms” at the time, and he acquainted Sergei with his wife. Now, Sergei said: “Since I know your wife, you have to meet the man who is my lover.” The meeting took place at the terrace of a small restaurant. After Vladimir first saw Hermann, he described the scene to his wife in a letter: “The husband, I must admit, is very nice, quiet, not at all the pederast type. Attractive face and manners. All the same I felt rather uncomfortable, especially when one of their friends showed up, red-lipped and curly.”

In the spring of 1940 Hitler invaded France, and by May the Germans were bombing Paris. Vladimir and his family left for America on the last boat out of St. Nazaire, but Sergei was away in the countryside at the time. Returning to Paris he chose to stay in Europe with Hermann. The Nazis were already rounding up homosexuals as actively as they did to Jews, and in order to avoid attracting suspicion Sergei and Hermann rarely saw each other. Sergei took a job as a translator in Berlin, but he had no stomach for war, and the Allied bombings frightened him horribly. The fighting grew more intense, and flight became impossible; Sergei had almost no money, and as a refugee from the czarist Russia his only travel document was a flimsy Nansen passport. In 1941, the Gestapo arrested Sergei on charges of homosexuality. It released him four months later, but he was placed under constant surveillance. It's ironic that at that moment, after the lifelong shyness and stuttering, Sergei could not keep silent. He began to speak out against the injustices of the Third Reich to his friends and colleagues. In winter of 1943, he was arrested for the second time. The file that the police kept on Sergei accuses him of subversive statements. There may have been more to the story: Princess Zinaida Shachovskaya, whose relations with the Nabokov family have sometimes been strained, has written an un-translated memoir in which she asserts that Sergei was in fact involved in a plot to hide an escaped prisoner of war, a former Cambridge friend, a pilot who been shot down above the German territory. Now Sergei was taken to Neuengamme, a large labor camp near Hamburg, where he became prisoner # 28631. Conditions were horrible: the camp was a center for medical experimentation, and the Nazis used the prisoners to conduct research on tuberculosis. Of the approximately 106,000 inmates who passed through Neuengamme, fewer than half survived, and as a rule, the guards singled out homosexuals for particularly harsh treatment. Meanwhile, Hermann had also been arrested, but he was sent to fight on the front lines in Africa, and he would survive. According to camp records, Sergei had died on Jan. 9, 1945, of a combination of dysentery, starvation and exhaustion. Neuengamme was liberated four months later.

Meanwhile in America, VN was beginning a new life. He spent the summer of 1944 sunning himself in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, with Edmund Wilson and Mary McCarthy; he collected butterflies for Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology, enjoyed the benefits of American dentistry and taught Russian to Wellesley College undergraduates, with whom he flirted shamelessly. The New Yorker was beginning to print his poems. He knew nothing of what was happening to his brother in Europe. In autumn of 1945, he had a night dream of his brother Sergei. He saw him lying on a bunk in a German concentration camp, in terrible pain. The next day he received a letter from a family member in Prague about the death of Sergei.

After the war, Hermann Thieme spent his later life at Schloss Weissenstein, without a career, caring for his invalid sister. He died in 1972.

To bring to a conclusion, let’s return to VN’s novels. In all of them we can see a certain fundamental layer: a clash between a lonely individual -- who has a mental singularity and a certain sublime gift -- and the crowd, the narrow-minded persons as well as the rough and boring world. No defense from the clash, and the lonely individual dies. The conflict we can see in The Defense, in Invitation to a Beheading as well as in Lolita, where the main character has a gift that is not correspondent to the generally accepted morals, a gift of original erotic vision. VN hates the crowd; he despises the generally accepted morals -- like Oscar Wilde. The profound relation of VN’s mental experiences and his brother’s mentality as well as gay writers’ creativeness emerges in this case. A lot of gay writers prefer a lonely individual as a main character, who has a singularity and erotic gift, and they describe the conflict of the character and the alien surrounding that repels the lonely individual and his gift. VN’s main characters have other “gift”, but the conflict is the same. This similarity is based upon the family relation of the Nabokovs, whose education gave rise to contempt and hatred to the crowd, giving rise to the aristocratic individualism that was revealed both in creative works and in erotic tastes, and only by virtue of a subtle play of genes, the phenomenon of VN came into the world in one case, and in other case we can see his shade, where his uncles and brother were covered up. As the uncles and brother are coming out of the shade, we can see in the new light VN, his creative works, and his world, so penetrated with sense of loneliness, so strained and always tragic.

 

2007

 

Discover other titles by Lara Biyuts at Smashwords.com:

 

Clair-Obscur. Part 1, 2

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/541304

 

Clair-Obscur. Part 3

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/541307

 

Forever Jocelyn (novel)

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/30041

 

La Arme Blanche (novel)

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/30042

 

Silver Thread Spinner (novel)

http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/110216

 

A Handful of Blossoms (novelette)

http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/168036

 

Vampire Armastus

http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/31439

 

Extraordinary Story of a Turnskin

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/259119

 

Playing White

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/264429

 

Latent Prints

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/451734

 

Infernal Kaleidoscope

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/436815

 

Beyond the Silver Threads

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/262541

 

Lord Jocelyn

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/284860

 

Severin

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/306873

 

Eric’s Wonderful Quest

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/595873

 

Italian Imbroglios

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/429252

 

The Dead that Travel Fast

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/433390

 

Billiard at Dawn

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/448225

 

Through the Baltic Looking-Glass

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/505270

 

Crepuscular Rays

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/538323

 

Eric’s Wonderful Quest

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/595873

 

Wild Polka Dot

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/603480

 

Vampire in the Mirror

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/598508

 

The Jetsam (essays)

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/27895

 

The Dome (essays)

http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/174846

 

The Sunless Parlour (essays)

http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/30327

 

Icebound Minstrel (poems)

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/27811

 

Ball-Masquerade (poems)

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/27812

 

Connect with Me Online: larisabee@yahoo.com

 

Twitter: http://twitter.com/deajuly

 

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/bijucie.lara

 

Smashwords: https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/lasept

 

My blog: http://revueblanche.blogspot.com/

 

A short bio:

Lara Biyuts (aka Lara Biuts, Larisa Biyuts) is a Smashwords author of 14 books of fiction, writer of the RevueBlanche.blogspot, collage maker for her book covers, translator, who signs her translations as Larisa Biyuts. Her novella A Handful of Blossoms is 2012 Rainbow Awards Honorable Mention. Her works are accepted for anthologies: Cat’s Cradle Time Yarns (Time Yarns Anthologies), Authors off the Shelf (Lazy Beagle Entertainment), Of Words and Water 2014 (Words and Water group supporting WaterAid), Hope Springs a Turtle, The Black Rose of Winter, and Greek Fire (Lost Tower Publications). Her old tale and poems are featured on TheHolidayCafe.com (2013). Her poetry is on the monthly eJournal The Criterion (April, 2014). She is a Goodreads librarian.

Her novel La Lune Blanche is the first of the series. “The novel is the world where pleasures of life and pleasures of art are just norms.” (Turner Maxwell Books)

“The author produces a setting which is detailed and believable, and also characters which the reader gets to know well. Also the plot moves along nicely through-out the story.” (April O., facebook.com)

“Lara Biyuts’ writing is deep and multi layered.” (Maggie Mack Books, maggiemackbooks.com)

“Lara Biyuts comes to us from the great tradition of Nabokov and Conrad, enriching our literature in English with the rich cosmopolitain perspecitve of the East European tradition leading back to Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. Like those great masters she takes us also into the shadow world of sexuality with its hidden psychology, possession and sensual revelations.” (Robert Sheppard, Author of the novel Spiritus Mundi, linkedin.com)

“The secret of Lara Biyuts is her tales. The secret of her tales is their charm. The secret of the charm is Lara Biyuts.” (Les Hudson, goodreads.com)

Impressum

Tag der Veröffentlichung: 13.06.2009

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