From the diary of a writer-publisher: 31

Posted on January 16, 2025 by Patrick Miles

20 December 2024
Yet another pair of new M&S cords on which the button hole in the fly flap is too small for the button it is meant to go over! What has gone wrong at M&S about this? Have they made the right-sized eye, then stitched it round with such stout thread that it is too small for the button — and never tested it? I have to strangle the trousers to get the button through, even though I’ve tried enlarging the eye. (But if I did that with scissors or a Stanley knife the eye would doubtless tear.) Is this the fashion now? Are these trousers made expressly for weightlifters with Herculean thumb muscles who don’t blink at the task? Or am I completely self-deluded and the problem is simply that I am seventy-six?

27 December
Following the Archbishop of York’s sophistical Christmas Day sermon (‘Empty words. I have no words more than that to describe their meaning’, the excellent Bishop of Newcastle said of it), the media are full of further condemnations of ‘the Church of England’ because of its ‘handling’ of the Smyth, Tudor and other abuse cases.

To reduce the scandals to a failure of ‘handling’, or say such things as ‘I admit the Church could have acted differently’, is very characteristically to overlook that it was a failure of moral-ethical duty at the very top of an organisation whose very raison d’être is to proclaim and enact the very highest moral-ethical values. They simply don’t get it: that it’s the failure in fundamental moral action that shocks and infuriates people.

A few days ago I attended only the second Christingle service in my life, at a parish church in bleakest North Norfolk. It was theologically, liturgically, humanly, empathically, musically, lovingly magnificent, conducted with marvellous warmth, directness and humour by the young chaplain of a local school. The children who took part in it were completely relaxed, threw themselves into its spirit, and thoroughly enjoyed it (e.g. being entrusted with lighted candles and eating the jelly babies adorning the orange and symbolising the fruits of creation). This was the real Church of England, the majority Church of England for the majority of people who either attend its services or benefit from its charitable ministry, the real, loving Church of England in action; the ‘body’ of the Church of England, and not the ‘Church of England’ which failed in its ethical duty to victims of abuse — that was its head, its hiercharchs, the top of the organisation that has been obsessed with ‘management’ (‘handling’) since Justin Welby became archbishop.

As it happens, I attended a sermon that Welby gave in Canterbury Cathedral soon after his enthronement. I was appalled: it was entirely management speak and trendy sociology. He worked in two oil companies for eleven years before becoming ordained, and I seriously think he believed God ‘revealed’ to him that the Church of England should be ‘managed’ like an oil company. I worked with oil companies for fifteen years myself, and can assure Welby it shouldn’t. The purpose of an oil company is to produce oil (they may produce it ethically: western oil companies’ environmental protection, for instance, was hugely appreciated by the local populations of Sakhalin, Central Siberia etc). The purpose of the Church of England is to proclaim and live out Christ’s utterly, purely, completely ethical, inter-human message (Christ reserved one of his strongest condemnations for those who ‘offend these little ones’). It was this supremely ethical purpose that Welby and the hierarchs forgot. An oil company regularly takes on highly paid consultants to manage specific issues that the consultants know about and are the best people to tackle. This has been Welby’s knee jerk response to issues in the CoE. But where the issues are ethical ones like abuse and safeguarding, you do not need to take on droves of ex-policemen and secular regulators if the whole point of your church is that you are supposed to know about such issues from the fount of ethical knowledge. Your duty is to apply that knowledge of right and wrong proactively yourself. Instead, CoE hierarchs have burbled wokely for ten years and given absolutely no spiritual leadership, for example during the pandemic. When the Church’s ‘managers’ have failed at their first and foremost mission — enacting Christ’s ethics — then the very sight of their rich vestments makes people feel sick. There are also far too many bishops. The CoE is bloated with such burbling ‘managers’.

During the pandemic, when Welby inimitably informed everyone that church services were ‘not an essential service’, Charles Moore wrote of the CoE that its ‘system is so obsessed with saving face that it makes everyone else lose faith’. (Welby actually admired Paula Vennells, the CEO of the Post Office equally disconnected from personal responsibility!) My own opinion — I’m afraid — is that Welby, chosen from the ‘evangelical wing’ of the CoE, is not seized by Christ-led ethical action, but some sort of ‘charismatic’ afflatus or effulgence, ‘prayer in tongues’, ’empty words’ and a form of supreme un-self-doubting righteousness. He lives in a blessed world of his own.

30 December
The days when we had to go out and catch bigger and bigger pike are past. Now we go as much to see the wildlife in the Fens as anything. Today, for instance, we crouched or stood in dense, seven-foot reeds and nettles for five hours, saw not a single human being, but beheld three marsh harriers, a kestrel hunting, a buzzard, a sparrowhawk, a water rail, two egrets, two herons, cormorants, a barn owl, and more, in bright crisp air. We have also become obsessive about not harming the pike we catch. Why catch them, then? Well… It satisfies something, to defeat such a fierce and beautiful predator who once was simply considered vermin and ‘tapped on the head’, and who puts up a cunning fight against being landed. Today, at a spot where we have landed pike in the past up to 17 lbs in weight, we caught just a 3 lb pickerel. It was not even hooked, it had ripped off the bait and clamped its jaws on the wire trace. ‘Pike, perfect Pike in all parts’, as Ted Hughes wrote.

all the pike wields now: its green-gold stick

6 January 2025
Both Harvey Pitcher and I have received emails expressing admiration for his new translation of Chekhov’s ‘Lady with a Little Dog’. Their given seems to be that the story is a masterpiece. This could be why no-one has left a Comment about it. Dozens of Russianists subscribe to Calderonia, but they are unlikely to want to raise points of translation in a Comment and they perhaps feel that the story itself ‘leaves nothing to say’.

Another possible reason occurs to me. Apparently, after the first showing of the film Shakespeare in Love (1998) many couples came away arguing whether it was realistic about love, or even moral, and London dinner parties resounded with disagreement on these matters. ‘Lady with a Little Dog’ also purports to show what a ‘true’, a ‘great’ love is like. (‘He understood clearly that she was the nearest, dearest, and most important person in the world for him now; this little woman, lost in the provincial crowd, not remarkable in any way, holding a cheap lorgnette, now filled his whole life, was his joy and sorrow and the one happiness that he longed for.’) But if you have never experienced anything like that, you are unlikely to want to stand up and say so, or that the story is ‘romantic’, ‘unrealistic’, not ‘universal’. If the story sweeps you off your feet, you aren’t going to need to Comment. If you are not convinced by it, you probably aren’t going to want to say so.

Time to take down the mistletoe

14 January
This blog was never intended as a forum for contentious national issues. I acknowledge that I may have broken my own rule about that in the entry above for 27 December by attacking the hierarchs of the Church of England, but I have had experience of this issue and have been thinking about it for a long time. I had to get it out.

When John Polkinghorne and I were working on our book What Can We Hope For? it so happened that a long-standing friend of mine, deeply active in the CoE, was arrested and charged with viewing heinous child pornography on the Web, and two ecclesiastical colleagues of John’s were also charged with serious abuse of young people. One of these was a local theologian whom we were actually quoting in our book! I asked John why he thought there were so many cases of this in the CoE, but he became very sad, looked down at the floor, made a slight gesture and would only say quietly: ‘It’s a terrible problem.’

I think the first question that has to be answered is, why does the CoE attract so many paedophiles and abusers, when, as I said above, the ethical source of its existence utterly condemns such activities? You would think that might put potential offenders off. I dare say the public believes, however, that these offenders coolly identify the opportunities for them within church life; that in abusers’ terms the church offers them ‘havens’.

But why does it? Most paedophiles, I suspect, believe they are ‘right’, that paedophilia is defensible, even ‘normal’, and that they are ‘victims’ of illiberal laws. Churches are known for their ‘tolerance’, so paedophiles must see that as a further opportunity, even encouragement. Moreover, Christians are always supposed to forgive.

The latter, in my opinion, is why sexual abusers have got away with it for so long in Christian churches. Theologians, hierarchs, and modern Christians generally, are terribly confused about forgiveness. They believe it is always incumbent on them to forgive, when it is actually incumbent first on the sinner to repent. To the outside world an over-willing forgiveness is indistinguishable from a cover-up. Forgiveness without repentance in the offender merely makes the Christian him/herself feel right and good, and our priests and hierarchs always want to feel that, of course. My instinctive feeling is that the clerics have been ‘tolerant’ to abusers because they believe forgiveness is always a virtue. I don’t believe this myself. Forgiveness of an abuser without repentance is smug self-gratification and merely forgetting, not forgiveness. I admit that John Polkinghorne and I disagreed over Christian forgiveness (see pages 59-63, 65-66), but we certainly agreed that it should be mandatory for the church to report all abuse cases to the Police and pursue them to legal conclusions — whether the abuser repented and the victim forgave, or not.

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’ Michael Pursglove, East-West Review

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Edwardian marriage, Personal commentary | Tagged ageing, Anton Chekhov, Archbishop of Canterbury, birds, Bishop of Newcastle, Bishop of York, Charles Moore, child abuse, Church of England, comments, ethics, evangelical movement, fly flaps, forgiveness, glossolalia, Harvey Pitcher, Jesus Christ, John Polkinghorne, Justin Welby, Lady with a Little Dog, Marks & Spencer, mistletoe, morality, paedophilia, pike, pike fishing, Police, prayer in tongues, proactivity, propensity to act, repentance, safeguarding, sexual abuse, Ted Hughes, the pandemic, translation, trousers, wildlife | Leave a comment

‘Lady with a Little Dog’ (Concluded)

Posted on January 1, 2025 by Patrick Miles

Waves breaking on the rocks at Yalta, c. 1900, from a tourist brochure

And Anna Sergeyevna began coming to see him in Moscow. Every two or three months she

would leave S., telling her husband she was going to consult a professor about her female

complaint – and her husband believed her and did not believe her. On her arrival in

Moscow, she put up at the ‘Slavyansky Bazaar’ hotel, and immediately sent a messenger in

a red cap round to Gurov. Gurov walked round to see her, and no one in Moscow knew

anything about it.

On one such occasion he was walking round one winter morning, the messenger

having called the previous evening and not found him in. With him was his daughter, as he

wanted to drop her off at school, it was on his way. Snow was falling heavily, in thick wet

flakes.

‘The temperature is three degrees above freezing,’ Gurov was saying to his daughter,

‘and yet it’s snowing. That’s because the warmth is only on the earth’s surface, in the upper

layers of the atmosphere the temperature is quite different.’

‘Papa, why isn’t there any thunder in winter?’

He explained that, too. As he talked, he was thinking that here he was on his way to an

assignation, and not a single living soul knew about it, and probably ever would know. He

had two lives: one that was out in the open, and everyone who needed to could see it and

knew about it, a life full of conventional truth and conventional deceit, a life that was

indistinguishable from the lives of his friends and acquaintances, and another life, running

its course in secret. And by some strange, perhaps chance, combination of circumstances,

everything that was important, interesting, and essential to him, in which he was sincere

and did not deceive himself, that constituted the core of his life, was taking place in secret

from other people – whereas everything that was false, a façade he hid behind so as to

conceal the truth, like his work at the bank, for example, the arguments in the club, his

‘lower breed’ talk, attending jubilee celebrations with his wife, all that was out in the open.

And he judged other people by himself, did not believe what he saw, and always assumed

that each person’s real, most interesting, life was taking place under a veil of secrecy, like

the veil of night. Each private existence rests on a secret, and it may partly be for this

reason that a cultivated man is so nervously anxious that his private secret should be

respected.

After seeing his daughter off at school, Gurov made his way to the ‘Slavyansky Bazaar’.

He took his coat off downstairs, walked up and knocked quietly on the door. Anna

Sergeyevna, wearing his favourite grey dress, was tired by the journey and by waiting, as

she’d been expecting him from the previous evening; she was pale, looked at him without

smiling, and as soon as he came in, threw herself onto his breast. Their kiss was long and

lingering, as if they’d not seen each other for a couple of years.

‘Well, how’s life with you?’ he asked. ‘Any news?’

‘Wait, I’ll tell you in a moment… I can’t now.’

She could not speak for crying. She turned away from him and pressed a handkerchief

to her eyes.

‘Let her have a little cry, I’ll sit down for a while,’ he thought and sat down in an

armchair.

Then he rang the bell and ordered tea for himself, and while he was drinking, she still

went on standing by the window with her back to him… She was crying from emotion,

from the miserable realisation of how sadly their lives had worked out; they could only

meet in secret, hiding from people like thieves! Hadn’t their lives been ruined?

‘Do stop crying now!’ he said.

It was obvious to him that the end of this love of theirs was still very distant, and who

knew when that end might be. Anna Sergeyevna had become attached to him more and

more strongly, she worshipped him, and it would be unthinkable to say to her that at some

time all this would have to come to an end; and she wouldn’t have believed it in any case.

He went up to her and took her by the shoulders, so as to caress her and have a little

joke, and at that moment he caught sight of himself in the mirror.

His hair was already beginning to turn grey. And it struck him as strange that in the

last few years he’d become so old and lost his good looks. The shoulders on which his

hands rested were warm and trembling. He felt compassion for this life, so warm and

beautiful now, but which was probably close to the point when it would begin to fade and

wither like his own. What makes her love him as she does? He had always appeared to

women other than he was and it was not him they loved, but an imaginary person they’d

created and been eagerly searching for all their lives; and then, when they noticed their

mistake, they went on loving him just the same. And not one of them had been happy with

him. Time went on, he struck up an acquaintance, became intimate, parted, but not once

had he loved; there was everything you might want, only not love.

And it was only now when his hair had turned grey that he had fallen well and truly in

love – for the first time in his life.

Anna Sergeyevna and he loved each other like very close relatives, like husband and

wife, like bosom friends; fate itself, it seemed, had predestined them for each other, and it

did not make sense that he should have a wife and she a husband; and they were like two

migratory birds, male and female, which had been caught and forced to live in separate

cages. They had forgiven each other for what they were ashamed of in their past lives, they

forgave each other for everything in the present, and they felt that this love of theirs had

changed them both.

At sad moments earlier he had calmed himself down with whatever rational

considerations came into his head, but he was in no mood now for such considerations, he

felt a deep sense of compassion, he wanted to be sincere and tender…

‘Please don’t cry, my darling,’ he said, ‘you’ve had a little cry – and that’s enough…

Now let’s have a talk, we’ll think of something.’

Then they had a long discussion, talking of how to escape from the need to hide, to

deceive, to live in different towns and not see each other for long periods. How could they

free themselves from these intolerable chains?

‘How? How?’ he kept asking, clutching his head. ‘How?’

And it seemed that in a short time the solution would be found and then a beautiful

new life would begin, and it was clear to both of them that the end was still a very long way

off, and that the most complicated and difficult part was only just beginning.

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian literature, Edwardian marriage, Personal commentary | Tagged Anna Sergeevna, Anton Chekhov, Dmitrii Gurov, endings, hotels, Lady with a Little Dog, love, love affairs, love stories, Moscow, open endings, short stories, Slavyansky Bazaar | Leave a comment

‘Lady with a Little Dog’ (Continued)

Posted on December 19, 2024 by Patrick Miles

III

Back home in Moscow, everything already felt like winter: the stoves had been lit, and

when the children were getting ready for school and drinking tea in the morning, it was

dark and Nanny lit the lamp for a short time. The frosts had begun. On the first day of

snow, when sledges come out for the first time, it is pleasant to see the white ground and

white roofs, the air you breathe is gloriously soft, and you’re reminded then of days when

you were young. The old limes and birches, white with hoar frost, have a kindly

expression, they are closer to one’s heart than palms and cypresses, and when you are near

them, you have no wish to go on thinking about mountains and the sea.

Gurov was a Muscovite, he arrived back in Moscow on a fine frosty day, and when he

put on his fur coat and warm gloves and strolled along the Petrovka, and when he heard

the sound of the church bells on Saturday evening, his recent trip and the places he had

visited lost all their attraction for him. He gradually immersed himself in Moscow life,

before long he was greedily devouring three newspapers a day and saying he didn’t read

the Moscow papers on principle. Already he felt drawn to clubs and restaurants, to dinner

parties and jubilee celebrations, and felt flattered to be entertaining well-known lawyers

and artists at his house, and to be playing cards with a Professor at the Doctors’ Club.

Already he could polish off a whole portion of Moscow hotpot from the pan…

A month or so would pass, he thought, and Anna Sergeyevna would cloud over in his

memory, and only occasionally would he dream of her and her touching smile, just as he

dreamed of the others. But more than a month went by, they were deep into winter, and

he remembered everything as clearly as if he had parted from Anna Sergeyevna only

yesterday. And his memories became more and more vivid. If the sound of the children’s

voices preparing their lessons reached him in his study in the quiet of an evening, or he

heard a love song, or an organ playing in a restaurant, or a snowstorm started whining in

the chimney – then suddenly everything would come alive in his memory: that time on the

pier… early morning mist over the mountains… the steamer from Theodosia… and the

kisses. He would walk for a long time round his room, remembering and smiling, then his

memories would turn into daydreams, and in his imagination what had happened mingled

with what lay ahead. Anna Sergeyevna did not appear in his dreams, she was behind him

everywhere like a shadow following him around. When he closed his eyes, he could see her

for real, and she seemed more beautiful, younger and more tender than she had been; and

he himself seemed better to himself than he had been back then in Yalta. In the evenings

she was looking at him from the bookcase, from the fireplace, from the corner of the room,

he could hear her breathing, the soft rustle of her dress. In the street he stared after

women to see if any of them looked like her…

And he was tormented now by a strong desire to share his recollections with someone.

But he couldn’t talk to anyone at home about his love, and outside there was no one.

Certainly not with his tenants and not at the bank. And what would he say? Had he really

felt love then? Had there really been anything beautiful, poetic, or instructive, or simply

interesting, about his relations with Anna Sergeyevna? And he had to speak vaguely about

love and women, and no one guessed what it was all about, and his wife would simply

twitch her dark eyebrows and say: ‘The role of lady’s man doesn’t suit you at all,

Demetrius.’

One night, coming out of the Doctors’ Club with his partner at cards, a civil servant, he

could not restrain himself and said: ‘You can’t imagine what an enchanting woman I got to

know in Yalta’.

The civil servant climbed into his sledge and drove off, but suddenly turned round and

shouted: ‘Dmitrii Dmitrych!’

‘Yes?’

‘You were right just now about the sturgeon: it was a bit off!’

For some reason these everyday words suddenly made Gurov feel indignant, they

struck him as coarse and degrading. What barbaric ways of behaving, what people!

Meaningless nights, boring, uneventful days! Frantic card-playing, eating and drinking too

much, repeated conversations on the same old topics. These useless activities and

conversations monopolise the best part of our time, our best energies, and what we’re

finally left with is a stunted, barren kind of life, some kind of garbage, and you can’t get

away and escape, it’s like being in a madhouse or a forced labour squad!

Gurov lay awake all night feeling worked up and all next day he had a headache. On

the following nights he also slept badly, sitting up in bed all the time thinking, or walking

from corner to corner of the room. He was bored with his children, with the bank, he

didn’t want to go anywhere or talk about anything.

In December during the holiday period he made preparations for a trip, telling his wife

he was going to St Petersburg to lobby on behalf of a certain young man – and left for the

town of S. For what reason? He himself did not really know. He wanted to see Anna

Sergeyevna and have a talk with her, arrange a meeting if possible.

He arrived in S. in the morning and took the best room in the hotel. The floor was

completely covered with grey military cloth and on the table stood an inkwell, grey with

dust, which showed a man on horseback, holding his hat aloft but with his head broken

off. The porter gave him the information he needed: von Diederitz lives on Old

Goncharnaya Street, in his own house, it’s not far from the hotel, he lives in grand style,

has his own horses, everyone in town knows him. The porter pronounced the name

Dreedyritz.

Gurov took his time walking along to Old Goncharnaya Street and located the house. A

long grey fence topped with nails ran the whole length of its front. ‘You’d want to run away

from a fence like that,’ thought Gurov, glancing up at the windows, then at the fence.

As government offices were closed that day, he reasoned that the husband would

probably be at home. In any case it would be tactless to go into the house and cause an

upset. If he sent a note, it might fall into the husband’s hands and that could spoil

everything. The best thing would be to rely on chance. He kept walking up and down the

street and by the fence waiting for such a chance to arise. He watched a beggar enter the

gates and be set upon by the dogs, then, an hour later, the sounds of someone playing the

piano reached him, faint and unclear. That must be Anna Sergeyevna. The front door

suddenly opened and an old woman came out, with the familiar white Pom running

behind her. Gurov wanted to call the dog, but his heart suddenly began thumping and in

his agitation he couldn’t remember the Pom’s name.

He walked up and down, hating the grey fence more and more, and feeling annoyed by

the thought that Anna Sergeyevna had forgotten him and might already be amusing

herself with someone else, and this would be only too natural if you were a young woman

forced to look at that damned fence from morning to evening. He went back to his hotel

room and sat for a long time on the sofa, not knowing what to do, then had a meal, then a

long sleep.

‘How stupid and disturbing all this is,’ he thought, on waking up and seeing the dark

windows: it was already evening. ‘Now for some reason I’ve gone and overslept. So what

am I going to do when night comes?’ Sitting on the bed, which was covered by a cheap grey

blanket like one in a hospital, he taunted himself in his vexation: ‘You and your lady with a

little dog… You and your adventure… Now look where you’ve landed yourself.’

At the station that morning his attention had been caught by a poster advertising in

huge capitals the opening night of The Geisha. He remembered this and set off for the

theatre. ‘More than likely,’ he thought, ‘she attends first nights.’

The theatre was full. And here, as in all provincial theatres generally, there was fog

above the chandelier, and a noisy hubbub coming from the gallery; before the performance

began the local dandies were standing in the front row, hands clasped behind their backs;

and over there in the Governor’s box, the Governor’s daughter was sitting in the front

seat wearing a boa, while the Governor himself was modestly concealed behind the

portiere, and only his hands were visible; the curtain kept swaying, and the orchestra

spent a long time tuning up. As the audience was coming in and occupying their seats,

Gurov eagerly studied every face.

In came Anna Sergeyevna. She sat down in the third row, and when Gurov looked at

her, his heart missed a beat, and he understood clearly that she was the nearest, dearest,

and most important person in the world for him now; this little woman, lost in the

provincial crowd, not remarkable in any way, holding a cheap lorgnette, now filled his

whole life, was his joy and sorrow and the one happiness that he now longed for; and to

the sounds of this bad orchestra, of these dreadful provincial violins, he thought how

beautiful she was. Thought and dreamed.

A young man had come in with Anna Sergeyevna and sat down next to her. He had

short side whiskers, and was very tall and stooping; with each step he took he nodded his

head and seemed to be forever bowing. This was probably the husband she had referred to,

in a bitter outburst back in Yalta, as a ‘lackey’. And indeed, his tall figure, his side whiskers

and his small bald patch all suggested a lackey’s modest bearing, he had a sugary smile,

and the badge of some kind of learned society gleaming in his buttonhole looked like a

lackey’s hotel number.

In the first interval the husband went out for a smoke, while she remained in her seat.

Gurov, who was also sitting in the stalls, went up to her and said in a shaky voice, forcing a

smile:

‘Good evening.’

She looked at him and turned pale, then looked at him again in horror, unable to

believe her eyes, and seized tight hold of her fan and lorgnette, clearly struggling not to

faint. Neither of them spoke. She was sitting, he standing, scared by her confusion and

unsure whether or not to sit down next to her. The violins and the flute began tuning up,

there was a sudden sense of panic, it felt as if they were being watched from every box. But

now she got to her feet and made quickly for the exit; he followed, and they walked along

corridors and up staircases at random, now up, now down, various people flashing before

their eyes, in the uniforms of lawyers or teachers or crown employees, and all with their

insignia; ladies flashed past, fur coats were hanging on pegs, a draught brought the smell

of cigarette ends. And Gurov, whose heart was beating fast, thought: ‘Oh Lord, why are all

these people here, this orchestra…’

At that moment he suddenly recalled that evening at the station when he’d said

goodbye to Anna Sergeyevna and had said to himself that everything was over and they

would not see each other again. But the end was still such a long way off!

On a gloomy narrow staircase saying ‘Circle’ she stopped.

‘What a fright you gave me!’ she said, breathing heavily and still pale and shaken. ‘I

nearly died. Why did you come? Why?’

‘Understand me, Anna, understand me…’ he said hastily in a low voice. ‘Understand

me, I beg you…’

She was looking at him fearfully, pleadingly, lovingly, looking at him intently, so as to

fix his features more firmly in her memory.

‘Oh how I’m suffering!’ she went on, not listening to him. ‘All this time I’ve done

nothing but think about you, thinking about you kept me alive. And I wanted to forget,

forget, but why did you come, why?’

On a landing up above two schoolboys were smoking and looking down, but Gurov

didn’t care, he drew Anna Sergeyevna towards him, and began kissing her face, her cheeks,

her hands.

‘What are you doing, what are you doing!’ she said in horror, pushing him away from

her. ‘You and I have gone mad. You must go away today, go away now… By all that’s holy, I

beseech you, I beg you… There’s someone coming!’

Someone was coming up the staircase from down below.

‘You must go,’ Anna Sergeyevna went on in a whisper. ‘Do you hear, Dmitrii Dmitrich?

I’ll come to see you in Moscow. I’ve never been happy, I’m unhappy now, and I’m never

going to be happy, never! Don’t make me suffer even more! I’ll come to Moscow, I swear it.

But now we must part! My good kind dear one, we must part!’

She pressed his hand and began going swiftly downstairs, all the time looking round at

him, and her eyes showed how unhappy she really was. Gurov stood there briefly, listened

until everything had gone quiet, then found his peg and left the theatre.

(To be concluded)

Happy Christmas from Calderonia / Sam&Sam!

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian literature, Edwardian marriage, Personal commentary | Tagged Anna Sergeevna, Anton Chekhov, Dmitrii Gurov, Harvey Pitcher, Lady with a Little Dog, love, love stories, Moscow, Pomeranian dogs, provincial life, Saratov, short stories, sturgeon, translation, von Diederitz, Yalta | Leave a comment

‘Lady with a Little Dog’ translated by Harvey Pitcher

Posted on December 9, 2024 by Patrick Miles

The Promenade at Yalta, c. 1900, from a tourist brochure
(Click on image to magnify)

Word went round that a newcomer had turned up on the Promenade: a lady with a little

dog. Dmitrii Dmitrich Gurov had already spent a fortnight in Yalta and become used to its

ways, and he too had begun taking an interest in newcomers. From his seat in Vernet’s

Pavilion, he watched the young lady walk the length of the Promenade. She was not very

tall, she had fair hair and was wearing a beret. A white Pomeranian dog ran along behind

her.

After that he came across her several times a day, in the Gardens or in the Square. She

was strolling along alone, always wearing the same beret and with the white Pom. No one

knew who she was and they called her simply ‘the lady with the little dog’.

‘If she’s here without a husband and without friends,’ Gurov reasoned to himself, ‘it

wouldn’t be a waste of time to get to know her.’

He was still under forty, but he already had a daughter of twelve and two schoolboy

sons. He had been married off early, when he was still in his second year at university, and

now his wife seemed half as old again as he was. She was a tall woman, with dark

eyebrows, erect, imposing and forthright, and called herself ‘a thinking person’. She read a

great deal, didn’t use the hard sign in correspondence, and called her husband Demetrius

instead of Dmitrii, but privately he considered her shallow, narrow-minded and inelegant,

he was scared of her and did not like spending time at home. He had begun deceiving her

long ago and did so frequently, which was probably why he almost always referred to

women disparagingly, and if they were mentioned in his presence, he would call them:

‘The lower breed!’

He felt he’d learned enough from bitter experience to call them whatever he liked, but

nevertheless without ‘the lower breed’ he could not have survived for even a couple of

days. In men’s company he was bored and ill at ease, with them he was cold and

uncommunicative, but among women he felt relaxed and knew what to say to them and

how to behave; and he even found it easy to be silent with them. In his outward

appearance, his character and the whole of his nature, there was something attractive,

something elusive, that predisposed women towards him and enticed them. He was

conscious of this and some kind of force also attracted him towards them.

Repeated experience, indeed bitter experience, had long ago taught him that every

liaison, which to begin with offered such a pleasant diversion in life and might be seen as a

nice easy adventure, was bound to escalate with respectable people (especially Muscovites,

so ponderous and indecisive) into a whole problem, of extreme complexity, and the

situation would eventually become oppressive. But he had only to meet an interesting

woman and this experience would somehow drop out of his memory and he wanted to live,

and everything seemed so simple and amusing.

One evening, then, he was dining early in the Gardens when the lady in the beret came

in and walked over unhurriedly to the next table. Her expression, how she walked, her

dress and her coiffure, told him she was a respectable married woman on her own in Yalta

for the first time, and she was bored… The stories one heard about morals being loose here

were largely untrue, he despised them and knew that most of the stories were made up by

people who would gladly have sinned if they had known how to; but when the lady sat

down at the next table three paces from him, he was reminded of those stories of easy

conquests and trips to the mountains, and the tempting thought of a brief fleeting

attachment, an affair with an unknown woman, whose name and surname you didn’t

know, suddenly took possession of him.

He softly beckoned the Pom over to his table, and when the dog came, wagged his

finger at him. The Pom growled. Gurov wagged his finger a second time.

The lady glanced at him and immediately looked down.

‘He doesn’t bite,’ she said and blushed.

‘May I give him a bone?’, and when she nodded in agreement, he asked amiably:

‘Have you been in Yalta long, I wonder?’

‘Four or five days.’

‘And I’m already whiling away my second week.’

There was a short silence.

‘Time passes quickly, but it’s so boring here,’ she said, without looking at him.

‘That’s just the done thing, to say it’s boring in Yalta. A fellow from some distant town

in the provinces doesn’t find his life there boring, but arrive here and it’s nothing but “Oh,

it’s so boring in Yalta! It’s so dusty”. Anyone would think he’d just come from the Riviera.’

She laughed. Then they both went on eating in silence, like strangers; but after dinner

they went off together – and there began the light-hearted conversation of two people who

were at ease and happy, and didn’t mind where they went to and what they talked about.

As they strolled along, they talked about the strange light on the sea: the water was a soft

warm lilac colour, and the moon cast a golden band across it. They talked about how close

it was after the warm day. Gurov told her he was a Muscovite, an arts graduate but

worked in a bank, at one time he’d trained to become a singer in a private opera company

but had given it up, in Moscow he owned two houses… And from her he learned that she’d

grown up in St Petersburg but been married in S., where she’d been living for the past two

years, that she’d be spending another month or so in Yalta and her husband might be

coming to join her, as he also wanted a break. She was at a complete loss to explain where

her husband worked – was it in the provincial government or the provincial regional

council – and she too found this amusing. Gurov also learned that her name was Anna

Sergeyevna.

Later, in his hotel room, he thought about her and how next day she would probably

meet him. It was bound to happen. As he got ready for bed, he called to mind that only a

very short time ago she’d been at boarding school and studying, just as his own daughter

was doing now, and he recalled how timid and awkward she’d been when laughing and

talking with a stranger – it must have been the first time in her life she’d been on her own,

in a situation where she was being followed and looked at and talked to with one secret

intention that she could not fail to divine. He also called to mind her slender, fragile neck,

her beautiful grey eyes.

‘One can’t help feeling a bit sorry for her all the same,’ he thought and began to drop

off.

A week had gone by since their first meeting. It was a public holiday. Indoors it was airless,

but in the swirling dust outside hats were being blown off. All day you felt thirsty and

Gurov kept going in to the Pavilion and offering Anna Sergeyevna a fruit cordial or ice

cream. There was no escaping the heat.

In the evening, when it had quietened down a little, they walked along to the pier to

watch the steamer arrive. Many people were strolling around on the landing-stage: they

had gathered to meet someone and were holding bouquets. Here two features of Yalta’s

smart crowd stood out distinctly: the elderly ladies were dressed like young ones and there

were lots of generals.

On account of the choppy sea, the steamer did not arrive until after sunset, and before

mooring at the pier it spent a long time turning round. Anna Sergeyevna looked

through her lorgnette at the steamer and its passengers, as if searching for people she

knew, and when she addressed Gurov, her eyes were shining. She talked a lot, asked

abrupt questions and immediately forgot what she’d asked about; then she lost her

lorgnette in the crowd.

The smart crowd had dispersed, there was no one around, and the wind had died down

completely, but Gurov and Anna Sergeyevna went on standing there, as if waiting to see if

anyone else would disembark. Anna Sergeyevna was silent now, smelling her flowers and

not looking at Gurov.

‘The weather’s got a bit better in the evening,’ he said. ‘Where shall we go next? How

about a drive somewhere?’

She didn’t reply.

Then he looked at her intently and suddenly embraced her and kissed her on the lips,

breathing in the moist scent of the flowers, and straight away he looked round nervously:

had anyone noticed?

‘Let’s go to your place,’ he said quietly. And they both hurried off.

Her hotel room was airless and smelt of the perfume she had bought at the Japanese

Shop. Looking at her now, Gurov thought: ‘What encounters one does have in life!’ From

his past he retained the memory of carefree, good-hearted women, cheerful lovers who

were grateful to him for even a very brief happiness; and of others, like his wife for

example, who loved insincerely and with lots of needless talk, affectedly and with hysteria,

their expression seeming to say that this was not love or passion, but something more

significant; and of two or three very beautiful cold women, whose faces would suddenly be

lit with a predatory expression, a wilful desire to take, to snatch from life more than life

could offer, and these were women past their prime, capricious, unreflecting, powerful,

unintelligent women, and when Gurov grew cool towards them, their beauty aroused in

him feelings of hatred, and the lace on their underwear seemed to him then like the scales

of a lizard.

But here there was still that same timidity and awkwardness of inexperienced youth,

an uneasy feeling; and she gave an impression of distractedness, as if someone had

suddenly knocked on the door. Anna Sergeyevna, this ‘lady with a little dog’, had reacted

to what had happened in a particular kind of way, very seriously, as if she’d fallen from

grace – or so it seemed, and this was strange and inappropriate. Her features drooped and

faded, loosened hair hung down sadly on either side of her face, and she struck a pose of

thoughtful despondency, like the sinner in an old-style painting.

‘It’s wrong,’ she said. ‘You’ll be the first to despise me now.’

On the table in her room stood a water-melon. Gurov cut himself a slice and began to

eat it without hurrying. At least half an hour went by in silence.

Anna Sergeyevna was a touching sight, she had about her the purity of a naïve,

respectable woman who had seen little of life; the single candle burning on the table

scarcely lit up her face, but her distress was unmistakable.

‘Why should I cease to respect you?’ Gurov asked. ‘You don’t know what you’re saying.’

‘May God forgive me!’ she said and her eyes filled with tears. ‘This is terribly wrong.’

‘You seem to be making excuses for yourself.’

‘Excuses? I’m a bad low woman, I despise myself, excuses don’t come into it. It’s not

my husband I’ve deceived, but myself. And not only now, I’ve been deluding myself for a

long time. My husband may be a good honest man, but he’s nothing but a lackey! I don’t

know what kind of work he does there, but what I do know is – he’s a lackey. I was twenty

when I married him, I was tormented by curiosity, I wanted something better, life must be

different from this, I said to myself, it must be. I wanted to have a life! A life, a real life… I

was burning up with curiosity… You won’t understand this but I swear to God, I couldn’t

control myself, something was happening to me, I couldn’t be held back, I told my

husband I was ill and came down here… And here I’ve been walking about all the time in a

kind of daze, like a mad person… and now I’ve become a cheap bad woman and everyone

has the right to despise me.’

Gurov had become bored listening, he was irritated by the naïve tone and this

confession, so unexpected and inappropriate; and but for the tears in her eyes, one might

have thought she was joking or playing a part.

‘I don’t understand,’ he said quietly, ‘what is it you want?’

She buried her face in his chest and pressed herself against him.

‘Believe me, believe me,’ she said. ‘I implore you. I like everything in life to be pure

and honest, I find sin abhorrent, I don’t know myself why I’m acting like this. The simple

folk say, the Devil tempted me. That’s true of me now, I’ve been tempted by the Devil.’

‘That’s enough now…’ he murmured.

He looked into her unblinking, frightened eyes, kissed her, spoke soft kind words, and

little by little she calmed down and her cheerfulness returned; they both began laughing.

When they went out later, the Promenade was completely deserted and the town with

its cypresses looked completely dead, but the sea was still pounding noisily against the

shore, while on the waves a single launch was rocking to and fro, a lamp on it glimmering

drowsily.

They found a cab and set off for Oreanda.

‘ I learned your surname just now down in the lobby,’ Gurov said. ‘The board says von

Diederitz. Is your husband German?’

‘No, I think his grandfather was German, but he’s Russian Orthodox.’

At Oreanda they sat on a bench near the church and looked down in silence at the sea.

Yalta was barely visible through the morning mist and white clouds hung motionless on

the mountain peaks. Not a leaf was stirring on the trees, cicadas chirped, and the

monotonous boom of the sea from down below spoke of peace and the eternal sleep that

awaits us. It was booming like that down there before Yalta or Oreanda even existed, it is

booming now, and it will go on booming with the same muffled indifference after we have

gone. And in this permanency, this complete indifference to the life and death of each one

of us, there lies concealed, perhaps, a pledge of our eternal salvation, of the continuing

movement of life on earth, of continuing perfection. Sitting alongside a young woman who

looked so beautiful in the dawn light, soothed and spellbound by these magical

surroundings of sea and mountains, of clouds and open sky, Gurov reflected on how

beautiful everything in the world really was when you stopped to think about it, everything

except our own thoughts and actions when we lose sight of the higher aims of existence

and our human dignity.

Someone came up to them – a watchman, probably – took a look and walked off. And

this detail struck them as very mysterious, and beautiful also. They watched the steamer

arriving from Theodosia, lit by the sunrise, its lights already extinguished.

‘There’s dew on the grass,’ Anna Sergeyevna said after a silence.

‘Yes, time to be getting back.’

They returned to the town.

Every day after that they met at midday on the Promenade, lunched and dined

together, went for walks and admired the sea. She complained of sleeping badly and

palpitations, and kept asking exactly the same questions, worried now by jealousy and now

by fear that he didn’t respect her enough. And frequently in the Square or the Gardens,

when there was no one around, he would suddenly draw her to him and kiss her

passionately. The complete idleness, these kisses in broad daylight looking round

anxiously to see if anyone was watching, the heat, the smell of the sea, and the constant

flitting before his eyes of idle, smart, well-fed people, seemed to rejuvenate him; he told

Anna Sergeyevna how beautiful and alluring she was, he could not restrain his passion,

and did not leave her side for a moment, whereas she often became thoughtful and asked

him to admit that he didn’t respect her and didn’t love her in the least, but simply saw her

as a cheap woman. Almost every evening when it was getting late, they went for a drive

somewhere beyond the town, to Oreanda or the waterfall; and the outing went off well, on

each occasion without fail they came away with impressions of beauty and grandeur.

They were expecting the husband to arrive, but a letter came from him to say that his

eyes had become very painful and begging his wife to return home as soon as possible.

Anna Sergeyevna lost no time.

‘It’s a good thing I’m leaving,’ she said to Gurov. ‘It was meant to happen.’

She hired a carriage and he accompanied her. The journey lasted a whole day. After

she’d taken her seat on the express and the second bell rang, she said:

‘Let me have one more look at you… One more. That’s right.’

She wasn’t crying, but was sad, as if unwell, and her face was trembling.

‘I’ll think of you…remember you,’ she was saying. ‘The Lord bless you and keep you.

Don’t think ill of me. We’re saying goodbye forever, that’s as it should be, we ought never

to have met in the first place. God be with you, then.’

The train went off quickly, its lights soon disappeared, and a minute later it was out of

earshot, as if everything had deliberately conspired to bring this sweet oblivion, this

madness, to an end as soon as possible. Standing alone on the platform and peering into

the far darkness, Gurov could hear the sound of the crickets and the humming of the

telegraph wires, and felt as if he had just woken up. This had been another incident or

adventure in his life, he thought, and it too had come to an end, and all that was left now

was a memory… He felt moved and sad, and experienced a slight feeling of remorse; this

young woman, whom he would never see again, hadn’t after all been happy with him; he’d

been kind to her and affectionate, but all the same, in his attitude to her, his tone and his

embraces there’d been a slight touch of mockery, the rather coarse condescension of a

happy man who was also nearly twice her age. She had kept calling him good, unusual and

exalted, so clearly she had not seen him as he really was and that meant he’d involuntarily

deceived her…

Here at the station autumn was already in the air, the evening was cool.

‘Time for me too to head north,’ Gurov thought as he walked off the platform. ‘High

time!’

(To be continued)

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian literature, Edwardian marriage, Modern parallels | Tagged Anna Sergeevna, Anton Chekhov, Dmitrii Gurov, Harvey Pitcher, Lady with a Little Dog, love, love stories, Oreanda, Pomeranian dogs, sex, short stories, translation, von Diederitz, Yalta | Leave a comment

‘The world’s best short story’: A new translation

Posted on November 25, 2024 by Patrick Miles

The Promenade at Yalta, 22 June 1970
(Click on image to magnify)

Long-term followers of Calderonia may recall my post five years ago devoted to Harvey Pitcher, in a series called ‘Inestimable Russianists’. I quoted Harvey saying at the time (he was then in his eighty-third year) that he was just putting the finishing touches to a translation of The Lady with the Little Dog.

Some six or seven complete working drafts later, and perhaps as long as ten years since actually starting it, Harvey has signed the translation off. The time interval should not surprise you, as this story is particularly subtle, allusive and difficult to decide how to render. Harvey made his very first translation from Russian literature in 1957 and what he now entitles ‘Lady with a Little Dog’ is surely the pinnacle of his translating career. Calderonia, then, is deeply honoured to be invited to publish it for the first time.

In a throwaway line at a lecture-seminar, the brilliant Chekhov scholar Aleksandr Chudakov once described ‘Lady with a Little Dog’ as ‘the world’s best short story’ — and his audience, who were mainly young women, eagerly agreed. He did not say ‘greatest’ short story. In what sense, then, is it ‘best’? For that Russian audience, and for the people I have known who read it at least once a year in English (one, Derwent May, knew it by heart), it is ‘best’, surely, because of its subject, and the movement and climaxing of that subject. What began as a sordid ‘holiday conquest’ by a male chauvinist who calls women ‘the lower breed’, turns to compassion, even agapē, then an all-encompassing mutual love that, one can say, perfectly merges agapē and eros. Love stories don’t come better than this. In Kierkegaard’s words on the subject, ‘instinct’ becomes ‘spirit’.

Chekhov finished the story in 1899 after moving to Yalta. The first two chapters are set in Yalta and will be posted in Calderonia on 9 December. The third and longest chapter is set in wintry Moscow and the town of S. (widely thought to be Saratov, but it could well stand humorously for seryi, grey) and will be posted on 19 December. The last and shortest chapter, also set in Moscow, will go out on New Year’s Day 2025. Enjoy!

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian literature, Edwardian marriage, Personal commentary | Tagged agapē, Aleksandr Chudakov, Anton Chekhov, comments, Derwent May, eros, falling in love, Harvey Pitcher, Inestimable Russianists, Lady with a Little Dog, love, Moscow, Russian literature, Saratov, seduction, short stories, Søren Kierkegaard, translation, translators, women, Yalta | Leave a comment

Ukrainian journal

Posted on November 3, 2024 by Patrick Miles

23 September 2024
Vladimir Kara-Murza, a Cambridge graduate historian and scion of a Russian family with opposition to autocracy in its DNA, has given an interview with The Times following his release from a 25-year prison sentence for ‘treason’. Instead of suddenly being led out of his Siberian cell to be shot, as he thought, he was deported as part of the exchange that included Evan Gershkovich, the Wall Street Journal reporter jailed by Putin for 16 years for ‘espionage’. Kara-Murza is a leading member of Open Russia, the organisation founded by Khodorkovsky which advocates civil society and democracy in Russia, and I must say he talks more sense in this interview than many Russian oppositionists.

Vladimir Kara-Murza (2017)

The fact is, Kara-Murza knows Russian history, he is very well informed about Russia today, and he knows Russian life intimately. In the interview he reminded us that more than 20,000 people have been arrested across Russia for opposing the war since 2022 and at least 300 protesters imprisoned. In these conditions, he continued,

does anybody expect large numbers of people to speak out? I did and got a 25-year sentence in prison. I don’t think you would find many people who would be prepared to pay such a price. [Yet] what amazes me, and makes me proud of my country, is that there are so many people who are doing this; tens of thousands who have openly protested against this war, despite the repression, despite the fear.

This is a salutary corrective for those who believe Russia is completely devoid of conscience or hope. But what pleased me most was that he is ‘sure’ that the Putin regime will ‘eventually collapse’ because ‘political change in Russia usually happens suddenly, unexpectedly, when nobody sees it coming, and nobody is ready for it’.

Unbelievable though this must sound to us in the West, it is true. The reason it is true is that for interminable periods of time nothing appears to happen in Russia at all, so when the accursed power finally breaks, everybody is caught on the hop and things move very fast. I am reminded of the nine-year-old Nikolay Andreyev, who when Nicholas II abdicated was ‘stunned’ and kept saying ‘Don’t things happen fast in Russia!’. Only people with Kara-Murza’s experience and antennae know this, and know how imminent it may be. When Andrei Amal’rik’s Will The Soviet Union Survive Until 1984? came out in 1970, very few sovietologists believed his predictions, or even took the book seriously, but his antennae and knowledge of Russia were better than theirs. Two days after I arrived in Moscow in the spring of 1981, I knew Amal’rik was right.

The psychopathic KGB man’s ‘special operation’ has been an abject, humiliating disaster and he faces threats all round. For instance, he knows the Russian people will not stand for conscription; if instead he is going to bring in thousands of troops from North Korea, Russians know that regime from Soviet times and detest it; freeing tens of thousands of convicts to fight (be mown down) in Ukraine has produced a doubling of organised crime and an explosion of violence in society; certain generals won’t stand for Russia being the first to use nuclear weapons merely to keep the fantasist in power…

10 October
So is Putin bluffing about using nuclear weapons? Yes. At the moment. It is shameful and ridiculous for the West to be bowing to his blackmail. But the determining paradigm in the criminal’s head is the cornered rat’s behaviour of his youth: he and his fellow street louts closed in to kill it, when it went for them full frontal and survived. So if his ‘special operation’ were terminally cornered, and with it himself, I believe he would use tactical nuclear weapons and cause a stain of radioactivity across Europe to equal Chernobyl. His 20 July generals might well not have time, or be organised enough, to stop him. The fact that, having used nuclear weapons, he would certainly be finished by plotters, is, of course, small consolation. At the moment, he is using Russian and Iran-supplied missiles to devastate Ukrainian power stations. The proportionate response is to allow Ukraine to use NATO-supplied missiles to destroy targets inside Russia. This would sober Putin up a bit and incense Russia’s citizens (already furious that their president has not retaken the Kursk salient inside Russia); it would free Ukraine’s hand tied behind its back and give Putin a taste of real, proportionate war; but I doubt whether it would drive him into that ultimate corner of a nuclear response. Indeed, it might help drive him to a peace deal.

Reminder

20 October
What is the current situation in the war? It is complex, as there are so many literal and figurative fronts, but I believe the important features are as follows.

Putin lost his war in 2022. His aim was to take Kyiv, assassinate key figures in the Ukrainian government, occupy Ukraine from north and east, and destroy Ukraine’s statehood. He has failed in all these objects, and especially the last one, as his barbaric war with Ukraine has been the making of Ukraine as a nation. Ukraine has not won the war, but it is no longer possible to imagine that Russia can annex and enslave it.

According to western intelligence, Russia has lost about 300,000 men killed or injured, and with its present ‘meat grinder’ strategy on the eastern front is losing 1200 killed and wounded a day. The meat grinder, which sends hardly trained Russian troops across a 300-metre no man’s land to be mown down by machine gun fire and shelling, is even beginning to be criticised and questioned in the Russian media.

Nevertheless, the meat grinder depletes Ukrainian munitions, picks away at Ukraine’s overstretched forces, and works: in the past two months Russia has gained territory in the Donbas at a rate not seen since 2022. It has not redeployed troops from Donbas to Kursk; clearly, seizing Donbas is more important to it and seems feasible. Ukraine simply does not have the military capacity now to retake Crimea, which would have been a turning point. Iran and North Korea are efficiently supplying Russia with shells and missiles. Ukraine is still under-supplied by the West and hamstrung by the veto on long strikes.

Meanwhile, the intensified degrading of Ukraine’s power grid using cruise missiles and drones means that it will have only half the generating capacity that it had last winter. Ukraine is boosting its renewable energy and will import some energy from the EU, but the winter will be a very severe test of national morale. On the analogy of the Blitz, people believe morale won’t collapse, but Ukraine has been at war for ten years now. At the front Ukrainian commanders frankly admit they are exhausted and their motivation lower than a year ago. More than 57% of Ukrainians now support negotiations to end the war.

Despite all that, I do not agree with Owen Matthews’s view in this week’s Spectator (‘Ukraine’s NATO fantasy’) that ‘Kyiv finds itself in the worst of all possible worlds’ because no state can join NATO that has disputed borders and ‘no state in modern times has more viciously disputed borders than Ukraine’. If, as I believe, the only saver for Putin now is to sign a peace, then if Ukraine forced itself by referendum to recognise de jure the new borders (Zelenskyy would surely resign over this) it would qualify to join NATO, start the process forthwith, and Putin would be forced to accept his worst nightmare.

28 October
Does Putin want peace and would he accept his worst nightmare? Of course not! I am afraid that Matthews does not know his Russia if he believes that the invasion was ‘fundamentally about preventing Ukraine from joining NATO’ and ‘Putin’s theories of the unity of the Ukrainian and Russian peoples were ideological window-dressing’. Putin believes in restoring the Russian/Soviet empire as genuinely and madly as Hitler believed in the ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ and the ‘Third Reich’. Before the invasion there was absolutely no question of Ukraine joining NATO, because of the disputed borders blocker, so that was the ‘window-dressing’ to the invasion and Putin’s imperialism was the reality.

Putin does not want peace, he wants to carry on annexing Eurasian states that were part of the Russian empire in about 1893, and if Ukraine joined NATO as an outcome of the war he launched it would indeed be his worst nightmare. ‘Russia’ has almost always been an empire, not a country, much as for two hundred years ‘England’ was synonymous for the world with ‘British Empire’. As Gary Kasparov has been saying recently only Putin’s complete defeat in Ukraine could kill the ‘virus of imperialism’ in Russians’ minds, and lead to the real Russian homeland and its true values being reborn.

But the consequences of the dictator’s war now threaten his power, so he will have to make a peace — a peace, of course, as tough as he can make it, with a lot of bluff suggesting that he is the injured party (because he has to put up with having democracy on his door step), or that he can walk away at any moment as he doesn’t really need a deal. There are clear signs this week that he is orchestrating his climbdown to a peace. All of the foreign participants in the Brics summit in Kazan have been denigrated for shaking the hand of an internationally proscribed criminal, but in fact the key players (even Xi Jinping) publicly called for de-escalation of the war and the conclusion of a peace. Above all, Putin himself said he welcomed Donald Trump’s ‘sincere pledge’ to end the war if he becomes president. This is a plain warning: Putin and Trump intend to do a Trumpian deal. The cost of such a ‘peace’ for Trump and the West would be Ukraine not joining NATO.

So the choice is between a Trump ‘peace’ that sells Ukraine out, a tough peace that would recognise Crimea and Donbas as de jure Russian but enable Ukraine to join NATO, or (if Harris becomes president, presumably) the US and Europe finally taking the war seriously and enabling Ukraine to defeat Russia militarily. (Slava Ukraini, heroiam slava!)

2 November
I have decided that I shan’t write about Ukraine again until quite some time after the outcome of the US election…

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Personal commentary | Tagged 20 July 1944 Plot, Adolf Hitler, Andrei Amal'rik, Chernobyl, Crimea, Donald Trump, Donbas, Evan Gershkovich, Gary Kasparov, Iran, Kamala Harris, Kursk, meat grinder, NATO, Nicholas II, Nikolay Andreyev, North Korea, nuclear weapons, Open Russia, Owen Matthews, peace negotiations, rats, Russo-Ukrainian War, sovietologists, Ukraine, Vladimir Kara-Murza, Vladimir Putin, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984? | Leave a comment

50 years of ‘small publishing’: what has it taught me?

Posted on October 21, 2024 by Patrick Miles

It has turned out that since Musk took over Twitter we cannot, after all, post our own Calderonia Tweets at the bottom of the Subscribe, Categories, Comments etc column on the right of the home page — though we can, of course, send our own Tweets out into the great Ocean of Oblivion. You can read the text of our latest Tweet here.

What is this all about? Well, we are currently selling very few copies of George Calderon: Edwardian Genius a year, but we are not going to ‘remainder’ or ‘pulp’ the 104 copies left, because small publishers don’t do that. We are happy to bet that the book will sell out eventually, we know from experience that there might suddenly be a surge of interest in it for some unpredictable reason, and it’s beautifully produced by the best printers in Britain, so we can reasonably raise its price by £20 and be assured that when it has sold out, the whole imprint will be in the black. This strategy is only possible if you haven’t printed too many copies in the first place (459 was mercifully right, and some would say that the Russian phrase ‘bibliographic rarity’ is now appropriate).

This is the kind of flexibility small presses have to practise. There will be profits and losses and it’s no good going into this business thinking you’ll always be in pocket. You have to take the long investment view. In Russia, Sam&Sam sold 20,000 copies of the first edition (1993) of the book featured immediately below, and 30,000 of the second edition the year after. (Sam1’s Russian translation of Koulomzina’s 1973 book was smuggled out of Russia, corrected by her in the U.S., and the corrected text sent to me in Cambridge, where it sat with other samizdat until Sam1 was able to collect it in 1991 under Yeltsin.) Even the first book I published in the U.K., Berdiaev’s Aphorisms in 500 copies, sold like hot cakes when it was taken into Russia and if we had had free access to the Russian market then (1985, with the Soviet regime still in place) we could have sold tens of thousands. Successes fund your less popular works, whose publication you nevertheless passionately believe in.

Sofia Koulomzina, Our Church and Our Children, Moscow, Sam&Sam, 1993

Nikolai Berdiaev, Aphorisms, London, Sam&Sam, 1985

This year is the fiftieth anniversary of Sam&Sam’s founding by my Russian friend and me in Moscow. If asked, he and I would be blunt: it’s had seismic ups and downs, mainly owing to politics, but I’m glad to say we have ridden them out. You must be prepared for this bumpiness in small publishing before you even go into it. Take the present year. Sam1 and I can have mimimal contact because of the war and our dissident record. Since 1974 we have published over 30 titles, but some years we have had to lie low. Not to mention the fact that, understandably, no-one in the West wants to buy a book in Russian at the moment, however pure the publisher: I haven’t sold one here since February 2023! The western outlet, by the way, is https://www.samandsam.co.uk/.

I could rabbit on about what small publishing has taught me, but I will summarise it in a few lines. First, you have to put an enormous amount of time, and some hard cash, into advertising and marketing your books. Second, don’t for one moment listen to the people who tell you what to them is so obvious: that you can only produce your own books by not charging for your own time, so (according to such friends) you ‘can’t make any money out of it’ and they would never risk it. Third, if you believe in what you and your authors have written, and don’t want half a dozen paid so-called editors messing it up in commercial publishing, always bring it out yourself. Finally: go for the highest possible quality of typesetting, design, proofreading and printing. Such standards send their own message to the reader and posterity. You may be an outfit that operates on a shoe string and mathematically speaking brings you in only £0.12 an hour, but you are doing it all to prove something — that your books matter. Create a reputation for originality and top quality.

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian English, Edwardian literature, Edwardian marriage, Heroism and Adventure, Personal commentary | Tagged anniversaries, bibliographic rarities, biographies, books, editors, Elon Musk, George Calderon, George Calderon: Edwardian Genius, Nikolai Berdiaev, profit and loss, publishing, quality, Russia, Russo-Ukrainian War, Sam&Sam, samizdat, selfie publishing, small publishers, Sofia Koulomzina, Twitter, Ukraine | Leave a comment

From the diary of a writer-publisher: 30

Posted on September 23, 2024 by Patrick Miles

15 August 2024
I have seriously to consider binning Twitter (‘X’). I recently started receiving Tweets from Elon Musk, which I either skimmed or did not read at all. This was a mistake, because the bots decided that my ‘tolerance’ of Musk’s political statements qualified me to receive a swarm of racist, violent, extreme R/L-wing, vulgar and pornographic Tweets as well. I therefore blocked Musk, but it took me three quarters of an hour to block all the sources of the junk that came in his train. My feed is now 90% acceptable to me. Basically, I am interested in Tweets about Russia and the Ukrainian War, especially Zelenskyy’s daily communications, CWGC Tweets, and ones about literary culture. Incidentally, it’s a great pity that since Elon Musk acquired Twitter I can’t display my occasional Retweets on Calderonia down right of this screen, only my own extremely rare Tweets.

But do I actually want to continue supporting something that is not only owned by Musk but used by him personally to air his Trumpworthy ravings? People argue in the name of free speech that Musk has as much right as anyone to air his views on Twitter. Certainly he has, if he didn’t own it in the first place. I would not read The Times if Rupert Murdoch personally wrote in it every day and brazenly used it as the tool of his personal politics. I can choose not to buy it. The equivalent to that in Twitter’s case is to unsubscribe from it. Is blocking Musk and all the other extremism, but continuing to use Twitter to one’s own satisfaction, therefore hypocritical? I fear it is; but at the moment I need all that real-time Ukrainian news. Watch this space.

22 August
We are in Orkney. Today we were able to visit the weathered red, utterly magnificent 900-year-old St Magnus Cathedral in Kirkwall, which dominates the skyline. Wherever we had been in Orkney previously (visiting the revelatory complex of Neolithic sites), we encountered the story of St Magnus, for whom I have come to feel a peculiar affection.

St Magnus Cathedral, Kirkwall, and a 14th century icon of Saints Boris and Gleb

In the early 1100s Magnus was co-Earl of Orkney (then owned by Norway) with his cousin Hakon. The two were due to meet to discuss their differences, but Hakon broke the agreement to bring two ships of unarmed men each, he brought eight full of armed henchmen, and it was clear his intent was to kill the unarmed Magnus. He ordered his cook Litolf to do it, whereupon Magnus knelt down praying and was killed by a blow to his head. The photograph of Magnus’ skull is entirely convincing. His bones are now buried in a pillar within the cathedral’s choir and I couldn’t help stroking the pillar when no-one was looking. The copy of the Bible open on a lectern in the transept was in Norwegian.

The Penguin Dictionary of Saints says of Magnus ‘he was honoured because of his repute for virtue and piety, but there appears no reason why he should have been called a martyr’. Maybe not, but to anyone knowing the Orthodox tradition he is as clear a case of a strastoterpets as the young princes Boris and Gleb, who were murdered in 1015 for dynastic-political reasons and became the first saints created in Kievan Rus’ after its conversion to christianity. A strastoterpets is a saint who was not martyred because of his faith, but who accepted death as the innocent Christ did — the word means ‘an endurer of the Passion’, ‘non-resister and sufferer of evil for Christ’s sake’. The early Orthodox church regarded them as a uniquely Russian class of saint. There seems to be such a resemblance between the stories of Magnus and Boris-and-Gleb (the latter also executed by a cook under orders), that I just feel the Orcadians canonised Magnus for the same reason — he meekly accepted his political murder as Christ did.

24 August
The train we are on leaves Newcastle six minutes later than it should have, with no explanation, but then comes the announcement: ‘We have gained six minutes departing Newcastle and our expected time of arrival in York is now…’ Gained?

30 August
I have been so embroiled in choosing from all my past haiku since 1970 and editing them into a collection, that I have not written one ‘in the moment’, as haikus should be written, for about a year. When you come home from somewhere far away and entirely different, however, you see the most familiar things in your back yard afresh:

Twenty years on,
the cat’s paws just visible
in concrete.

(Don’t believe anything they say about haikus having to have 5-7-5 syllables.)

19 September
Hallelujah! The locksmith called early today and I could get back into my summer house, aka writing shed. Seventeen days ago its lock failed and I had to wire the door closed for local security reasons. This meant I could not go down there to make the final edit of my latest story (27,000 words) and simultaneously smoke a cigar.

The forensic reader of Calderonia will know that publication of my book of twenty short stories is now running nearly a year late. I am used to meeting deadlines, but in the writing game one must always expect the unpredictable: I started researching this science fiction story in April 2023, when I was sure it would be only 10,000 words long…

So by the end of today all 78 pages of ‘The Retiral’ were read, checked, tweaked and the changes installed from the defaced printout. But I have also been thinking for about seven months of how I am going to write the last story in the book. I have always known it would be entirely different from the sixteen central stories, ‘Ghoune’, because they are about a certain ‘laminated’ world, as Damian Grant rightly called it, and therefore written in a somewhat satirical, at arm’s length style. The last story will not be set in Ghoune Land, it will be about a complex person. Somehow, I knew that I had to read some of our women writers of short stories to learn (perhaps) how to write this last story.

I’ve recently read collections by Penelope Lively, Tessa Hadley, and Lucy Caldwell (who has a masterpiece called ‘Bibi’). Come to think of it, I have read them all twice and some stories four times. I am happiest in Tessa Hadley’s latest collection, where I could re-read forever the title story, or ‘My Mother’s Wedding’, ‘Funny Little Snake’ and ‘Coda’:

Click the cover to find this book on Amazon.

When I started reading the stories in these collections, I instantly knew they were written by women. Why? (I wouldn’t say the same about Katherine Mansfield’s stories.) There is a mass of reasons, a world of reasons in fact, a whole world of difference. If I try to sum it up, I can’t. There is an intimacy with their characters, a familiarity, but not over-familiarity (although, worryingly for me at least, half of Caldwell’s stories are written in the first person). If you like, these stories are never written at arm’s length but the authors are not in their characters’ pockets either. The familiarity is natural; I doubt whether these writers are aware of it. It’s a beguiling quality, so difficult for me to put my finger on, but they all have it, so I assume it goes with being a woman. (It’s not empathy as such.) Then there is a sort of haziness at the edges of/within their stories which convinces you they are organic with the real world, whereas the worlds of men’s stories tend to seem hard edged (and never, surely, so relaxed, even D.H. Lawrence’s short stories). These women’s stories all have that organicity, elasticity, space, at times almost chaoticity. I need some of this…

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Personal commentary | Tagged 'The Retiral', cats, cigars, concrete, D.H. Lawrence, Elon Musk, euphemisms, free speech, haikus, Katherine Mansfield, locks, Lucy Caldwell, men writers, Newcastle upon Tyne, Penelope Lively, Rupert Murdoch, sheds, short stories, Tessa Hadley, The Times, trains, Twitter, Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, women writers, York | Leave a comment

Two anniversaries

Posted on August 14, 2024 by Patrick Miles

Commemoration of the tenth anniversary of this blog was elided. On 30 July 1914 George Calderon arrived on the Isle of Wight to spend a holiday with the Pym family and I began the blog on 30 July 2014 with his letter to Kittie describing his arrival.

There are several things that come to mind in connection with this anniversary. First, that I never remotely imagined in 2014 that I would still be running Calderonia ten years later, but I am deeply beholden to followers who persuaded me to continue. Second, that between 30 July 19/2014 and 30 July 19/2015 I posted on every day when I had a relevant document or event that shed light on what George was doing that day, and I think this ‘blography’ was something of an innovation. It slowed down the completion of my full biography, but I think it contributed something that I could not produce in the latter, namely the nearest thing to ‘real time’, and is a story that may still grip the reader. It is, perhaps, the part of Calderonia that will ‘stand’, that is worth preserving for posterity. But (third) I am also extremely glad that the blog was able to broaden beyond 19/2015 to accommodate my interests, concerns, growing pains at any given moment, and to attract so many brilliant Commentators and guest contributors. Thank you, all.

But this time is also the one hundred and tenth anniversary of the outbreak of the ‘Great War’. What can I possibly say about that? To live through the four years of centenary commemoration was, as long-term subscribers to Calderonia will remember, to co-experience the eviscerating madness of it all from day to day. I am more convinced than ever that the deeply national empathising with the 1914-18 holocaust during its centenary had a fundamental impact on the EU Referendum — which no-one at the time could, or would, articulate. And, to our stupefaction, since 2022 Europe has seen the return of trench warfare. To our disbelief, Europe is again on the brink of a general war.

Perhaps the night of 4 August 2014, when the nation put lighted candles in its windows, seems a world away. But it is not. Volodymyr Zelenskyy daily pays tribute to those who are giving their lives to defend Ukraine’s sovereignty. Ukrainians constantly stress that they will never forget those men and women who have fallen to preserve Ukraine’s freedom, nationhood and culture. Our debt to those who fought for us in the ‘Great War’ and the Second World War is the same. In the words of George Calderon’s lifelong friend Laurence Binyon, ‘They shall grow not old’. We will never forget them.

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Edwardian character, Heroism and Adventure, Modern parallels, Uncategorized | Tagged 'real time', anniversaries, biographies, biography, Brexit, British Expeditionary Force, Calderonia, candles, commemoration, comments, empathy, George Calderon, George Calderon: Edwardian Genius, Isle of Wight, Kittie Calderon, Laurence Binyon, Pym family, The Great War, Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, World War I | 1 Comment

Ukrainian journal

Posted on August 1, 2024 by Patrick Miles

27 June 2024
A Russian opposition group called the Congress of People’s Deputies, consisting of over sixty exiled politicians who were once MPs in the State Duma, has met this week in Warsaw to discuss their plan to overthrow the Putin regime. They argue that it can only be done by force and this means assassinating key oligarchs and propagandists, presumably culminating in Putin. The group’s military wing, the Freedom of Russia Legion, has already killed two important pro-Putin figures inside Russia. The Congress’s ‘Victory Plan’, whilst also calling for tougher sanctions and more weapons for Ukraine, states that ‘it is no longer an option but simply the duty [of the West and NATO] to encourage revolutionary action’ within Russia. They argue that it is morally justified.

One can see that it might be morally defensible in the state of brutal war that exists between Russia and Ukraine, on the analogy, say, of the assassination of the architect of the Holocaust, Heydrich, in a joint British-Czechoslovak operation. But, quite apart from the fact that we did not think it politic to kill Hitler during the War, I’m afraid that in the perspective of Russian history it would be a very bad idea indeed to unleash a campaign of assassinations inside Russia. Impatient for ‘progress’, in 1879 the Russian Populist movement split into two parties, of which ‘The People’s Will [or Freedom]’ was dedicated to assassinations. International terrorism as we know it today is traceable to this development. Lenin and the Bolsheviks inexorably followed suit. The last thing any Russian political party should be doing today is perpetuating Russia’s 150-year-old cycle of party/state violence, which is simply a death cult that mutates into genocide. The Congress of People’s Deputies is falling into a trap. I would much rather hear from them what structures they are going to create when in power to ensure the survival of democracy, the rule of law and an open society in Russia for longer than the usual ten minutes.

It is also depressingly predictable that Russian oppositionists are telling the West that it should be solving Russia’s political problems for it (‘no longer an option but simply the duty’). This is what I call Russia’s ‘Invited Ruler Syndrome’, going back to the supposed founding of Rus’ when foreigners were implored to come in, ‘rule and reign over us and establish order’. It was the father of cop outs. Under communism both dissidents and emigrés demanded of their western sympathisers that the West transplant democracy for them and massively invest in their country; then Russians changed their minds and decided the West was interfering. Nothing is really going to change in Russia until they themselves want real democracy and they themselves establish and safeguard it.

29 June
Another lesson that Russia’s nineteenth century history offers us is that defeat in the Crimea (1856) can lead to rapid political and social change. I am convinced that if Ukraine could swiftly recapture Crimea it would precipitate the end of Putin’s regime and the war. One can see how it could be done, as Crimea is attached to Russian-occupied territory by a not too wide neck in the north and the very vulnerable Kerch Bridge in the east. The Ukrainians have now sunk most of the Russian Black Sea Fleet and the rest of it is holed up in the Azov Sea and Havana Harbour. God forbid they should attempt to retake the peninsula with seaborne landings à la Gallipoli. But they are slowly disabling Russian air bases on Crimea and one can see that a surprise multi-directional attack involving drones, missiles, special operations and an invading force from the north could succeed. However, the Russians have (apparently) packed Crimea with troops, and the Ukrainians simply would not be able to rustle up a big enough crack force to take it. That, of course, is Ukraine’s direst need now: people for their army. How long can they go it alone?

In an article in the Spectator today by Ivan Krastev, political scientist and founding member of the European Council on Foreign Relations, he argues that fear of a declining population is actually what has driven Putin’s military operations. At its present rate, Russia’s population of 146 million is projected to fall to only 140 million in 2039. ‘The biggest single boost in recent years came when the country annexed Crimea in 2014, adding 2.4 million inhabitants.’ Certainly, demographic need is entwined with Putin’s messianic fantasy of restoring the Russian Empire. Putin has only his own criminality to blame for Russia’s human hollowing out: 600,000 of its citizens have left the country since 2022, at least 150,000 Russian soldiers have been killed so far, in 2010 a respectable poll in Russia indicated that 73% of the population did not want to live in their own country. Mind you, the drain started ten years before Putin came to power: between 1990 and 2010 four million Russians emigrated to the USA — over 1% of the latter’s population.

One wonders what there is left to like in Crimea. Small businesses, especially IT start ups, soon left in 2014 faced with Russian interference and expropriations. Now, according to Twitter, even resorts like Koktebel’ are empty. In the Soviet period, it seemed, everyone could take a cheap holiday in Crimea offered by their workplace. I visited Yalta in the summers of 1970 and 1973. The most sunny, colourful, inspiring place was Chekhov’s villa and garden, where I was shown around on my own by a wonderful friend of his sister’s. Of ‘sunbathing’ on Yalta’s uncomfortable slate beach I have only monochrome memories:

Yalta beach, June 1970

15 July
Budanov, Ukraine’s military intelligence chief, has warned today that Russia is preparing another attempt to invade from the north and take Kyiv. He is doubtless right and NATO is well aware of it. Quite simply, because Russia does not have a problem with cannon fodder and is running a war economy (about 40% of government spending), it could well mount an attempt to reverse the fiasco of its armoured column assault of 2022. Again because of Ukraine’s shortage of troops, it is feasible that the Russians capture at least a northern swathe of Ukrainian territory, if they don’t actually reach Kyiv. It would be yet another front for the Ukrainians to fight. I want Trump’s ‘Peace Plan’ as little as Zelenskyy or the Ukrainians do. But it looks increasingly doubtful that enough hardware alone can be supplied by the West fast enough for Ukraine to inflict defeat or a stalemate. We are helping the Ukrainians fight but not win, as the saying goes. If Ukraine continues to lose the ground war, the only solution is for the sovereign countries of the US, Poland, Britain and France to send their soldiers in — not ‘NATO troops’, you understand. According to a Polish government source, the Americans have already threatened to ‘defeat the Russian occupiers with superior American conventional forces if Putin attacks Ukraine using nuclear weapons’. We need here to define ‘A Third World War’ as a nuclear one of mutual assured destruction, not as the offensive participation of Ukraine’s allies’ ground forces in the defeat of the Putin fascist state by conventional means.

Kyrylo Budanov: a tough nut

20 July
Yesterday Zelenskyy addressed a meeting of the British cabinet — the first foreign leader since Bill Clinton in 1997. His key message was the need for his de facto allies to ‘permit’ Ukraine to launch long-range missiles into Russia to destroy the bases from which Russian missiles have reduced Ukraine’s electricity output by 61% and killed hundreds of civilians. His message at the European Political Community Summit the day before was the same. At the NATO summit the week before, Zelenskyy’s thrust was the same. There, Starmer told Zelenskyy that the UK’s military aid, including (Anglo-French) Storm Shadow missiles, could be used as the Ukrainians saw fit. Next day, a Ministry of Defence spokesperson said that ‘the policy on this has not changed’. So is NATO permitting Ukraine to use these long-range missiles defensively-aggressively, or not? Can Ukraine do with the Anglo-French missiles what Starmer has ‘permitted’, or not? Can the UK take unilateral decisions where the Ukrainian war is concerned, or has it to abide by a NATO consensus partly determined by decisions like Germany’s refusal to hand over Taurus missiles in case they are ‘used to hit targets in Russia’? Is NATO brain dead as Emmanuel Macron warned five years ago? Can it win a war already being waged against it?

If Trump wins in November, what price the EU’s and NATO’s repeated promise to stand by Ukraine ‘for as long as it takes’? If they should break it now…as Hamlet said.

27 July
Putin’s purge of the military goes on. Shoigu was moved sideways from being Minister of Defence, Gerasimov seems under threat since his deputy was detained pending trial, and at least four other top brass have been arrested. As far as we know, none have been shot, so the comparison with Stalin is not quite exact. They have ostensibly been removed because of corruption. From day one of the ‘special operation’, however, I have never been convinced that the Russian general staff’s heart is in it. They project a kind of deep stupor. They were never warned about the invasion in advance and Putin’s intelligence men were so wrong about Ukraine’s morale that they made the military look fools. Soldiers don’t forgive that. I still believe that a younger generation of generals could mount a coup. There is no tradition of that succeeding in Russia; historically, it has been members of the aristocracy who have taken things into their own hands — i.e., today, oligarchs.

31 July
What are Russia’s writers doing, people might ask, why aren’t they protesting against the war and the regime? To ask that would be the height of naivety. At the start, along with scores of Orthodox priests, writers did speak out, loudly and bitterly. But they have been forcibly gagged or terrorised into silence by Putin’s martial laws. Last week Yevgeniia Berkovich was jailed for six years for her poems about the war. Others have simply gone to live abroad like the hilarious satirist Viktor Erofeev, who declared: ‘I didn’t leave Russia, Russia left me.’ Russkii dom (‘The Russia House’) seems culturally empty. It indeed gives you the feeling of those bleak, monochrome photos of Stalinist Russia. OK, then, I’ll end with a colour photograph I took of the windows of Chekhov’s study in his house Buiurnuz (Tatar for ‘As You Like It’) at Yalta; a house with inimitable, unforgettable feng shui.

Yalta, July 1973

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Adolf Hitler, Anton Chekhov, assassinations, Buiurnuz, comments, Congress of People's Deputies, conventional forces, Crimea, Donald Trump, Evgeniia Berkovich, Freedom of Russia Legion, Gallipoli, genocide, Ivan Krastev, Keir Starmer, Koktebel', Kyiv, Kyrylo Budanov, NATO, nuclear war, Populism, Reinhard Heydrich, Russia, Sergei Shoigu, terrorism, The Crimean War, The People's Will Party, Ukraine, Valerii Gerasimov, Viktor Erofeev, Vladimir Putin, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Yalta | Leave a comment

A second Family Bible

Posted on July 15, 2024 by Patrick Miles

Click the cover to find this book on Amazon.

Laurence Brockliss, Emeritus Professor of History at Oxford University, is no stranger to Calderonia’s followers. For ten years he and his research team worked to create a relational database that crunched biographical information from online sites, archives, newspapers and other sources, on 750 families and 16,000 individuals across Britain throughout the nineteenth century. In guest posts for us, Professor Brockliss used some of the findings to refocus sharply our ideas about George Calderon as a journalist, about George and Kittie’s marriage, and above all about what the ‘Edwardian Age’ and ‘Edwardianism’ really were. This odyssey of ‘digital history’ has now been published.

The professions that the book addresses include the traditional three of the Church, Law and Medicine, but it was in the decades 1840-8o that the ‘modern’ professions were born, and between 1851 and 1911 the number of British ‘professionals’ rose from roughly 275,000 to nearly a million — ‘more rapidly than the population as a whole’ (p. 6). Thus the book is dealing with nearly forty professions that were either recognised or coming into being during the Victorian and Edwardian periods, from accountants to vets. Its ‘cohort’ of male professionals from eight British provincial towns originates in the 1851 census, from which the study extends ‘longitudinally’ between the end of the eighteenth century and the mid-1920s by tracing the 750 families over four generations. Nor are women remotely excluded! Although expanding, the number of professions that women could work in during this period was severely limited (unbelievably, nursing was not recognised as a profession), but since this is a study of families women feature on nearly every page. A whole fascinating chapter 9, ‘Wives and Daughters’, is devoted to them.

This is a statistical study with lots of tables, but it is no exaggeration to say that it is a truly vibrant book — for two contrasting reasons, of which the second strikes me as unusual and highly skilfully managed. On the one hand, the authors analyse and evaluate their statistics most judiciously. It is a sheer pleasure to follow them weighing evidence, considering hypotheses, playing with arguments, arriving at their own conclusions, which are all the more convincing for their empirical basis. And these conclusions often shake up the historical orthodoxy and our stereotypical notions of the Victorians and Edwardians.

For instance, in reality there was no strict system forcing the eldest son into his father’s profession, and among the professionals there was astonishingly little snobbery about occupations in trade and manufacturing; ‘any hard division between the professional and the entrepreneurial or capitalist class was an illusion’ (chapter 2, ‘Male Occupations and Career Mobility’, p. 80). Being a self-employed professional was precarious; there was a vast range in professionals’ income; the ‘extraordinary conclusion’ is that ‘virtually all the better-off cohort families became poorer, not richer, over time’ (chapter 3, ‘Male Family Members and Intergenerational Wealth’, p. 120). Families tended to be attached to their home ground, for cultural and networking reasons, and it was ‘only in the third generation that the regional attachment of the majority of cohort families began to break down’ (chapter 4, ‘Moving About’, p. 147). ‘Membership of a church in some form or other was all but de rigueur’ (p. 220); no more than 15% of the cohort were ever involved in national or local affairs; the cohort’s enthusiasm for pursuits outside the home ‘waned dramatically’ among their sons, and their grandsons seemed only interested in sport (chapter 5, ‘Male Leisure’). Where ‘Family, House, and Home’ are concerned (chapter 6), popular beliefs are overturned by the fact that nearly 90% of men married and the average age of marriage was as high as ‘just under thirty’ (p. 227); moreover, the Victorian/Edwardian nuclear family was ‘porous and […] many households, for a time at least, contained permanent visitors [!] whose presence complicated the traditional picture’ (p. 241). Chapter 7, ‘Fathers and Sons’, radically revises notions of the importance of public schools and Oxbridge in this period; for a variety of reasons even the richest professional families were content to send their sons to a local grammar school. Divorce or annulment was ‘fairly rare’ (p. 333), almost every marriage was ended only by death, and the family really was as strong a social unit as we probably expected: ‘A close circle of relations and friends provided a network of succour and comfort which helped individual families through the bad times as well as the good’ (chapter 8, ‘The Domestic Circle’, p. 368). Chapter 9 is replete with new fact-based insights into women’s lives, from which the authors draw the conclusion that the strictly gendered ‘separate spheres’ conception of nineteenth century British society is inaccurate. This is important, because ‘separate spheres’ was the main argument of the Edwardian anti-suffragists (of whom George Calderon was one). Similarly, in chapter 11, ‘Concluding Remarks’, it is shown that the professions were not a separate ‘class’ as many social historians have asserted, and that the term ‘middle class’ itself is an ‘overused and often hackneyed social referent’ (p. 470).

By profession I am not a historian, but I would put money on this book shaking up their cohorts. It is the first statistical study of its kind. The team behind it deserve our sincere thanks and congratulations on their stupendous effort.

Something that I am, perhaps, better qualified to comment on, is its nature as writing. This is the ‘second reason’ for its vibrancy. Brockliss’s and Smith’s prose never stops punching forwards. There is an admirable and amusing robustness to their style (‘he idled his life away’, ‘died worth £54’, ‘quick descent into drudgery and poverty’, ‘she hit rock bottom’, ‘both families need a leg-up’, ‘egregiously disloyal’, ‘she was no shrinking violet’ etc). The authors discuss how the novelists of the period have influenced our perceptions of its professionals (pp. 12-15), and they reference Dickens, Austen, George Eliot, Gissing, Trollope and others throughout. But the authors themselves have produced a kind of novel: beneath the surface of the statistics and historical analysis, as it were, flows the life of the myriad individuals named, whose biographies are skilfully narrated, either piecemeal from chapter to chapter or at some length in self-contained paragraphs, and whom you get to know, become involved with, believe in the warm existence of. To create a statistical study that is so humane, a human comedy in itself, is a rare achievement; I can only conclude that Brockliss and Smith have been appropriately influenced by the Victorian novelists they have read. I defy anyone, for instance, to forget the stories of ornithologist John Latham (p. 371), or Dennis Henry Wickham (p. 449), or Thomas S. Boase (p. 452), not to mention John Stanhope Baines, whom we featured in 2020.

Of particular interest to Calderonians would be chapter 10, ‘The First World War and Beyond’, which traces the lives of the cohort’s descendants in the Great War and after. There are marvellous sidelights — for instance that the empirical evidence ‘would suggest there was widespread reluctance to play the hero’ (p. 430) — but the authors also address major, familiar issues about the interpretation of the War and its aftermath generally. Amongst the cohort’s descendants, the war was not ‘a Damascene moment’; you might have expected some of them to ‘lose their faith and others to have been radicalized’, but ‘no clergyman in the third generation abandoned the cloth, and no grandson is known to have become a pacifist’ (p. 448). But was the War a watershed in these families’ history? Most survivors went back to their pre-War occupations, and the digitized information suggests that ‘there was no visible alteration to the rhythm of their family life’ (p. 451). On the closing pages of this chapter the authors movingly describe the ‘visceral feeling of loss’ that still existed in British families marking the recent centenary of the Great War, and how the War was commemorated; not so much officially, as ‘by the people’. It is very gratifying to see Andrew Tatham’s book singled out for praise here.

Thanks to online computer databases, more people are researching their family history than ever. In the past, the family tree with its births, marriages and deaths used to be inscribed on the inside covers of the Family Bible. I suggest that any family that has had Victorian-Edwardian antecedents who were in the professions should immerse themselves in Brockliss’s and Smith’s book — and keep a copy beside the Family Bible.

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian marriage, Heroism and Adventure, Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged Andrew Tatham, Anthony Trollope, biographies, career mobility, Charles Dickens, Dennis Henry Wickham, digital history, Edwardianism, Edwardians, Family Bible, family histories, George Calderon, George Eliot, George Gissing, Harry Smith, Jane Austen, John Latham, Kittie Calderon, Laurence Brockliss, occupations, Oxbridge, professionals, professions, prosopographical studies, prosopography, public schools, relational databases, The Edwardian Era, The Great War, Thomas S. Boase, Victorians, women, World War I | 4 Comments

‘Immaturity’ and ‘youth’ in poetry

Posted on July 1, 2024 by Patrick Miles

I was amused (for reasons about to emerge) that the first hit I had for my last post, ‘Quetzalcoatl’, came from Mexico…but I was astonished that no-one wrote in to ask why on earth the poem was called ‘Quetzalcoatl’ and what it is all about. Perhaps you are all too polite! For, although I headed it ‘Poem after a summer rain shower in Moscow, 1970’, the context was surely so opaque as to make the poem impenetrable.

A poem written by a young person that has no common context with the reader, that is therefore pretty incomprehensible to a reader, and seems to have been written only for the poet’s satisfaction, is an immature poem; and ‘Quetzalcoatl’ is just that. After the longest, coldest and most depressing winter in Moscow that I ever experienced, even the Russian spring was so violent as not to lift the spirits much. But a sudden, soft, sun-soaked shower of rain in early summer, complete with rainbow, was, as they say, an epiphany. Before me was a dusty Moscow square. Heady with joy, I imagined the arc of the rainbow zooming down into the middle of the square, as in a cartoon, or comic (‘shh-tunk!’).

And what would it do next? Well, it was the incarnation of all colours, defying all the grisaille of Moscow and, frankly, Soviet life, so this creature would dance! And as soon as I saw it doing that before me, I thought of Quetzalcoatl, the radiant ‘plumed serpent’ Mexican god, who was a happy, joyful, dancing god amongst so much Aztec fatalism, morbidity and death. He threw his bird beak in the air (‘beakproud’) and shook all his gorgeous, quetzal bird feathers (‘the jewels flew’).

But — I jest not — this is a political poem. The rainbow took shape for me as Quetzalcoatl because I had been translating (in Moscow) a book from German for Cambridge University Press about the Spanish Conquest of South America, so I was very aware of Quetzalcoatl’s place in the Aztec pantheon. He was opposed to human sacrifice. As a twenty-two-year-old in the USSR, I felt I was living in another society that was built on human sacrifice (the genocide of Stalinism was actually presented by some Russians as a ‘necessary’ sacrifice for the Communist future). Therefore when in the second half of the poem the rainbow takes on Quetzalcoatl’s other nature — as a snake — and ‘eels’ through hearts, he is ‘lacing’ together again those hearts that were ripped out and flung on the Aztec/Soviet altars; healing them in enactment of his new faith of life and joy.

Alexander Pushkin as a fifteen-year-old schoolboy. An 1822 engraving by G.-J. Geitman from a drawing made from life at the Imperial Lyceum by an unknown artist.

Obscurity, not to say pretension, combined with extreme ‘Romantic’ solipsism (‘written for your own satisfaction’) are what marks an immature poem. But ‘immaturity’ in poems is not the same as mere ‘youth’, because you find immaturity in quite old poets! The clearest example of a body of ‘young’ poems that I can think of in literature is Pushkin’s hundred or so ‘Lyceum Poems’, which were immensely popular in his lifetime. They were written between the ages of fourteen and eighteen, so they are by definition ‘young’. But they are not ‘immature’, because they are always free of pretension. They sparkle with wit, self-irony, verve and virtuosity. Consequently, they give an impression of surprising maturity. On the other hand, he did keep revising them up to the age of thirty…

‘Quetzalcoatl’ is an immature poem — mercifully short — but I would never deny that its sense of excitement, its pace, its genuine spontaneity, breathe youth — my own. Although it was writtten down over fifty years ago, I recognise an authentic youthful energy in it, which is why I have chosen to include it in my collection The New Dark Blue Cowboys and foreground it against such a fantastically vibrant painting of Kandinsky’s.

Postscript: I’ve never read D.H. Lawrence’s novel The Plumed Serpent, although I had read his Mornings in Mexico long before I went to Russia, and loved that book.

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Heroism and Adventure, Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged Alexander Pushkin, Aztecs, Communism, D.H. Lawrence, G.-J. Geitman, genocide, human sacrifice, immaturity, Imperial Lyceum, Joseph Stalin, Lyceum Poems, Mexico, Moscow, poetry, quetzal, Quetzalcoatl, rain, rainbows, Russia, Spanish Conquest, The Plumed Serpent, USSR, Wassily Kandinsky, youth | Leave a comment

Poem after a summer rain shower in Moscow, 1970

Posted on June 17, 2024 by Patrick Miles

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Personal commentary | Tagged allegory, Aztecs, cannibalism, D.H. Lawrence, dance, human sacrifice, Mexico, Moscow, Painting with Green Centre, Plumed Serpent, poems, political poetry, Quetzalcoatl, rain, Russia, summer shower, The Plumed Serpent | Leave a comment

From the diary of a writer-publisher: 29

Posted on May 15, 2024 by Patrick Miles

5 April 2024

I have received from a cousin the above image of our grandfather’s regimental sword. This plate on its scabbard seems to supply some context to what I knew about his military career. He joined up in 1894 when he was nineteen, and would normally have retired after twenty-one years. His military record, however, tells us that on 2 June 1914 he was ‘permitted to continue in the Service’ beyond that and was promoted to Regimental Sergeant Major on 25 August 1914. He was discharged on 15 December 1919. It rather looks, then, as though the Northamptonshire Regiment decided they would need him in the war that was widely anticipated (and only two months away), so they held out to him the prospect of becoming their RSM if he stayed on with them; which he did, and by July 1918 they appreciated his contribution warmly enough to present him with this sword. We know from his record that he did not go to the Front, he stayed at regimental HQ Northampton on the parade ground. So he must have been mainly employed in training the intake of (very) young officers. This would perhaps explain the family anecdote about him saying to an officer as the company which the latter was drilling marched into the distance: ‘Well say something to them, sir, if it’s only goodbye!’

I told my wife that he must have been engaged to train such men, and we both fell silent. How many of those young Northamptonshire Regiment officers did my grandfather ever see again? Alison immediately said, ‘It was like in Andrew’s book — the gaps in the photograph as they went down one by one.’ Exactly; their usually brief lives after leaving the parade ground for the Front, whether Loos or the Somme. As vital sources to the chapter about George Calderon’s military career in my biography of him, between 2014 and 2018 I read an awful lot of books about the First World War. But six years after the centenary I am more convinced than ever that the two most meaningful and permanent books to have come out of it are Andrew Tatham’s A Group Photograph and I Shall Not Be Away Long. I thought a military historian of my acquaintance was exaggerating when he said ‘every British home should have a copy of these two books’, but he was not.

17 April
So my version of Hölderlin‘s poem ‘Wenn aus der Ferne’ was posted on this blog two days ago. To say it was much worked on would be daft — the poem was long lived with before I even started writing it down in English. Unfortunately, today I spotted a typo in it: stanza 5 begins ‘Aspect’, when it is just the completion of enjambement from the previous stanza so the word should not have a capital letter. Dear me, dear me, how on earth had I missed that? It can’t be corrected now, because the text in the post is not wordprocessed — you can’t easily do that Alcaic stanza layout in WordPress — it’s a scan of my typescript that only Blogmaster Jim Miles could set up for me in Calderonia. Possible explanations for the typo: (1) I forgot that my own convention in this translation was not to use capital letters for the beginning of each line as Hölderlin does, because I wanted a more flowing, natural look to Susette’s speech, (2) the sheer force of the capital A in ‘Aussehn’ (look, aspect, mien, appearance) as the first word of the new stanza (qua abstract noun it always has a capital letter in German) bewitched me into doing the same in English, (3) the sheer force of this extraordinary enjambement (‘Aussehn. Wie flossen Stunden dahin, wie still’…) knocked me over, suspended my typographical judgement. BUT: ‘[man] of sombre/Aspect’ grows on me more and more and I may leave it like that. The portentous use of the capital A in English suggests Susette is gently — so gently — mocking Hölderlin, in order to shake him out of his seriousness and self-absorption; and I like it, because only someone who loved him as deeply and knew him as completely as she did could do that.

2 May

Swirling koi clouds by Caitlin Pirie, The Clay Akita

The above clay brooch, 4 cm across, was given to me by Jim for Christmas. Caitlin Pirie creates modern jewellery from clay with different glazes and other materials, often with a Japanese motif as her workshop is named after the affectionate Japanese Akita dog. It looks to me from the Web that my brooch is a one-off — unique! Well, Jim couldn’t possibly have given me a more appropriate subject, as I love watching koi carp. Caitlin has captured beautifully the effect of clouds in the water which I once alluded to in a haiku. She has even enhanced that sense of the sky by placing a kind of sun in the middle. It would be interesting to know what were her own intentions.

The English anorak badges

The brooch has two pins at the back and was just asking to join the menagerie on my anorak (yes, I am an anorak and proud of it). So for a while that’s where it was. But I thought it was so fascinating and dynamic that I moved it to my desk where I can see it all the time. By the way, the solid old fish with barbels, beneath the vivid Small Tortoiseshell on my collar above, is a Tench.

5 May Another emailed expression of regret that I said I was closing this blog down on its tenth anniversary, 30 July 2024. I was beginning to hope that someone would email or Comment to the effect that they were pleased it was finishing, high time, enough is enough, get off the stage etc etc. O fallacem hominum spem! Now that my book of short stories won’t come out until Christmas, I obviously must continue beyond then, to publicise the book… I have drawn a serious lesson from all this: if you have a blog, you do not need to become tethered to it. I no longer have to post every day, as I did in 2014-15, or even every month. So relax. Keep it there, available for ‘whenever’.

13 May
I’ve received a long letter from team Foreign Office about Ukraine. It begins: ‘Russia’s assault on Ukraine is an unprovoked, premeditated and barbaric attack against a sovereign democratic state […] an egregious violation of international law and the UN Charter.’ Correct. It describes ‘a significant uplift in UK military aid — providing £2.5 billion the next financial year, an increase of £200 million on the previous two years’, as well as ‘£245 million throughout the next year to procure and invigorate supply chains to produce urgently needed artillery ammunition for Ukraine’. The UK was ‘the first European country to provide lethal aid to Ukraine and this played a crucial role in stalling the Russian advance’. Correct. The letter then details, with statistics, our deliveries of materiel and training for Ukrainian forces. For such a small country, the UK’s support is quite impressive. The last paragraph begins: ‘As the Prime Minister told President Zelensky again at the NATO Summit in Vilnius in July 2023, Ukraine’s rightful place is in the NATO Alliance.’ Ah, not so good. I do not for one moment believe NATO was courting Ukraine to join NATO in the decade before the Russian invasion, as the paranoid murderer Putin supposedly convinced himself, but this kind of prime ministerial statement plays straight into his hands. For Putin it is post facto proof and reinforces his paranoia. It is also irresponsible of NATO members like Britain to raise Ukraine’s hopes: it’s not permissible (I always thought) for a country to become a member of NATO whilst that country is in territorial dispute with a neighbour, which Ukraine is likely to be for a long time.

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Heroism and Adventure, Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged A Group Photograph, Alcaic metre, Andrew Tatham, anoraks, badges, British Expeditionary Force, brooches, Caitlin Pirie, Charles Miles, comments, Foreign Office, Friedrich Hölderlin, George Calderon, haikus, I Shall Not Be Away Long, Japan, Jim Miles, koi carp, military aid, NATO, Northamptonshire Regiment, paranoia, swords, The Clay Akita, The Great War, typos, Ukraine, verse translation, Vladimir Putin, World War I | Leave a comment

Susette speaks

Posted on April 15, 2024 by Patrick Miles

Mask of Susette Gontard by Landelin Ohnmacht

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Personal commentary | Tagged 'If from this distance', Aether, Alcaic metre, beyond the grave, death masks, dialogue, dreams, Friedrich Hölderlin, German literature, life after death, logosphere, love, lovers, madness, mistresses, paradise, poems, poetry in translation, Susette Gontard, translation, Wenn aus der Ferne | Leave a comment

From the diary of a writer-publisher: 28

Posted on March 25, 2024 by Patrick Miles

Costume parade after completing ‘Armageddon’ in 49.18 minutes

11 February 2024
Do not be put off trying an ‘Escape Room’ because you fear claustrophobia: you aren’t actually locked into it, you simply have to solve a series of problems (often involving locks) in order to complete a narrative within a set time and thereby regain your ‘freedom’.

Yesterday Sam2 gave me for my birthday an hour in one in Cambridge with the rest of the family. We were ‘locked’ in a very realistic space station whose task was to stop an approaching asteroid from annihilating Earth (‘Armageddon’). We had to work out in an hour how, in the absence of the incapacitated crew, to put the correct information into a large control panel that would enable us to fire a missile at the asteroid and destroy it.

To get the information, you had to notice everything around you very quickly and work out how it might be connected. Lateral thinking. Rather arithmetical at times. The four of us noted different things, then pooled our information to solve one puzzle after another. Being a family, we found working as a team easier than we had expected. At times you bounce along, at others you are stumped. We were doing very well until the last clue needed to fire the missile. It seemed that we had exhausted everything. I had noticed a tiny symbol inside a letter on a notice board that we hadn’t used. I kept coming back to it, but concluded each time that it was irrelevant. With time running out, we had to phone the games master for a clue. It turned out that the ‘symbol’ depicted the workings of an unassuming item in the room, which we had all thought was simply functional and not part of the puzzles. When we interacted with it, we could see the digits on its components that we needed to fire the missile.

Truly, I haven’t enjoyed a game so much in ages!

24 February
On Twitter a sickening video, probably taken by a drone, of a large bird of prey feeding off the neck and brain of a dead Russian soldier.

An acquaintance’s Russian friend writes: ‘Our life more and more resembles living on a desert island. Railway communications with Europe have been suspended and now the Post has announced that it’s not accepting items for abroad. There are fewer and fewer air services, and very few airline desks open in Moscow. The sanctions are impacting more and more on people’s everyday lives.’

Russians also seem increasingly insulted by the cynicism of the ‘election’. The murder of Navalnyi (a catacomb Christian) was obviously a brutal desperate measure. On television, even Putin cronies like Medvedev and Peskov are beginning to sound and look desperate.

3 March
We are now two months behind with producing my book of stories The White Bow:Ghoune, which Sam&Sam were to bring out this spring. There are all kinds of extraneous reasons for this, but the main one is that I started writing the penultimate story intending it to be 10,000 words and it is expanding towards 25,000. It could easily be made into a short novel, but I shall never go there. It’s subtitled ‘A science fiction’ and the scientific dimension, I must admit, took longer to research than I was expecting. It concerns the scents that male butterflies shower the females with during courtship. These can be smelt by humans, whereas the scents produced by the female butterflies to direct males cannot. The male of the continental Cleopatra Brimstone, for instance, scatters a scent described in a classic publication of 1945 as ‘rich and powerful, freesia’. I remember a hyperactive little colony of Green-Veined White butterflies when I was a boy that smelt subtly of lemon (1945: ‘lemon verbena’), but I did not know at the time what produced it.

Male of the Cleopatra (Gonepteryx cleopatra)

10 March
I finished the first draft of my translation of Hölderlin’s poem ‘Wenn aus der Ferne’ on 3 February and have been fiddling with it ever since. It’s time now to leave it alone…until the next time. I think I have rendered the Alcaic metre as closely as I can in English. The metre will certainly have a weird effect on some readers. But that all goes with the other-worldly, some might say ‘mad’, sense of the poem. The most unsatisfactory part of the version (for me) is that I have had very slightly to pad it with adjectives because German nouns tend to contain more syllables than English ones, leaving feet to fill. The choice of these monosyllabic English adjectives has been agonising. On the other hand, adjectives are one of the English language’s most natural strengths, so I don’t think they stick out in the translation; which I entitle ‘Susette speaks’. I will post an image of it on 15 April.

15 March
I am going through my library trying to create a bit of space here and there for new books. This morning I came upon three by a Russian prose writer whom I will not name, but who was born in 1937 and regarded in the late Soviet period as highly original, off piste and somehow dissidental. One of them, a collection of short stories, was given to me in Moscow in 1970 by a very literate Russian friend, and I understood that the book was much sought after. The second is an offprint of a long short story published in 1988 and inscribed to me by the author on his visit to Cambridge that year. The last is his first long novel, nicely published in Russia the following year (350 pages plus 50 pages of self-commentary), which caused a stir amongst Russianists so I thought I should buy it.

The sad fact is, I have tried to read these works on at least four separate occasions over the years, but never been able to get further than the first few pages. Let me leave that fact there. It doesn’t necessarily mean anything. What sticks in my mind about this author is the day — I see from his lengthy inscription that it was 19 July 1988 — that I spent taking him round Cambridge at the request of the British Council. I showed him places associated with famous Russian cultural figures, such as Newnham College where Turgenev met women undergraduates, the Senate House where Tchaikovsky received an honorary degree, the sports shop in Trinity Street above which Nabokov lived as an undergraduate, then I suppose we had lunch somewhere, although I can’t remember it, and in the afternoon he had a mission: to go to the Singer Sewing and Knitting Centre in Cambridge and buy for £130 a sophisticated sewing machine. We did this. He paid in cash and took the machine away with him, first to London then to the USSR. However, he was so well informed about the export sale of British sewing machines that he knew he could claim back the VAT on it (£20) if he filled out a special form in the shop, with his Moscow address, passport number etc, which he did. Obviously, there was no feasible means of Singer refunding him in Moscow, so the ruse was for me to give him the £20 there and then and Singer to pay me the refund by cheque later, which they did.

As it happened, I did not have an extra £20 in my wallet, so before accompanying the writer and his sewing machine to Cambridge station we went to an ATM that had recently been installed in a wall off the market. The writer had never seen such a device before and hung back warily when I went over to it. ‘What,’ he exclaimed, ‘do you mean to say people can just take money straight out of a wall?!’ ‘Well,’ I replied as I got the cash out, ‘you do have to have it there in the first place! One day, perhaps Russia will have them.’ ‘No it won’t!’ he thundered at me with sudden vehemence. ‘Russia will have a path of its own! It will always do things its own way, not imitate you in the West’. It turned into a veritable tirade. I must admit I was slightly shocked, and I remember blaming myself for making such an unguarded comment. But in retrospect I shouldn’t have been shocked. This man was a Russian ‘intellectual’ through and through, almost a parody of one in his extreme literary cleverness, and time has shown that ‘scratch a Russian intellectual and you find a Great Russian nationalist underneath’ (to paraphrase V.I. Ul’ianov).

23 March

Russian icon, 16th century

My favourite icon subject is The Myrrh-Bearing Women. This was the second earliest depiction of the Resurrection, but it became superseded by the apocryphal subject Christ’s Harrowing of Hell. Note that in the example above, the resurrected Christ is not present in the background as the ‘gardener’; he’s not there at all. In his place is a terrifying archway, with a symbolic city above it. Both archways are mouths of Hell. The angel in the foreground, the empty tomb and the haloed women are the strongest possible opposites to that nothingness and death, hence they embody the triumph of the Resurrection. For us, perhaps, it is too easy not to realise that this icon works through visual counterpoint.

Happy Easter!

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.