The incomparable young Menuhin playing, with Hubert Giesen, an arrangement of the Song of the Bride from Rimsky’s The Tsar’s Bride. London, December 11 1930. Meeting Menuhin was one of the great moments of my life. I’ll describe it next time I write about Davos. Another post of the same recording.
Inspired by Daniel Miller’s comment under the post before last: the Cortège or Procession of Nobles from Rimsky-Korsakov’s Mlada. Performers one of the ensembles on the LP cover. The “tread” of the marvellous tune could be a little more Russian and dignified, and slower. Still, these are marchers who are capable of breaking into dance. I always think something goes wrong with Rimsky’s harmonising towards the end. It seems particularly jarring in this version.
There are versions for band. Rimsky-Korsakov was Chief-Inspector of Bands of the Imperial Russian Navy from 1873 to ’84.
From an old post about assassinations in theatres:
“On September 14 (Old Style September 1) 1911, the Russian Prime Minister Pyotr Arkadyevich Stolypin attended a performance, in the presence of the Tsar and his family, of Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Tale of Tsar Saltan at the Opera House in Kiev. Stolypin had travelled to Kiev without his bodyguards, defying police warnings and refusing to wear his bullet-proof shirt. A young man in evening dress, Dmitri Bogrov, produced a gun and shot him twice, once in the arm and once in the chest. Bogrov was both a leftist radical and an agent of Okhranka, a secret police force and extended body-guard for the Tsar. (Rimsky’s fairy-tale world had collided with twentieth-century violence just as Rimsky’s spirit was encountering the twentieth century in the living person of Igor Stravinsky. … Had the opera begun? Did Bogrov enter Stolypin’s box or was the shot fired across the auditorium?) The wounded Stolypin stood up from his chair, carefully removed his gloves, and unbuttoned his jacket, unveiling a blood-soaked waistcoat. He sank down and shouted ‘I am happy to die for the Tsar’, motioning to the Tsar in his royal box to withdraw to safety. Tsar Nicholas remained in his position and Stolypin blessed him with a sign of the cross.
“Stolypin died four days later. The following morning, the Tsar knelt at his hospital bedside and repeated the words ‘Forgive me’. Bogrov was hanged ten days after the assassination, and the judicial investigation was halted by order of Tsar Nicholas II. This led to suggestions that the assassination had been planned not by leftists, but by conservative monarchists who were afraid of Stolypin’s reforms and his influence on the Tsar, though this has never been proved. This might have been the reason for the Tsar’s penitence, if the hospital story is true. The first line of Stolypin’s will read ‘Bury me where I am assassinated.’”
Song of the Indian Guest from Sadko.
He’s a champion of Medtner.
… and other impious unions.
There was [...] a fitful co-operation between France and the Ottoman Empire against the Hapsburg Power from the generation of Francis I and Suleymān the Magnificent onwards, while in the eighteenth century Sweden and Poland were drawn towards the Ottoman Empire by their common concern over the rising power of Russia.
There had been an earlier, sixteenth-century Polish-Ottoman alliance. The Crimean War saw Britain, France and Sardinia nominally on the side of the Ottoman Empire. The First World War saw Germany allied with Turkey.
A Study of History, Vol I, OUP, 1934
The kind of story, then considered gently funny, that used to appear in Douglas Woodruff’s Talking at Random column in The Tablet; it ran from 1936 to ’69 and ’71 to ’78; Toynbee would have read it occasionally:
The monks of a monastery on Mount Athos in which the writer had been spending the night as a guest in June 1912 courteously expressed to him, the morning after, their hope that his sleep had not been disturbed by their frequent nocturnal celebrations of the Liturgy. Wishing to return his hosts’ courtesy in kind, the writer on his side expressed the hope that the monks did not find these never intermitted night-long vigils too painfully exhausting. “Not at all”, replied the monks, “considering that we are able to sleep in the day-time.” – “And how do you manage to do that?” their English guest inquired. “O, well, because we have fine estates in Rumili, with peasants on them to work them for us. You will remember our showing you yesterday our arsenal at the water’s edge, stored with provisions of gram, oil, and wine. All that comes from our estates, and the peasants have to deliver it to us at the arsenal by water.” – “And how do the peasants live?” I asked. “O, the peasants live like dogs”, said the monks, “but you can see for yourself what an admirable arrangement ours is. As the peasants work for us and fetch and carry for us, instead of our having to do any of this for ourselves, we can afford to sleep in the day-time and so keep ourselves fresh for praying at night, and this is really most advantageous, as you can imagine. After all, most people in the World – including, perhaps, Your Honour (τὸν λόγον σας) – are in this respect in the less favourable position of our peasants. Having, as they do have, to work all day, they are forced to spend the night in sleep instead of in prayer, in order to be fit for work again next morning; so at night-time the volume of prayers reaching God is at a minimum, and this means that God can give to a prayer offered up to Him during the night an amount of individual attention that would be out of the question in the day-time, when the great majority of Mankind are awake and in the running to gain a hearing for their prayers at odd moments of their working day. Yes, thanks to the endowments bequeathed to us by pious benefactors, we monks do find ourselves in a decidedly advantageous position.”
Entirely believable. In September 2008, on the eve of the recession in Greece, the Vatopedi monastery, one of twenty monasteries on Mount Athos, was accused of enhancing its real estate portfolio through corrupt deals made by Abbot Ephraim and the monk Arsenios with the government of Kostas Karamanlis. Michael Lewis told the story in Vanity Fair, October 2010 and in Boomerang, Travels in the New Third World, New York, WW Norton, 2011, and compared Ephraim and Arsenios to Skilling and Lay of Enron. They are still being investigated.
Abbot Ephraim carrying the Belt of the Mother of God on a roadshow through Russia in late 2011; who are the others?; picture credit: Valeriy Melnikov at RIA Novosti, cropped, use deemed fair for non-commercial scholarly purposes
Ephraim was jailed in December on his return to Greece, but released the following March.
“The Belt of the Virgin Mary, otherwise referred to as the Precious Sash, or Cincture, of Our Most Holy Lady Theotokos – the holy treasure of the Vatopedi Monastery on Mount Athos in Greece – is travelling abroad for the first time. The Belt is travelling in style. It flies in a private jet, chartered by the tour’s organizer, the influential St. Andrew Foundation, and is accompanied by six Vatopedi monks. In St. Petersburg, it was welcomed by none other than Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. In Yekaterinburg, Russia’s fourth largest city, Governor Alexander Misharin and the region’s bishop, Metropolitan Kirill, met the relic with the guard of honor before a procession of some 15,000 people took it to the cathedral.”
The report quotes George Fedotov’s The Russian Religious Mind (1946): “Russia knew neither Reformation nor Counter-Reformation with their explanations, symbolic interpretations and the uprooting of medieval idol-worshipping.” Didn’t he mean veneration? What kind of symbolic interpretation could have undermined icon-veneration in the Orthodox world? “People were more superstitious” might have been a better way of putting it.
Mary is supposed to have worn the belt on earth and given it to St Thomas during her transition to heaven. The Monastery also holds a silver and jewel-encrusted reliquary allegedly containing the skull of St John Chrysostom, a chalice made of a single piece of jasper, many icons and a large library.
A Study of History, Vol IX, OUP, 1954 (footnote)
The Russian Pale, the hearth and hell of modern Jewry.
Isaac Watts, A Fair Enquiry and Debate Concerning Space, Whether It Be Something or Nothing, God or a Creature: “It has a being like God, in heaven, hearth and hell, diffused through all [...].”
Presumably there are etymological links between hearth, earth and hard.
Turkey, A Past and a Future, Hodder & Stoughton, 1917
… was the third of the Cherubic Hymns that are the first three of his Nine Church Pieces for unaccompanied mixed voices of 1884-85. Three settings of the same words.
Performers not stated.
I did a post about Tchaikovsky’s stay in Davos in November 1884 here.
The nine pieces are all settings of the Liturgy of St John Chrysostom. His Liturgy of St John Chrysostom for the same forces from 1878 had set some of these texts (and others), including the words of the cherubic hymn.
This is the main (not only) divine liturgy in the Byzantine rite and is used by all Orthodox Churches. John was Archbishop of Constantinople from 398 to 404. The title of Patriarch came after the Council of Chalcedon. Kievan Rus was converted to Eastern Orthodox Christianity in 988, nearly half a millennium before the fall of Constantinople.
Tchaikovsky wrote to Balakirev about the sacred pieces on November 17 (Julian calendar). That was the day he left Davos. Did he post the letter there or in Landquart?
That date and the quotations below are from Tchaikovsky Research. My link to Bortnianskii.
“I have written three Cherubim’s Songs, which I am now sending to you. … If His Majesty orders [the Imperial Chapel Choir] to study one of them, then I humbly ask you, my good fellow, to choose which one of the three you consider to be superior. In my opinion the third (in C major) is the best, but I fear lest my attempt to imitate non-notated sacred chants (in «Яко да Царя» [‘That we may receive the King’: the opening words of a verse in the Cherubic Song]) should strike you as unsuccessful and inappropriate. Then again the remaining two are different, in that one (in D major) sounds closer in style to Bortnianskii, while the other is much further away, although I am admittedly a poor judge of my own works, and you have complete discretion to choose any one of them.”
Balakirev, who was director of the Imperial Chapel, was important to Tchaikovsky at this time as a kind of mentor for the Manfred Symphony, which, as I showed in the earlier post and had always suspected, was partly inspired by this visit to Davos. And no sacred score could be published or performed without the Chapel’s imprimatur.
Tchaikovsky Research shouldn’t present Balakirev’s reply, presumably from St Petersburg, as being from the following day.
“I received your Cherubim’s Songs some time ago, and since I was not ordered to make a hasty decision, I sent them to your publisher friend in order to study them from the printed parts, which is more straightforward for choral works. On their relative merits I shall say nothing, since I have hardly seen them. But with regard to the one in C major, which you prefer, then I am not sure that it could be considered the best. Its opening is ruined by piquances [...] [my bracket], has no spice to it and sounds like a kind of dance rhythm [after the opening notes]. Anyway, in spite of these reservations, it is my considered opinion they should all be published.”
“Considered” even though he had hardly seen them? Ruined by piquances, but lacking spice?
[Postscript, January 29: the site has tidied up the translation and corrected the date of the letter to December 18 (Julian).]
The C major hymn is perhaps not very Orthodox-ecclesiastical. Do we hear a dance rhythm? Did Tchaikovsky, who loved church music, think that he had imitated non-notated sacred chants successfully? His “publisher friend” was Petr Jurgenson.
Some of Bortnianskii’s music, including cherubic hymns, is on YouTube.
The first performance of the nine pieces was in the Moscow Conservatory in February 1886.
___
It is hard to judge Davos when you are not there. But the evidence of the “public programme” posted on the Forum’s website this year wasn’t encouraging. It was only the public programme (an idea that came in circa 2002 as a gesture towards inclusiveness), but why is the real one no longer posted? It wouldn’t have to show times and locations, but why hide it? The public programme had unexciting people on panels and too many of them.
On the morrow of the decisive Russian victory in the Great Russo-Turkish War of A.D. 1768-74, [...] the sincerity of the Russian peasantry’s devotion to the Holy Land was attested by the volume of an annual pilgrimage-stream that used to roll through the Bosphorus and Dardanelles till it broke on the coast of Palestine after sweeping over the promontory of Athos. The aspiration to make the pilgrimage to their holy places came to play as dominant a part in the Russians’ life as in the Muslims’; and in the World War of A.D. 1914-18 an Imperial Russian Government at its last gasp obstinately vetoed all Western suggestions for establishing a Jewish National Home in Palestine on the ground that this would create an intolerable eye-sore for Russian pilgrims to Orthodox Christendom’s Holy Land. In A.D. 1917 the Tsardom had to fall on the 12th March before the Balfour Declaration could be published on the 2nd November.
And General Allenby entered Jerusalem on foot, through the Jaffa Gate, on December 11.
A Study of History, Vol IX, OUP, 1954
Peter transferred the capital of his dominions from Russian Orthodox Moscow to a new city, founded by him in the maritime Western March of the Russian World and named after its founder; and, on the culturally as well as physically virgin soil of St. Petersburg, a Westernizing Russia was to have a seat of government that would be Western from the start, uncontaminated by any antecedent deposit of Orthodox tradition. [Footnote: A corresponding consideration had been in the mind of Constantine the Great when he had transferred the capital of the Roman Empire from Old Rome to his own foundation of New Rome or Constantinople. The seat of Government of a converted Roman Empire was to be Christian from the outset, unaffected by the archaistic paganism that was dying so hard in its Senatorial fastness on the banks of the Tiber [...]. In making the transfer, both Constantine and Peter were, of course, moved by political and strategic motives in addition to the cultural motive here in question [...].]
A Study of History, Vol VII, OUP, 1954
When, fourteen years after the ecclesiastical Union of Florence [a last-minute attempt to unify Christendom in the face of the Turkish threat], the Greek Roman Empire was extinguished by the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople, the Russians saw in this a divine retribution for the Greeks’ apostasy. Now that the Muslim Ottoman Empire had imposed its rule on all the Orthodox peoples of Anatolia and South-Eastern Europe, Muscovy was the sole surviving independent Orthodox Christian state. What was more, the Russians were the only Orthodox Christian people that had preserved its orthodoxy uncompromised by any concessions to Papal claims. On these grounds a sixteenth-century Russian ecclesiastical publicist asserted that Moscow was “the Third Rome”. Augustus’s Old Rome and Constantine’s New Rome had now each fallen in its turn. Moscow was the heir of both, and her dominion, unlike theirs, was to have no end. This doctrine was endorsed by the Muscovite government implicitly when, in 1547, the Grand Duke Ivan IV “the Terrible” assumed the title “Czar” (Caesar).
The “ecclesiastical publicist” was the monk Philoteus, who in 1510 wrote to the Grand Duke Vasili III (Basil III): “Two Romes have fallen. The third stands. And there will not be a fourth. No one will replace your Christian Tsardom!”
The Grand Dukes (or Grand Princes) of Moscow were nominally vassals of the Golden Horde until the reign of Ivan III (the Great), 1462-1505.
The notion of this further Rome seems to have appealed to Toynbee in the Study, but he prints comments by two Oxford scholars who warn him not to make to make too much of it.
[The writer has had] the benefit of comments and criticisms from B. H. Sumner, the Warden of All Souls College, Oxford, and from Prince Dmitri Obolensky, the Reader in Russian and Balkan Medieval History in the University of Oxford, on the question of the degree to which the course of Muscovite History was affected by the influence of the Byzantine element in the Russian Orthodox Christian cultural heritage. B. H. Sumner’s opinion on this question is set out in the following passages of a letter of his, dated the 25th January, 1951, to the writer of this Study:
“I find the build-up and development of the Muscovite state in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries very difficult to analyse, but, from what I have read of those two centuries from the Russian side, I should say that the most effective and practical influences in building up centralized administration and government came from autochthonous Russian developments of the semi-feudal conditions of Moscow and the other Russian principalities (shot through with a strong nationalist colouring), combined with some Tatar influence, but with little Byzantine influence. I do not think, for instance, that either Ivan the Great or Ivan the Terrible [reigned 1547-84] regarded themselves as successors of the Byzantine emperors, or that they and their civil servants, boyars, diplomats, &c., had any idea of ‘oecumenical’ pretensions. It is true that Ivan the Terrible, for instance, claimed to be Tsar ‘Autocrat’, Gosudar [sovereign], and appointed by God, combining plenitude of power both vis-à-vis his subjects and as against any other states, but he never claimed to be the successor of the Basileus [Roman Emperor in the East], or to be ‘oecumenical’ or ‘Tsar of the Orthodox Christians of the whole World’ (that was the expression used by the Patriarch of Constantinople in a letter to Ivan in A.D. 1561, but not by Ivan). I don’t think that it could be held that Ivan the Great and Ivan the Terrible and the civilians in Russia held that there had been any translatio imperii, or made any claim over all Christians or all Orthodox.
“Such claims, implicitly or explicitly, had appeared from the end of the fifteenth century onwards, bound up with the idea of Moscow as the Third Rome, but, at any rate at that time, this idea, which admittedly had its origins in writings of certain monks, continued to be confined to certain ecclesiastical circles in Russia, with occasional echoes from Constantinople. It is striking, I think, that the official historiography of the sixteenth century in Russia, which was built up by the Tsars, does not lean at all towards Byzantium: both in the chronicles and in Russian diplomacy of the time the emphasis is all on the heritage of Kiev, not at all on the heritage of Byzantium. That, of course, was because of the continuous struggle for the Russian western lands against Lithuania-Poland.
“From about A.D. 1470 onwards, for more than a century, Moscow had a whole series of overtures, either from Rome or from the Emperor, or both, linking together an anti-Turkish alliance, re-union of churches, recognition of Moscow as the heir of the Byzantine Empire, and elevation of the Metropolitan of Moscow to the patriarchal dignity. It is, I think, significant that the Russians in reply were always silent as regards the inheritance of the Byzantine Empire, or coronation of the Tsar as ‘the Christian Tsar’. What the Russians were interested in was their claims against Lithuania-Poland and their struggle for an exit to the Baltic, and not the Balkans or the Ottomans: hence the failure of Western overtures for an anti-Turkish alliance and of Western attempts to win the Russians for this by dangling before them the lure of the Byzantine heritage.
“Thus, the conception of Moscow as ‘the Third Rome’, or of Muscovy as the inheritor of the ‘oecumenical’ role of Byzantium, was, in my view, of no practical importance and of very little theoretical or emotional importance among the governing class in Muscovy in the late fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries. Its appeal was in the main limited to certain ecclesiastical circles in Muscovy – and, in a sense, to needy Orthodox in the Ottoman Empire in quest of money from Moscow. It is quite true that the idea of Muscovy as the sole possessor of the pure Orthodox Christian faith after the Council of Florence and the capture of Constantinople was a stock-in-trade element in Muscovite national pride during these centuries, and it fostered Muscovite exclusiveness and xenophobia. But this line is not the same as stepping into the shoes of Byzantium by aspiring to an ‘oecumenical’ role.
“Much later [at the end of the eighteenth century], when the Russians had advanced far southwards and were strong enough to challenge the Turks, then the idea of the liberation of the Orthodox, and sometimes that of some form of resurrected Orthodox empire at Constantinople, became prominent, and increasingly so in the nineteenth century. Even so, I think that the influence of the messianic ideas of the Slavophils and Dostoievsky and their typicalness can be exaggerated, and that the ‘oecumenical’ and messianic elements in Russian nineteenth-century thought ought not to be read back into earlier centuries as being then powerfully creative and proof of a strong and continuous Byzantine heritage.”
In a note communicated to the writer of this Study on the ist June, 1951, Prince Dmitri Obolensky expresses the same view.
“Neither the successive Russian governments of the sixteenth century nor, on the whole, contemporary Russian writers and historians seem to have taken the theory of ‘Moscow the Third Rome’ very seriously; for the Muscovite rulers from Ivan III onwards, Moscow was much more the ‘Second Kiev’ than the ‘Third Rome’. I would agree here with Humphrey Sumner. Some recent historians have, rightly, it seems to me, ‘played down’ the importance of the theory of ‘Moscow the Third Rome’ in the development of Russian sovereignty. See, for example, G. Olšr: ‘Gli ultimi Rurikidi e le basi ideologiche della sovranità dello Stato russo’, in Orientalia Christiana Periodica, vol. xii, Nos. 3-4 (Rome, 1946), pp. 322-73.”
But he defends part of his view.
It will be seen that Sumner and Obolensky agree in making three points: In the first place, the concept of “Moscow the Third Rome” was an academic idea which was never taken very seriously outside ecclesiastical circles; secondly, the architects of a Muscovite autocracy were indebted to the institutions of the East Roman Empire for little except certain external forms and ceremonies; thirdly, the statesmen in control of Muscovite policy showed themselves unwilling to sacrifice the interests of their own Russian Orthodox Christendom to those of an Ottoman Orthodox Christendom which was sundered from Russia by the double barrier of the Eurasian Steppe and the Black Sea. None of these three points would be contested by the present writer; but he would point out, in his turn, that none of them is incompatible with the thesis that the extinction of the last glimmer of the East Roman Empire in A.D. 1453 had an important and enduring psychological effect on Russian souls, [footnote below] and that this effect consisted in the implantation in them of a feeling that Muscovy, as the now sole surviving Orthodox Christian Power of any consequence, had inherited from the East Roman Empire both the mission of preserving intact the purity of the Orthodox Christian Faith and the high destiny which this onerous mission carried with it ex officio.
It will be noticed that Sumner, in the passages quoted above, equates the ideological legacy of the East Roman Empire with a pretension to an oecumenical authority. As the present writer sees it, the idea for which the East Roman Empire had stood, first and foremost, in its own people’s minds was the guardianship of Christian Orthodoxy rather than the possession of a title to world-wide dominion. He would, however, go on to contend that, in fact, the second of these two pretensions was logically latent in the first, since it would be difficult for a people to believe that God had singled them out to be the unique heralds of His Truth on Earth without also believing that He had likewise singled them out to be His instruments for propagating this Truth eventually throughout the Oikoumenê. It was, for example, an article of orthodox Jewish belief among a politically impotent Jewish diasporà that the extinct Kingdom of David would eventually be restored by the Messiah, not in its historic form as a parochial state, but with a dominion that would be coextensive with the Oikoumenê. The writer would therefore take issue with Sumner’s contention that the idea of being the sole possessor of the pure Orthodox Faith does not carry with it an aspiration to an oecumenical role; and he would have consulted his friend and mentor further on this point if, by the date when he was revising the present Part of this Study for the press, Humphrey Sumner’s friends and fellow historians had not suffered an irreparable loss in this saintly scholar’s untimely death.
Footnote to the last paragraph but one:
This psychological effect of the concept of “the Third Rome” is, however, also questioned by Prince Obolensky:
“I do not wish to minimize the importance of the religious factor in the resistance offered by the seventeenth-century Russian conservatives to the infiltration of Western ideas and customs: some of them at least seem to have regarded Russia as a guardian of the Orthodox faith against the heretical West. But I doubt whether the theory of ‘Moscow the Third Rome’ had much to do with this attitude, except possibly among the ‘Old Believers’. Except in some ecclesiastical, and particularly monastic, circles, this theory does not seem to have made much headway in Russia. … [It] [bracket in original] does not seem to have been sufficiently accepted to justify the view that future generations of Russians were moved by it to resist the impact of Western culture upon their way of life.”
In an earlier passage – admittedly speaking of “survivals” rather than revivals or successions – he points out that
“survivals” afforded [EA Freeman and his school, with their exaggeration of the link between Hellenic and Western history] the intellectual and aesthetic pleasure of tracing – as they imagined – the continuity of this thread and that, as its colour flashed out and vanished and flashed out again in the shot-silk texture of historic sequences. This pleasant exercise of the fancy has sometimes led historians who have indulged in it into irrelevant conceits and barren controversies.
Whether he is right or wrong here, Toynbee was writing of what he knew: he sometimes allowed himself such “pleasant exercises of the fancy”. In due course I will quote the passage to which Sumner and Obolensky were objecting.
Novgorod and St Petersburg (with pre-Ivan background)
Vasili III, contemporary (west) European engraving
Change and Habit, The Challenge of Our Time, OUP, 1966 (first quotation)
A Study of History, Vol VII, OUP, 1954
A Study of History, Vol I, OUP, 1934 (last)
In A.D. 1952 it would, no doubt, have been folly for a Western World that had been thrown on the defensive by a Russo-Chinese entente under the banner of Communism to count upon any possibility of a future breach between the two titanic non-Western Powers that were now cooperating with one another in an anti-Western campaign.
But a breach occurred in 1961. The two powers had been diverging ideologically since 1956.
There was perhaps more legitimate ground for encouragement in the fact that a Western Community which had come into headlong collision with the Chinese in Korea and which was desperately embroiled with the Vietnamese in Indo-China had managed to come to terms with the Indonesians after having crossed swords with them on the morrow of the “liberation” of the East Indian archipelago from the Japanese, and had voluntarily abdicated its dominion over the Filipinos, Ceylonese, Burmans, Indians, and Pakistanis by amicable agreements that had not been sullied by any stain of bloodshed.
The voluntary liquidation of American rule in the Philippines was perhaps not so remarkable – though an English observer could hardly claim to be an impartial judge in this case – as the voluntary liquidation of a British Rāj in India that was not only a hundred years older than the American régime in a former dominion of the Spanish Crown but had also come to count for far more in the life of the ruling Western country. When, on the 18th July, 1947, [footnote: This was the date on which the Royal Assent was given, at Westminster, to an India Independence Act enacted by the Parliament of the United Kingdom. The formal assumption of authority by the Governments of the Indian Union and Pakistan followed on the 15th August, 1947.] Great Britain had completed the fulfilment of a pledge, first made on the 20th August, 1917, [footnote: In the House of Commons at Westminster by the Secretary of State for India, Mr. Edwin Montagu.] to grant full self-government to India by stages at the fastest practicable pace, the Western country that had carried out this transfer of political power on this scale without having been constrained by any immediate force majeure [he is flattering us] had performed an act that was perhaps unprecedented and was certainly auspicious for the future, not merely of the Western Civilization, but of the Human Race.
The Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms (Wikipedia). Successor of the Morley-Minto Reforms.
A Study of History, Vol IX, OUP, 1954
List of lists of extreme points.
Derbent, the southernmost town in Russia, in Dagestan; Narin-kala, a Sassanian citadel, in the background
Before the Industrial Revolution, Man had devastated patches of the biosphere. For instance, he had caused mountain-sides to be denuded of soil by felling the trees that previously had saved the soil from being washed away. Man had cut down forests faster than they could be replaced, and he had mined metals that were not replaceable at all. But, before he had harnessed the physical energy of inanimate nature in machines on the grand scale, Man had not had it in his power to damage and despoil the biosphere irremediably. Till then, the air and the ocean had been virtually infinite, and the supply of timber and metals had far exceeded Man’s capacity to use them up. When he had exhausted one mine and had felled one forest, there had always been other virgin mines and virgin forests still waiting to be exploited. By making the Industrial Revolution, Man exposed the biosphere, including Man himself, to a threat that had no precedent.
The Western peoples had begun to dominate the rest of mankind before the Industrial Revolution. In the sixteenth century the Spaniards had subjugated the Meso-American and Andean peoples and had annihilated their civilizations. In the course of the years 1757-64 the British East India Company had become the virtual sovereign of Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa. In 1799-1818 the British subjugated all the rest of the Indian subcontinent to the south-east of the River Sutlej. They had a free hand because they held the command of the sea and because in 1809 they made a treaty with Ranjit Singh, a Sikh empire-builder, in which the two parties accepted the line of the Sutlej as the boundary between their respective fields of conquest. In 1845-9 the British went on to conquer and annex the Sikh empire in the Punjab. Meanwhile, in 1768-74, Russia had defeated the Ottoman Empire decisively; in 1798 the French had temporarily occupied Egypt, and in 1830 they had started to conquer Algeria; in 1840 three Western powers and Russia had evicted the insubordinate Ottoman viceroy of Egypt, Muhammad Ali, from Syria and Palestine. In 1839-42 the British had defeated China dramatically. In 1853 an American naval squadron compelled the Tokugawa Government of Japan to receive a visit from it. The Japanese recognized that they were powerless to prevent this unwelcome visit by force of arms.
These military successes of Western powers and of one Westernized Eastern Orthodox power, Russia, were won at the cost of occasional reverses. In the seventeenth century, the Portuguese were evicted forcibly from both Japan and Abyssinia. A British army that invaded Afghanistan in 1839-42 was annihilated. Yet by 1871 the Western powers and Russia were dominant throughout the World.
Even before the Industrial Revolution in Britain the Tsar of Russia, Peter the Great, had recognized that the only means by which a non-Western state could save itself from falling under Western domination was the creation of a new-model army on the pattern of the Western armies that were being created in Peter’s time, and Peter also saw that this Western-style army must be supported by a Western-style technology, economy, and administration. The signal military triumphs of the Western powers and of a Westernized Russia over non-Westernized states between 1757 and 1853 moved the rulers of some of the threatened states to do what Peter the Great had done.
Eminent examples of Westernizing statesmen in the first century after the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in Britain are Ranjit Singh (ruled 1799-1839), the founder of the Sikh successor-state, in the Punjab, of the Abdali Afghan Empire; Muhammad Ali, the Ottoman Padishah’s viceroy in Egypt from 1805 to 1848; the Ottoman Padishah Mahmud II (ruled 1808-39); King Mongkut of Thailand (ruled 1851-68); and the band of Japanese statesmen that, in the Emperor’s name, liquidated the Tokugawa regime and took the government of Japan into its own hands in 1868. These Westernizing statesmen have had a greater effect on the history of the Oikoumenê than any of their Western contemporaries. They have kept the West’s dominance within limits, and they have done this by propagating, in non-Western countries, the modern West’s way of life.
While the achievements of all the Westernizers mentioned above are remarkable, the Japanese makers of the Meiji Revolution were outstandingly successful. They themselves were members of the hitherto privileged, though impoverished, traditional military class, the samurai; the Tokugawa Shogunate succumbed after offering only a minimal resistance; a majority of the samurai acquiesced peacefully in the forfeiture of their privileges; a minority of them that rebelled in 1877 was easily defeated by a new Western-style Japanese conscript army composed of peasants who, before 1868, had been prohibited from bearing arms.
Muhammad Ali and Mahmud II did not have so smooth a start. Like Peter the Great, they found that they could not begin to build up a Western-style army till they had liquidated a traditional soldiery. Peter had massacred the Muscovite Streltsy (“Archers”) in 1698-9; Muhammad Ali massacred the Egyptian Mamluks in 1811, and Mahmud II massacred the Ottoman janizaries in 1826. The new Western-style armies all gave a good account of themselves in action. Muhammad Ali began building his new army in 1819 and a navy in 1821; in 1825 his well-drilled Egyptian peasant conscript troops almost succeeded in re-subjugating for his suzerain Mahmud II the valiant but undisciplined Greek insurgents. The Greeks were saved only by the intervention of France, Britain, and Russia, who destroyed the Egyptian and Turkish fleets in 1827 and compelled Muhammad Ali’s son Ibrahim to evacuate Greece in 1828. In 1833 Ibrahim conquered Syria and was only prevented from marching on Istanbul by Russia’s intervention on Mahmud II’s behalf. Muhammad Ali’s army was more than a match for Mahmud’s because he had been able to make an earlier start in building it up. Mahmud could not start before 1826, the year in which he destroyed the janizaries; yet, in the Russo-Turkish war of 1828-9, his new-model peasant conscript army put up a much stiffer resistance than the old Ottoman army in the Russo-Turkish wars of 1768-74, 1787-92, and 1806-12.
Ranjit Singh, like his contemporary Muhammad Ali, engaged former Napoleonic officers as instructors. The British succeeded in defeating the Western-trained Sikh army in 1845-6 and again in 1848-9, but these two wars cost the British a greater effort and heavier casualties than their previous conquest of the whole of India outside the Punjab.
Rulers who set out to Westernize non-Western countries could not do this solely with the aid of a few Western advisers and instructors. They had to discover or create, among their own subjects, a class of Western-educated natives who could deal with Westerners on more or less equal terms and could serve as intermediaries between the West and the still un-Westernized mass of their own fellow-countrymen. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the Ottoman Government had found this newly needed class, ready to hand, among Greek Ottoman subjects who were acquainted with the West through having been educated there or having had commercial relations with Westerners. Peter the Great in Russia, Muhammad Ali in Egypt, and the British in India had to create the intermediary class that they, too, needed. In Russia this class came to be called the intelligentsia, a hybrid word composed of a French root and a Russian termination. During the years 1763-1871, an intelligentsia was called into existence in every country that either fell under Western rule or saved itself from suffering this fate by Westernizing itself sufficiently to succeed in maintaining its political independence. Like the industrial entrepreneurs and the wage-earning industrial workers who made their appearance in Britain in the course of this century, the non-Western intelligentsia was a new class, and by the 1970s it had made at least as great a mark on mankind’s history.
The intelligentsia was enlisted or created by governments to serve these governments’ purposes, but the intelligentsia soon realized that it held a key position in its own society, and in every case it eventually took an independent line. In 1821 the ex-Ottoman Greek Prince Alexander Ypsilantis’s invasion of the Ottoman Empire taught the Ottoman Government that its Greek intelligentsia was a broken reed. In 1825 a conspiracy of Western-educated Russian military officers against Tsar Nicholas I was defeated and was suppressed, but it was a portent of things to come, and this not only in Russia but in a number of other Westernizing countries.
To live between two worlds, which is an intelligentsia’s function, is a spiritual ordeal, and in Russia in the nineteenth century this ordeal evoked a literature that was not surpassed anywhere in the World in that age. The novels of Turgenev (1818-83), Dostoyevsky (1821-81), and Tolstoy (1828-1910) became the common treasure of all mankind.
See the eighth volume of the Study and the Reith lectures.
Vasily Timm, The Decembrist revolt, painted 1853, St Petersburg, Hermitage
The scampering boy in the foreground appears in so many works of this period and somewhat earlier. In British prints he sometimes rolls a hoop and is followed by a scampering dog.
Mankind and Mother Earth, OUP, 1976, posthumous
P.T.: Have you ever talked to the real fire-eaters, to any of the Pentagon generals?
A.T.: Well now, I was once invited to give a talk in the Pentagon to a roomful of staff colonels, and the wife of the then Secretary for War got up and attacked me for saying that we ought to recognise China. She was a real fire-eater. She had no business to be there, I suppose, but she didn’t hesitate to throw her – or perhaps it was her husband’s – weight about in the presence of all those distinguished professionals. I got a horrible feeling when I went into the Secretary for War’s office. It was full of little cardboard models of missiles. They were all over the tables and chairs and everywhere, and he was delighting in them – like a child surrounded by its toys. Now that was alarming.
He presumably means Secretary of Defense, who replaced the Secretary of War (office abolished; established 1789) in the US cabinet in 1947.
In Britain a Minister of Defence separate from the prime minister replaced the Secretary of State for War (office established 1794; the “War Office”) in the cabinet in 1946, but the office survived as a non-cabinet post. It was abolished in 1964, along with that of First Lord of the Admiralty and Secretary of State for Air, and the cabinet minister was restyled Secretary of State for Defence.
Nixon visited China in 1972. The US recognised China on January 1 1979. Russia and China had been diverging ideologically since 1956. The Sino-Soviet split came into the open in 1961 and was never repaired.
With Philip Toynbee, Comparing Notes, A Dialogue across a Generation, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1963
Owing to the tendency of the parochial states of a broken-down civilization in its Time of Troubles to sharpen their weapons in fratricidal conflicts with one another and to take advantage of this dearly bought increase in their military proficiency to conquer neighbouring societies with their left hands while continuing to fight one another with their right hands, most universal states have embraced not only a fringe of conquered barbarians but substantial slices of the domain of one or more alien civilizations as well. Some universal states, again, have been founded by alien empire-builders, and some have been the product of societies within whose bosoms there has already been some degree of cultural variety even on a reckoning which does not differentiate between march-men and the denizens of the interior of the same social world. [...]
No other universal state known to History appears to have been as homogeneous in culture as Japan under the Tokugawa régime. In “the Middle Empire” of Egypt, in which a fringe of barbarians on the Nubian glacis of its Theban march was one element of variation from the cultural norm of the Egyptiac Society of the age, there was another and more positive feature of cultural diversity in the Empire’s culturally Sumeric provinces and client states in Palestine and Coele Syria. As for “the New Empire”, which was a deliberate revival of the original Egyptiac universal state, it accentuated the pattern of its prototype by completing the assimilation of the barbarians of Nubia and by embracing the domain of an abortive First Syriac Civilization in Syria and North-Western Mesopotamia; and this culturally tripartite structure – in which the cultural domain of the civilization through whose disintegration the universal state has been brought into existence is flanked by culturally alien territories annexed at the expense of both barbarians and neighbouring civilizations – appears to be the standard type.
For example, in the Mauryan Empire, which was the original Indic universal state, an Indic cultural core was flanked by an alien province in the Panjab, which had been at least partially Syriacized during a previous period of Achaemenian rule after having been partially barbarized by an antecedent Völkerwanderung of Eurasian Nomads, while in other quarters the Mauryan Empire’s Indic core was flanked by ex-barbarian provinces in Southern India and possibly farther afield in both Ceylon and Khotan as well. The Guptan Empire, in which the Mauryan was eventually reintegrated, possessed an ex-barbarian fringe, with an alien Hellenic tincture, in the satrapy that had been founded by Saka war-bands in Gujerat and the North-Western Deccan, and a Hellenized fringe, with a Kushan barbarian dilution, in the territories under its suzerainty in the Panjab. In a Han Empire which was the Sinic universal state, the Sinic World proper was flanked by barbarian annexes in what was eventually to become Southern China, as well as on the Eurasian Steppe, and by an alien province in the Tarim Basin, where the Indic, Syriac, and Hellenic cultures had already met and mingled before this cultural corridor and crucible was annexed to the Han Empire for the first time in the second century B.C. and for the second time in the first century of the Christian Era. In the Roman Empire, which was the Hellenic universal state, a culturally Hellenic core in Western Anatolia, Continental European Greece, Sicily, and Italy, with outlying enclaves in Cilicia, in Syria, at Alexandria, and at Marseilles, was combined with the domain of the submerged Hittite Civilization in Eastern Anatolia, with the homelands of the Syriac and Egyptiac civilizations in Syria and in the Lower Nile Valley, with the colonial [Carthaginian] domain of the Syriac Civilization in North-West Africa, and with ex-barbarian hinterlands in North-West Africa and in Western and Central Europe as far as the left bank of the Rhine and the right bank of the Danube. [Footnote: Leaving out of account the late-acquired and early-lost Transdanubian bridgehead in Dacia.]
There are other cases in which this standard cultural pattern has been enriched by some additional element.
In the Muscovite Tsardom, a Russian Orthodox Christian core was flanked by a vast ex-barbarian annex extending northwards to the Arctic Ocean and eastwards eventually to the Pacific, and by an Iranic Muslim annex consisting of the sedentary Muslim peoples of the Volga Basin, the Urals, and Western Siberia. This pattern was afterwards complicated by Peter the Great’s deliberate substitution of a Westernized for a traditional Orthodox Christian cultural framework for the Russian Orthodox Christian universal state, and by the subsequent annexation of additional alien territories – at the expense of the Islamic World on the Eurasian Steppe and in the Crimea, the Caucasus, and the Oxus-Jaxartes Basin, and at the expense of Western Christendom in the Baltic Provinces, Lithuania, Poland, and Finland.
In the Achaemenian Empire, which was the original Syriac universal state, there was an antecedent cultural diversity, within the Syriac core itself, between the Syrian creators of the Syriac Civilization and their Iranian converts, and a geographical gap between Syria and Iran that was still occupied by the dwindling domain of the gradually disappearing Babylonic culture. The Achaemenian Empire also embraced the domain of the submerged Hittite culture in Eastern Anatolia, the best part of the domain of the Egyptiac Civilization, fringes torn from the Hellenic and Indic worlds, and pockets of partially reclaimed barbarian highlanders and Eurasian Nomads. Moreover, after its life had been prematurely cut short by Alexander the Great, its work was carried on by his political successors, and especially by the Seleucidae, whom it would be more illuminating to describe as alien Hellenic successors of Cyrus and Darius. In the Arab Caliphate, in which the Achaemenian Empire was eventually reintegrated, the Syriac core – in which the earlier diversity between Syrian creators and Iranian converts had been replaced by a cleavage, along approximately the same geographical line, between ex-subjects of the Roman and ex-subjects of the Sasanian Empire – was united politically, by Arab barbarian empire-builders, with barbarian annexes – in North-West Africa, in the fastnesses of Daylam and Tabaristan between the Elburz Mountains and the Caspian Sea, and on the fringes of the Eurasian Steppe adjoining the Oxus-Jaxartes Basin – and with fragments of alien civilizations: a slice of the new-born Hindu World in Sind; the potential domain of an abortive Far Eastern Christian Civilization in the Oxus-Jaxartes Basin; an Orthodox Christian diaspora in Syria and Egypt; and a fossil of the by then elsewhere extinct Babylonic Society at Harran.
In the Mongol Empire, which was a universal state imposed by alien empire-builders on the main body of the Far Eastern Society in China, the annexes to a Chinese core were unusually extensive – including, as they did, the whole of the Eurasian Nomad World, the whole of Russian Orthodox Christendom, and the ex-Sasanian portion of a Syriac World which by that time was in extremis. The Mongols themselves were barbarians with a tincture of Far Eastern Christian culture. In the Manchu empire-builders, who subsequently repeated the Mongols’ performance on a less gigantic yet still imposing scale, there was the same tincture in a more diluted form; and the Chinese universal state in its Manchu avatar once again embraced, in addition to its Chinese core, a number of alien annexes: a “reservoir” of barbarians in the still unfelled backwoods and still virgin steppes of Manchuria, the whole of the Tantric Mahayanian Buddhist World in Tibet, Mongolia, and Zungaria, and the easternmost continental outposts of the Islamic World in the Tarim Basin, the north-western Chinese provinces of Kansu and Shansi, and the southwestern Chinese province of Yunnan.
In the Ottoman Empire, which provided, or saddled, the main body of Orthodox Christendom with its universal state, the alien ʿOsmanli empire-builders united an Orthodox Christian core with a fringe of Western Christian territory in Hungary, with the whole of the Arabic Muslim World except Morocco, the Sudan, and South-Eastern Arabia, and with pockets of barbarians and semi-barbarians in Serbia, Bosnia, Albania, the Mani, the Caucasus, the Crimea, and on the Arabian Steppe. In the Mughal Empire, which was the Ottoman Empire’s counterpart in the Hindu World, the pattern was simpler, since, apart from the Iranic Muslim empire-builders and their co-religionists who had been deposited in the Hindu social environment by earlier waves of invasion from the Middle East and Central Asia [since the twelfth century], the Mughals’ only [sic] non-Hindu subjects were the Pathan barbarian highlanders on the north-western fringe of their dominions. When, however, the Mughal Rāj was replaced by a British Rāj, the pattern of the Hindu universal state became more complex; for the advent of a new band of alien empire-builders, which substituted a Western element for an Islamic at the political apex of the Hindu universal state, did not expel the Indian Muslims from the stage of Hindu history, but merely depressed their status to that of a numerically still formidable alien element in the Hindu internal proletariat, so that the Hindu universal state in its second phase combined elements drawn from two alien civilizations with a Pathan barbarian fringe and a Hindu core.
There had been other universal states in which, as in the Mughal Empire, the cultural pattern had been less complex than the standard type yet not so simple as that of the Tokugawa Shogunate.
The Empire of Sumer and Akkad, which was the Sumeric universal state, included no representatives of an alien civilization – unless Byblus and other Syrian coast-towns are to be counted as such in virtue of their tincture of Egyptiac culture. On the other hand, the Sumeric Civilization itself was represented in two varieties at least – a Sumero-Akkadian and an Elamite – and in no less than three if the domain of the Indus Culture should prove also to have been included in “the Empire of the Four Quarters of the World”. Moreover, the Babylonian Amorites, who eventually restored a polity that had been first constructed by the Sumerian Ur-Engur (alias Ur-Nammu) of Ur, were not merely marchmen but marchmen with a barbarian tinge. So, on a broader and a longer view, the cultural pattern of the Sumeric universal state proves to have been less homogeneous than might appear at first sight. “The thalassocracy of Minos”, again, which was the Minoan universal state, probably included representatives of the continental Mycenaean variety of the Minoan culture as well as the creators of that culture in its Cretan homeland, even if it did not embrace any representatives of an alien civilization.
In the Central American World, two once distinct sister societies – the Yucatec Civilization and the Mexic – had not yet lost their distinctive characteristics, though they had already been brought together by force of Toltec arms, when the task, and prize, of establishing a Central American universal state was snatched, at the eleventh hour, out of the hands of barbarian Aztec empire-builders by Spanish representatives of an utterly alien Western Christendom. In the Andean World the Empire of the Incas, which was the Andean universal state, already included representatives of the Kara variety of the Andean culture [...] before the indigenous Incan empire-builders were suddenly and violently replaced by Spanish conquistadores from Western Christendom who turned the Andean World upside-down, with a vigour reminiscent of Alexander the Great’s, by proceeding to convert the indigenous population to Christianity and to variegate the social map by studding it with immigrant Spanish landlords and self-governing municipalities.
The Danubian Hapsburg Monarchy, which served as a carapace for Western Christendom against the assaults of the ʿOsmanlis, and which, seen from the south-east, wore the deceptive appearance of being a full-blown Western universal state, set itself, like the Tokugawa Shogunate, to achieve domestic cultural uniformity, but lacked both the ruthlessness and the insularity which, between them, enabled the Japanese isolationists for a time to put their policy into effect. In pursuing its aim of being totally Catholic, the Hapsburg Power did succeed, more or less, in extirpating Protestantism within its frontiers; but the very success of its stand, and eventual counter-attack, against the Ottoman embodiment of an Orthodox Christian universal state broke up the Danubian Monarchy’s hardly attained Catholic homogeneity by transferring to Hapsburg from Ottoman rule a stiff-necked minority of Hungarian Protestants and a host of Orthodox Christians of divers nationalities, most of whom proved unwilling to accept the ecclesiastical supremacy of Rome, even when the yoke was proffered in the easy form of Uniatism [union with Rome and retention of local rites], while, among those who did accept this relatively light burden, the rank and file remained nearer in heart and mind to their dissident Orthodox ex-co-religionists than they ever came to be to their fellow Catholics who were of the Latin Rite.
The [post-Assyrian] Neo-Babylonian Empire [or Chaldean Empire], which was the Babylonic universal state, similarly forfeited its cultural purity – and thereby worked unwittingly for the eventual extinction of the Babylonic Civilization itself – when Nebuchadnezzar conquered and annexed the homeland of the Syriac Civilization west of the Euphrates; and the impress of the indigenous Babylonic culture became progressively fainter as the domain which Nebuchadnezzar had bequeathed to a short line of native successors was incorporated first into the barbaro-Syriac Empire of the Achaemenids and then into the Hellenic Empire of the Seleucids.
Our survey has shown that, in the cultural composition of universal states, a high degree of diversity is the rule; and, in the light of this fact, it is evident that one effect of the “conductivity” of universal states is to carry farther, by less violent and less brutal means, that process of cultural pammixia that is started, in the antecedent Times of Troubles, by the atrocities that these bring in their train. The refugees, exiles, deportees, transported slaves, and other déracinés of the more cruel preceding age are followed up, under the milder régime of a universal state, by merchants, by professional soldiers, and by philosophic and religious missionaries and pilgrims who make their transit with less tribulation in a more genial social climate.
A Study of History, Vol VII, OUP, 1954
The first Beatles single and the first James Bond film – Love Me Do and Dr No – were released 50 years ago today in the UK.
More 1962:
The Brazilian Girl from Ipanema, Garota de Ipanema. Far too well known to post.
The cosmic Telstar (released August 17 in UK):
The Japanese Sukiyaki (not quite 1962: released Japan 1961, arrived UK and US 1963):
In Japan it was Ue o Muite Arukō, 上を向いて歩こう, I Will Walk Looking Up. Sukiyaki was a meaningless title used in the West. Sakamoto died on Japan Airlines Flight 123 on August 12 1985.
The Russian Midnight in Moscow (released USSR 1955-56, hit in the West 1961-62); the famous version in the West was an arrangement by Kenny Ball and his Jazzmen:
In Russia it was Podmoskovnye Vechera, Подмосковные вечера, Evenings in Moscow Oblast.
Here’s Van Cliburn doing it in Moscow:
Cliburn was the young Texan who won the first International Tchaikovsky Competition in 1958. It was one of the great cultural episodes of the Cold War, like Gould’s visit (1957), Nureyev’s defection (1961) and Stravinsky’s return visit (1962 again). Cliburn’s performance of Tchaikovsky’s first concerto and Rachmaninoff’s third gave him an eight-minute standing ovation. The judges asked permission of Khrushchev to give first prize to an American. “Is he the best?” Khrushchev asked. “Then give him the prize.” It was the year after Sputnik. Cliburn returned home to a ticker-tape parade in New York. This clip may be from his visit of 1962 for the second competition. The first prize then was shared by Vladimir Ashkenazy and John Ogdon.
The Van Cliburn International Piano Competition was held first in 1962 in Fort Worth.
The real Telstar (launched Cape Canaveral July 10; note mention of Toynbee):
Tetralogy, or trilogy with sequel:
The Age of Revolution: Europe 1789-1848 1962
The Age of Capital: 1848-1875 1975
The Age of Empire: 1875-1914 1987
The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991 (UK title) 1994
Some others:
Bandits 1969
Revolutionaries, 1973
Editor, with Terence Ranger, and contributor, The Invention of Tradition 1983
Uncommon People: Resistance, Rebellion and Jazz 1998
A final book, Fractured Spring, sent to the publisher a few months ago, will appear in 2013.
Schama meets Hobsbawm (conversation last year, post here).
Interview with Silvia Lemus, wife of Carlos Fuentes, perhaps for Mexican television and presumably from circa 1994:
Philippa Sands on the city of Lviv, NYR Blog, May 30 (meant to post over summer).
Post mentioning Lviv. Post with Lemberg video.
Ruthenia immediately beyond the Carpathians (in Ukraine) used to be called Galicia or Austrian Poland (capital: Lvov or Lwów in Polish, Lemberg in German, Lviv in Ukrainian). It belonged to Poland until the First Partition. Austria controlled it from 1772 to 1918. It was Polish between the wars and passed to the Soviet Union (Ukraine) at the end of the Second World War.
Sands: “[Lviv] was a closed city during the Soviet period from 1945 to 1991, and even today remains relatively little known. [...] Polish director Agnieszka Holland’s film In Darkness, which was nominated for an Oscar last year, describes a short moment in [the] longer story. Drawn from Robert Marshall’s 1991 book The Sewers of Lvov [the title is actually In the Sewers of Lvov] and Krsytyna Chiger’s [formula ghost-written] memoir The Girl in the Green Sweater (2007), the film is about a small group of Jewish residents who take refuge in the sewers of Nazi-occupied Lviv with the assistance of Leopold Socha, a city worker. His nemesis is the sinister Bortnik – he is given no first name – an unpleasant Ukrainian officer who has been enlisted by the Nazis to root out hidden Jews. Holland is a filmmaker of impeccable honesty and the story is simply and powerfully told. But above all it is the film’s setting, below the streets of Lviv, that gives it such force.
“Robert Marshall’s book was among the first of dozens I have read to understand what had happened in the city from 1914 to 1945 [...].”
Lwów Eaglets by Wojciech Kossak (1926): Polish teenage defenders of Lvov in the Polish war of 1918-19 against the short-lived West Ukrainian People’s Republic; on November 21 1918 the Ukrainians were repelled from the area of the Lychakiv Cemetery
Second Polish Republic, 1922-39 (the First Republic is another term for Poland-Lithuania from 1569 until the Third Partition: “a republic under the presidency of a king”)
“Du sublime au ridicule il n’y a qu’un pas” (Napoleon to de Pratt, after the Grand Army’s retreat from Moscow in A.D. 1812).
This is actually Archbishop Dominique Dufour de Pradt, to whom Napoleon made the remark on on December 10 1812, four days before the army left Russian territory for that of the Grand Duchy of Warsaw. Their conversation is given in English in Vol III of Sir Archibald Alison, History of Europe from the Commencement of the French Revolution in 1789 to the Restoration of the Bourbons in 1815, William Blackwood, 1842, whose source appears to be a published account by de Pradt.
A Study of History, Vol IX, OUP, 1954 (footnote)
His own transcription of the Dance of the Blessed Spirits from Gluck, Orfeo ed Euridice.
Byron’s main source seems to have been Voltaire. (Liszt based his rather tiresome symphonic poem on Byron.)
Wikipedia, edited:
“The poem opens with a framing device: Mazeppa and the Swedish King Charles XII, together with their armies, are retreating from the Battle of Poltava, where they were defeated by the Russians. Exhausted and war-weary, the two men set up camp for the night. The King admires Mazeppa’s horsemanship, and Mazeppa offers to tell him how he learnt this skill. The poem then switches to the first person. Mazeppa describes his youth and his service as a page to King John II Casimir in Poland. He becomes acquainted with Theresa, a beautiful woman who ‘had the Asiatic eye’. She is married to a Count who is thirty years her senior. Mazeppa falls passionately in love with her, is unable to control his passions, and they meet at night and consummate their love.
“However, the Count’s men catch them together and bring him to the Count. The Count orders an unusually cruel punishment: Mazeppa is to be tied naked to a steed, which is then to be taunted and set loose. Stanzas 10 to 18 recount the steed’s flight across Eastern Europe, emphasizing the pain, suffering and confusion that Mazeppa feels. However, the horse has seemingly limitless energy. Mazeppa nearly dies twice. In Stanza 13, he describes himself ‘full in death’s face’, but is restored when the horse swims through a river. Stanza 18 concludes with a description of ‘an icy sickness’ and his vision of a raven flying overheard, ready to feast on his corpse. However, in Stanza 19, Mazeppa awakes to find himself in bed, with his wounds being tended by a Cossack maid. In the final stanza, Mazeppa’s narrative ends. The poet-narrator describes Mazeppa preparing his bed for the evening. King Charles is already asleep.
“There are historical sources which verify that the Orthodox Ivan Stepanovych Mazepa, his historical name, served in the Polish Court to John II Casimir. However, it is unclear why he left Poland in 1663 and returned to his homeland in what is now Ukraine. There is no historical evidence that Mazepa was exiled from Poland because of a love affair, or that he was punished by being strapped to a wild horse.”
After Poltava, Mazeppa, as I write it, arrived with Charles XII at the Turkish fortress of Bendery, within modern Moldova. Mazeppa died there a few months later.
Géricault, c 1820, private collection; crossing the river; the body has the animal immediacy of a cave painting
Charles XII [...] defiantly courted death in the trenches before Frederiksten in A.D. 1719 [...].
He was invading Norway – and died in 1718, not ’19. Denmark-Norway was one of Russia’s allies in the Great Northern War of 1700-21 (Sweden and others vs Russia and others).
Charles had already led Sweden to its major defeat by Russia in the Battle of Poltava (Russian Empire territory in the Ukraine) in 1709. This was the occasion on which the Dniepr Cossack Mazeppa, who been helping the Russians to suppress a rebellion of the Don Cossacks, unwisely switched sides and supported Sweden.
Peter the Great’s callow peasant army had won its spurs in A.D. 1709 at Poltava, in the Ukraine, against Charles XII’s far-ranging Swedes [...].
The Battle of Poltava, orchestral passage in Tchaikovsky’s Mazeppa; the opera is after Pushkin’s narrative poem Poltava, which was an answer to Byron’s Mazeppa; performers not stated
With peace in 1721, Protestant Sweden and Catholic Poland-Lithuania (1385-1795) ceased to be major powers. Russia gained its Baltic territories and became the greatest power in Eastern Europe.
Voltaire published his Histoire de Charles XII in 1731. Charles ought to have been a hero in Cold-War America.
Between A.D. 1494 and A.D. 1952 the only other actor of a leading part in the Western power game who had lost his life in battle had been one of Charles XII’s predecessors on the throne of Sweden, Gustavus Adolphus. Napoleon, like Francis I, had died in his bed; Hitler had died in his bunker.
The great-power century for Sweden had begun with Gustavus Adolphus. He died in 1632 at the Battle of Lützen in Saxony, near Leipzig, during the Thirty Years’ War (Sweden and others vs Holy Roman Empire and Spain).
For Toynbee, 1494, the date of Francis I’s invasion of Italy, was the beginning of modern international power relations in Europe: the age which ended in 1945.
A Swedish militarism that had been rampant since Gustavus Adolphus (regnabat A.D. 1611-32) had disembarked his expeditionary force on German soil on the 27-28th June, 1630, had been extinguished by a subsequent and consequent Swedish experience of being bled white by Charles XII (regnabat A.D. 1697-1718).
Gustavus Adolphus was a hero in Protestant Germany. My grandfather had an engraving of him hanging in the hall of his house in Baden-Württemberg.
Gustavus Adolphus in a Polish coat, Matthäus Merian the Elder, 1632, Skokloster Castle, Stockholm
Charles XII, David von Krafft workshop or circle, 1724 (posthumous), location?
A Study of History, Vol IX, OUP, 1954 (passages not contiguous)
A Study of History, Vol IX, OUP, 1954 (footnote) (third extract)
Emily Ezust’s Lied, Art Song and Choral Texts Archive.
Rob Glaubitz’s Aria Database.
[The] epiphany of the ruler of a universal state as the one shepherd whose oecumenical monarchy makes one fold for all Mankind [footnote: John x. 16.] appeals to one of the Human Soul’s deepest longings, as, in Dostoyevski’s fable, the Grand Inquisitor reminds a subversive Christ.
In The Grand Inquisitor, a parable in The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan imagines Christ returning to Earth and meeting a leader of the Spanish Inquisition in Seville.
“Thou mightest have taken … the sword of Caesar. Why didst Thou reject that last gift? Hadst Thou accepted that last counsel of the mighty spirit, Thou wouldst have accomplished all that Man seeks on Earth – that is, someone to worship, someone to keep his conscience, and some means of uniting all in one unanimous and harmonious ant-heap; for the craving for universal unity is the third and last anguish of men. Mankind as a whole has always striven to organise a universal state. There have been many great nations with great histories, but the more highly they were developed the more unhappy they were, for they felt more acutely than other people the craving for world-wide union. The great conquerors – Timurs and Chingis Khans – whirled like hurricanes over the face of the Earth, striving to subdue its people, and they too were but the unconscious expression of the same craving for universal unity. Hadst Thou taken the World and Caesar’s purple, Thou wouldst have founded the universal state and have given universal peace. For who can rule men if not he who holds their conscience and their bread in his hands?” [Footnote: Dostoyevski, F.: The Brothers Karamazov, Part II, Book V, chap. 5: “The Grand Inquisitor”.]
The translator is not stated, but is Constance Garnett, as one would expect.
Dostoyevsky had encountered the figure of the Grand Inquisitor in Schiller’s Don Carlos.
The Spanish Inquisition lasted from 1480 to 1834. List of Grand Inquisitors.
Postscript: El Greco and Modernism, Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf runs until August 12.
A Study of History, Vol VII, OUP, 1954
“Toute nation a le gouvernement qu’elle mérite” (de Maistre, J.: Lettres et Opuscules Inédits (Paris 1851, Vaton), vol. i, p. 215, 15th August, 1811).
Joseph de Maistre was a Savoyard philosopher and from 1803 to 1816 Sardinia’s ambassador to Tsar Alexander I. The Kingdom of Sardinia-Piedmont, including Savoy, was under French occupation until 1815 and sent this anti-revolutionary, pro-Church emissary to Russia.
De Maistre wrote the letter in St Petersburg. It is about the possibility of constitutional change in Russia. The phrase Pougatscheff d’université in it means nihilist. In the 1873 Vaton edition I have seen, it is addressed “A M. le chevalier de …”. I don’t know whether we know from the context of the collection who he is.
Joseph de Maistre’s brother Xavier, a military man, arrived in Russia before him and stayed after the overthrow of Napoleon.
Their descendant Xavier de Maistre (born 1973) is a harpist.
Haydn, Piano Concerto in D major, Hob XVIII: 11, c 1780-83, arranged by?, first movement, Bertrand de Billy, ORF Radiosinfonieorchester Wien, Schloss Esterházy, Eisenstadt, 2009
A Study of History, Vol IX, OUP, 1954 (footnote)
In the encounter between the world and the West that has been going on by now for four or five hundred years, the world, not the West, is the party that, up to now, has had the significant experience. It has not been the West that has been hit by the world; it is the world that has been hit – and hit hard – by the West; and that is why, in the title of this book, the world has been put first.
The World and the West, OUP, 1953
The nemesis of a Napoleon I’s militarism had not deterred Frenchmen of a later generation from placing their lives and fortunes in the hands of a Napoleon III; and, after having pandered to his subjects’ still impenitently militaristic taste by leading them successively into a Roman adventure in A.D. 1849, a Russian adventure in A.D. 1854-6, an Austrian adventure in A.D. 1859, and a Mexican adventure in A.D. 1862-7, this second-rate practitioner of a dangerous trade had committed his country in A.D. 1870 to a Prussian adventure in which the agonies of the Hundred Years War had been concentrated within a Time-span of seven months.
A Study of History, Vol IX, OUP, 1954
The French psyche was [...] a psychological barometer on which the readings at successive dates of Western history since A.D. 1494 had been apt to give accurate forecasts of imminent rises and falls in the strength of martial feeling in the Western World as a whole. The progressive militarization of Western Christendom in the course of the four centuries beginning with a French King Charles VIII’s invasion of Italy had been registered in the French people’s change of mood from the peaceableness (perhaps due to their still lively memories of their sufferings in the Hundred Years War) that had been characteristic of a majority of the French people in the first chapter of this tragic story to the chauvinism that had come to be characteristic of a majority of them by the Napoleonic Age. This adventitious aggressive spirit in France had not been blunted by the horrors of the Grand Army’s retreat from Moscow in A.D. 1812 or by the experience of fighting on French soil in A.D. 1814 or even by the humiliatingly decisive defeat, at Waterloo in A.D. 1815, of a light-hearted attempt to reverse the military decision of the preceding year. Thereafter, the French had still had in them the spirit to seek psychological compensation for the loss of an abortive Napoleonic French empire in Europe by embarking in A.D. 1830 on the arduous aggressive military enterprise of conquering a substitute-empire in North-West Africa; and a French aggressiveness which had thus survived a chastisement with whips at Waterloo had required the sharper sting of a chastisement with scorpions at Sedan [1870] to make it wince and wilt. The nemesis of a Napoleon I’s militarism had not deterred Frenchmen of a later generation from placing their lives and fortunes in the hands of a Napoleon III; and, after having pandered to his subjects’ still impenitently militaristic taste by leading them successively into a Roman adventure in A.D. 1849, a Russian adventure in A.D. 1854-6, an Austrian adventure in A.D. 1859, and a Mexican adventure in A.D. 1862-7, this second-rate practitioner of a dangerous trade had committed his country in A.D. 1870 to a Prussian adventure in which the agonies of the Hundred Years War had been concentrated within a Time-span of seven months. This terrible retribution upon France for a militarism to which her Government had been addicted since A.D. 1494, and her people since A.D. 1792, had been so shattering a psychological experience that French souls had never afterwards fully recovered from it.
Though in A.D. 1914 a conscript French national army had patriotically flown to arms to stem a fresh German invasion, and though for four years thereafter the French people had heroically endured casualties of a severity that was crushing for a country in which the population had ceased to increase, besides being grievous for millions of bereaved families, the French had emerged in A.D. 1918 from this deadly struggle for existence with a sharpened consciousness of having been caught by the malice or nemesis of History in a strategico-political position that was so perilously exposed that, sooner or later, it must prove untenable. History had condemned France in a post-Modern Age to have for her next-door neighbour a German national state that was at least as aggressive-minded as France had ever been at her worst, and that was now far more than a match for France in industrial war-potential, as well as in man-power. On the 11th November, 1918, the French had been aware that they would never have emerged on the winning side from a war with the Germany of that day if the combined strength of all the English-speaking peoples had not also been thrown into the anti-German scale; and from that moment onwards France’s English-speaking allies and associates had started perversely to do their worst to break French hearts by serving public notice on France that she could not depend upon their being willing to come to her rescue again if the German peril were once more to loom up. In these cruelly unpropitious circumstances the French had entered an inter-war breathing-space in a mood of disillusionment and discouragement that had been registered in action eventually in France’s collapse and capitulation in June 1940; and the ensuing passage of French history had been big with the future of the Western World as a whole.
The Vichyssois temper and régime had given a practical demonstration of a psychological process through which Nationalism, when carried to an extreme, could box the compass by turning into an equally extreme renunciation of a traditional will to maintain and assert a parochial sovereign independence. Frenchmen, responsible at the time for the government of their country, who, on the 16th June, 1940, had rejected with indignation Churchill’s eleventh-hour offer of a voluntary political union on equal terms between a then all-but-conquered France and a then still unconquered United Kingdom, on the ground that this British offer was an insidious move to consummate the sacrifice of France for the United Kingdom’s benefit, did not rebel when, six days afterwards, on the 22nd June, they were required to sign an armistice which placed France at the mercy of a National Socialist Germany, and did not refuse, after that, to accede to German demands for French collaboration with Germany’s continuing war-effort against a Britain who, till yesterday, had been France’s ally, though a German victory over Great Britain would have extinguished France’s last hope of ever being liberated from the German yoke to which she had bowed her neck. The ostensibly nationalist Vichyssois slogan “la France seule” was a euphemism for the unspeakable truth that France had placed herself at Germany’s disposal and had accepted the shameful role of principal slave to a foreign tyrant nation that had attacked and conquered its neighbours in Continental Europe as a first step towards attacking and conquering the rest of the World with sinews of war that were to be reinforced thanks to the pliancy of Continental European victims who were to be bullied into becoming their German conquerors’ accomplices.
It was true that a demoralized French nationalism would never have entered into a transaction of which it was manifestly ashamed if the alternative course demanded by a traditional standard of heroism had not been beyond the French people’s powers of endurance under novel technological conditions of warfare which had keyed up a once familiar and tolerable ordeal to an unprecedented degree of severity; but this turn of a technological screw was not the whole explanation of the collapse of French moral that had declared itself in A.D. 1940. Part of the explanation also was that, for nationalist-minded souls, the psychological difficulty of acquiescing in the abrogation of a national sovereign independence by a foreign conqueror’s exercise of an irresistible brute force was not so great as the psychological difficulty of taking the initiative in voluntarily surrendering some agreed part of the same national sovereign independence in order to enter into co-operation with people of other nations, on a footing of equality, in a loose confederation like the League of Nations or in a full federal union like the United States and this though the difference between the respective effects of these two alternative ways of foregoing sovereignty was the extreme difference between purchasing security through cooperation and paying the penalty of subjection for the luxury of choosing the psychologically easier option of accepting a fait accompli imposed by force majeure.
The second factor that was reinforcing the effect of an advancing Technology in undermining a parochial patriotism was a victory of class-feeling over patriotism in a competition for precedence between two conflicting expressions of sectional corporate self-interest that were irreconcilable in the last resort. In a France that had been living under the regime of a Front Populaire from June 1936 to April 1938 a considerable portion of the middle class had apparently come, by A.D. 1940, to feel that the aggression of its working-class fellow-countrymen on a domestic front was a greater menace to the preservation of the middle class’s most highly prized assets than the aggression, on an international front, of a Fascist Power which promised to protect a compliant French bourgeoisie’s private property as a quid pro quo for the abrogation of their country’s national sovereignty. [Footnote: Similarly, in a China that had been living under the régime of a Kuomintang during the years A.D. 1928-48, a considerable section of the industrial working class and even of the peasantry had apparently come, by A.D. 1948, to feel that the incompetence and corruption of this ruing clique of a Chinese intelligentsia was a greater evil than the hegemony of a Soviet Union under which they would be allowing their country to fall if they acquiesced in the liquidation of the Kuomintang régime by a Chinese Communist Party.]
If in France the Vichyssois policy and spirit had thus demonstrated that the experience of a First World War had made one once aggressively martial-minded Western nation willing to purchase peace “at any price”, the French people’s British allies had been convicted of a willingness to purchase peace “at almost any price” [footnote: “Not peace at any price, but peace at almost any price” (Mr. Eden in the House of Commons at Westminster on the 25th June, 1937).] by a policy and spirit of “appeasement” (in a pejorative connotation of the word) that had been in the ascendant in Great Britain from the 18th September, 1931, when her inter-war temper had first been put to the test by the opening move in a new Japanese campaign of military aggression in the Far East, and the 10th May, 1940, when the British people had taken for their leader a statesman who had lost no time in putting their temper to the test again by his challenging offer to his countrymen of “blood and toil and tears and sweat” [footnote: Mr. Churchill in the House of Commons at Westminster, 13th May, 1940.] as the price that must be paid for the United Kingdom’s present survival and future victory.
From June 1940 to August 1945 the British people had paid as appallingly heavy a price for the purchase of an inestimably valuable spiritual treasure as the French people had paid in A.D. 1914-18; and in A.D. 1952, some seven years after their release from this supreme ordeal, it had still to be seen whether the ultimate psychological effect of a Second World War on British moral would or would not prove to have been the same as the effect of a First World War had proved to have been on French moral. Would British souls that had been willing to purchase peace “at almost any price” rather than have to face a Second World War be found willing to purchase it “at any price” if a third world war were to descend upon them? There were, after all, limits to Human Nature’s powers of endurance, even in communities of the toughest moral fibre fortified by the most Spartan martial tradition. If the spirit of France had flinched in June 1940 at the prospect of having to face casualties in the field even heavier than the French casualties in A.D. 1914-18 and having to see the whole of her metropolitan territory overrun by a temporarily victorious enemy, how was the spirit of Britain likely to react to the prospect of seeing a congested island subjected to an intensive bombardment with guided atomic missiles which would do incomparably greater execution than the heaviest of the blows recently delivered by Göring’s Luftwaffe?
The answer to this question was no foregone conclusion, and any future follower, German or Russian, in Hitler’s footsteps would be inviting the fate that Hitler had brought on himself and his ambitions if, like Hitler, he were to gamble on the answer to the question turning out to be that the British no longer had any spirit left in them; yet, for all that, the question could not be denied a hearing in A.D. 1952; and the British people was not, of course, the only people in the World at this date about whom this importunate question had to be asked. If it was at least questionable whether a third world war would be endurable for the people of the United Kingdom, it was manifestly questionable a fortiori whether this tribulation would be endurable for Continental West European peoples who had undergone in the years A.D. 1940-5 – and, in the Belgian, French, Italian, and Polish cases, in the years A.D. 1914-18 before that – an experience that was more harrowing, and very much more demoralizing, than the British people’s ordeal of an aerial bombardment. These Continental West European victims of an inordinate German militarism had seen their countries partially or completely overrun and occupied by invading hostile armies, and they had found themselves at the mercy of an occupying alien enemy that had taken advantage of its power over them to distrain upon their material resources for the reinforcement of its own war effort against their surviving allies and to harness their energies to its own evil will by training upon them all the terrors of a post-Modern Western totalitarian police-state.
This institutional engine of militarism had been keyed up to a sinister efficiency on the home fronts of a Fascist Italy and a National-Socialist Germany; and, while in A.D. 1952 it was indisputably true that Western Europe as a whole had had its martial spirit damped by its devastating experiences since A.D. 1914, was this true without reservations of the two West European countries in which Fascist national governments had deliberately re-stoked the local fires of militarism after the First World War with the intention of profiting, in a Second World War, by a consequent marginal difference between the respective limits of their foreign victims’ and their native instruments’ capacity for continuing to stand the traditional test of an ordeal by battle? What had been the ultimate effect, on Italian and German souls, of the misdeeds that they had allowed their governments to require of them, and of the retribution that they had consequently allowed their governments to bring down upon their guilty heads? In what mood had the Italians emerged from the twenty-one years A.D. 1922-43, and the Germans from the twelve years A.D. 1933-45?
An observer in the year A.D. 1952 could predict with some assurance that the Italians would prove to have no more stomach for a Mussolinian militarism to which a majority of the nation had paid lip-service, not because they ever had it in them to go forth conquering and to conquer any foreign people that was their match in technical equipment, but because they did not have in them the spirit to defy the will of a domestic tyrant from the Romagna. It was assuredly no accident that there was always an exceptionally strong local resistance to Fascism in a Piedmont that was also exceptional in being the one locality in a twentieth-century Italy that had preserved something of an earlier martial tradition. On this showing, it might be prophesied in A.D. 1952 that Italy would go the same way as the rest of Western Europe. But could the same prophecy be made at the same date with the same confidence about Germany, where the traditional Prussian militarism that Hitler had stoked up to such incendiary effect manifestly had a far more wide-spread and far more tenacious hold on the souls of the people?
This question was one of grave concern to non-German West Europeans at a moment when, with their reluctant and half-hearted assent, the Americans were soliciting a German people that had attacked and overrun its neighbours twice in one lifetime to revive a martial tradition that, within living memory, had cost the rest of the World two world wars. At the time of writing, it was impossible to predict what the German response was going to be to a challenge presented to Germany by the current quarrel between the ex-victors in the latest of two wars that Germany had made and lost. Which of two features in the new situation would loom the larger in German eyes? The possibility for Germany of reacquiring political power by auctioning German military services to the higher bidder of the two parties that were now feverishly competing for so unquestionably valuable a military asset? Or the possibility of exposing herself to suffer a fate that would be even worse than the fate that she had brought upon herself in A.D. 1945, and indeed as bad as the fate that she had experienced in A.D. 1618-48, if she were now to become the battlefield of a war between foreign Powers by whom she had formerly been “encircled”? On the morrow of the War of A.D. 1939-45 there were signs in Germany that some Germans, at any rate, had by this time had enough of sacrificing life, property, and conscience by submitting to serve as “cannon-fodder” for successive German Governments to spend in successive wars of aggression ending in successive disastrous defeats; and the emergence of this mood in Germany after VE-Day, 1945, was, after all, something that was to be expected in the light of similar changes of heart which, at earlier dates, had come over other West European peoples who, in their day, had been addicted to Militarism no less strongly or persistently than the Germans.
The Germans’ French victims, as we have already noticed, had lent themselves to Militarism for 376 years (A.D. 1494-1870), till they had been cured of it by a crushing German retort. A Swedish militarism that had been rampant since Gustavus Adolphus (regnabat A.D. 1611-32) had disembarked his expeditionary force on German soil on the 27-28th June, 1630, had been extinguished by a subsequent and consequent Swedish experience of being bled white by Charles XII (regnabat A.D. 1697-1718). A Spanish militarism that had been coeval with its French counterpart had evaporated after the Thirty Years War. “Therefore say: ‘Thus saith the Lord God: … I will put a new spirit within you; and I will take the stony heart out of their flesh and will give them an heart of flesh’.” [Footnote: Ezek. xi. 16 and 19.] When this God-given change of heart had been vouchsafed, in recent Western experience, to the Spaniards and the Swedes and the French, it seemed unlikely that the Germans would be proof against an influence to which these other West European peoples had all yielded. Spanish, Swedish, and French hearts had been changed, sooner or later, by the experience of learning through suffering (πάθει μάθος); [footnote: Aeschylus: Agamemnon, l. 177, quoted in this Study, passim.] and since A.D. 1914 the Germans had received, in their repeated punishment for a repeated sin, a double measure of this sovereign spiritual education. “Whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth, and scourgeth every son whom He received!”, [footnote: Heb. xii. 6.] was a timeless truth that held out hope for the conversion of the Germans in the sixth decade of the twentieth century of the Christian Era.
No doubt the non-German West Europeans, in their dealings with their German neighbours at this critical time, might, while putting their trust in God, still feel inclined, en attendant, to keep their powder dry. Yet, notwithstanding the openness of this question concerning Germany, by the year A.D. 1952 it looked as if, in a Western Europe which had already been put to the torment of a Second World War, dispirited nations and exasperated social classes had been reduced, by the combined operation of the psychological forces analysed above, to a temper in which their moral capacity to offer resistance to a world-conqueror would be at a minimum.
One could quibble with the use of the phrase “rises and falls” in the plural at the beginning.
Churchill’s phrase, in the first of his three Battle of France speeches, was “blood, toil, tears and sweat”, not “blood and toil and tears and sweat”. (He may have adapted it from Garibaldi, who had rallied his forces in Rome on July 2 1849 with the words “Non offro nè paga, nè quartiere, nè provvigioni. Offro fame, sete, marce forzate, battaglie e morte”, or from Theodore Roosevelt, who may have said something similar in 1897.)
Brandenburg Gate on Sedantag, September 2 1898; German Wikipedia, with more images; Sedantag was celebrated in the German Empire from 1871 to 1918
A Study of History, Vol IX, OUP, 1954
This is from the first of the 1952 BBC radio Reith Lectures, given under the title The World and the West. I posted the fourth, The Far East and the West, here. Background on Reith Lectures here.
In writing both the world and the west into my title, and writing the two words in that order, I was doing both things deliberately, because I wanted to make two points that seem to me essential for an understanding of our subject. The first point is that the west has never been all of the world that matters. The west has not been the only actor on the stage of modern history even at the peak of the west’s power (and this peak has perhaps now already been passed). My second point is this: in the encounter between the world and the west that has been going on now for 400 or 500 years, the world, not the west, is the party that, up to now, has had the significant experience. It has not been the west that has been hit by the world; it is the world that has been hit – and hit hard – by the west; and that is why, in my title, I have put the world first.
Let us try, for a few minutes, to slip out of our native western skins and look at this encounter between the world and the west through the eyes of the great non-western majority of mankind. Different though the non-western peoples of the world may be from one another in race, language, civilisation, and religion, if we ask them their opinion of the west, we shall hear them all giving us the same answer: Russians, Moslems, Hindus, Chinese, Japanese, and all the rest. The west, they will tell us, has been the arch-aggressor of modern times, and each will have their own experience of western aggression to bring up against us. The Russians will remind us that their country has been invaded by western armies overland in 1941, 1915, 1812, 1709, and 1610; the peoples of Africa and Asia will remind us that western missionaries, traders, and soldiers from across the sea have been pushing into their countries from the coasts since the fifteenth century. The Asians will also remind us that, within the same period, the westerners have occupied the lion’s share of the world’s last vacant lands in the Americas, Australia, New Zealand, and South and East Africa. The Africans will remind us that they were enslaved and deported across the Atlantic in order to serve the European colonisers of the Americas as living tools to minister to their western masters’ greed for wealth. The descendants of the aboriginal population of North America will remind us that their ancestors were swept aside to make room for the west European intruders and for their African slaves.
This indictment will surprise, shock, grieve, and perhaps even outrage most of us westerners today. Dutch westerners are conscious of having evacuated Indonesia, and British westerners of having evacuated India, Pakistan, Burma, and Ceylon, since 1945.
That was almost all the imperial evacuation that had happened by 1952, except for the abandonment of concessions in China. Hard as it is to believe now, the British Empire handed over no territory (except the Anglo-Egyptian “condominium”, Sudan; I don’t count Palestine or the military base at Suez) between the end of the Raj on August 15 1947 and the independence of Ghana on March 6 1957. 1952 was also a year of direct British and American interference in the internal affairs of Iran.
British westerners have no aggressive war on their consciences since the South African war of 1899-1902, and American westerners none since the Spanish-American war of 1898. We forget all too easily that the Germans, who attacked their neighbours, including Russia, in the First World War and again in the Second World War, are westerners too, and that the Russians, Asians, and Africans do not draw fine distinctions between different hordes of “Franks” – which is the world’s common name for westerners in the mass. “When the world passes judgment, it can be sure of having the last word”, according to a well-known Latin proverb. And certainly the world’s judgment on the west does seem to be justified over a period of about four and a half centuries ending in 1945. In the world’s experience of the west during all that time, the west has been the aggressor on the whole; and, if the tables are being turned on the west by Russia and China today, this is a new chapter of the story which did not begin until after the end of the Second World War. The west’s alarm and anger at recent acts of Russian and Chinese aggression at the west’s expense are evidence that, for westerners, it is today still a strange experience to be suffering at the hands of the world what the world has been suffering at western hands for a number of centuries past.
The lectures introduced ideas which would be developed in the eighth volume of the Study.
In the encounter between the world and the west that has been going on now for 400 or 500 years, the world, not the west [...], has had the significant experience
is the most striking sentence. These views were shocking, as he says, to many listeners in 1952. They seemed defeatist.
I have taken this from a transcript on the BBC website, not from the printed book: there may be differences. The transcript probably shows what was printed in The Listener. I have made the use of upper case in references to world wars consistent.
The lectures were published in book form as
The World and the West, OUP, 1953
The trade between the Greek settlements on the north shore of the Black Sea and the Royal Scythians had its [medieval] counterpart in a trade between Venetian and Genoese settlements on the same coast and the Golden Horde. During the Mamlūk régime in Egypt, when the Mamlūks were importing their slave-successors from the Great Western Bay of the Eurasian Steppe and not, as in the second phase, from the Caucasus, the Venetians were the principal carriers of this valuable human freight.
A Study of History, Vol VIII, OUP, 1954 (footnote)
And see last post. It links back to another. Apropos the more recent, we get a glimpse in this clip of his Mozartiana.
Born 1904.
Russia (mainly St Petersburg) to 1924.
Europe (mainly Ballets Russes) to 1932.
US (eventually New York City Ballet) to death in 1983.
Balanchine, cited here the other day, and in the spirit of looking freshly at Tchaikovsky:
“What are Tchaikovsky’s orchestral suites about? [...] The first movement of the Second Suite is called Jeu des sons. What does that mean? [...]
“The first movement of the First Suite is sheer genius, it’s complete in itself. We used to dance the march from that suite in Russia in the ballet The Fairy Doll, conducted by old Drigo. The Third Suite is a masterpiece. Think of that waltz: gloomy, almost grim, but not in the least sentimental! And that waltz is orchestrated masterfully; it starts in the violas, then goes to the lower register of the flutes. You can’t stop listening closely. The last movement of the Third Suite, Theme and Variations, is now played rather frequently. The theme is so elegant and restrained – sheer Mozart!”
The suites stand in something like the same relation to his symphonies as Brahms’s serenades do to his, but they don’t predate the symphonies. They aren’t well-known. They have his brilliance and charm, but not every movement is equally successful. There is an experimental feel to some of them. The Third Suite strikes a deeper note.
They are the other side of the Tchaikovskyan moon. Jeu des sons: what a modern name! It looks sideways to Liszt and forward to Ravel. It’s a strange movement. Doesn’t it begin with a quotation from Beethoven’s Pastoral? The Tchaikovsky of Nutcracker influenced Ravel in a very direct way.
Even the variations at the end of the Third Suite are not known to most people now. Adrian Boult’s recording of that suite with the Paris Conservatoire Orchestra is one of the great Tchaikovsky recordings. There is a recording of the Second and Third with the Moscow Philharmonic under Kondrashin.
The Fourth Suite is a set of Mozart arrangements called Mozartiana.
The march in the First Suite, the fourth movement of six, is a sort of Nutcracker number a dozen or so years before the Nutcracker. He composed it in Florence, where he would later write Pique-Dame. It looks forward to the children’s chorus at the beginning of that opera, where the children are like toy soldiers. There is a hint of the Waltz of the Flowers. It is less refined than what we have in the Nutcracker (sounds like a failed precursor), but according to Jurgenson, his publisher, the audience at the first performance in Moscow under Rubinstein, December 20 (Gregorian) 1878, was enchanted: the march “drew applause which would not stop until it was repeated”.
Performers not stated. Despite the picture, I don’t think the piece has anything to do with Christmas. Balanchine again:
“The Nutcracker is a ballet about Christmas. We used to have a fantastic Christmas in Petersburg. Ah, how fantastic it was! For me, Christmas was something extraordinary. Naturally, Christmas is no Easter. At Easter the church bells pealed joyously throughout the night! Nothing is like Easter. But for Christmas St Petersburg was all dark and somehow strange. It wasn’t the way it is now, with everyone shouting, running around as if it’s a fire instead of Christmas. Back in Petersburg there was a stillness, a waiting: Who’s being born? Christ is born!
“I’ve never seen a Christmas like we had in Petersburg anywhere else – not here in America nor in France. It’s hard for us old Petersburgers! I tried to get people in the Orthodox church in New York to take Christmas more seriously, more solemnly, with understanding. But nothing came of it. They get to church with their candles and it starts: ha-ha-ha, ho-ho-ho. Russian talk, gossip. It’s all wrong!
“In Petersburg they had the Christmas service at nearby St Vladimir’s. And naturally in all the big cathedrals: at the Kazan, at St Isaac’s. An unforgettable moment of mystery: when the candles were put out, the church was plunged into darkness, and the choir came in. They sang magnificently! In the Orthodox church, the service is a real theatrical production with processions and all that. The priests come out in pairs wearing velvet kamilavka on their heads, the deacons and altar boys in brocade vestments. And finally, chasuble glittering, the Metropolitan himself.
“On Christmas night we had only the family at home: mother, auntie, and the children. And, of course, the Christmas tree. The tree had a wonderful scent, and the candles gave off their own aroma of wax. The tree was decorated with gold paper angels and stars, tangled up in silver ‘rain’ or tinsel. I liked the fat glass pears – they didn’t break if they fell.
“Of course, we all expected presents. We weren’t wealthy, so we children didn’t get big presents, just a few things. Once I received a watch that didn’t run. I was wildly ecstatic – both because the watch didn’t run and because it was mine!”
Solomon Volkov, Balanchine’s Tchaikovsky: Interviews with George Balanchine, New York, Simon and Schuster, 1985.
It’s an interesting passage, but one wonders whether the Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease which killed him (it was only diagnosed after his death) was beginning to make itself felt.
Waltz of the Snowflakes, end of Act 1, The Nutcracker, London Festival Orchestra, conductor and chorus not stated. Better and more mysterious than a Dresdner Staatskapelle version also on YouTube.
Poulenc (last post) did write some Christmas music, the Quatre motets pour le temps de Noël of 1952 for mixed chorus to Latin texts. But here is something else that is Christmassy, at least in parts, and deeply-felt, the Suite française of 1935 for woodwind (two oboes and two bassoons), brass (two trumpets and two trombones), percussion and harpsichord. This is a set of arrangements of tunes by a sixteenth-century French composer, Claude Gervais.
The movements are Bransle de Bourgogne, Pavane, Petite marche militaire, Complainte, Bransle de Champagne, Sicilienne and Carillon. One can imagine the lovely Pavane, Bransle de Champagne and Sicilienne played outdoors in a French or Swiss town in winter.
Milhaud’s marvellous and very different Suite française would use folk tunes. What was Gervais’s relationship with popular music? Why doesn’t one speak of French “folk music”, or does one? Is it because the word folk is too German?
I wrote about the Milhaud in an earlier post. No YouTube example there, though there are many indifferent performances. It has a life in high school and other bands which is far away from official recording studios, in so far as those still exist. I’d like to hear it done by the Trinity High School Band, Euless, Texas.
Some of the best of the neoclassical arrangements between the wars were made of the music of composers who were rather unknown, at least outside their countries. Pergolesi, I would bet, was not well-known when Stravinsky made Pulcinella. Poulenc uses Gervais. Milhaud in one work uses Anet. In another Campra. Respighi uses obscure sources for Ancient Airs and Dances. In England, Peter Warlock’s Capriol Suite was based on based on tunes in Thoinot Arbeau’s Orchésographie, a manual of Renaissance dances.
I have a theory (which I need to develop, I’m sure it’s not original) that there were two great ages of the tune. The first was in the sixteenth century. It produced the greatest and most elemental tunes. Think of the Old 100th (sixteenth-century French and still sung every year at Concord, Massachusetts), Es ist ein Ros entsprungen (German, circa 1600), Vom Himmel hoch (Luther), many others. And these tunes by Gervais which Poulenc is setting. The second age was after 1800, and especially after 1850, and it produced a kind of apotheosis of the tune, especially in Tchaikovsky and Puccini. In the great age of counterpoint and in the classical era that followed it the tune was, relatively speaking, in abeyance. (I am distinguishing “tune” from “melody”.)
Claude Rostand’s description of Poulenc as monk and delinquent, le moine et le voyou, is unforgettable. The Piano Society website writes of Suite française that it “displays Poulenc’s inimitable blend of the archaic and the anarchic”. The astringency of that blend is slightly reduced by the version I’m about to embed. It is described as an arrangement for brass (Empire Brass) and organ (Michael Murray). In other words, we have lost the woodwind. At least, I think we have. The harpsichord is there, though not mentioned by the uploader. So is some percussion. The result is something warmer. The effect of losing the woodwind is to give the harpsichord no foil. Did Poulenc make the arrangement?
What classic film used Poulenc’s music? Alfred Hitchock’s Rope of 1948. Hitchcock has always been big in France.
One of the protagonists obsessively plays the first of the Mouvements perpétuels for piano of 1918. In doing so he makes the film obsessively memorable. (He was played by Farley Granger, who died this year. As did the screenplay-writer, Arthur Laurents.) And Leo Forbstein and/or David Buttolph combined that mouvement perpétuel with a fragment from the Pastorale, the first of Trois pièces for piano, also of 1918, in a Hollywood, and somehow wholly Hitchcockian, take on the material for full orchestra for the opening credits. Here it is.
Here are Poulenc and Jacques Février in the first movement of the two-piano concerto, with the ORTF under Georges Prêtre. The rest of the work is clickable at the end. Poulenc is the one with the hairy hands.
Poulenc accompanying Jean-Pierre Rampal in the second movement of his flute sonata of 1957.
Both those sequences are on an essential EMI DVD called Francis Poulenc and Friends. You can watch him taking questions from a Parisian audience at the Salle Gaveau.
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This ramble on Poulenc was supposed to be a prelude to something on Nutcracker, inspired by Gavin Plumley’s wonderful current series of posts on it at Entartete Musik and recent article in the Guardian. He is right to insist that one looks at Tchaikovsky freshly. A book that does that (I know there have been questions about Volkov’s academic integrity now and then) is Solomon Volkov, Balanchine’s Tchaikovsky, conversations between Volkov and Balanchine about Tchaikovsky which took place in New York in the early ’80s, towards the end of Balanchine’s life. Some of it is disarmingly simple. There is a chapter on the Nutcracker.
“Sometimes people say to me [routinely], ‘I love the music of such-and-such composer.’ My feelings for Tchaikovsky were different, even as a child. [...]
“I was small and knew nothing about music theory. But I liked all of Tchaikovsky’s compositions. When I looked at his pictures, I liked his face. I liked everything about him, everything Tchaikovsky had ever done in his life.”
Another way to refresh one’s ideas about Tchaikovsky, equally far from analysis and theory, is through his letters. In addition to the letters, one should read David Brown’s anthology of personal reminiscences of Tchaikovsky, Tchaikovsky Remembered.
Gavin begins his Guardian piece: “Pyotr Tchaikovsky wrote music for the soul.” He’s right, but Balanchine might not have liked that sentence or one about the Nutcracker’s “soulful message”.
“Tchaikovsky wrote a lot of gentle lyric music, but there are also stormy passages, almost Dostoyevskian. [...] But in Tchaikovsky it’s in harmony, it’s all proportional. [Mozartian.] You can study at length how he did it, what tricks of the trade he used. And people say – soul! I don’t understand what that is – soul in music. Tchaikovsky was right to laugh at it. When people like something, they say it’s dushevno, soulful. They confuse two completely different words – dushevnyi, ‘soulful’, and dukhovnyi, ‘spiritual’. Tchaikovsky’s music isn’t soulful, it’s spiritual.”
Awakening of people stunned since 1991. Putin being booed after a wrestling match last month.
There was [...] a feature in the past domestic history of Russian Orthodox Christendom which may have helped Saint Petersburg to maintain itself as the capital of the Russian Empire for as long as it did. The Empire had been brought into existence through the imposition of the rule of the Grand Duchy of Muscovy upon the city-state of Novgorod between A.D. 1471 and 1479. At that date Novgorod represented one half of Russian Orthodox Christendom, and this not merely in the extent of her territory but also in the complexion and orientation of her culture. The Russian state [Rus] which had been converted to Eastern Orthodox Christianity by the cultural influence of the East Roman Empire at the close of the tenth century of the Christian Era had been founded by pagan seafarers who had made their way into Russia at her opposite extremity, from Scandinavia. Their port of entry had been Novgorod, on the River Volkhov, which the sea-going ships of the Vikings were able to ascend via the River Neva and Lake Ladoga. When the Scandinavians in their homelands were converted to Western Catholic Christianity – a conversion which was simultaneous with that of the Russians to Eastern Orthodoxy – Novgorod became a point of contact between Russia and Western Christendom, and it continued to perform this function till its subjugation by Muscovy. The heavy hand of Muscovite autocracy extinguished both Novgorod’s overseas trade with the West and the self-governing institutions that were her heritage from the pagan Viking Age and that had been favoured by the cultural effects of Novgorod’s subsequent commercial intercourse with the Hansa towns. In crushing Novgorod and what she stood for, the Muscovite empire-builder Ivan III and his successors were depriving Russian Orthodox Christendom of a valuable cultural asset, and conversely Peter the Great, in founding Saint Petersburg, was in a sense merely restoring to Russia this treasure of which his predecessors had robbed her. In purely geographical terms, Saint Petersburg was the eighteenth-century counterpart of a medieval Novgorod, taking into account the increase in the size and draught of sea-going ships that had taken place in the meantime. In cultural terms the effect of the removal of the capital of the Russian Empire to Saint Petersburg from Moscow was to create at that stage the situation which would have been created in the fourteen-eighties if at that date the political unification of Russia had been brought about through the city-state of Novgorod’s conquering the Grand Duchy of Moscow instead of through Moscow’s conquering Novgorod. In the light of this historical background, Peter the Great’s act of transferring his capital from Moscow to Saint Petersburg appears somewhat less perverse than Seleucus Nicator’s act of transferring his from a site in Babylonia [Seleucia] to Antioch.
In 882 the capital of Viking, or Varangian, Rus was moved from Novgorod on the Volkhov south to Kiev on the Dnieper. Kievan Rus, which had dissolved into a collection of principalities, fell to the Mongols circa 1240; but Novgorod, which had evolved into a largely independent republic, was spared a Mongol invasion. The Grand Duchy of Moscow did not begin to rise until the end of that century.
The Rurik dynasty, which dominated Kievan Rus (and was originally from Novgorod), also supplied the Grand Dukes of Moscow – and the first two Tsars, Ivan the Terrible (reigned 1547-84) and Feodor I (reigned 1584-98).
The Viking route from the Gulf of Finland to Lake Ilmen was via the River Neva (on which St Petersburg was built), Lake Ladoga and the River Volkhov
Kievan Rus in the eleventh century; both maps Wikimedia Commons
A Study of History, Vol VII, OUP, 1954 (footnote)
The Ballets Russes, that solar flare, weren’t the first Russian dancers to reach the West. The Degas exhibition now on at the Royal Academy in London makes it clear that there was a vogue for Russian dancing in Paris in the 1890s. Did the Imperial ballet ever tour?
There is a pastel of some red-booted Russian, actually Ukrainian, dancers who are obviously dancing the gopak. Also some film.
Here is a gopak from Mussorgsky’s unfinished opera, Sorochintsy Fair, after Gogol.
It’s called Sorochinsky there (Albert Coates, LSO), I don’t know whether wrongly. Anyway, I find poetry in “Sorochintsy Fair”. Gopak comes from hopaty (гопати), to jump. Tchaikovsky put a gopak or Cossack Dance into the first act of his Ukrainian opera Mazeppa, after Pushkin. There’s a famous trepak in the Nutcracker. It’s usually called “Russian Dance”, but is also Ukrainian. Is there an etymological connection there with “trip”?
Anyone who thinks Degas ballet pictures have no more to tell them, and when you’ve seen one you’ve seen them all, needs to go to that exhibition if they can. It’s entering its last seven days and is an amazing piece of exhibition-making. The last main room, assembling many of his late pastels, would alone have been a major event. It won’t be reassembled in my lifetime. The last important pastel is from 1903. When you look at those works, it is impossible to believe that he had been born in 1834.
Cold rehearsal rooms in Paris and St Petersburg. Degas painted one at the Salle Le Peletier, the old opera house, several years after it had burned down.
The exhibition is called Degas: Picturing Movement. We are shown the cinematic experiments of Marey in France and Muybridge in England.
What happened to stockiness?
Also fascinating experiments of others, especially the photosculptures of François Willème.
We are given a glimpse of the low life of Marie van Goethem, the Little Dancer of Fourteen Years. Her face is beautifully-rendered.
Is there a lack of humanity in Degas?
Russians are the world’s best dancers. Go to any authentic club in Moscow. I saw proof in a disco in Almaty in 1996, where I went with a Kazakh of Korean ancestry called Vlad.
Tchaikovsky’s dance music is evidence. Deportation of Koreans in the Soviet Union.
At the end of the exhibition is a 10- (15-?) second clip of Degas in a street in Paris in 1915 shot by Sacha Guitry. I could watch it forever.
1935, Wikimedia Commons
I remember, at the beginning of a university term during the Bosnian crisis of 1908-9, [the historian] Professor L. B. Namier, then an undergraduate at Balliol and back from spending a vacation at his family home just inside the Galician frontier of Austria, saying to us other Balliol men, with (it seemed to us) a portentous air: “Well, the Austrian army is mobilized on my father’s estate and the Russian army is just across the frontier, half-an-hour away.” It sounded to us like a scene from The Chocolate Soldier, but the lack of comprehension was mutual, for a lynx-eyed Central European observer of international affairs found it hardly credible that these English undergraduates should not realize that a stone’s-throw away, in Galicia, their own goose, too, was being cooked.
In a later book, Toynbee places this incident several years later.
Lewis Namier had been born Ludwik Bernsztajn vel Niemirowski in 1888 in Russian-controlled Poland, to non-practising Jewish parents. His father (unlike him) idolised the Hapsburgs and acquired an estate across the border in Austrian Poland, ie Galicia.
At Balliol, where Namier arrived in 1908, he was known as Bernstein. In 1910 he changed his name to Lewis Bernstein Naymier and in 1913 anglicised it further to Namier. Toynbee, rightly or wrongly, calls him Bernstein in 1912-13.
In my picture, Eastern Europe was still a terra incognita, though regions that were far more remote from England – for instance, India, China, and Malaya – already meant something to me, thanks to my education by Uncle Harry and by Cousin Fred. In this, I was typical of my generation and my kind in England; and most of Bernstein’s and my contemporaries at Balliol persisted in their state of invincible ignorance about Eastern Europe till they were overtaken by the outbreak of war in August 1914. They failed to profit by the opportunity of learning about Bernstein’s world at first hand from Bernstein himself because they were allergic to him and therefore to his homeland. They did not take him seriously, and they therefore could not recognize that his world, too, was real.
In the last academic year but one before the outbreak of the First World War in August 1914, Bernstein was still at Balliol, while I was back there again as a don. This was the year of the two Balkan wars. In one of that year’s vacations – I forget whether it was at Christmas 1912 or at Easter 1913 – Bernstein had gone home to visit his family, and he came back to Oxford looking worried. “The international situation is very serious,” he reported to us. “The Austrian Army is mobilized on my father’s estate, and the Russian Army is mobilized just across the frontier, only twenty minutes’ walk away. A European war is just round the corner now.” Bernstein was given no chance of enlarging on his grave theme. At the words “European war”, most of the young Englishmen whom Bernstein was addressing in Balliol front quad burst out laughing, as the Athenians had laughed when St. Paul, in his address to them on the Areopagus, came to the words “resurrection from the dead”. Too good to be true! Ruritania was running true to form! As entertaining as a novel of Anthony Hope’s! Ruritania? But what about Utopia? Certainly, Bernstein’s world and the laughers’ world could not both be real; for they were mutually incompatible. Which of the two would prove to have been the reality and which would prove to have been the mirage? It was Bernstein’s world, not the laughers’ world, whose reality was vindicated in the event. Within three years of this fantastic conversation in the quad, half of those unfortunate laughers were dead.
The English film director Ken Russell died yesterday. The Rainbow, after DH Lawrence, is no longer on YouTube, so I can’t link to its wonderfully-directed vignette of a pre-1914 view of war (I don’t think it’s in the book) where Ursula and the soldier Anton wander into Winifred and Uncle Tom’s wedding party.
Everyone there is tipsy, older and foolish. Ursula and Anton are sober, young, post-coital and somehow pre-foolish. Ursula’s father and the grinning Tom improvise a dance whose choreography includes firing an imaginary pistol at each other. As the dance ends, Will collapses to the floor and Tom plunges an imaginary bayonet into him.
The novel is set during the Boer War, but was published in 1915.
Civilization on Trial, OUP, 1948
Acquaintances, OUP, 1967
or Why Georges Simenon’s novels seem longer than they are. I suggested that they did here.
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“‘What! You’ve got some white bread!’
“The two Persians, the consul and his wife, had just come into the drawing-room, and it was the woman who was going into ecstasies before the table covered with attractively arranged sandwiches.
“It had only been a minute earlier that Adil Bey had been told:
“‘There are only three consulates in Batum: yours, the Persian consulate and ours. But the Persians are quite impossible people.’
“It was Madame Pendelli, the Italian consul’s wife, who had said this, while her husband lay sprawled in an armchair, smoking a slim cigarette with a pink tip. The two women greeted each other with smiles in the middle of the drawing-room at the very moment when some sounds which until then had been nothing but a vague noise in the sunlit town grew louder and suddenly exploded in a fanfare at the corner of the street.
“Everybody immediately went out on to the verandah to watch the procession.”
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That is the opening passage of Simenon’s 1933 novel Les gens d’en face, which is set in Soviet Georgia, in Batum, now called Batumi, on the Black Sea. Trabzon, on the Turkish coast, is round the corner. Translation, as The Window over the Way, by Robert Baldick, a translator of Chateaubriand, Flaubert, the Goncourts, Verne, Barbusse, Sartre. There was an earlier one, less good and with the same title, by Geoffrey Sainsbury.
Look at the time-shifts.
“‘What! You’ve got some white bread!’ [Time 1]
“The two Persians, the consul and his wife, had just come into the drawing-room [time 2], and it was the woman who was going into ecstasies [time 1] before the table covered with attractively arranged sandwiches.
“It had only been a minute earlier [time 3] that Adil Bey had been told:
“‘There are only three consulates in Batum: yours, the Persian consulate and ours. But the Persians are quite impossible people.’
“It was Madame Pendelli, the Italian consul’s wife, who had said this, while her husband lay [change of tense within time 3] sprawled in an armchair, smoking a slim cigarette with a pink tip. The two women greeted each other [time 1] with smiles in the middle of the drawing-room at the very moment when some sounds which until then [indeterminate time 4] had been nothing but a vague noise in the sunlit town grew louder and suddenly [time 1] exploded in a fanfare at the corner of the street.
“Everybody immediately went out on to the verandah to watch the procession.”
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The last sentence gets us into the story after seven time-shifts in 14 or so lines of a book, and viewpoint-shifts from Persian to Turk to narrator. Spatially, we are in the room, looking over the town with the sun, and on the verandah.
In a few lines, Simenon has suggested an exotic location, the shallowness of the Persians, the laziness and vanity of the Italians, the passivity of the Turk. Adil Bey is introduced in the passive voice. That sets the tone for him. These may be residual racial stereotypes, but Simenon’s observations are so immediate that one doesn’t think of them in that way.
The slicing up, concertina-ing in and out, of time shows the influence of modernism. He can’t stay in the same place. The time-shifts, and the non-sequitur in the statement made to Adil Bey, make the passage surreal and are the descriptive equivalent of more general dysfunctionality.
How long did it take for the two women to meet each other in the middle of the room?
Simenon starts several of his books (248 core titles under his own name on my current reckoning, which are about half his total output) with compressed overtures like this: expressionist upbeats followed by cæsuras, so that we can catch breath. We’re reminded of vignettes in The Waste Land.
Exhausted nations and their isolated envoys. Within the boredom, hysteria. The vulgarism “going into ecstasies” is well-selected by Baldick. “Attractively arranged” matches it. Almost everyone reading this book (not that many do: its last edition in English was in 1972) compares it with Graham Greene. And then privately thinks: “But better.”
The time-shifts are compressed here, but Simenon uses them often. As he moves forwards and backwards, with a short wavelength here, but a longer wavelength in other passages and novels, especially later novels, where the characters’ lives are described through excursions into their pasts, he builds up a reality through pointillism, with each point being a different time. This makes the surface of his novels surge and gleam. It makes them, in fact, harder to read than simple two-dimensional narratives: they don’t slip down all that fast.
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My own visit to Batumi in 1997 was anything but dull: a story for another time. Or perhaps a novel.
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I like this passage.
The hapless Adil Bey opens a door in his consulate.
“The room was invaded by people who were so shabby, stupid and wild-looking that he wondered where so many could come from every day. Even now Adil Bey would make a mistake in trying to identify their race and some of them spoke a dialect which nobody understood, so that after vain efforts to explain themselves they would go off thoroughly discouraged.
“They came down the mountains, from the direction of Armenia and Persia, or else, heaven knows why, they had set off from the borders of Turkistan and even from Siberia.
“And they all told endless stories of disarming complexity.
“‘But what do you want in the end?’ Adil Bey would finally explode.
“‘I want some money for another donkey.’
“Now the donkey would be the only thing which the man had never mentioned.”
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Boundary platoon, Batumi, 1927, from a page about a soldier called Feodor Makovetski; he is seated second from right; inevitable leaning pair in front
He fled Berlin for Russia in 1936 and worked in Moscow and Leningrad until 1960. Then returned to (East) Germany. Obituaries: Independent, Telegraph.
Boulezian posted a remarkable Mahler 10 (presumably one of the Deryck Cooke versions) with the (East German) Berlin Symphony Orchestra, no date given. Here: Sibelius, Valse Triste, same orchestra, Berlin, Christuskirche, 1983.
Back October 1.
Start of Tchaikovsky’s Liturgy of St John Chrysostom, composed 1878, USSR Ministry of Culture Chamber Choir, Valery Polyansky, 1990
