Paging All Bookworms! discussion

YEAR GOAL: 135 books/25 nE, 33,000 pages

Jan. 4

1. Lázló Krasnahorkai, Satantango [1985, Eng. tr. 2012] 275 pages [Kindle]

Lázló Krasnahorkai is the 2025 Nobel Prize winner in Literature. Satantango was his first novel. It is a rather difficult novel which apparently is intended to illustrate that life is a chaotic flux of images and sensations which the mind (i.e. the reader) has to choose among in order to construct a world that seems to (but perhaps actually doesn’t) make sense. It piles up random details while leaving out the information which might (or might not) allow it to be a real narrative.

The book follows the actions and dialogue of about a dozen people living in a small village which is decaying because the “mill”, the main source of employment and income, has been shut down a decade earlier, and all those who had enough energy or ambition have long since left. Two men, Irimiás and Petrina, who were thought to have died, have suddenly returned, and the other characters at the beginning are awaiting them in a long scene in a bar. Obviously, everyone has different expectations and opinions about them, and the reader is equally unsure who they really are. Are they a pair of con men, police informants, or brilliant leaders who will save the villagers and create a new age of prosperity? Everything we think we understand is undercut, and the ending further defeats our attempt.


Jan. 8

2. Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl: The Definitive Edition [1944, pub. 1947 (Dutch), this Eng. tr. 1991] 368 pages [Kindle, Overdrive]

Given the current rise in antisemitism worldwide, I have decided to read some of the better-known works on the Holocaust, beginning with The Diary of Anne Frank as it commonly referred to, which is probably all most younger Americans have read about the Holocaust (with the possible exception of Maus or The Book Thief). Most people have probably read Anne Frank in high school, but it wasn’t on the curriculum at my high school, whether because it wasn’t yet considered a “classic” in the 1960s or (more likely) because the right-wing school board was antisemitic, and I never found the opportunity to read it later.

If there is anyone who hasn’t read it, it is the diary of a Jewish girl in Amsterdam who, together with her parents, another couple and their teenage son, and later a friend of her father, are in hiding in a hidden annex behind her father’s office. Although the people in the “Annex” and their helpers had heard rumors of the death camps, the diary itself ends the night before their arrest (a few months before the liberation of the Netherlands) and so has no actual description of the concentration camps; it is an account of the anti-Jewish campaign under the German occupation in the Netherlands, where the Franks had fled from the Nazis in Germany itself, and their attempt to hide from the Germans and their Dutch collaborators, which was successful for over two years.

What surprised me in reading the book was that, in addition to the descriptions of the Holocaust, which I expected, it is also an expression of the ambivalent attitudes of a maturing teenager towards her parents, exacerbated by the fact that she could never get away from her family and escape to her friends, schoolmates or teachers. This by itself in addition to the information about the Holocaust would make it an important read both for teenagers and parents of teens.

I will be following it up with at least Ellie Wiesel’s Night trilogy, the Maus graphic novels, and two or three books by Primo Levi; I may also read a couple books on the rise of fascism which have been recommended to me lately (Guerin’s Fascism and Big Business and Trotsky’s The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany in particular.) Although I do not identify the current US regime with fascism, the attacks on immigrants and the mass deportations, including to work-camps in El Salvador, seem to represent the same sort of combination of fear, hatred, and simple cowardice as the hunting of Jews in the late thirties and forties.


Jan. 11

3. Lázló Krasnahorkai, The Melancholy of Resistance [1989, Eng. tr. 1998] 322 pages [Kindle]

The Melancholy of Resistance is not the most difficult novel I have ever read, but it is probably in the top ten. Perhaps it is not so much difficult as deliberately obscure. It opens in the same kind of decaying and depressive town as Satantango. The style is also somewhat similar, although it piles up subjective rather than objective details. The viewpoint is distributed in a kind of “stream-of-consciousness” style among four major characters: the old and fearful Mrs. Plauf, her mentally retarded son Valuska, the retired musicologist Ezter, and his estranged wife Mrs. Ezter.

The book is usually described as “postmodernist fiction”, but it is in my opinion a clear example that much of what is called “postmodernism” today is largely just a development of what fifty years ago was called “existentialism”. This is most obvious in the consciousness of Ezter, which reminded me of Sartre’s La Nausée; he goes from believing in global “meanings”, to a consciousness of “meaninglessness”, to the epiphany that every particular thing has its own individual “meaning” just as itself. He eventually “chooses” his own meaning in his relationship with Valuska.

The main action of the novel concerns a “circus”, really just an exhibition with a dead whale and an alien or demonic creature we never actually see called “The Prince”. The “circus” is accompanied by a group of followers who under the influence of the “Prince” engage in the meaningless destruction of the town and brutal killing of many people. This may be an allegory of the Nazis, the Stalinists, or the chaos of post-Stalinist Hungary, but above all it represents the irrationality of life. The role of the con-artists in Satantango is here played by Mrs. Ezter, who, in her own opinion, is responsible for everything that happens, manipulating events to reach some sort of power. Krasznahorkai has said that all his works, or at least the principle novels, are successive approximations to the novel he wanted to write.



Jan. 13

4. Elie Wiesel, Night [1958, Eng. tr. 2006] 133 pages

One of the earliest and best-known accounts by a survivor of Auschwitz, Elie Wiesel’s Night exposes the brutality of the German concentration camps. There is really nothing I can say about a book like this; the horrors speak for themselves. Wiesel later received a Nobel Peace Prize for his work in seeking justice for the victims of the Holocaust.


Jan. 14

5. Elie Wiesel, Dawn [1960, Eng. tr. 1961] 87 pages

Wiesel’s first two novels, Dawn and Day, were added to the memoir Night to form a trilogy.
Dawn is focused on a moral dilemma. The protagonist is a terrorist (Wiesel correctly uses the term); a survivor of the Holocaust, he has been recruited by “The Movement” to fight against the British in Palestine. The British are about to execute a captured terrorist, and the protagonist has been ordered to execute a captured British soldier in reprisal. Although as a soldier he is used to killing combatants, to kill an unarmed prisoner creates a moral conflict. He imagines himself as an SS executioner, and then tries to rationalize the need for killing this prisoner, going back and forth throughout the night as his human conscience wars with his loyalty to the “Movement”.

The description of the situation is very strange. Wiesel refers in his later (2006) preface to the edition I read, to “one of the movements that fought for the right of the Jewish people to form an independent state in their ancestral homeland.” There is no mention of the fact that their “ancestral homeland” was also the current homeland of another people. He describes the situation in the novel itself by saying that a Jewish country was occupied by British colonialism (as if he were writing about somewhere like Ireland), and one of the characters consoles the protagonist by assuring him that as soon as the British leave, there will be peace and his children will grow up in a normal situation. Given the actual situation in Palestine at the time, and the subsequent eighty years of Israeli/Palestinian history, could anyone really have had that illusion (to say nothing of in 2006)?

Leaving that aside, the moral questions he raises about political violence are perennial ones, and the book dramatizes them in a very moving way.



Jan. 15

6. Elie Wiesel, Day (previous tr. as The Accident) [1961, Eng. tr. 1962] 117 pages

In the last book of the trilogy, originally titled The Accident, Wiesel begins with the protagonist in the hospital in critical condition following being hit by a taxi. The novel then returns in a flashback to his first meeting with his girlfriend, Kathleen. The book continues to alternate between the two times, his recovery in the hospital and the development of his relationship. We soon realize that he is a Holocaust survivor, and that he is haunted by guilt and shame about his past. Today there is a name for that — survivor’s guilt. At the time, this was not understood, and this book is one of the first descriptions of it.

Jan. 18

7. Francine du Plessix Gray, At Home with the Marquis de Sade: A Life [1999] 491 pages

As I have mentioned a couple months ago, my eighteenth-century literature reading is up to the Marquis de Sade. I am finishing up with this biography and a special journal issue on Sade, before going on to Sébastien Mércier and Choderlos de Laclos in French and MacKenzie in English. Sade, brilliant and perverted, philosopher and pornographer, has been an enigma to twentieth-century scholars. Gray’s book is a fairly good biography which tries to place his life in the context of the history and society of the ancien régime and the French Revolution and its aftermath. There is much interesting material, although her understanding of history is rather superficial, and she is very opposed to the Revolution, perhaps due to a lack of objective distance from her subject. There was not as much about his writings as I had hoped for, but this is necessary background.

Jan. 20

8. Rudolph Erich Raspe, The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchhausen [1786] [Kindle] 204 pages

I found another classic eighteenth-century book for free on Amazon. [I took the pages from a different Kindle edition as the one I “bought” did not have the physical pages listed.] Raspe’s book was the original version of the Munchhausen tales, from which the other versions, including the expanded German translation by Burger which I read long ago, were all derived. Although Raspe was a German author, he wrote the book in English while in exile due to some roguish activities. This book is divided into two parts; the first part, or at least the first four or five chapters, is essentially the book by Raspe, which is one of the most comic novels among all the “classics”, while the second part consists of several sequels by various anonymous hack-writers and is fairly mediocre and more satirical than comic.

If you aren’t familiar with these stories, they are all completely true, just like the speeches of our current national leaders. Among the most famous are the time he stops in an empty field of snow, and hitches his horse to a pole sticking up out of the snow. In the morning, he wakes up in the middle of a village, with his horse hanging from the steeple of a church. Apparently, the village was completely covered by snow which due to a sudden change of weather had all melted overnight. Another story is when he was hunting and ran out of shot. He quickly ate a number of cherries and used the pits as shot. He hit a stag in the head but did not manage to kill it. The next year he hunts in the same place and finds a stag with a cherry tree growing out of its head. Another famous story is how he enters an enemy town in pursuit of fleeing soldiers, and stops to water his horse. The horse keeps drinking and drinking without stopping; he turns around and sees that half his horse is missing, having been cut in half by the portcullis being lowered as he was entering, and the water is just running out the back. He finds the other half at the gate and stitches the horse back together.

Jan. 21

9. Littérales, v. 46, 2019: Sade: roman et philosophie 148 pages [in French]

If the biography by Gray tries to put the Marquis into the historic context of the years before, during, and after the Revolution, this special issue of the journal Littérales tries to put his writings into the context of eighteenth-century philosophical novels. It contains eight articles, including the introduction: Colas Duflo, “Introduction. Sade et l’histoire du roman à ambition philosophique”; Fabrice Moulin, “L’orgie sans la dissertation: le statut du discours philosophique dans Les Cent Vingt Journées de Sodome”; Jean Goldzink, “La philosophie dans Aline et Valcour; Élise Sultan, “Juliette philosophe: vers un au-delà du libertinage”; Stéphanie Pujol, “Le principe de lésion. Le discours politique et moral de Sade à la lumière de Montesquieu et de Rousseau”; Jean-Christophe Abramovici, “La prise de parole philosophique dans le roman sadien”; Audrey Faulot, “Manon défloré ou les impossibles Mémoires de Justine: la parodie romanesque comme instrument philosophique dans Les Infortunes de la vertu, Les Malheurs de la vertu et La Nouvelle Justine de Sade”; and Mladen Kozul, “Sade, le libertinage et la durée”. The most interesting was the article by Faulot on Sade’s novels as parodies of Prevost’s Manon Lescaut and Marivaux’s La Vie de Marianne.

Jan. 21-22

10. Art Spiegelman, Maus: A Survivor’s Tale I. My Father Bleeds History [1986] 159 pages (Graphic novel format)
11. Art Spiegelman, Maus: A Survivor’s Tale II. And Here My Troubles Began 136 pages [1991] (Graphic novel format)

Continuing with my reading min-project on the Holocaust, I read this two volume “graphic novel”. Actually, like most of the very few books I have read in this format, it is really non-fiction. Spiegelman tells the story of his father and partly of his mother from the beginning of the war in Poland to their liberation at the end of the war, a period during which the father was first in a POW camp, then later in the concentration camps at Auschwitz and eventually Dachau, and the mother was also in Auschwitz and later in another camp whose name he can’t remember. The younger Spiegelman embeds this into the later life of his father, as an old man in the United States, who is telling him the story, and we see how his experiences have distorted his life even much later on.

I would recommend this, together with the diary of Anne Frank, as a good introduction for teenagers to the events of the Holocaust (I wouldn’t recommend it to younger readers), but it also is worth reading for adults as well.

Jan. 23

12. Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing-World [1666] 102 pages [Kindle]

The Blazing-World is often described as the first work of science fiction, or more conservatively the first work of science fiction by a woman (was there any earlier science-fiction by men? I don’t know of any; everything I have read earlier than this that has been called science fiction is basically just utopian fantasy.) To be honest, its claim to be science fiction rests on a small portion of the book, in which one of the protagonists, who has become Empress of the Blazing-World, establishes scientific societies, which then discuss in a rather absurd way the science of the day (just before the first publications by Newton) and this is probably meant as a satire on the Royal Society. Most of the book is fantasy or allegory. The novel was first published as an appendix to her non-fiction work, Observations on Experimental Philosophy. It is a short, fun read, obviously very much what you would expect from a duchess under the Restoration.

I found this short biographical sketch on the Folger Shakespeare Library website:
“Anna Battigelli, the author of Margaret Cavendish and the Exiles of the Mind and professor of English at the State University of New York at Plattsburgh, wrote the following about Cavendish for a 2012 Folger exhibition, Shakespeare’s Sisters: Voices of English and European Women Writers, 1500-1700:
“Cavendish’s life was shaped by the trauma of the English civil wars. She was a maid of honor to the unpopular Queen Henrietta Maria, with whom she fled into exile. In exile, she married England’s most eligible bachelor, William Cavendish, later Duke of Newcastle, with whom she lived in Paris and Antwerp for sixteen years before returning to London in 1660. With no children and all the resources of her husband’s literary and scientific salon, Cavendish threw herself into the emerging discipline of science, even as she produced fourteen volumes of plays, poems, biographies, scientific treatises, romances, and satire. Hers was a mind on fire — so much so that she would wake her scribe in the middle of the night to take dictation. Her compulsive writing compensated for her pathological shyness. In her books she engaged and challenged her age’s leading thinkers. She satirized the Royal Society, the court, and social conventions. She forwarded copies of her lavish folio volumes to universities and members of the aristocracy. Remarkably, she arranged for an invitation to attend a meeting of the Royal Society, the only woman of her era allowed entrance into this circle of men.”

Jan. 30

13. Bhisham Sahni, Tamas [1976] 277 pages [Kindle]

This famous novel, set in the last days of British rule in India, describes the religious and ethnic tensions among Hindus, Sikhs, and Moslems which led eventually to the partition of India and Pakistan. Of course, behind all religious and ethnic violence lie political and economic causes, and the positive characters in the novel, those who try to prevent the violence, all put the blame on the English; but the narrative itself leaves the role of the colonial administration ambiguous. They clearly do nothing to prevent the rioting, but we never see them actively fomenting it. We never find out the motivation of the apparent villain of the book, Ali Murad, whether he is working for the British or playing his own game. In any event, we cannot take a reductionist approach; the English could not have fanned religious hatreds if they had not already been latent in the society, and Sahni shows the deep roots of the distrust among the main groups going back to the mediaeval history of the Moslem conquest.

Among the major complaints of the Moslem League characters is that the Congress Party claims to represent all Indians when in fact it was the party of the Hindus. The best non-fiction account of these events I have read, Tariq Ali’s The Clash of Fundamentalisms, which sees the partition of India as being at least as important as the contemporary events in Palestine in the rise of Islamic fundamentalist radicalism, attributes much of the problem to Gandhi’s decision to base the independence movement on a Hindu religious rather than a secular basis.

The novel opens with a nightmarish scene of one of the minor characters trying unsuccessfully to slaughter a pig in his hut. This sets the tone for the entire book; it is not what one would consider a pleasant novel. Throughout we see brutal violence against people who are only trying to live their own lives in communities where they have always lived peacefully with neighbors of the “enemy” religion, and can’t believe the changed situation until it is too late to do anything. This is similar to other novels I have read dealing with the Middle East, Africa and post-Stalinist Eastern Europe. This is important to read about as a warning against allowing ourselves to be caught up in ethnic and religious hatreds, which only benefit the most reactionary political movements.

Feb. 3

14. Louis-Sébastien Mercier , L’An deux milles quatre cent quarante: Songe s’il en fut jamais [1771] 410 pages [Kindle, Wikisource] [in French]

Another work which is considered as a precursor of science-fiction, Mercier’s L’An deux milles quatre cent quarante is a utopian fiction which is set in the far future, probably the first to use that device, although it is also presented as a dream. There is no futuristic technology; the means of transport is still horse-drawn carriages and the buildings are lighted with lamps — what else could have been imagined at the time? The age of even steam technology had not yet begun in 1771. What little he says about science and medicine is very vague and mostly wrong.

The point of the book is political utopianism; even then the emphasis is less on the supposed situation in 2440 than on criticizing his own time. The “great men” who are revered and have statues erected to them are all figures of the eighteenth century: Voltaire, Beccaria, Rousseau (the author of Émile, not the bad poet, as he tells us every time the name is mentioned) and so forth. It is interesting to see the concerns and limitations of a “moderate” two decades before the Revolution (Mercier himself would be a delegate to the National Assembly, vote against the execution of the king, and be awaiting the guillotine himself when saved by the fall of Robespierre.) The government is headed by a beloved king, a constitutional monarch, or even a figurehead like the present-day king of England; the changes mentioned are the abolition of the Bastille and the lettres de cachet, a more honest judiciary, and other reforms which were demanded at the very beginning of the Revolution. It has all come about peacefully by the voluntary actions of a philosopher-king.

Mercier throughout the book, and not just in the chapter devoted to religion, is obsessed by religious ideas; although he criticizes the intolerance of the church in his own time, the future he describes is not based on religious toleration but on a universally accepted (and enforced) deistic cult of the “Supreme Being”, which reminded me of Robespierre again. Atheists who refuse to recant are banished. He is hardly consistent; he opposes the royal censorship of the eighteenth century but then tells us with great complacency that nearly all past writings have been censored or burnt, and that no books are allowed which are “immoral” or criticize the established religion or the government. His views on women are completely reactionary even for the eighteenth century. Fortunately, the real 1790s were more advanced than his 2440.

Feb. 8

15. John Ruskin, Modern Painters v. 3 [1856] 439 pages [Kindle]

I finished the very disappointing second volume of Modern Painters last April (see my review), and it has taken me about ten months to get back to the third volume; but it took Ruskin ten years to get back to writing it, so I guess I didn’t do so bad. This is a much better book; Ruskin is a more mature writer, and is writing in simple (for him) English rather than the affected prose imitating Hooker. While still religious in essence, it is less dogmatically Protestant than the previous volumes, or the intervening The Stones of Venice (also see my review).

The book is less rigidly organized into sections and subsections than the first two volumes. It divides roughly into two parts; the first half investigates what makes a painting (or a poem or work of literature) “high art” or noble, and the second part is a history of landscape in literature and art, in the classical, mediaeval, and modern periods. When he is not talking about God, there is much that is interesting and useful in his discussions, and this volume is probably worth reading for anyone interested in aesthetic philosophy or practical criticism of painting. The book ends on a rather jarring note, with a digression supporting the Crimean War. There are five appendices, three by Ruskin and two added by the editors with additional matter from the manuscripts.

Feb. 10

16. Primo Levi, If This Is a Man [1947, rev. 1958, Eng. tr. 1959] and The Truce [1963, Eng. tr.] 404 pages [Kindle, Open Library]

I had four books on my list to read by Primo Levi, but it turned out the other two were just the American titles, Survival in Auschwitz and The Reawakening, for these. (Perhaps those who weren’t buying books back in the sixties don’t realize that up to the mid-sixties British and American paperbacks nearly always had different titles, which might also be different from the hardcover title. Today, most are reprinted under the original British hardcover title.)

If This Is a Man is the story of Levi’s year in Auschwitz (actually in the Buna workcamp, one of the dependent camps on Auschwitz). It was originally published in 1947 but was largely ignored until it was reprinted in a slightly revised form by the larger Einaudi publishing firm in 1958, and a year later in English translation. It is probably the best-written and most thoughtful of the concentration-camp memoirs, at least of those I have read, perhaps because Levi was not just an accidental victim but a politically conscious anti-fascist partisan.

The Truce, printed together with it, is a sequel which describes the long roundabout journey of Levi and other Jewish survivors through Eastern Europe and Russia before they were finally allowed to be repatriated to their original countries. Levi was fortunate in that his home and family still existed in Italy when he returned.

Feb. 14

17. John Ruskin, Modern Painters v. 4 [1856] 487 pages [Kindle]

The fourth volume of Modern Painters is devoted to mountains. It begins with some outdated (even for 1856) geology, interpreted with an almost mediaeval teleology (the purposes of mountains are all relative to human life and culture). There is also some mineralogy, which I can’t judge, although the terminology is certainly not modern. There are two chapters on Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory which make very dubious generalizations about the influence of mountains on religion, politics and psychology. There are some interesting insights mixed with much that just seemed strange, and all of course given religious interpretation. The book is best when it discusses actual art, but unfortunately there is much less of this than in volume three.

Feb. 21

18. Richard N. Frye, The Heritage of Persia [1962] 401 pages [Kindle, Open Library]

This book is described by the author as a “scientific-popular” book, by which he means a book written for a popular audience based on up-to-date scholarship. It is very detailed and dense in information, perhaps more than I would expect in popular writing. It is a bit more up-to-date than the previous book I read last month on the same subject, A.T. Olmstead’s History of the Persian Empire, by about fourteen years, but there was much new archaeology in that decade and a half, especially by Soviet archaeologists in South Russia and Central Asia, which Frye makes good use of. The main differences were that Frye has much more on the prehistory of the Iranian peoples, and continues the story through the tenth century, while Olmstead was writing only about the Achaemenid period, and that he has much more on the eastern parts of the empires and much less, relatively, on relations with the Greeks and other Western states. Of course, it is outdated today; I would say the horizon for a history book, while a bit longer than for the physical sciences, is no more than twenty-five years (bibliographies generally don’t include anything farther back than that, unless they have a chapter on the history of the discipline). My next book will be about 34 four years more recent, but still about 30 years back. Nevertheless, I learned a lot about subjects I knew almost nothing about, especially for Central Asia.

Feb. 26

19. Ashapurna Debi (or Devi), The First Promise [1964, Eng. tr. 2004] 600 pages [Kindle]

After reading Tamas, about the end of British rule in India and the partition with Pakistan, the Goodreads group which is doing India this year turned back to the early years of British colonialism in Bengal. Ashapurna Debi’s The First Promise is one of the most famous works of modern Bengali literature. It is not really about colonialism as a political fact, which is sort of in the background, but about the changes in domestic life. I learned much about Hindu and especially brahmin culture as it existed in Bengal at that time.

Set some time in the nineteenth century (there are no precise chronological indications), it is the story of Satyabati (usually referred to as Satya), from her marriage at the age of eight through her daughter Subarna’s marriage. Satya from the beginning is a rebel, and through the course of the novel we see her questioning polygamy, child marriage, and other forms of domestic slavery and abuse, and sometimes, though rarely, succeeding in opening a small space for liberation within her family and community.

The translator has a long introduction, in which, in addition to summarizing the plot (if you are concerned with “spoilers” don’t read the introduction first) she claims the novel is showing how tradition can be used as a resource in fighting for liberation. I think this is more a reflection of her own views than Debi’s, because it seemed to me that whenever Satya conforms to tradition she betrays her own best instincts and fails, and the same is true for all the other positive characters in the book. What is true, of course, is that she has to frequently compromise with tradition to survive, but that is a different question from using tradition as some sort of resource.

Despite her occasional successes, Satya is an isolated example and even the most intelligent and daring among her relatives and friends stop short and think she goes too far, that she is crazy or unbalanced. I think the “first promise” of the title is Satya herself, in the sense in which someone might refer to a crocus peeking out of the snow as a first promise of spring. The First Promise is the first volume in a trilogy, which will show how that promise is fulfilled by later generations. I am waiting now for the second volume to arrive from Amazon (it doesn’t seem to be available as an e-book); the third volume on the other hand is available on Kindle Unlimited.

Feb. 28

20. Alexander Pushkin, Boris Godunov and other dramatic works [1825-1832; Eng. tr. 2007] 249 pages [Kindle, Open Library]

An Oxford World Classics edition, this book contained Boris Godunov, A Scene from Faust, the Little Tragedies (which was a re-read for me) and Rusalka.

Boris Godunov is one of the classic Russian plays. It is obviously influenced by Shakespeare’s chronicle plays. Tsar Ioann IV (better known in English as Ivan the Terrible) had three sons; he killed the older, another Ioann, in a fit of anger, and was followed on the throne by his second son Feodor. His youngest son Dmitry died as a young boy, and public suspicion at the time believed he was murdered by his father’s closest advisor, Boris Gudonov. This is the version followed in the play, although according to the introduction scholars now believe he died as a result of an epileptic seizure. The play begins at the death of Feodor, with no clear successor, and Boris Godunov’s usurpation of the throne. It then chronicles the reigns of Boris Godunov and his son, and the rise of the “False Dmitry”, a monk named Grigory who claims to be the son of Ioann IV who somehow escaped the murder plot. The play ends with the triumph of the False Dmitry, According to the introduction, Pushkin intended the play as the first of a trilogy, to be followed by plays about the reign of Dmitry and the ultimate rise of the Romanovs, who ruled for the next two centuries until they were overthrown by the 1917 revolution, but the second and third plays were never written.

The other dramatic works are all single act plays. The Scene from Faust is not actually from Goethe’s play, but is an original scene, which forshadows the Little Tragedies. These are condensed versions of other plays, real or imaginary, but seen from a different perspective. I have already reviewed them when I read them separately several years ago so I will not discuss them again here. Rusalka is a probably unfinished play based on the myth of the abandoned woman who becomes a water spirit and lures men to death by drowning.

Mar. 5

21. Alexander Pushkin, Eugene Onegin [1831; Eng. tr. 1881] 212 pages [Kindle, Proj. Gutenberg]

Pushkin is considered the greatest Russian poet, and Eugene Onegin is considered his best work; to be honest, I can’t really understand this. It may be because I don’t know Russian, and poetry doesn’t translate well; I tried two different translations, more than a century apart. Or it may be because I am not particularly attuned to Romantic era poetry — I didn’t like Byron’s Don Juan either, and this seems to be modeled on Byron. In any case, I didn’t appreciate the poetry, and I didn’t find the plot about a senseless duel particularly moving either. At least I can check off another classic.

Mar. 8

22. Alexandr Sergeyevitch Pushkin, The Complete Prose Tales [Eng. tr.] 495 pages

Still working on Russian literature.

Apart from the Tales of Belkin and “The Queen of Spades”, both of which I had already read, the only completed work is the novel The Captain’s Daughter. The other seven items are all unfinished works: The Moor of Peter the Great, about Pushkin’s great-grandfather; A Novel in Letters; “The History of the Village of Gorukhino”; “Roslavlev”; Dubrovsky; “Kirdjali”; and “Egyptian Nights”. The Captain’s Daughter is a fairly good historical novel about the Pugachev Revolt (the “False Peter”).




Mar. 9

23. Nicolai Gogol, Taras Bulba [1842; Eng. tr. 1962] 125 pages

On to Gogol. Taras Bulba is a Romantic novel in the tradition of Sir Walter Scott, about the war of the Ukrainian Cossacks for the independence of the Ukraine from Poland, and to reunite it with Russia. Gogol was Ukrainian, though he wrote in Russian, and he calls the Cossacks Russian or Ukrainian as if they were synonymous. Very interesting in the light of current events.

Mar. 13

24. Nikolai Gogol, Plays and Petersburg Tales [1835-1843; Eng. tr.1995] 358 pages

The title Petersburg Tales is not by Gogol, but is a later grouping of his tales set in St. Petersburg, which were originally published either separately or as part of his collection Arabesques. Of the six stories included, I had already read (and reviewed in the past months) four of them; the two that were new to me were “Nevsky Prospect”, a story about two men, one of them an artist, which is most interesting for its description of the life of the city rather than the plot, and “The Portrait”, a supernatural horror story also about an artist. I enjoyed both, although not as much as his humorous stories.

This book also included his two famous plays, Marriage and “The Inspector General” (also translated as “The Government Inspector” or simply “The Inspector”). Both are very funny comedies. Marriage, which as Nabokov pointed out is more accurately translated as “Getting Married”, is about a group of men who are courting the same girl. “The Inspector General” is probably Gogol’s best work. It is about a picaresque figure who is mistaken for an inspector general by the completely corrupt officials of a small town. (I followed it up by watching the 1949 American musical version which is somewhat more slapstick and changes the plot quite a bit to fit the standard Hollywood formula.)

Mar. 12

25. Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls [1842; Eng. tr. 1961] 278 pages

Gogol is best as a comic writer and this is his novel masterpiece. It is the story of a rogue, Chichikov, who buys up dead “souls”, i.e. deceased serfs, who are still listed as alive in the preceding census, for reasons that are revealed near the end of the book. In addition to this comic premise, the book is full of comic portraits of landowners like Nozdrev, Manilov, Sobakevich,and Nastasia Korobochka, whose names became bywords for later writers. Of course, there is a lot of satire of social customs, but the novel is really more a comedy than a satire as such. The novel was intended as the first in a trilogy, but Gogol, like Tolstoy, got religion and ended up burning the manuscript a few days before his death.

Mar. 16

26. Daniel Guerin, Fascism and Big Business [1936, rev. 1945, 1965; Eng. tr.1973] 318 pages

I decided to read about fascism at this time for two reasons; firstly, because I have recently been reading about the Holocaust, and secondly, because some of my friends on the Internet are debating with each other rather heatedly about whether Trump is a fascist. This book is frequently mentioned, and rightfully; it’s probably the best book I’ve read about fascism. Written initially in 1936, although revised to an extent in 1945 and again in 1965, it explains very clearly what the essence of a fascist movement is, using both Italian and German fascism of the nineteen twenties and thirties (Mussolini and Hitler) as examples.

To summarize, Guerin explains that fascism is a violent movement based originally on the petty bourgeoisie and the lumpenproletariat (declassed workers) to attack and ultimately suppress the unions and workers’ organizations, which is supported (and ultimately controlled) by the big bourgeoisie (especially in heavy industry) who eventually decide as a last resort to bring it to power in response to a crisis of the rate of profit which can’t be resolved by less drastic measures. Its first and most important task is to allow the wages and benefits (including social services) of labor to be reduced to or even below the subsistence level in order to maintain the rate of profit at a level acceptable to the capitalists. I would not say that Trump or the majority of MAGA meet that criterion, at least so far.

He also explains that all bourgeois governments in the age of imperialism are latently infected with the virus of fascism, which will come to the fore whenever there is a major crisis in the economy which threatens the existence of capitalism. He explains that the crisis which produces fascism does not come from the threat of the workers’ movement, but from the internal contradictions of the system itself.

Of course there are parallels. Any right-wing authoritarian movement or regime since World War II will use whatever tricks it can get away with from Hitler and Mussolini’s playbook. Many of the fascist’s secondary techniques are just an extreme form of techniques which are used by even the most “democratic” bourgeois governments, such as “bail-outs” of failing enterprises and banks, massive armaments spending and an aggressive foreign policy (this has been US policy since World War II, as was already evident to Guerin in 1965), tariffs and other impediments to foreign trade designed to isolate the domestic economy from the world economy, and attempts to erode civil rights and democratic checks and balances to prevent any resistence to their policies.

To acquire and maintain their base, the fascists have to rely on populist and even “socialist” demagogy. They promise to protect the “middle class” from both the capitalists and the “red” workers, but in power they do just the opposite, promoting centralization and squeezing the petty bourgeoisie with high taxes to fund their military spending and “prestige” projects which are designed to keep up the profits of the richest capitalists. (Space-X, anyone?) They also promote nationalist and racial prejudices, scapegoating Jews, immigrants, and other “foreign” elements. Their ideology is hardly a coherent philosophy, and so they rely on attacking “intellectuals” and promoting all sorts of irrationality over reason. They push a form of mysticism of race, especially the mystique of the Great Leader, and here are the similarities that I think are causing some of my friends to call Trump a “fascist”. It’s not just another example of liberals using “fascist” as a “Schimpfwort” for whatever they don’t like, although there is plenty of that in the media.

The biggest similarity, however, is in the response of the reformist liberals. They rely on “public opinion”, “democratic traditions”, and the institutions of bourgeois democracy: the “democratic” and social-democratic parties and their elected officials; parliament (Congress) and the courts, and the media. They proposed “popular fronts” between workers and “democratic” forces. Right up to the moment the bourgeois democratic leaders turned over state power to the fascists, they were predicting that the fascists would lose in the elections, that they were losing support and that the fascist movement was splintering. Does any of this sound familiar?

The most important point that Guerin makes is that the only way to stop fascism and prevent it from arising again (and it will arise here someday, regardless of what Trump represents) is for an independent movement of the working class to take power and abolish capitalism. He explains that even a mass “antifascist” movement is worthless if it is not explicitly anti-capitalist and resolute about taking power. This is the real lesson of fascism.

Mar. 18

27. Ashapurna Debi, Subarnalata [1965; tr. 1997] 213 pages

After reading The First Promise, which was very good, I decided to read the other two books in the trilogy. The second book, Subarnalata, begins three years after the end of the first book, and tells the story of Subarnalata, the daughter of Satyabati, the heroine of the first book. She is a rebel like her mother, and we see her fight against the same sort of domestic oppression. Unlike her mother, she does not have the support of a relatively liberal father, and her husband and in-laws are even worse, so she has a harder time at the beginning, but outside the family things are beginning to change. Unfortunately, the English translation is highly abridged — 209 pages, compared with 522 in the original — and essentially everything apart from Subarnalata’s own story has been eliminated, so this is not so evident as it might have been. At the end, she sees her life as a failure, but actually she has managed to educate her two youngest daughters, including Bakul, who is inspired by her mother’s life and who is the subject of the third book.

After reading this, I began the third book, Bakul Katha, which was available from Kindle Unlimited. I gave up after the first chapter. The translation is unreadable, with grammatical errors and inconsistent levels (elegant prose mixed with colloquialisms in the same sentences) and other faults in nearly every sentence. I was very sorry about this, not only because I wanted to finish the trilogy, but because it is evident from the translator’s preface that this was a labor of love, a book that affected her and others of her generation very deeply and which she wanted to make available to women and girls in the English-speaking communities of India as well as elsewhere. She is very modest and admits that she is unskillful as a translator, but I wish that, after putting in the effort to translate this long novel from Bengal into English, she had partnered with someone who was fluent in English, whether or not they knew Bengal, to put it into some sort of standard English. If it had been fifty or even a hundred pages, I might have struggled through it, but I couldn’t imagine reading over 430 pages of barely readable writing. I hope someday some daring publisher will buy the rights and give us a complete and readable translation of the entire trilogy, which would be a contribution to world literature.

March 27

28. Ananda Devi, Le rire des déesses [2021] 234 pages [Kindle] [in French]

Le rire des déesses is another strongly feminist novel by Ananda Devi (the ninth book I have read by her), set in the region of Benares in India, and it is an excellent book, although I didn’t agree totally with all of its perspectives (the novel is narrated by a hijri, or what would be referred to today in the West as a “transgender woman”). While the books I read last month set in Bengal (by Ashnapurna Debi) were about the oppression of women from the Brahmin aristocratic caste, this novel by Devi is about the lowest of the untouchables, a community of urban prostitutes and a community of hijris.

The first part of the book begins by describing the life of the prostitutes generally, and then focuses in on a woman named Veena and her young daughter, Chinti (“the ant”). We also meet one of her clients, the Swami or “holy man” Shivnath, who is the founder and leader of a wealthy and powerful cult movement allegedly devoted to the goddess Kali. In the second part, we meet a hijri named Sadhana, who is revealed as the actual narrator of the book, and learn her back story. The third and fourth parts describe how Shivnath abducts the young Chinti, and how Veena and the other prostitutes, together with Sadhana and the hijris of her community, set out to rescue her.

The book often seems on the verge of becoming a tragedy, and there are tragic parts, but over all it is an inspiring novel about isolated and alienated women who have always seen themselves as powerless becoming conscious of their strength when they develop solidarity.

March 31

29. Josef Wiesehöfer, Ancient Persia from 550 BC to 650 AD [Eng. tr. 1996, rev. 2001] 332 pages

Written (assuming the translation followed quickly on the German original) about thirty four years later than Frye’s The Heritage of Persia, the last book I read on ancient Iran, and revised (mostly just in the bibliography) about twenty five years ago, this is relatively though not completely up-to-date. It is apparently aimed mainly at specialists in historical fields other than but related to Iranian studies, so in terms of level it would fall somewhere in between the high-level popularization of The Heritage of Persia and specialized works (which I haven’t read) like Frye’s The History of Ancient Iran which is listed prominently in Wiesehöfer’s bibliography.

As one might expect from a book at this level, it emphasizes evidence rather than conclusions. Each of the four major parts, on the Achaemenids, Seleucids, Arsacids/Parthians, and Sassanians, begins with a section of “testimonia” which discusses the nature of the sources both written and archaeological for the particular culture. It also ends with almost fifty pages of “bibliographic essays”, which apart from primary sources includes mainly works written in the twenty five or thirty years before the book was written, with a supplement in the second edition of works appearing between 1996 and 2001.

Unlike the previous books I have read on ancient Iran, this is not a chronological history of rulers and wars; rather it attempts to describe the nature and evolution of the state; agriculture, crafts and everyday life; religion; and literature and art for each of the four major periods from the founding of the Achaemenid Empire by Cyrus to the end of the Sassanian Empire under Yazdgird III, when it succumbed to the Arab Moslem invasion.

Of course I am not an expert on the history of ancient Iran, and my readings tend to depend on chance factors such as what books I find at book sales or used book stores rather than seeking out what are the best possible books on a subject; of the books I have read so far, I would suggest Frye’s book for the general reader and this one (or both) for the reader who is interested in going further.

April 6

30. Lázló Krasnahorkai, War and War[1999; Eng. tr. 2006] 278 pages

War and War is another very strange novel by Lázló Krasnahorkai. It opens on a passenger bridge over a railway yard, with a middle-aged man who doesn’t appear to be fully sane surrounded by a gang of armed children, who have attempted to rob him, and to whom he gives a rambling monologue about his life which they don’t understand (nor does the reader) and by which they are totally bored. Eventually, they go away and he continues on his journey.

From his monologue and many other similar ones — the entire novel is presented as things he is telling other characters, with no real narrative connections — we learn that he is Györgi Korin, and that he is a former archivist (probably the occupation has symbolic meaning) from a small town a couple hundred kilometers from Budapest, divorced and with no close friends or relatives, who has left his job, sold or given away all his possessions, and is on a self-imposed mission which we only later come to know. As far as we can tell, he seems to have had somewhat the same sort of existentialist epiphany as Ezter in The Melancholy of Resistance, which apparently has some unexplained connection with the god Hermes.

After a number of similar and all seemingly random and meaningless adventures, he manages to get to New York City. At this point we learn that he left his position because he found a mysterious manuscript in a folder at the records archive, which he is convinced has a profound meaning and which he wants to give to Eternity by typing it onto the Internet. (The novel has a delightfully nostalgic description of mid-nineties computer and Internet technology, with dial-up internet connections, Alta Vista as the main search engine, the web made up of personal home pages but no social media, and so forth.)

The manuscript, as Korin tells various people about it (we never get to read anything from it directly, only Korin’s descriptions, which he is trying to express, unsuccessfully, in his poor, nearly nonexistent English) concerns four friends named Kasser, Bengazza, Falke and Toót, and a mysterious villain named Mr. Mastemann (anagram of Mens Satan?), who appear at various places and times. The somewhat incoherent account he gives of the story does not in any way give the reader the impression that it is at all the profound meaningful writing that he is certain it is. From time to time, he seems to have epiphanies where he thinks he has finally understood it, but which he cannot communicate.

The novel has a lot of self-referential comments where Korin discusses the manuscript in ways that apply to the novel itself and the other novels by Krasnahorkai. The War and War in the title are metaphorical, referring to the war between Mind and Enlightenment as Korin calls them (which might be represented by the friends and Mastemann?), because neither the story of Korin nor the story in the manuscript take place in wartime.

April 8

31. Adrienne Mayor, Greek Fire, Poison Arrows & Scorpion Bombs: Biological and Chemical Warfare in the Ancient World [2003] 319 pages

Adrienne Mayor is an independent researcher who specializes in the interface between myth, science and history, for example in her books I read a few years back about the possible influence of fossil discoveries on ancient and Native American myths. Her books are always interesting and provocative. One major problem with her writings, however, is that she tends to consider all myths to have a basis in scientific or historical fact. She seems to have no understanding of or interest in myths as myths, or the functions that they actually serve in ancient and preliterate cultures. This problem is especially noticeable in this book, which looks at non-conventional types of warfare in antiquity and the Middle Ages (which she calls “late antiquity”). She is also very uncritical in her use of sources.

The book begins on fairly solid ground. The first chapter begins with the myth of Hercules and the hydra, which features Hercules dipping arrows into the poisonous blood of the hydra, and traces these poisoned arrows through his later encounters with monsters and Centaurs, and eventually to Philoctetes and the Trojan War. She shows that the descriptions of the effects of poisoned arrows in these myths and other stories in the Homeric and other early epics demonstrate an accurate knowledge of them and make it plausible that the Mycenaean and archaic Greeks were familiar with and probably themselves used poisoned arrows. (Her attempt to give a historical explanation of the poisoned tunic of Hercules on the other hand is an example of her more far-fetched attempts to rationalize myth, and she gives an even more unlikely version in chapter four.) The second and third chapters turn to more historical texts from Greece, Rome, India and China concerning poison arrows and other uses of poison in warfare, and are fairly convincing, although she is somewhat too uncritical in her approach to the sources.

With the fourth chapter, on biological weapons, she enters into crank territory. She brings in two of the myths that are most often referred to by crank writers, the ten plagues of Moses and the Ark of the Covenant. She suggests that the fifth and sixth plagues were consistent with pulmonary anthrax and that they might have been deliberate. She also identifies the plague sent by Apollo at the beginning of the Iliad as anthrax. She then continues that “although neither the Iliad nor Exodus implicates humans in the anthrax-like plagues, the priests of Apollo and Yahweh took credit for summoning the epidemics, and that definitely reveals both the human desire and intention to wage what we now call germ warfare.” So praying to the gods to send plagues against the enemy is a form of biological warfare! “The ten plagues of Exodus were most likely a series of natural calamities that were advantageous to the Israelites, but inherent in the story is the strong suggestion that plagues and biological disasters could be powerful weapons against enemies.” Having it both ways. “The tenth plague, the sudden death of the Egyptians’ firstborn children, has been called the ultimate biological weapon.” (No source given.) Now I would say the ten plagues were “most likely” – that is, almost certainly – invented, probably on the basis of earlier mythical events; mythology is filled with similar punishments by the gods. They were attributed to God, and if one denies or ignores the religious context, there is no reason whatsoever to accept the description as historical. She then quotes examples from Indian and Roman authors accusing enemies of deliberately spreading plagues, before turning to the Ark.

The story she refers to is from 1 Samuel, which tells how after the Philistines captured the Ark of the Covenant, there were outbreaks of plague (which she probably correctly identifies as bubonic plague; there are medical articles supporting this view) among the Philistines wherever it was taken. Although 1 Samuel was probably written much later, it is certainly possible that there was an epidemic of plague among the Philistines at the time they captured the Ark (if that is historical) and that the Jews and possibly the Philistines themselves connected the two events. This would be an example of the typical mythical motif of divine revenge for the plundering of temples or sacred objects (see later on.) The Philistines according to the account returned the Ark together with images of mice (which suggests that rodents were associated with the plague even by the Philistines, as they would actually be if the account is historical.)

Crank theories about the Ark abound (Indiana Jones!) but mainly claim that it was an alien artifact made of radioactive materials or having a high-voltage power supply. Mayor on the other hand suggests that it was filled with fomites, that is infected materials from plague victims, to deliberately spread disease to enemies: “The coincidence of a plague breaking out upon the arrival of a special casket in each town raises interesting questions. It may simply have been that the Philistine escorts of the Ark brought the disease with them. But, given the worldwide occurrence of tales of plague begun by opening sealed containers from enemies and the modern knowledge that such a scenario is plausible, one wonders: Does the story of the Ark suggest that the chest might have contained some object, such as cloth, that harbored aerosolized plague germs, or an insect vector that infected the rodents in Philistine territory?”. Conspiracy theorists take note: the Jews were spreading disease three thousand years ago! (In fact, anti-Semitic writers attributed the Black Death and later outbreaks of plague to the Jews.) Given the apparent origin of the Ark in the nomadic period, I would say it undoubtedly just contained the kind of cult objects that one would find in a shaman’s medicine bundle, certainly not disease-causing material. I don’t think Mayor was deliberately promoting antisemitic conspiracy theory, because it wasn’t just the Jews. She then refers to many accounts from the ancient world about pestilences attacking enemies after they open sealed chests or jars in temples, especially temples of Apollo (the god of plagues and rodents). She suggests in fact that ancient temples were repositories for biological warfare weapons, since we know they stored up other kinds of weapons (as votive offerings). She does come back to the Jews, however, to mention the later Testament of Solomon and Islamic legends that Solomon sealed up demons in jars and bottles, who were then later released and caused disease. Now again this seems to me to be just the motif of divine revenge for plundering temples; and when the ancients said “gods” or “demons” I think they meant – gods or demons.

In the sentences I have quoted, she presents these ideas as speculations: “one wonders”, “might have”, “could have been” and so forth. However, in a technique used by crank writers from Velikovsky onwards, in later chapters she refers back to these speculations as if they are facts and uses them as a basis for further speculations.

The rest of the book describes the uses of animals in warfare, incendiary weapons, and the famous Greek fire. While her use of sources leaves much to be desired, she does bring together interesting material from many parts of the ancient and mediaeval world. However, I would not recommend this book.

April 12

32. Tom Holland, Persian Fire: The First World Empire and the Battle for the West [2005] 418 pages [Kindle]

Persian Fire tells the story of the wars between the Greeks and Persians. I use the word “story” literally, because this is written in a novelistic narrative style. Compared to the other books I have read recently, I would call this a lower-to-mid-level popular work. I don’t mean that in any disparaging way; it is a question of his intended audience. I would definitely recommend this to high-school students or general readers just looking for a good, exciting true story from ancient history. It might well inspire them to look further into the history. For someone who is already planning to read further, I would probably recommend starting with something at a somewhat higher level.

Holland devotes about half the book to the background history of Persia from the time of Cyrus, Sparta, and Athens up to the beginning of the wars. The emphasis is on events and personalities, rather than analysis of the social and economic foundations. He bases himself largely on the ancient sources such as Herodotus and Thucydides; the sources are all cited, but without any critical discussion of them, and there are some, but fairly few, footnote references to modern scholars and disputed points. In other words, a fairly traditional narrative based on the consensus of historians rather than on sifting evidence, and one which perhaps is somewhat biased towards a “triumph of the West” view.

The highpoints are the descriptions of the battles: Marathon, Salamis, Thermopylae and Plataea are all here. In short, a fairly exciting story, and probably not too inaccurate as history.


April 13

33. Cees Nooteboom, The Following Story [1991, Eng. tr. 1993] 98 pages

After finding this short novel at a book sale recently, I looked up the author on the Internet and found that he was one of the most prominent experimental novelists from contemporary Holland, and this is one of his best-known books. He was also a travel writer. The Following Story is a quick, enjoyable read where nothing is what it seems and is filled with classical references and witty comments.

While this brief synopsis is far from giving a real idea of the book, it is as much as I can say without spoilers: Hermann Mussert, a former classics teacher, nicknamed “Socrates” by his students, and later a travel writer under the pen name “Dr. Strabo”, goes to bed one night in his apartment in Amsterdam, looking at newspaper photographs of the planets taken by one of the Voyager spacecraft. He wakes up with the strange sensation that he is dead, and realizes that he is in a hotel room in Lisbon, the same one where he had an affair many years earlier. He wanders around the city visiting sites and remembering events from his past. A second part has him on a ship from Lisbon to the Amazon, with a cast of strange fellow travelers, and we learn more about his past.



April 14

34. Ibrahim Nasrallah, Rain Inside: Selected Poems [2009, Eng. tr.] 120 pages [Kindle, Open Library]

Ibrahim Nasrallah, this year’s winner of the Neustadt Prize, was first known as a poet before becoming a novelist. This is not, as I expected, his 1982 collection, Rains Inside, but a translated selection of his poetry from many different collections over his lifetime. It contains forty-two poems, but the last three, “The Chairs”, “The Hours”, and “Mirrors of Dust”, are actually collections of short poems on related themes, so the total is actually ninety nine.

The poems center on themes of loss, alienation and exile, as well as love and joy, but they are unlike other Palestinian poetry I have read in not being explicitly political. This may just be due to the particular selection, or may be typical of his poetry. The poems are good, and speak to human life in general. Of course, poetry always loses much in translation, and as I don’t read Arabic, I am better able to appreciate his novels than his poetry.

April 17

35. Ibrahim Nasrallah, Prairies of Fever [1985; Eng. tr. 1993] 155 pages [Kindle, Open Library]

Prairies of Fever is Nasrallah’s first novel. I had previously read three of his historical novels from the Palestinian Comedy, which are written in a straightforward Romantic/Realist style; this is very different. It is an experimental novel which is told out of order and partly in first, partly in second person, and we are not always sure which character is the “I” and which is the “you” – if there are in fact two characters, because this is a doppelganger novel.

Nasrallah, who was born and grew up in a Palestinian refugee camp in Jordan, spent a number of years as a rural teacher (Ustadh) in the region of al-Qunfudhah in Saudi Arabia. The protagonist(s) of the novel also is/are teaching in a village in the same region. Each chapter opens with a short section in verse, then begins a first person narration which suddenly switches to second person. Not only the verse but the prose uses many of the same images that we find in Nasrallah’s poetry.

The novel begins, after first verse section, with five mysterious men on motorcycles arriving in the middle of the night and demanding that Ustadh Mohammad Hammad pay them a thousand riyals for his burial. They insist that he is dead, although he tries to convince them otherwise. The next morning, Mohammad wakes up and discovers that his roommate has disappeared, leaving behind his identity card and his briefcase, which besides clothes contains the thousand riyals. Oddly, the door to their hut is still locked from the inside. After much hesitation, Mohammad goes to the police to report the disappearance. We then learn that the roommate is also named Mohammad Hammad, and that “he looks just like me.”

He goes to work at the school, worried about how he will explain the fact that the other Mohammad is not with him, but to his surprise, no one asks or seems to notice. He decides that there must be a conspiracy not to mention the disappearance. The police attempt to arrest him, but he flees. Later, after talking to the head of the school, they drop all attention to him. He wonders, what could the head of the school have said to make them abandon the investigation?

We get a number of apparent flashbacks to when the two Mohammads arrived in the village. He arranges for a room for them, although for some reason the landlord doesn’t seem to realize that there will be two teachers rather than one. We also learn that he can’t remember when or where the two of them met, whether on the journey or previously. There are also a number of episodes with unclear chronology, some of which involve very unlikely or impossible events. Are they dreams, or hallucinations? Were there actually two Mohammad Hammads, or is he schizophrenic, or did he imagine the other Mohammad from loneliness and alienation, or is he simply suffering from delirium due to fever?

I won’t reveal the ending, but if you have read much modernist literature you can probably guess.

April 30

36. Adrienne Mayor, The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome’s Deadliest Enemy [2010] 448 pages

With The Poison King my ancient history project went a bit out of my geographical plan, anticipating my shift from Iran to Anatolia later in the year, but after reading about the Parthian wars with Rome, I realized I needed to know a little about the wars to the northwest in Anatolia and Armenia. King Mithradates of Pontus (ca. 132 - 63 BCE, although Mayor has him born a couple years earlier, to match up with a comet appearance), with the intermittent support of his son in law King Tigranes of Armenia, fought the late Roman Republic for more than forty years, at times driving the Romans out of Asia Minor and even invading Greece, at times being defeated and forced into hiding, but always returning with new forces to renew the war. There were officially four Mithradatic Wars, but the conflict was essentially continuous with military and diplomatic phases alternating.

The Mithradatic Wars, together with the contemporary wars with Jugurtha in Numidia, Sertorius in Spain, and the rebellions of the native Italians (the Social War) and the slaves (Spartacus), certainly contributed to the fall of the Republic and the beginning of the Empire in the next generation. Sulla’s power derived largely from the prestige and plunder he won fighting Mithradates, and the last war was won by his protegé Ptolemy “the Great”, due to the treachery of Mithradates’ son and apparent heir, Pharnaces. (Although I’ve read some Roman history over the years, going all the way back to when I took Latin in high school, I won’t get to it seriously for another two or three years; I still have the rest of my Iran reading, Anatolia from Çatalhoyuk and the Hittites on, Syria, Canaan, Phoenicia, and of course the Greeks, first.)

At the beginning of this month, I read and reviewed (very negatively) Mayor’s book on unconventional warfare in antiquity, especially criticizing her use of sources and her tendency to consider all myths and legends as based on fact. Mithradates and his reputation as a poisoner played a role in that book, and as she says in the Introduction to this one, inspired her to study Mithradates. I would make the same criticisms of this book; the subtitle is “the life and legend” and she essentially doesn’t distinguish the two. In the Introduction, she explains her views on “virtual history”, and significantly tries to distinguish it from historical novels. Her distinction is that “virtual history” tries to fill in the gaps in our knowledge of events based on a general knowledge of the period and culture and reasonable speculation, while historical novels invent characters and change known events to make a better story. To me, this sounds more like a distinction between two types of historical novel. Mayor definitely “fills in the gaps” with speculation, sometimes basing two or three chapters on two or three sentences in the sources.

Considered as a history book, I would give this very low marks, but considered as what it really is, a reasonably accurate historical novel, I learned what I wanted to know from it and would probably recommend it as historical fiction.

May 2

37. Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls, Part II [Posthumous reconstruction of four chapters, bef. 1852] 146 pages

In March, I read Dead Souls. According to the introduction, Gogol wrote a second part, which he burned a few weeks before his death. So I was rather surprised when the friend I am reading Russian literature with got to the end of the book in the edition she was reading and found a second part of a couple hundred pages still left. Reading the introduction to that edition more carefully, we saw that when describing his burning of the second part it mentioned that the first four chapters had accidentally survived. Investigating further on the Internet, it appeared that what was found was five notebooks with four chapters of earlier drafts. Not even of the same draft. Given my completeness demon, I read the 146 pages of this “Part II”. The chapters, which have gaps, are very different; some episodes are in the humorous style of Part I, though not as funny, while others are serious and even didactic (i.e. “preachy”) in tone. While I am sure that the final draft would have been better than any of these draft versions, I wonder whether Gogol really burned the manuscript because of his religious scruples or whether he just knew it wasn’t very good and that he had no time to revise it.

At the end of these four chapters, I then found another sixty pages left – a translation of a French translation of a continuation by a certain Zakharchenko, which doesn’t even pretend to be by Gogol. I didn’t read that – even my completeness demon has its limits.

May 3

38. Ananda Devi, Le Jour des Caméléons [2023] 267 pages [Kindle, in French]

I’m not sure if this is Devi’s latest novel, but it is probably the last I will read for a while (I usually read up to ten books by each of the Neustadt or Nobel winners, and this is my tenth.) I have liked all but one of her novels, and this was also good, although not her best. It has a kind of magical realist style, with the island (Mauritius, or Isle Maurice) itself as the narrator, and the appearance of the chameleons from time to time as participants in the action, but the story itself is realist or even naturalist (the characters seem to be controlled by their immediate emotions, rather than by any sort of rational thinking.) The narration is very angry, if I can put it that way, and sometimes verges on being a political pamphlet against consumer culture and tourism.

The plot alternates between a half-dozen characters, a ten-year-old girl named Sara, her mother Sonia, her uncle René, a middle-aged woman named Nandini who has just left her husband Abhi, and a gang-leader who calls himself Zigzig. All these characters interact with one another to create a catastrophic explosion perhaps modeled on the 1999 Kaya riots.

May 7

39. Ivan Turgenev, The Vintage Turgenev v.2 [1850-1859] 391 pages

The Vintage Turgenev is a two volume paperback containing four novels and three short stories by Ivan Turgenev in a very readable translation by Harry Stevens. For some reason, it is in reverse order by the chronology of when they were written.

[Warning: Some plot spoilers, but the interest in these stories is hardly in the plots anyway.]

In keeping with this, I read the books backwards starting with the last story of the second volume which was the first written, “The Diary of a Superfluous Man” [1850]. This slight early story was actually one of my favorites. It somewhat reminded me of Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Ilych”, in that it is the reminiscences of a dying man looking back at his life and finding it a failure. Unlike the case in Tolstoy, however, it is not a moral failure and there is no religious epiphany. Rather, the dying man has been a good man, not unintelligent or lazy, who has had a normal career, until succumbing to “consumption”. He recognizes that he has been precisely “superfluous”; he has never been needed, and in whatever he has done someone else could have done as well or better. Honestly, I can relate. Of course, being by Turgenev, there was an unsuccessful love story; the girl he loved simply preferred someone else, and he was the “fifth horse to the carriage”.

The next story chronologically was “A Quiet Spot” (sometimes translated as “The Backwater”) [1854]. According to the blurb on the back cover, this “is the masterpiece of Turgenev’s special forte – the psychology of women.” To be honest, I didn’t really see that; it was too elliptical for me perhaps. As with nearly all of Turgenev’s stories, even his more philosophical ones, the plot is based on a love triangle, and there doesn’t really seem to be much more. Vladimir Sergeich Astakhov, a young nobleman, visits one of his outlying estates to check up on the accounts. His neighbor Ipatov invites him for a visit. Ipatov has a young sister-in-law, Maria Pavlovna, living with him and taking care of his two daughters. He has a neighbor, Nadiozhda Alexieevna, whose brother Piotr is the suitor of Maria Pavlovna. Vladimir and Maria begin to be interested in each other, and Nadiozhda flirts with Vladimir to distract him from her brother’s love-interest; her own suitor becomes jealous, etc. I won’t reveal the melodramatic consequences.

Next is his first novel, Rudin [1855]. This again begins with two neighbors, Alexandra Pavlovna and the rather older and conservative but intellectual Daria Mikhailich. Naturally, Alexandra has a brother who is in love with Daria’s daughter, Natalia. The title character arrives and moves in and of course he and Natalia fall in love. The interest of the novel is not in the plot but in the character of Rudin. He is a charismatic talker, who is full of idealistic opinions about equality of the sexes, love, freedom, and so forth, expressed with all the trappings of German Idealist philosophy. Most of the novel is taken up with dialogue between Rudin and the rather unpleasant foil, the male chauvinist pig Pigasov. (Not a pun in Russian.) In the climax, Rudin and Natalia reveal their love for each other; Rudin says “Nothing can part us forever”. But the sycophantic parasite Pandalevsky has observed the scene and reports it to Daria, who reprimands Natalia for her unworthy behavior with a social inferior. Natalia responds honestly, and goes to Rudin expecting him to take her away with him; he says they should “submit to their fate”, that is “not intended for them to be happy”, and she is totally disillusioned in him. He leaves the next day. We then get much rambling discussion about his character and an epilogue. Basically, this is a study of a weak character (elsewhere Turgenev labels them as “hamletic”) who is always making grandiose plans and abandoning them at the first sign of an obstacle. A footnote to the translation notes that Turgenev claimed the character of Rudin was based on his close acquaintance the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, which seems unlikely given what I know about Bakunin; apparently (this is from Wikipedia so I don’t know if it is accurate) their mutual friend Alexander Herzen wrote in his memoirs that in fact Rudin had more in common with Turgenev than with Bakunin.

Lastly ( firstly in the book) is Turgenev’s third novel, On the Eve [1859], which some critics consider his best book. (His second novel, A Nest of Gentlefolk, is not in this collection and is not on my current list, though I may read it eventually.) It is certainly his most positive novel. According to Wikipedia, it is loosely based on a true story. The heroine is a woman named Yelena Stakhova, and the book as usual with Turgenev opens with a love triangle. Yelena has two suitors, a sculptor named Pavel Shubin, whom she considers too unserious, and a student named Andrei Berensiev, whom she favors. Then, however, a friend of Berensiev, the Bulgarian Dmitri Insarov, arrives and he and Yelena soon fall in love. Insarov is the opposite of Rudin; he is rather taciturn, a man of action who is wholly devoted to the cause of Bulgarian independence from the Turks. When Yelena’s parents oppose their relationship, rather than submit like Rudin, he marries her secretly. They then set out for Bulgaria; Insarov dies en route in Venice, Yelena takes his body to Bulgaria and disappears without a trace.

May 12

40. Sunil Gangopadhyay, Those Days [1982, Eng. tr. 1997] 589 pages [Kindle]

This month’s read for the World Literature group I am in on Goodreads, Those Days is a historical novel about the Bengal Renaissance of the nineteenth century, from the 1840s to about1870. It covers basically the same time period as Ashapurna Debi’s Subarnalata, the second book of her trilogy, also set in Calcutta, which I read last month, but where that novel focused on women characters and domestic life, this book with its mostly male characters deals with the political and literary developments of the time. Many of the characters and events are historical; unfortunately I do not know enough about the history of the period to always recognize which events are real or how closely the novel follows them.

The novel begins with the birth of one of the major characters, Nabin Kumal Singha, to a wealthy family and ends with his death. He plays such a major role in political and literary events that it seems as though he must be historical, but in fact he is an invented character. Among the characters and events which are undoubtedly historical are the Sepoy mutiny of 1857, the Widow Remarriage Act, and the founding of the Brahmo movement by Debendranath Tagore (father of the Nobel prizewinning author Rabindranath Tagore) and Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, and its later split under Keshab Chandra Sen; the literary role of Michael Madhusudan Dutt is also historical but apparently much of what this book says about his personal life is fictional.

I very much enjoyed the book and learned some history from it. (It has inspired me to add some nonfiction about the history of India and the Hindu religion to my TBR list.) It is well-researched, well-written and for the most part well-translated; there aren’t too many typos for an e-book. It is also very long, very complex, and has many characters, many of whom a Bengali reader would probably be familiar with; it took me over two weeks to read, although of course it wasn’t the only thing I was reading. The sequel sounds interesting, but it is even longer; I have added it to my TBR list but to be honest I may not get to it.

May 12

40. Sunil Gangopadhyay, Those Days [1982, Eng. tr. 1997] 589 pages [Kindle]

This month’s read for the World Literature group I am in on Goodreads, Those Days is a historical novel about the Bengal Renaissance of the nineteenth century, from the 1840s to about 1870. It covers basically the same time period as Ashapurna Debi’s Subarnalata, the second book of her trilogy, also set in Calcutta, which I read last month, but where that novel focused on women characters and domestic life, this book with its mostly male characters deals with the political and literary developments of the time. Many of the characters and events are historical; unfortunately I do not know enough about the history of the period to always recognize which events are real or how closely the novel follows them.

The novel begins with the birth of one of the major characters, Nabin Kumal Singha, to a wealthy family and ends with his death. He plays such a major role in political and literary events that it seems as though he must be historical, but in fact he is an invented character. Among the characters and events which are undoubtedly historical are the Sepoy mutiny of 1857, the Widow Remarriage Act, and the founding of the Brahmo movement by Debendranath Tagore (father of the Nobel prizewinning author Rabindranath Tagore) and Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, and its later split under Keshab Chandra Sen; the literary role of Michael Madhusudan Dutt is also historical but apparently much of what this book says about his personal life is fictional.

I very much enjoyed the book and learned some history from it. (It has inspired me to add some nonfiction about the history of India and the Hindu religion to my TBR list.) It is well-researched, well-written and for the most part well-translated; there aren’t too many typos for an e-book. It is also very long, very complex, and has many characters, many of whom a Bengali reader would probably be familiar with; it took me over two weeks to read, although of course it wasn’t the only thing I was reading. The sequel sounds interesting, but it is even longer; I have added it to my TBR list but to be honest I may not get to it.

May 15

41. Lázló Krasnahorkai, A Mountain to the North, a Lake to the South, Paths to the West, a River to the East [2003, Eng. tr. 2022] 130 pages

This book is very different from the previous three novels I have read by Krasnahorkai. The only thing they have in common is strangeness.

The novel is apparently set at the present time. The chapters are short, each one composed of a single long sentence. A man referred to only as “the grandson of Prince Genji”gets off an empty railway car onto an empty platform, and begins walking through the inexplicably empty streets of Kyoto, eventually arriving at a Buddhist monastery which is also completely deserted. The building of the monastery is described in detail, and attributed to some inscrutable masterplan, apparently of god. He walks through the monastery observing everything and then leaves. That is the entire story.

The book is a treat in style, very much a prose poem. But what it meant, I haven’t the slightest idea.

May 17

42. Ambrose Bierce, In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians [1891] 403 pages [Kindle, Open Library]


In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians was Bierce’s first major collection of stories; it is divided into two sections, “Soldiers”, which contains fifteen stories about the Civil War, including his most famous (and by far best) story, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”, and “Civilians”, which contains eleven stories, nearly all horror stories, one or two with possible paranormal elements (only the last story, “The Eyes of the Panther” is definitely paranormal) but most simply psychological.

All the stories are individually good, but they lose a lot by being collected, since there is much repetition of themes and technique; for example, many of the Civil War stories have nearly the same “surprise ending”, which after the first story the reader is looking for. The style has elements of Romanticism (nearly all of them depend upon multiple coincidences) and of Naturalism (some of the Civil War stories will remind the reader of The Red Badge of Courage), but the labels aren’t really important. I would recommend this as a quick and enjoyable read.

May 21

43. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections [1923-1940; Eng. tr. 1985] 278 pages

Walter Benjamin was an extremely interesting figure. He is often called a philosopher, but was really more of a literary critic; his criticism however went beyond what we usually think of as literary, using literature and the arts as examples to discuss changing trends in all aspects of modern life. Raised in a Jewish family, his early education was religious, but he later became influenced by Marxism; he considered joining the Communist Party in the mid-twenties, when it still had some claim to being a revolutionary movement, but never did, and later became associated with the Institute for Social Research (the Frankfort School) but never accepted its more doctrinaire (and increasingly un-revolutionary) opinions. He committed suicide in 1940 to avoid being deported to a concentration camp.

Illuminations is a collection of translations of some of his essays, mainly about literature; it is not, as one might assume, a translation of the German collection of the same name, which has an almost completely different and much larger selection of essays. This book contains a rather unhelpful preface to the recent reprint, by someone I have never heard of, a much longer and more interesting introduction by Hannah Arendt, and ten essays by Benjamin.

The first essay is about unpacking his books after a move (he was an inveterate book collector, sometimes going without food to buy books) which I could well relate to; I’ve been unpacking my own books now for some twenty years since I moved to Utah and I still have boxes left unopened. The second was the introduction to his translation of Baudelaire, which was the earliest written and which I found very metaphysical and obscure (the only one from before his Marxist period.)

There follow an essay ostensibly about Lensky (very little about Lensky, but a good discussion of the differences between storytelling and the modern novel), two on Kafka (very perceptive), one on his friend Berthold Brecht and the Epic Theater, and one each on Baudelaire and Proust (whom I haven’t read, but the essays had much of interest about modern life, and about memory.) The most interesting essay was his “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, but I’m currently reading that in German in another collection so I will put off my review to that book. The collection ends with a ten-page “Theses on the Philosophy of History” from 1940, which gives a good idea of why his relations with the Frankfort School were rather strained at the end of his life.

It is a very thought-provoking book, which I would recommend to anyone interested in modern life and literature from a radical perspective.

May 24

44. Sarah Orne Jewett, The Country of the Pointed Firs and Other Stories [1896-1910] 296 pages

I read The Country of the Pointed Firs a long time ago, and didn’t really remember it; I had never read the stories. This collection included the novel [1896], the four stories set in the same fictional location of Dunnet’s Landing and with the same characters and narrator (The Queen’s Twin [1899], A Dunnet Shepherdess [1899], The Foreigner [1900], and William’s Wedding [1910]) and four other stories (A White Heron [1886], Miss Tempy’s Watchers [1888], Aunt Cynthy Dallett [1896], and Martha’s Lady [1897].)

The Country of the Pointed Firs is a novel in stories. It is a novel of a kind which is no longer written, at least by literary novelists, and could hardly be written since the First World War (and the same is true of the stories): we are in a world of essentially good people living a difficult but on the whole happy life; there is no conflict, class or otherwise, no villains, no horrors, no tragedies except the natural ones of unlucky love, old age and natural death. Although there are references to the war (the Civil War, some thirty years past) and we are told that the area is in decline after the end of the era of whaling and sea-trade – the people are as always nostalgic for a yet earlier past – this is essentially the ahistorical past for which many conservative people today are nostalgic. The closest contemporary novel to this I have read was The Life of Rebecca Jones, set in a similarly isolated rural region, but even that novel has change and intrusions from war and other events – and in the end we learn that it was not a possible world after all. The world of The Country of the Pointed Firs is also not just a world that no longer exists, but a world that never could have existed, but Jewett unlike Price doesn’t realize it.

I was born in Maine and grew up mostly in Maine and New Hampshire, and mostly among good hardworking people, so much of this did seem real to some extent; but where was the willful ignorance, the bigotry, the pettiness and so forth that I also remember from the time I was old enough to notice? It is relaxing to occasionally back off from the novels of horror and tragedy and read something like this, but it is essentially not reality.

May 25

45. Walter Benjamin, Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit [1937] 107 pages [in German]

This little book contains three of Benjamin’s essays. “Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit” (The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction) is probably his best-known essay, and the English translation is included in Illuminations. His basic thesis is that just as the invention of printing changed our understanding of what literature is, so the modern technical means of artistic representation, photography, phonograph records, radio, and especially film, have changed out understanding of the work of art.

He presents the argument that the work of art was originally part of ritual or cult, and later as it became secularized it retained the “aura” of uniqueness, in the double sense of “one of a kind (Einzigkeit)” and “only produced once (Einmaligkeit).” Thus it was designed to be observed by individuals separately as a physical object, and its major characteristic was “authenticity” as opposed to copies. The first change was when mosaics and frescoes, which were permanently linked to a particular place, began to give rise to easel pictures which could be exhibited in multiple places, but not simultaneously; but the modern technical means allow the same work of art to be observed simultaneously in many places, and destroys the whole concept of authenticity – for example, one print of a photograph or one phonograph record is no more “original” than any other.

He also discusses the concept of “mass” art and how the existence of a mass audience affects the creative process itself. Most of the essay however is concerned with film and how the technical aspects of film production affect the work itself. There are many other insights in the essay.

In this edition, the essay is followed by two others on related themes. “Kleine Geschichte der Photographie” as the title suggests is a history of photography; it focuses especially on the earliest stages in its history and makes many similar points as to how it changed our way of perceiving art and the world. He makes the point that the arguments about whether photography is an art were pointless, when the real point was that photography changed the definition of art itself. “Eduard Fuchs, der Sammler und der Historiker” is a brief biography and appreciation of a historian of art who wrote histories of caricature and of erotic art and came to many of the same conclusions as Benjamin.

May 30

46. Lázló Krasnahorkai, Seiobo There Below [2008; Eng. tr. 2013] 451 pages [Kindle]

Although Seiobo There Below is described as a novel, it is really a collection of seventeen independent stories, and not even a “novel in stories”; the stories all have a certain thematic connection, being about art and artists, or more exactly the epistemology of art, but there are no characters or settings in common. All the stories are strange and poetic and some could be described as having a haunting quality, but they are anything but simple or straightforward.

First, the contents: the first story is about a white heron in a river, with no human characters, the second alternates the Biblical story of Queen Vashti from the Book of Esther with the story about a painting of it, the third is about the restoration of a statue of the Buddha, with the attendant rituals, chapter 5 is about a painting of the Dead Christ, chapter 8 is set in Athens where a tourist visits the Acropolis, chapter 13 is about an artist who makes Noh masks, chapter 21 is about an impoverished man in Barcelona who visits a gallery of Russian icons, chapter 34 is about a Noh actor, chapter 55 is about Perugino, the teacher of Raphael, chapter 89 is about the Alhambra, chapter 144 is about a sculpture, chapter 233 is about a museum guard at the Louvre who is obsessed with the Venus de Milo, chapter 377 is about a lecturer who is obsessed with Baroque music, chapter 610 is about a landscape painter who has just lost his lover, chapter 987 is about a Westerner who tries to learn the secrets of the rebuilding of a Shinto shrine, chapter 1597 is about the exile of the Noh playwright Ze’amim and chapter 2584 is about buried sculpures of the Chinese Shang dynasty.

What nearly all the stories have in common is a focus on the unique physical nature of the work of art, what Benjamin calls the “aura”; it was entirely by accident that I read this immediately after Benjamin’s The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction but Krasnahorkai is obviously influenced by Benjamin. This is the most interesting book I have read so far by Krasnahorkai.

May 31

47. Simon Wiesenthal, The Sunflower: The Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness [revised and expanded ed., 1998] 289 pages

The original story by Simon Wiesenthal describes his life in a concentration camp and an incident in which a terminally wounded SS soldier summons him to his bedside to hear a confession of the atrocity he has committed and asks him as a Jew to forgive him. Wiesenthal leaves without answering him, and later wonders whether he was right or wrong to have refused to forgive him. Whether this actually happened we cannot be sure; Wiesenthal was unfortunately known for presenting his own fictions as facts; but whether it was an actual event or a fable, the question it raises is interesting, and important in an age when right-wing regimes (almost exclusively) benefit from “amnesties”: are there crimes like genocide which cannot be forgiven?

The story is followed by fifty-two short (one or two page) responses by various people who were invited to comment on the question. Most were from the original edition of 1969, but others were added in the thirty-year anniversary edition, and refer to later massacres and genocides, in Bosnia, Cambodia, Rwanda and so forth. (Apparently following Western and Israeli foreign policy; there is no mention of My Lai or Pinochet’s Chile, and naturally no mention of the tabooed Palestinian question.) It was noted that in the original edition, the Jewish responses, many by Holocaust survivors, agreed with Wiesenthal that those responsible for the crimes of the Holocaust cannot be forgiven, while the Christians mainly came down on the side of forgiveness. Nearly all the invited respondents were religious leaders, so the discussion is almost completely based on theology; the few who take a more political approach, including the token “Marxist”, Herbert Marcuse, still confine themselves to the question of individual responsibility.

Personally, I believe that those who are responsible for crimes against humanity should be punished to the utmost. However, that for me is not the most important question. The problem is that all the respondents take for granted that we should “forgive” and support the very socio-economic system which produces fascism, genocide, and massacres somewhere or other every five or ten years.

June 1

48. Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons [Norton Crit. ed., 1966, ed, by Ralph E. Matlaw] 333 pages
49. Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Children [Norton Crit. ed., 2nd ed., 2009, ed. by Michael R. Katz] 418 pages

To begin with the novel itself, Fathers and Children (the more exact translation of the Russian title, Ottsy i deti) is one of the great novels of all time; it is certainly one of my own top twenty favorites. As both versions of the title suggest, one of its major themes is the conflict between generations, the feeling of the sons that they have gone beyond the outdated ideas of the fathers, and the unacknowledged fear of the fathers that they may be right. The novel opens with the two sons, Arkady Kirsanov and his friend Bazarov, who have just graduated, Arkady from the University and Bazarov from medical school, arriving at Arkady’s home. The fathers are represented by Arkady’s father Nikolai and his uncle Pavel. Later we meet another, somewhat different representative in Bazarov’s father.

The central character of the novel is Bazarov, a self-described “nihilist”. While Turgenev did not invent the word, his novel gave it wide currency at the time as a description of the radical youth; later it became synonymous with terrorism, but for Turgenev and the characters of Bazarov and his friend Arkady it meant materialism, or more precisely empiricism, and the rejection of the social and economic conditions of Tsarist Russia, as well as religion and the romantic idealism of the fathers’ generation. Turgenev conceived of Bazarov as a tragic hero, an intelligent, self-confident young man in complete rebellion against his surroundings, a basically isolated person who finds “disciples” like his friend Arkady but not collaborators at his own level. From an impoverished (but landowning) family (he may be a “man of the people” but in class terms he is not a serf or a peasant) , he is somewhat rude, and we can assume he has suffered affronts from people of higher social standing, which cause him to emphasize his own lack of aristocratic breeding in a kind of cynical reverse snobishness. He rejects what people like the Kirsanovs consider culture, such as literature, art, music, exaggerated politeness, and so forth. In other words, his rejection of the current order goes too far, is too undiscriminating. Even Arkady in the end cannot follow him to his ultimate conclusions. To be honest, I have met people very like Bazarov, and if I could not exactly like them, I have had to respect and even admire them.

The fathers in the novel are also essentially good people. Nikolai is a liberal landowner who is weak-willed precisely because he is not comfortable with his own privileged condition, and is vaguely in favor of reforms as long as they do not compromise his own position. He cannot argue with the sons, but he cannot accept their radicalism and especially Bazarov’s rejection of art. Turgenev explicitly refused to exemplify the older generation with evil people; he was concerned to attack a class, which he felt could be done best by showing the problem with its best representatives, not some evil individuals. His brother Pavel is a rather stiff and mannered aristocrat, somewhat of a dandy, and Bazarov’s main opponent, but he too shows a human side. Bazarov’s father is a retired army doctor who does his best to treat the peasants, and has some knowledge of science, but he and his wife are superstitious like the peasants they live with, and idolize but cannot really understand their son. Turgenev is sympathetic to the fathers, and sees the negative side of the sons, but is definitely on the side of the youth. At least, that is my interpretation; the criticisms here show that there are and always have been many different understandings and misunderstandings of the novel.

Turning then to the critical editions. As I noted in an earlier review, I am working my way through the Vintage Turgenev, and recently read the Harry Stevens translation of Fathers and Sons in that collection. Looking for more Turgenev in my large but uncataloged library stored in my garage, I found these two Norton critical editions, the first and second editions. They are almost completely different, beginning with the title of the book. The 1966 edition edited by Ralph E. Matlaw contains the old Constance Garnett translation as revised by Matlaw; the 2009 edition is translated and edited by Michael R. Katz. Both editions follow the text with the same selection of letters by Turgenev and his later essay, “A propos of Fathers and Children” which replies to the critics of the novel (somewhat abridged; I went to my next month’s reading of his Literary Reminiscences to read the whole essay, but there is really not much omitted) and four early reactions to the novel – the contemporary review, by the radical critic Dmitry Pisarev is probably the best explanation of Bazarov in either book. The modern criticisms are almost completely different; the first edition contains thirteen articles, and the second twenty one, with only two duplicated.

The only article I found fairly useful in the older book was a Soviet criticism by P.G. Pustovoyt, which was the only one to criticize it from a literary viewpoint, that is to discuss not the content or the character of Bazarov, but the How of Turgenev’s characterizations, the techniques he used to express them. In the newer book, there are many good articles (and miraculously, almost no “literary theory”). Among those I found most helpful were Richard Stites, “Nihilism and Women” (although only loosely connected to the novel), Jane T. Costlow’s two contributions, which focused on the character of Mme. Odintsova, Gary Saul Morson’s “Two Kinds of Love”, which emphasizes the importance of the Arkady-Katya theme, and Kathryn Feuer’s “Fathers and Children” which points to the continuity as well as the conflict between the generations. Many of the other articles had insights into particular questions or passages.

June 4

50. Ivan Turgenev, The Vintage Turgenev v.1 [1850-1859] 412 pages

Reading this backwards, that is in chronological order, “First Love” was a short story from 1860, about a love triangle involving a father and son; it somewhat reminded me of his play A Month in the Country in its theme, though not in the treatment. Then his greatest novel, Fathers and Sons, which I recently reviewed in another edition so I won’t go over it again today.

Finally, that is first in this edition, is the last of his full-length novels, Smoke, from 1866. While nothing by Turgenev is really bad, this was disappointing after reading his earlier works. It divides into three different strands: a series of comic discussions about the future of Russia, by two different groupings, one of ineffective emigré Slavophile “radicals” and one of Czarist generals; a number of didactic monologues by Petugin who obviously represents Turgenev’s own more Westernizing views; and the main plot, about the love affair between Litvinov and Irena. All are good in themselves but they are not integrated well, and they come together largely through unmotivated coincidences as in a Romantic Dickens or Hugo novel rather than in Turgenev’s Realist style.

The two volumes taken together give a good representative sample of Turgenev’s fiction and I would recommend them.

June 6

51. Wu Ch’eng-en (?), Monkey [bef. 1580; abr. Eng.tr. of Journey to the West, 1942] 306 pages

Buddhism, of course, originated in India, and was spread by missionaries to China and other parts of East Asia, while eventually fading away in its original homeland. For a long time, however, India remained the religious center. In the seventh century of the Common Era, a Chinese monk named Xuanzang (or Hsüan Tsang, in the older transcription used in this book), and often referred to as Triptaka, from the name of the scriptures he collected, made an almost two-decades-long (629-646) journey to India to search for and retrieve Buddhist scriptures unknown in China at the time. Over many centuries, the historical adventure of Xuanzang became encrusted with mythical elements and gave rise to both oral folk tales, and written versions, poetic and dramatic.

Near the end of the sixteenth century, these earlier sources were combined and moulded into a “novel” alternating prose and verse, called Journey to the West, which was published anonymously. While at first the book was attributed impossibly to a disciple of Xuanzang, in the early twentieth century it was attributed to a poet named Wu Ch’eng-en. Today, some scholars dispute that attribution and the more recent unabridged translations simply call it anonymous, although others still credit its present form to Wu. While there were earlier abridged translations into English, they generally just excerpted parts from each of the hundred chapters of the book; this 1942 translation by Arthur Waley, under the title Monkey, the form in which the book has most often been read by English-speaking readers, took a different direction, translating thirty of the hundred chapters in full, except for the verse which is usually omitted.

According to the Preface, Monkey contains the chapters 1-7, which give the origins of the Stone Monkey or Monkey King and his adventures before becoming a disciple of Triptaka; chapters 8-12, which give the story of Hsüan Tsang and the origin of the mission to India; chapters 14-15, 18-19, and 22, which deal with the finding of the four disciples, Monkey, Pigsy, Sandy (the last two names are Waley’s choices for Zhu Bajie, which according to Wikipedialiterally means "Eight Precepts Pig," and Sha Wujing, literally "Sand Awakened to Purity") and White Dragon Horse; chapters 37-39, 44-46, and 47-49, which give three episodes of the journey; and 98-100, which give the ending of the quest and the ultimate disposition of the characters.

As Waley’s English title suggests, the role of the impetuous and often violent Monkey (and his rival, the lusty and gluttonous Pigsy) tends to eclipse the role of their master Triptaka, much as Gawain and Lancelot eclipse the role of King Arthur in the tales of the Round Table. Sandy is less visible and mainly just mediates between Monkey and Pigsy, while White Dragon Horse is a “non-speaking” part. Journey to the West has frequently been interpreted as an allegory; Waley has been criticized for choosing his selections to emphasize the folk tale aspect over the religious implications. The book is full of stories of gods, demons, monsters and magicians, and is a humorous and entertaining read for both adults and younger readers alike.

June 9

52. Lu Xun, Selected Works v.1 [1918-1936, Eng. tr. 1956] 449 pages [Kindle, Open Library]

Lu Xun is called the “Father of Modern Chinese Literature”; his story “The Diary of a Madman” is considered the first work of fiction in modern vernacular (baihua) literature (although Chen Hengzhe’s “One Day” was published a year earlier, in a more obscure magazine). This is the first of the four volumes of the selected works published by the Foreign Languages Publishing House in Beijing; it contains his fiction, prose poetry and reminiscences; the other three volumes contain his nonfiction, mostly critical essays and political writings which are of only historical interest and which I do not plan to read.

This volume contains the preface and nine of the fourteen stories from his first collection, Nahan, translated here as Call to Arms. The two most famous are “The Diary of a Madman”, which uses cannibalism as a metaphor for the feudal exploiters who “devour” the people and created a sensation when it was published, and his longest novella, The True Story of Ah Q, which satirizes the passive, masochistic attitude of the Chinese people who consider every defeat as a “moral victory” (the name Ah Q became a byname for this sort of person.) The other stories are all rather short. It also contains seven of the eleven stories from his second collection, Wandering, including “The New Year Sacrifice” about a poor widow who is persecuted by Confucian morality after being forced to remarry, “A Happy Family” where a writer tries to imagine a happy family while living amid just the opposite conditions, “Soap”, a story about hypocrisy, and another fairly long story, “The Misanthrope” about an activist who despairs living in poverty and sells out to a warlord. There were also two of the eight stories from his last collection, Old Tales Retold, which are stories based on traditional mythology and legend.

In addition, the book contains nineteen prose poems from the collection Wild Grass, nearly the whole of that book (which has a total of twenty three), and nine non-fiction autobiographical essays from his two collections Dawn Blossoms Plucked at Dusk and The Last Essays of Qiejieting. There is a fairly long introduction to his life and works by his younger contemporary Feng Xuefeng.

There are other versions of the Selected Stories, and two of the Complete Stories, one by the same translators as this book, which seems to be unavailable, and one by another translator, which has poor reviews. This book gives a good representation in any case, and it is available from Open Library.

June 11

53. Ivan Turgenev, A Lear of the Steppes [1870. Eng. tr.] 85 pages

I’m finishing up the last of my readings for the time being in Turgenev. A Lear of the Steppes was one of his later novellas. As the title suggests, it is a re-telling of Shakespeare’s King Lear set in provincial Russia. A landowner divides his estate between his two daughters (like most re-tellings of King Lear there is no Cordelia, unless we consider the neighbor who advises him against the division and sympathizes with him as a sort of Cordelia), they mistreat him, and he goes mad and dies at the end. It is a good entertaining story but not as deep as some of his other fiction.


June 14

54. Ivan Turgenev, Literary Reminiscences and Autobiographical Fragments [1843-1883, Eng. tr. 1958] 309 pages

My last Turgenev, this is a selection of his non-fiction. The most interesting from a literary point of view are his reminiscences of Belinsky, his remarks on Gogol and others, and his defense “A propos of Fathers and Children” which explains his view of literature. There are two articles on his response to the 1848 Revolution in France, and a description of an execution, as well as a few shorter pieces. The book was introduced by a long essay on Turgenev by Edmund Wilson, which took up almost a third of the book. While it was worth reading, I think apart from the article on Fathers and Children I would rather have read another of his stories instead.


June 14

55. William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida [1601 or 1602] 153 pages

This is a re-read for me, of course; it is the only one of the three Shakespeare plays I am going to see at the Utah Shakespeare Festival next month which I have never seen produced (the other two are Hamlet and Twelfth Night which I have seen multiple times and have re-read in the last few years). It is probably one of Shakespeare’s least popular plays, at least in modern times, and is rarely performed to any critical or commercial success. The USF is committed to producing all of Shakespeare’s plays occasionally; I will be interested to see how it fares with the audience.

There are, I think, at least two reasons for the play’s lack of popularity. First, it is, or at least seems to be, Shakespeare’s most cynical play. The character of Thersites at first seems to be that of a ridiculous railer and misfit, as he is presented in the Iliad, gratuitously slandering the leaders of the Greek army, but by the end of the play we have to agree with his bitter views of the supposed heroes (without liking him any better for it). The lovers of the other main plot, Troilus and Cressida, and Cressida’s Uncle Pandarus (who gives us the modern word “pander”), and the near-rapist Diomedes, don’t fare any better; all are ultimately revealed as ridiculous, self-centered and petty. It’s a play with no positive character the reader/spectator can identify with.

The second reason, in my opinion, (and this is only my reaction, without support from any of the critical articles I have read – see my discussion below) is that more than any other of Shakespeare’s plays it depends on topical allusions to political and literary figures of the time it was written. Of course, many if not all of his plays have topical allusions, but in his other plays, they are “extras” which are not necessary for understanding the point of the play; this I think is not the case so much with Troilus and Cressida. When I was in high school, Lyndon Johnson was the President (yes, I am old), and a play came out called Macbird! by Barbara Garson using the plot of Macbeth to satirize the Johnson administration. I and my friends at the time thought it was extremely funny. Recently I was discussing humorous plays with a friend of mine who is some thirty-five years younger than I am, and I mentioned Macbird!; she decided to borrow my copy and read it. She got through about the first one or two scenes and said, “I don’t get it.” So I started pointing out the people and events it was referring to, and she said, “Who are they?” I realized that while I might convince her why I thought it was funny, she would never see it as funny – a joke that has to be explained never is. I think the same thing is true of Troilus and Cressida; like Macbird! it essentially uses a well-known classic (the poem by Chaucer) as a way of satirizing contemporary people and events, which only a historian or Shakespeare scholar would recognize today.

Shakespeare being Shakespeare, unlike the play by Garson,Troilus and Cressida, after subtracting the allusions, still has a certain residue of meaning; but without the intended specific targets, the satire seems to be just a generalized bitterness toward society as a whole, and seems much more bitter than it was perhaps intended to be. If, in fact, as most of the critics tell us, Thersites was intended for the satirist and rival playwright John Marston, part of the satire is directed against his bitterness and cynicism. (I haven’t yet read any of Marston’s earlier plays; his later ones are rather different.) This may be why the Quarto, from soon after it was performed, calls it a “comedy” while by the time of the Folio a quarter-century on it has been re-classified as a “tragedy”.

But this is just my impression, and as I said, I haven’t yet seen it on stage.

June 16

56. George Rapall Noyes, ed., Masterpieces of the Russian Drama [1782-1859, tr. 1933] 456 pages

I have been recently reading Russian literature more or less chronologically, so this anthology has taken me three or four months to get through. It’s the first of two volumes, arranged by date of performance. It contains six plays, beginning near the end of the eighteenth century with The Young Hopeful by Fonvizin, the best Russian satirist before Gogol, and ending in the middle of the nineteenth century with Ostrovsky’s The Poor Bride and Pisemsky’s A Bitter Fate. In between are Griboyedov’s Wit Works Woe, imitating the French neo-classical comedy (think Molière), Gogol’s The Inspector (more often translated as The Inspector General), which I recently reviewed in another translation, and Turgenev’s A Month in the Country, a realistic play which foreshadows Chekhov (who is in the second volume.) Perhaps it’s only because I have never seen any of them actually performed, but I think the Russian authors I have read are better in novels and short stories than in drama; nevertheless these were all worth reading.

June 22

57. Articles on Troilus and Cressida, Twelfth Night and Hamlet (43 articles, 607 pages) [1991-2022]

Next week will be the first time I have seen Troilus and Cressida performed (at the Utah Shakespeare Festival) so I wanted to read some secondary articles about the play before I go. I found sixteen articles on the Internet. The two I found the most useful were Roger Stritmatter’s
“The Tortured Signifier: Satire, Censorship and the Textual History of Troilus and Cressida” from Critical Survey and Meghan C. Andrews’ “Shakespeare the Formalist: Reading and Rewriting John Marston in the Poets’ War” from Texas Studies in Literature and Language. While searching for articles on the play, I also found nine more articles on Twelfth Night and eighteen on Hamlet, the other two Shakespeare plays I will be seeing.

[Troilus and Cressida]

Hyland, Peter, Legitimacy in Interpretation: The bastard voice in Troilus and Cressida (Mosaic, 26, 1, 1993) 7 pages — Argues for the importance of Thersites speeches in interpreting the play.

Godeschalk, William L., The Texts of Troilus and Cressida (Early Modern Literary Studies, 1, 2, 1995) 22 pages — Re-examines unproven hypotheses about the relation of the Quarto and Folio texts and tries to determine the facts.

Shaheen, Naseeb, Biblical Echoes in Troilus and Cressida (Notes and Queries, 43, 2, 1996) 8 pages — Notes various references to the Bible in the play.

Shaheen, Naseeb, A Note on Troilus and Cressida II.3.1-37 (Notes and Queries, 44, 4, 1997) 3 pages — Discusses one passage in the play and tries to determine the source.

Dayley, Glenn, Beneath the Surface: Motives for Rhetoric and Action in Troilus and Cressida: A Response to Vernon Loggins et al. (Connotaions, 11, 2-3, 2001-2002) 10 pages — Tries to show that while what the characters say and do in the play are at odds, both the words and acts derive from the same motives.

Griffin, Andrew, The Banality of History in Troilus and Cressida (Early Modern Literary Studies, 12, 2, 2006) 8 pages — Interprets the play as an exposure of the “romantic” views of the sources (the Iliad and Chaucer.)

Malonis, David, Repetition and Revision in Shakespeare’s Tragic Love Plays (Parergon, 25, 2, 2008) 23 pages — Considers that Shakespeare’s goal in the play was to contrast a more realist view of love with the naive romantic viewpoint in his earlier Romeo and Juliet. Finds allusions to the earlier play in this one.

Stritmatter, Roger, The Tortured Signifier: Satire, Censorship and the Textual History of Troilus and Cressida (Critical Survey, 21, 2, 2009) 23 pages — Argues that the play satirizes particular individuals and that the textual history is do to the censorship. Very important paper.

Held, Joshua R., Editing Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida: The Folio’s Double Rejection of Pandarus (Shakespeare Studies, 50, 2011) 25 pages — Another discussion of the textual question, arguing in favor of the Folio’s duplication of lines which are deleted in the Quarto as an artistic choice rather than an error.

Byville, Eric, Aesthetic Uncommon Sense: Early Modern Taste and the Satirical Sublime (Criticism, 54, 4, 2012) 39 pages — Discusses the bitter satire of the play in terms of Kantian aesthetic theory and compares it to Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground.

Hayes, Michael L., What Kind of Play Is Troilus and Cressida? (Explorations in Renaissance Culture, 39, 2, 2013) 12 pages — Tries to find an appropriate “label” for the genre of the play. Settles on “Satiric Romance”.

Brandon Centerwall, Troilus and Cressida Calls for Rival Acting Companies to Play the Greeks vs. the Trojans, Whether That Rivalry Be Real or Feigned (Shakespeare Newsletter 65, 2, 2016) 7 pages — Argues that the play was written for a competition between two rival acting companies, one playing the Greeks and one the Trojans.

Ansaldo, Marina, “ ’Tis but the Chance of War”: Fortune and Opportunity in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida (Explorations in Renaissance Culture, 42. 2016) 31 pages — Discusses the play as a presentation of Renaissance ideas of “Opportunity” in contrast to the use of “Fortune” in Chaucer’s poem.

Stenner, Rachel, The Word of Apollo: Prophecy and Vatic Poetry in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and William Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida (Comparative Drama, 55, 2-3, 2021) 24 pages — A feminist comparison of the two works.

Wiggins, Ellwood, Stage of Exception: Politics and Theatre in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida (Early Modern Literary Studies, 22, 2, 2022) 24 pages — Discusses the play in terms of Renaissance and modern theories of political sovereignty, with much discussion of Agamben, etc.


[Troilus and Cressida and Twelfth Night]

Andrews, Meghan C., Shakespeare the Formalist: Reading and Rewriting John Marston in the Poets’ War (Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 63, 1, 2021) 27 pages — Discusses Shakespeare’s relationship to Marston in Troilus and Cressida and Twelfth Night. A good article.


[Twelfth Night]

Leimberg, Inge, “M.O.A.I.”: Trying to Share the Joke in Twelfth Night 2.5 (A Critical Hypothesis) (Connotations, 1, 1, 1991) 18 pages — Argues that “M.O.A.I.” in Maria’s letter are an anagram of “I [a]M A[lpha] [and] O[mega]” referring to Malvolio’s pride.

Brown, John Russell, More About Laughing at “M.O.A.I.” (A Response to Inge Leimberg) (Connotations, 1, 2, 1991) 4 pages — Gives arguments against Leimberg’s theory.

Leimberg, Inge, Maria’s Theology and Other Questions (An Answer to John Russell Brown) (Connotations, 1, 2, 1991) 6 pages — Responds to Brown and gives further arguments.

Bauer, Mathias, Count Malvolio, Machevill and Vice (Connotations, 1, 3, 1991) 20 pages — Discusses Malvolio in terms of the contemporary image of Machiavelli and as a “Vice” character.

Tobin, J.J.M., A Response to Mathias Bauer, “Count Malvolio, Machevill and Vice (Connotations, 2, 1, 1992) 6 pages — Continues the discussion.

Fowler, Alastair, Maria’s Riddle (Connotations, 2, 3, 1992) 2 pages —Further discussion of “M.O.I.A.”; suggests that it is an anagram for “Omnia” with an understood continuation as “Omnia vincit amor” or “Omnia est Vanitas”.

Bauer, Mattias, A Note in Reply to Alastair Fowler (Connotations, 2, 3, 1992) 4 pages - Further hypothesis on “M.O.I.A.”

Dean, Paul, The Harrowing of Malvolio: The Theological Background of Twelfth Night, Act 4, Scene 2 (Connotations, 7, 2, 1997) 12 pages — Discusses the prison scene in connection with Christ’s releasing of the imprisoned souls from Limbo.

Smith, Amy L., and Hodgson, Elizabeth, “A cypress not a bosom hides my heart”: Olivia’s Veiled Conversions (Early Modern Literary Studies, 15, 1, 2009-2010) 14 pages — Discusses Elizabethan contexts of women wearing veils.


[Hamlet]

Brown, John Russell, Multiplicity of Meaning in the Last Moments of Hamlet (Connotations, 2, 1, 1992) 18 pages — Opens a discussion on the final scene of Hamlet

Mehl, Dieter, Hamlet’s Last Moments: A Note on John Russell Brown (Connotations, 2, 2, 1992) 4 pages — Continues the discussion on the final scene of Hamlet.

Charney, Maurice, The Rest Is Not Silence: A Reply to John Russell Brown (Connotations, 2, 2, 1992) 4 pages — Continues the discussion on the final scene of Hamlet.

Brown, John Russell, Connotations of Hamlet’s Final Silence (Connotations, 2, 3, 1992) 12 pages — Continues the discussion on the final scene of Hamlet.

Klein, Holger, Hamlet and After (Connotations, 3, 1, 1993) — Continues the discussion on the final scene of Hamlet.

Farley-Hills, David, A “Hamlet” crux (Notes and Queries, 42, 3, 1995) 3 pages — Discusses the reference to a hobby-horse.

DiMatteo, Anthony, Hamlet as Fable: Reconstructing a Lost Code of Meaning (Connotations, 6, 2, 1996-1997) 22 pages — Discusses the classical allusions in the play as a coded comment on the action.

Sohmer, Steve, Certain Speculations on Hamlet, the Calendar, and Martin Luther (Early Modern Literary Studies, 2. 1. 1996) 24 pages — Uses the feasts of the church calendar to discover the dates of the actions of the play (the ghost appears on the Feast of Marcellus, Halloween, All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day, which are days connected with the dead; the next events, from the arrival of Rosencrantz and Guildernstern to Hamlet’s embarkation for England, take place at Candlemas; and the final scenes take place on Corpus Christi.) He notes that the calendar was the same in 1517 and 1601, and on that basis suggests that at one level Hamlet and Horatio represent Luther and Melancthon. He calculates the dates of Old Hamlet’s and Gertrude’s marriage and Hamlet’s birth and arrives at the conclusion that Hamlet was born before the marriage and that this explains why he did not succeed to the throne on the death of Old Hamlet.

Sohmer, Steve, A Note on Hamlet’s Illegitimacy: Identifying a Source of the “dram of eale” Speech (Q2, I, 4, 17-38) (Early Modern Literary Studies, 6, 3, 2001) 4 pages — Follows up his earlier article to explain a difficult reference in the second Quarto.

Magnus, Laury, Tragic Closure in Hamlet (Connotations, 11, 2-3, 2001-2002) 21 pages — Continues the discussion on the final scene of Hamlet.

Roth, Steve, Hamlet as the Christmas Prince: Certain Speculations on Hamlet, the Calendar, Revels, and Misrule (Early Modern Literary Studies, 7, 3, 2002) 22 pages — Re-examines Sohmer’s article on the calendar, and shows that his dates don’t work; proposes that the three dates were All Souls’ Day as Sohmer proposes; Twelfth Night; and Valentine’s Day. Shows that some of Shakespeare’s time indications are impossible to reconcile with each other on any hypothesis.

DiMatteo, Anthony, Shakespeare and the Public Discourse of Sovereignty: “Reasons of State” in Hamlet (Early Modern Literary Studies, 10, 2, 2004) 18 pages — Discusses the play as concerned with the theory of sovereignty, with particular reference to Machiavelli.

Roth, Steve, Who Knows Who Knows Who’s There: An Epistemology of Hamlet (or What Happens in The Mousetrap) (Early Modern Literary Studies, 10, 2, 2004) 10 pages — Points out that unlike any other revenge tragedy, in Hamlet no one except Claudius (and the audience) knows that there is any murder that needs to be revenged; even Hamlet isn’t sure. Discusses the play within the play as designed (by Shakespeare, not Hamlet) to let Claudius know that Hamlet knows, if there is anything to know, while leaving Hamlet unsure.

Gleckman, Jason, Shakespeare as Poet or Playwright?: The Players’ Speech in Hamlet (Early Modern Literary Studies, 11, 3, 2006) 8 pages — Uses the cut in the Players’ Speech to argue that Shakespeare wrote both a shorter form for the theater and a longer one for print.

Green, Reina, Poisoned Ears and Parental Advice in Hamlet (Early Modern Literary Studies, 11, 3, 2006) 16 pages — Argues that the play “can also be read as a manual on parent-child relationships.” Discusses the various parent-child interactions in the play.

Floyd, Mary, Hamlet, the Pirate’s Son (Early Modern Literary Studies, Special Issue 19, 2009) 10 pages — Discusses Hamlet’s rescue by the pirates and argues that it is not as improbable as some critics suppose. Points out that there were pirates in the Baltic at the time the play was written. Also points out that some critics suggest the rescue may have been arranged in advance. Points out that in the original version (Saxo), Hamlet’s father was a Viking, i.e. a pirate.

Kiefer, Frederick, John Lyly and the Most Misread Speech in Shakespeare (Connotations, 28, 2019) 16 pages — Argues that the speech about “what a piece of work is a man” etc. was an example of Euphuism.

Weidle, Roland, Hamlet and the Limits of Euphuism : A Response to Frederick Kiefer (Connotations, 29, 2020) 16 pages — A reply to the previous article arguing that the speech was not an example of Euphuism.

June 22

58. Ainslie T. Embree, ed., 1857 in India: Mutiny or War of Independence? [1963] 101 pages

I recently read Sunil Gangopadhyay’s historical novel Those Days which is set in India from the 1840's to the 1870's. Among the historical events it dealt with were the 1857 Revolt and the Hindu Reform Movements. Knowing almost nothing about these events, I wanted to read some non-fictional accounts. I began with the Revolt. This is a small book of readings in one of the Heath series called “Problems in Asian Civilizations”.

It begins with one of the proclamations of the revolt, then gives six contemporary comments including a speech by Disraeli and a newspaper article by Marx. It follows this with sixteen later readings from the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries, both European and Indian. All the readings are excerpts, usually the conclusions of books on the events, and are in roughly chronological order; the last eight were published in 1957 or 1958, so the book is rather out of date for modern evaluations. More problematically, nearly all take a more or less pro-British standpoint. The question in the title is rather misleading, since none of the modern selections consider it as either just a military mutiny or as a real nationalist revolt.

I am currently reading a book on Hindu religion, a history of the Reform Movement, and another long historical novel set in India.

June 29

59. Qurratulain Hyder, River of Fire [1959, Eng. tr. 1998] 536 pages

Qurratulain Hyder was one of the major figures in modern Urdu literature. She was the among the first to introduce serious prose novels in a language which had previously had a mainly poetic literature (she wrote about a dozen novels and novellas). Aag ka darya, written in 1959, was her most important work. River of Fire, published some forty years later, is her own English “translation” of that novel, but apparently it was completely rewritten in the translation. It makes sense that the author would reflect changes in her experience forty years after the date of the original book.

The English novel is in four very unequal parts. To begin with the last and most important part, it comprises about sixty percent of the present book, and is really what the novel is about; it is set in the period from about 1935 to 1954, against the backdrop of the independence movement and the partition of India and Pakistan. It is written in a modernist style. It opens in 1954 with a group of friends talking about events earlier on, taking for granted information the reader doesn’t yet know; then it returns to the beginning of the modern episodes, although it moves back and forth with memories and discussions of various events out of order. We discover that it is essentially about three friends, two of whom are Hindus, Hari Shankar Raizada, and Gautam Nilambar, and one who is Moslem, Kamaladdun Reza (Kamal). We also meet Hari’s sisters, Laj and Nirmila (who have a maid named Jamuna); Kamal’s sisters Tehamina and Talat; his cousin Amir Reza (who is betrothed to Tehamina); and later on a woman named Champa Ahmed. For a while there is also another important character, Cyril Ashley, who is British. All are connected by stories of love, betrayal and abandonment, turning mainly on the character of Champa.

All these characters have the same or similar names as characters in the first three parts, but are related in somewhat different ways and have rather different personalities. Given much traditional Indian literature, it is difficult not to consider them as incarnations of the same characters (the inaccurate Wikipedia article on the book calls it right off “the fate of four [?] souls through time”) but in fact this is never made explicit (at least in the English version), and the main point is probably rather to compare the different times through parallel characters.

The real purpose of the novel is to emphasize the multi-ethnic, multi-religious nature of the Indian subcontinent, and why the communal violence and the partition was a tragedy. The description of India is consequently very different from the other Indian novels I have been reading lately, which were more concerned with problems of religious tradition as they affected political or domestic relationships. The religious background in this novel is far more syncretistic. Besides the difference in purpose, this may also be partly due to the fact that it is set much later than any of the other novels except Tamas, which also dealt with the period leading up to independence and partition; partly to the fact that the major characters are all westernized and well-educated students (much of the later action actually takes place in London, where the major characters are all studying); partly also to the fact that it is set in the Urdu-speaking culture of Uttar Pradesh (the characters are originally from Lucknow), which the book itself describes as having a more syncretic culture than other parts of India; and partly because, unlike the other novels, none of the Hindu characters belong to the Brahmin caste, which is particularly concerned with preserving Hindu religious tradition.

To go back to the first forty percent of the book, it is comprised of three separate episodes which take place at important periods in Indian history. The first episode opens around 325-320 BCE, shortly after the defeat of Alexander the Great’s attempted invasion of India, and about a century and a half after the life of Buddha (according to the characters; his actual dates aren’t known, but this is within range). It begins with a student named Gautam Nilambar, who accidentally sees a group of women, the Princess Nirmila, her friend Champak (the daughter of a high minister), and their maid Jamuna. The location is Shravasti, which is near the modern Lucknow (some of the characters in the last part visit the ruins.) It turns out that Champak is betrothed to Nirmila’s brother, the crown prince Hari Shankar, who has abandoned her to become a Buddhist monk. Gautam falls in love with Champak, but they are separated when Chandragupta Maurya of Maghad (the first Maurya Emperor, who united much of northern India under a single rule) invades their country. Gautam spends many years searching for Champak, but when he finally sees her she is part of a harem of one of the conquerors and he abandons her. Ultimately we see him swept away by a river and (presumably) drowning, and in the next sentence another character arrives at the same spot on the river. We wonder if he will save Gautam from drowning – but he has a Moslem name, and it turns out it is some eighteen hundred years later, about 1520, when the Mughals overthrew the Afghanistani Lodi dynasty.

The second episode concerns this character, the half-Persian, Iraqi-educated Abul Mansur Kamaluddin (and is largely presented as a travel book he is writing about India). Although a Moslem, he is in love with a Hindu girl named Champavati. I won’t go into detail, but they are separated by war.

The third episode begins shortly after the British East India Company establishes rule over much of India, and concerns a British “nabob” named Cyril Ashley (the grandfather of the Cyril Ashley of the last episode) and his native mistress, Champa Jan, whom he abandons. There are references to the Rebellion of 1857 (Lucknow was one of the centers of the uprising). Two of the other major characters are a scholar named Gautam Nilambar Dutt and Kamal Reza Bahadur (who explains the history of the English conquest and 1857). This episode ends around 1870.

(Judging by some on-line reviews which seem to be based on the Urdu novel, it had more episodes. The first episode, which takes place in the English novel at the time of Chandragupta, was apparently originally set in the remote past. There was a second episode around 600 BCE, involving the Persian Empire under Cyrus, which ruled parts of northwestern India, and a third episode set at the time of the first episode in the English version but with more emphasis on Alexander the Great, who is only mentioned briefly in the English first episode. The fourth episode seems to be the second episode of the English version. The fifth and possibly more episodes were from the colonial period, and don’t seem to involve the same characters as the third episode of the English novel. The last episode again is the period of independence and partition, perhaps in the original not quite as disproportionately longer than the rest of the book.)

The characters in all four episodes of the English novel are students or educated people; there is much discussion and meditation about religion and philosophy, not from any dogmatic or orthodox positions. They are also nearly all actors or involved in the arts. There are constant allusions, especially in the last part, to books and authors from India, China, and the West; I wasn’t familiar with all of them, even of the Western writers. There are also many allusions to historical and cultural events. Altogether, this was a very thought-provoking novel.

July 13

60. Nikolai Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky, What Is To Be Done? [1863; Eng. tr. 1986] 449 pages

My friend that I read and discuss literature with and I recently finished Turgenev’s Fathers and Children, and our next Russian text was going to be Doestoevsky’s Notes From Underground, when I read somewhere that Notes From Underground originated from a review of Chernyshevsky’s What Is To Be Done?, which in turn was an answer to Fathers and Children, so we decided to read this first. It had actually been on my TBR list for a long time, but much lower down.

I began it in a physical edition I had in my garage, the Vintage paperback which is an abridgement of the anarchist Benjamin Tucker’s 1886 second-hand translation (probably from a French intermediate, since he didn’t know Russian), but I soon ran into the problem that my copy was mis-bound and missing about fifty pages in the middle. This proved to be fortunate, as I found the century-later translation by Michael Katz which is complete and much better translated on the Internet (it’s free as a pdf on several websites) and began again from the beginning.

The introduction to the Tucker translation, by E. H. Carr, while emphasizing the importance of the book as an influence on later Russian revolutionaries, describes it as a terrible novel from the literary point of view, with a confused out-of-order chronology and with the author constantly breaking in to comment on the text as a story. When I began reading it, however, these “faults” struck me as very modern, the kind of “metanarrative” I would expect in a novel written a hundred years later. The introduction to the Katz edition points this out and suggests that Chernyshevsky should be “rehabilitated” as a major figure in Russian literature, not simply for his content but for his style. I totally agree with this.

As for the content, it is concerned primarily with relationships between men and women. It is probably the best feminist novel ever written by a male author, especially considering its date. Chernyshevsky considered Turgenev’s Bazarov, I think somewhat unfairly, as a caricature of the new generation of radical Russian youth. The first hero of his book, Dmitry Lopukhov, is intended as a positive characterization of Bazarov, while his friend and the second hero, Alexander Matveich Kirsanov, is obviously modeled on Bazarov’s friend Kirsanov in Turgenev’s novel. The real pivot of the novel, however, is the heroine Vera Pavlovna (Verotchka), who establishes women workers’ cooperative workshops. Written in prison under the strict eye of the censorship, the political aspects of the novel are expressed allegorically or between the lines, but the novel is obviously influenced by the utopian socialist movement in the West; many of Chernyshevsky’s implicit criticisms converge with those of Marx (with whom he was probably not familiar.) The novel was a major influence on the Revolutionary movement, inspiring Lenin and other later leaders. This is definitely a major work to be read by anyone interested in Russian literature and history or feminist history.