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July 555. Oscar Wilde, Lady Windemere’s Fan [1892] about 140 pages
Lady Windemere’s Fan was the first of Wilde’s major plays. It portrays the hypocrisy of the British upper classes, particularly with regard to marriage.
July 656. Oscar Wilde, Salomé [1893, Eng. tr. 1894] about 125 pages
Originally written in French, Salomé is unlike Wilde’s other plays; it is written in a poetic, symbolic style, rather than a realistic and witty one. The subject matter, the death of John the Baptist, is ultimately from the Bible, but probably owes more to the story by Flaubert. It was long banned in England, because it deals with scriptural characters who were forbidden to be portrayed on stage, rather than from any moral objections.
57. Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance [1893] about 100 pages
A Woman of No Importance is the second of Wilde’s four plays about the hypocrisy of the British upper classes. All seem to have similar plots, and are of course full of witty dialogue and end with revelations to the spectator and the prevention of revelations to the other characters. The distinction of this play is the use of an American character as a foil to the British aristocrats. The main problem with the play is that it breaks into two completely different parts, the first acts being total satire and the last acts being serious and somewhat too didactic.
July 7
58. Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband [1895] about 100 pages
The third of Wilde’s social comedies, An Ideal Husband is somewhat different in that it deals in a light way with political corruption rather than marital relations, although that is not entirely absent. It is similar in its theme of forgiveness and tolerance.
July 859. Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest [1895] 187 pages
The Importance of Being Earnest is Wilde’s best-known and most popular play. It is also the Wilde play I will be seeing later this month at the Utah Shakespeare Festival, which mixes Shakespeare plays with more modern fare. I saw it performed about fifty years ago in a college student performance with one of my roommates in the starring role, but I haven’t seen it again and as far as I can remember I have never read it before.
It is the least problematic of his social satires, which may be why it is the most popular; it is a very witty comedy about two men who lie about their identities to their potential fiancées with the expected entanglements. A fun read and a good introduction if you haven’t read anything else by Oscar Wilde.
July 1160. Philip Traci, The Love Play of Antony and Cleopatra: A Critical Study of Shakespeare’s Play [1970] 171 pages
Since I am going to see Antony and Cleopatra in about two weeks, I decided to read the only book specifically on the play which I had (undoubtedly purchased at some point for ten or twenty cents from the sale table at some used bookstore). Traci’s book originated as a dissertation; it is mostly a “survey of the literature”, and not a very good one at that. He basically just summarizes every famous critic who has written on the play in a few sentences and says that they did not understand the meaning of the play. When he gets to his own view of the meaning of the play (in the last ten or fifteen pages), beyond the trivial observation that it is about love, his views are very strange and not at all what I got from reading it. The book did occasionally point out some pun or image I hadn’t noticed, but otherwise the only good thing I can say about it is that, if it didn’t talk much about the play, at least it was talking about people who were talking about the play, while ten years later it would undoubtedly have been talking about people who were talking about literary theory. Perhaps it might have a use as a kind of annotated bibliography, but then it is rather outdated.
July 1461. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, In the First Circle: A Novel. The Restored Text [1955-1958, Eng. tr. 2009] 741 pages
This month’s book for the World Literature Group I am in on Goodreads is Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s In the First Circle. It has taken me three weeks to read this long novel (admittedly I was also reading other things), and three days to write this review. I remain somewhat ambivalent about it.
Written between 1955 and 1958, it was his first book, although One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was published first (the only one legally published in the USSR). According to the introduction, Solzhenitsyn prepared a self-censored (“lightened”) version in an unsuccessful attempt to get it approved for publication in the Soviet Union, and that was the version translated originally into English and published in 1968 as The First Circle. The version I read was the “restored text” that was first published in Russian in the Collected Works (1978) and in this translation in 2009, a few months after the author’s death. It was “refined”, so I am not sure what was in the original and what may have been added later. I have not compared it with the earlier translation, but going by the introduction it seems that the parts I had the most problems with were the ones that were “restored”.
Like One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, In the First Circle is based on Solzhenitsyn’s own experiences in prison; in this case, not the deeper hell of the labor camps, but the “first circle” of hell, a “special camp” or sharaska for prisoners with scientific or engineering skills needed by the Soviet regime. Ostensibly, it is a kind of detective story about a diplomat, Innokenty Volodin, although we know from the beginning that Innokenty is the guilty one and there is never any doubt that he will be caught. His “crime” in the “lightened” edition was a simple
act of humanity, trying to keep a colleague from compromising himself in the eyes of the regime. In the “restored” version, he actually betrays his country to the Americans in an attempt to keep the USSR from getting information about the atomic bomb. Although the reader is supposed to sympathize with him as a “hero” who risked his life to save the world from the danger of Stalin getting the bomb (actually, whatever technical information the Soviets may have gotten through espionage, essentially they were quite capable of building it on their own; the only “secret” was that it was possible, and the Americans revealed that with Hiroshima and Nagasaki) I personally could not really sympathize; the United States is the only country which ever used the bomb, Stalin never did, the USSR had the right to defend itself, and Stalin’s getting the bomb may well have prevented the US from using it again in Korea, Vietnam, or against the USSR itself. Another character, supposed to be one of the most sympathetic in the novel, actually says he would not mind having himself, his family and all his neighbors killed in a nuclear attack if it would destroy the Soviet government.
In fact, the detective story really plays very little role in the novel; it comes back from time to time, but it seems more like a pretext for the book because a realist novel needs to have some plot. What the book really is, is a series of episodes about a couple dozen different prisoners, their experiences in the prison (and various other prisons in reminiscences), their conversations and their opinions about life and politics. Although I have no way of knowing, I can well believe that his account of life in Stalin’s prison system is fairly true, and perhaps also his accounts of life outside at the time. (The novel is set in four days over Christmas of 1949.) When he goes beyond this and tries to describe the early history of the Revolution before Stalin, he is on much shakier ground. Solzhenitsyn was born in 1918, so he was about six when Lenin died and hardly into his teens when Stalin consolidated his power with the purges and the Moscow Trials. Whatever he says concerning times before Stalin is based on hearsay, and his method is essentially to believe whatever is most opposed to the official history, even if it is mutually contradictory. The best (or rather worst) examples of this are the chapter which takes place in Stalin’s mind, and the chapter about Uncle Avery.
The chapter which takes place in Stalin’s consciousness is one of the most interesting parts of the book. (I realized when reading it that it was the model for the chapter in Mao’s consciousness in Ismail Kadare’s The Concert.) It is partly factual, partly an attempt to present Stalin’s personality, and partly very imaginary. The most imaginary parts, including the claim that the young Stalin was a Tsarist spy in the Bolshevik party, are the ones added in the “restored” version. In his mind, Stalin distances himself from the “naive” and “fanatical” Lenin and Trotsky, who actually believed in the possibility of world revolution, which Stalin considers a total fantasy.
The chapter with Uncle Avery, on the other hand, presents the view that Lenin from the beginning was identical to Stalin, only interested in personal power, and that all the promises of the Revolution were deliberate deception. As with many anti-Bolshevik writers, his major proof is an idealization of the dissolved Constituent Assembly as an ideal democratic assembly, which I have commented on in an earlier review.
Considering the episodes from the prison which make up most of the novel, the characters represent a fairly broad spectrum of opinions. One important position which is omitted is that of the opposition within the Bolshevik party (apart from the minor character of Abramson, who is never really developed); I suppose this could be justified on the grounds that they would not still be surviving in 1949, and certainly not in a “special” prison, but it does skew the discussion. There are three characters which stand out and receive far more attention than any of the others: Nerzhin, who according to the introduction represents Solzhenitsyn himself, Sologdin, who represents Christianity and a certain nostalgia for the Old Regime, and Rubin, who considers himself a Marxist and argues that the Stalinist deformations are simply a temporary period in the march toward Communism, and justifies much of Stalin’s rule, even though he feels guilt at some of his own participation in his crimes (forced collectivization and so forth.) Again, I can believe that these were the main positions represented among the prison population in 1949.
In the end, however, Solzhenitsyn is not a historian but a novelist, and we should not look to novelists for political analysis. As Lukacs says, it is enough that they ask the important questions, not that they give correct answers. We need to judge the book as a work of literature. What can we say about it?
First, that it is in fact a work of literature, unlike many of the novels about Stalinism which are simply propaganda disguised as literature (e.g. Darkness at Noon). Secondly, it is a first novel and has many of the faults which are often associated with first novels: it is overambitious, too long and has too many characters; it is not well-structured; I would get interested in one subplot and he would move on to another, and by the time the first one came back, if I remembered where it ended up at all, I would no longer feel the same interest in it. On the other hand, the characterization is masterful; all the characters, no matter how minor, seem like real people and the dialogue almost never seems forced or unnatural to the characters.
I am not sure to whom I would recommend this. Perhaps to someone who can read sufficiently critically to see both what is right and what is wrong about it — and has lots of time for reading.
July 1762. Franklin M. Dickey, Not Wisely But Too Well: Shakespeare’s Love Tragedies [1957] 205 pages
Primarily a study of three of Shakespeare’s plays, Romeo and Juliet, Troilus and Cressida, and Antony and Cleopatra, this book begins with several chapters about the Elizabethan view of love and Shakespeare’s two long poems Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece. Throughout, it discusses the plays in their context of Renaissance literature and in the case of Antony and Cleopatra the classical and mediaeval background as well. I found much of what he said both interesting and well-argued. There is very little discussion of modern critics, except in general terms, and no literary “theory”.
July 1963. Oscar Wilde, A Florentine Tragedy [unfinished, pub. 1908] 33 pages
A Florentine Tragedy is one of Wilde’s two unfinished plays; I read it just for completeness. Judging by what exists, it probably wasn’t much of a loss that he didn’t complete it. The plot is rather conventional, although Wilde might have done something unexpected with it; perhaps it was meant as a parody.
July 19
64. Oscar Wilde, The Happy Prince and Other Stories [1888] 96 pages
One of Wilde’s three collections of “fairy tales”, The Happy Prince and Other Stories is often published as a children’s book, although I am not sure that was his intention. The five stories included were “The Happy Prince”, “The Selfish Giant”, “The Nightingale and the Rose”, “The Devoted Friend”, and “The Remarkable Rocket.” They all contrast the enjoyments of the rich with the miseries of the poor, and contain some of Wilde’s irony, although less subtly than in the plays. It was a fun, short read (about forty minutes at most).
July 2065. Serhiy Zhadan, Voroshilovgrad [2010, Eng. tr. 2016] 445 pages [Kindle]
Zhadan is a popular Ukrainian novelist, poet and political activist, who is now a soldier at the front in the war with Russia. His novel Voroshilovgrad was written before the war, in 2010, and is not explicitly political, although it shows the violence of the capitalist restoration after the collapse of the Stalinist regime. It is set in the Donbass region, along the border with Russia, somewhere near the former city of Voroshilovgrad; the text uses Voroshilovgrad, which technically no longer exists (it is now Luhansk), as a symbol of transience.
The plot involves a man named Herman who left his home city of Starobilsk (Zhadan’s birthplace, in the Luhansk region) to take over the gas station run by his brother Yura, who has mysteriously disappeared (allegedly he suddenly emigrated to Amsterdam, but no one manages to contact him there.) There is a gang of gangster-capitalists of the kind that blossomed in post-Stalinist Eastern Europe trying to pressure him to sell the station to their chain of gas stations, and Herman together with his brother’s employees Kocha, Injured, and Olga decides to resist. There is also an important subplot about a man named Ernst, who is trying to save an abandoned airport from the same gang.
The story is largely told in a Romantic style, although there are some impossible events which may be dreams, hallucinations or just magic realism. There is no real ending, and we never learn many of the most important facts, or whether Herman and his friends and allies succeed in defeating the gang or not. The theme of the novel is the importance of solidarity among friends.
July 2366. Oscar Wilde, Intentions and The Soul of Man Under Socialism [1891] 333 pages
This was the fourth volume of the 1909 Nottingham Society edition of the Complete Writings of Oscar Wilde. Intentions was a composite volume published in 1891, which contained four separate works.
The Decay of Lying, originally published in The Nineteenth Century in 1889, is a dialogue in Wilde’s most “contrarian” style. (To succeed in this one needs the brilliance and wit of a Wilde, which the contrarians of today, such as Christopher Higgins and Slavoj Zizek, are totally lacking in.) If we take away the paradox, which of course is to take away the essence of the dialogue, it is claiming that Art is never realistic, and that writers who try to imitate reality accurately are not real artists. He says that Shakespeare, for example, cares nothing about giving an accurate description of actual life. The dialogue is the origin of the claim that “Life Imitates Art” rather than the other way around.
Pen, Pencil and Poison, originally published in Fortnightly Review in 1889, is a short piece on the art criticism and criminal activities of Thomas Griffiths Wainewright.
The Critic as Artist, a long contrarian dialogue in two parts, originally published in The Nineteenth Century in 1890, discusses literature and criticism, opposing all the usual platitudes; it has much that is of value, although exaggerated. It is not clear how much of it is actually Wilde’s real attitude and how much is just pose, although it is usually taken as the statement of Wilde’s own aesthetic creed.
The Truth of Masks is not written in dialogue form. It is basically an essay on Shakespeare, arguing that he is meticulously accurate in his descriptions of life, particularly in costume.
The Soul of Man Under Socialism is not part of Intentions but was published separately in Fortnightly Review in 1891 and republished as a book in 1895. The book begins and ends with talking about socialism; this is not of course Marxist socialism but rather influenced by the Fabians, with many of whom Wilde was friends. It argues in a somewhat contrarian fashion (but I think it has a lot of truth) that socialism represents the triumph of individualism over bourgeois altruism, and ignores the methods of achieving socialism for a description of what it will mean once achieved, with the elimination of the state. (This is what all socialists, including Marxists and anarchists, have as a goal, although it seems strange to people who confuse socialism with Stalinism, and the reason I would recommend this little pamphlet.) Most of the book, however, is discussing the nature of literature and art, and since it is in Wilde’s own person and not a dialogue I think it is probably a better description of Wilde’s actual opinions, and practice, than the previous dialogues
July 2767. Oscar Wilde, The Rise of Historical Criticism [1879, pub. 1908] 108 pages
One of Wilde’s earliest works, this was written while a student at Oxford for a prize competition in the University (the prize was not awarded.) It is a good example of Wilde’s writing when he was serious rather than paradoxical. He discusses the rise of critical historiography in classical Greece, covering mainly Herodotus, Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle, and Polybius.
July 27
68. Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde at Oxford: A Lecture Delivered at the Library of Congress, on March 1, 1983 30 pages
This is a pamphlet published by the Library of Congress about Oscar Wilde’s life as a student at Oxford. Richard Ellmann is also the author of a long and somewhat controversial biography of Wilde. The pamphlet is interesting; Wilde is a complex and contradictory character, and Ellmann definitely has a particular interpretation, which is probably as good as anyone else’s.
July 3169. Oscar Wilde, Miscellanies (Complete Writings, v. 8) [pub. 1908] 321 pages
The final volume of the 1908 Complete Writings is as the title suggests a miscellaneous collection of writings which did not fit into any of the earlier volumes. It contains twenty articles, thirteen letters, some unfinished works and two lectures. I read it simply because I had it, and I have a completeness mania in reading. It does cast some light, though not very much, on his personality and works. Along with the next four books, I will have read everything by Wilde except his reviews and his letters, and then after two rather old biographies I will return to my other projects.
July 31
70. Oscar Wilde, The Duchess of Padua [1883] 108 pages
Wilde’s second play, this was much better than Vera but not comparable to his later plays. It is a melodramatic imitation of Jacobean drama, with passion and murder, which is rarely performed.
July 31
71. Oscar Wilde, A House of Pomegranates [1891] 104 pages
Wilde’s second collection of stories, this is similar to the stories in The Happy Prince. It contains four stories, “The Young King”, “The Birthday of the Infanta”, “The Fisherman and His Soul”, and “The Star Child”.
July 31
72. Oscar Wilde, Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime and Other Stories [1891] 192 pages
The third collection of Wilde’s stories, this contains five stories, “Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime”, “The Canterville Ghost” (which I had read previously). “The Sphinx Without a Secret”, “The Model Millionaire”, and “The Portrait of Mr. W.H.” The last-mentioned story is one of Wilde’s most interesting, giving under the guise of fiction a new (though not entirely original to Wilde) theory of the dedicatee of Shakespeare’s Sonnets.
Aug. 1
73. Oscar Wilde, De Profundis [1897, unexpurgated ed. pub. 1962] 163 pages
The last of Oscar Wilde’s works, apart from “The Ballad of Reading Gaol”, De Profundis is a long letter to his lover Lord Alfred Douglas written while in prison. It was published in a very much shortened version soon after his death, a longer version in the 1930s, and the complete “unexpurgated” version in the Collected Letters in 1962, from which this Vintage paperback is taken.
The ostensible purpose of the letter is to accuse Douglas of being an unintellectual and unimaginative person who has destroyed Wilde’s life by his selfishness and hatred for his father. Douglas spent much of the rest of his life trying to refute it and reinterpret his relationship to Wilde, although the most damaging parts were not published until long after his death. Of course, biographers have no choice but to try to decide the questions, but if I have learned anything through long experience it is not to judge between (ex-)lovers, given that the facts by definition are not accessible to any independent third party. Perhaps the best approach is that taken by Jacques Barzun in the introduction to this edition, to take it as a literary tragedy.
In any case, the real interest to a modern reader is not in the personal scandal but in Wilde’s retrospective summary of the purposes of his life and art. There is also a long digression which presents an aesthetic version of Christianity, which would be of more interest to someone who takes religion more seriously than I do.
Aug. 574. Frances Winwar, Oscar Wilde and the Yellow ’Nineties [1940] 381 pages
After reading most of Wilde’s writings last month, I decided to read the two (rather old) biographies which I had in my garage. Winwar was what is called a “Romantic biographer”, which I assume means that she emphasizes the personal and especially the scandalous side of Wilde’s life.. She not only gives scandalous anecdotes about Wilde’s relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas, and other relationships of his last few years, but also digs up scandals concerning his earlier life, his parents, and even persons who had no connection with him other than having been at Oxford at the same time he was. She has little about his actual writings, except for trying to draw connections with other “decadents” (she wrote a collective biography of the “decadents”, so perhaps that is understandable). There is some interesting material but I would take it with many grains of salt.
Aug. 875. Hesketh Pearson, Oscar Wilde: His Life and Wit [1946] 343 pages
The other old biography I had of Oscar Wilde, this is somewhat more important in that it is based largely on interviews with people who actually knew Wilde fairly well. It is also better than the previous biography in that it does not concentrate so largely on the scandals, but as the subtitle suggests gives many anecdotes about his witty conversations, as well as a bit more on his writings.
Aug. 1276. D.T. Potts, The Archaeology of Elam: Formation and Transformation of an Ancient Iranian State [1999] 490 pages
My reading project on ancient history is moving east into Iran. This book was written for professional archaeologists and archaeology students, which I’m not, rather than for general readers, so it was somewhat difficult; but what made it the most difficult and frustrating is simply the nature of Elam itself. From my readings on Mesopotamia, I had the impression that Elam was essentially Susa and its surrounding area, and this was in fact long the view of historians, but as Potts points out, the word “Elam” simply means “highlands”, and Susa is in the lowlands. Susa, although at times the “capital” of an Elamite polity (and at other times a dependency of one or another Mesopotamian state) was actually just the projection of the highland Elamite culture into the adjoining lowlands. The core of Elamite culture was in the ethnically heterogeneous tribes of the Zagros mountains and their foothills, from “Awan” and “Shimaski” to Anshan in the southeast.
Contrary to what one might expect from that, the book concentrates mostly on Susa. The reason in simple; it is the only part of Elam which has been sufficiently well excavated to allow for any sort of history; even then much of the story is derived from Mesopotamian and other external texts. Anshan has been only partially excavated, and the other settlements of the highlands have not been excavated at all and in fact in most cases have not even been identified. Given the present regime in Iran and its relations with the rest of the world, this is not likely to change in the near future.
Thus much of the book consists in the same history of relations between Susa and Mesopotamia which I had already read about in books about Sumer, Akkad, and Assyria, told from the perspective of Susa. This is not to say that that perspective is not interesting, or that the narrative of Susa doesn’t give a different viewpoint on the reason for events, which often seem arbitrary from the Mesopotamian side.
The book also differs from other books on the Near East by continuing through the Achaemenid, Seleucid, Parthian and Sassanian periods, and in fact through most of the Middle Ages, although the farther it goes the less we know about the Elamites until they finally disappear entirely with the conquests of Tamerlane.
This was a very interesting book, but I would probably not recommend it to anyone not specializing in archaeology or Near Eastern history. I will be following up with four or five books on the Persians and other later peoples in the region.
Aug. 2477. A.T. Olmstead, History of the Persian Empire [1948] 568 pages
The first two sentences of Olmstead’s preface are “Eighty years have passed since George Rawlinson . . . published the first edition of his Five Great Monarchies of the Ancient Eastern World. During these eighty years ancient history has been made over completely.” I have resisted the temptation to begin with Rawlinson’s 1867 book, although I have a copy of it, but today Olmstead’s book is itself almost eighty years old, and is certainly also very outdated. It is, however, the most complete book I have on ancient Iran under the Achaemenids (the period from Cyrus II, who became “King of Anshan” in 539 BCE and established the Empire in the succeeding decades, to the defeat of Darius III by Alexander the Great two hundred years later) and so I decided to begin with this and supplement it with later (but much shorter) works. (The book actually begins with a chapter on “Iranian Origins”, but this is the most outdated part; fortunately the subject is dealt with in the previous book I read, Pott’s Archaeology of Elam, which is only a quarter of a century old.)
Much (perhaps disproportionately much) of Olmstead’s history is devoted to the relations of Persia with Egypt, Judea, and of course Greece, and I had already read much of this material from the perspectives of those regions, but as in the case of Elam and Mesopotamia in Pott’s book, it all makes more sense when considered against the Persian background. The Greeks do not come off very well in his account, the Egyptians perhaps somewhat better, and it is astonishing how the Biblical prophets were usually totally mistaken in their prophecies. (The story of Ezra and Nehemiah was interesting, though, considered in relation to Persian policies.) Generally, the history of all four regions is presented as a series of personal conflicts and revolts, although he does consider overtaxation as the major cause of the weakness of the Empire; the class conflicts of the landowners in the countryside with the mercantile interests of the cities is disguised by the terms “conservatives” and “democrats.”
After the first few reigns, the eastern part of the Empire tends to get short shrift; this is perhaps understandable given the distribution of the evidence, and the lack of both textual and archaeological sources.
Aug. 2578. Nora Ikstena, Soviet Milk [2015, Eng. tr. 2018] 159 pages [Kindle]
Nora Ikstena is one of the best-known contemporary Latvian authors. Soviet Milk tells the story of the dysfunctional relationship between two women, a mother who is a gynecologist with psychological issues and her daughter, about nineteen or twenty at the end of the novel. The book alternates between short sections in the first person by each of them, mostly talking about the other. The mother was born at the end of the Second World War, while the daughter was born on October 15, 1969 – the same day as the author. Whether this is supposed to suggest an autobiographical element I don’t know. The mother’s mother and stepfather are also significant characters.
The main plot of the two women is told against the background of Soviet Latvia, and obviously a major theme of the novel is to show the conditions under Russian domination; however, I didn’t find the political aspects particularly insightful. Essentially, it was just what we all know, that the Baltic “Republics” were bureaucratic Stalinist dictatorships under Russian control. We are supposed to conclude that the mother’s issues were the fault of the Russians, because of the mistreatment of her father at the end of the war, and her Latvian patriotism, but this is never convincingly shown. In fact, she is allowed to study in Leningrad, where her promising medical career is side-railed when she attacks someone with a meat tenderizing hammer and puts him into the hospital. This is supposed to be political oppression by the Russians, but really, wouldn’t any country have responded the same way to that sort of incident by a foreign student? She is still allowed to work in a clinic in a smaller town, until she begins missing work due to her psychological issues.
The daughter doesn’t understand her mother’s hatred for the Soviet system until she experiences the repression herself in her school, where a teacher she particularly likes is dismissed on political grounds, and she is required to denounce him. This is a far more believable example of what Stalinism meant in the countries it controlled. Of course, it is also the same as any dictatorship tries to do, and we are slipping into it here with Trump’s attempt to enforce his political agenda in the universities by threats of reprisals and deportations. The novel ends with the collapse of the USSR and the independence of Latvia; I don’t know whether or not Latvia has fared any better than most of the other formerly Stalinist states.
Aug. 2979. The Pancatantra: The Book of India’s Folk Wisdom [ca. 300?] 195 pages
The Pancatantra is a collection of stories designed ostensibly to educate about political science; it is anonymous and the date could be anywhere between the third and mid-sixth centuries, although most scholars put it about the beginning of the fourth century. The style of stories embedded within stories makes it a forerunner of the later Indian and Arabic collections down to the Thousand Nights and a Night which I read over the last two years. Nearly all the stories in The Pancatantra are animal fables, interspersed with didactic verse.
I read this in the 1997 English translation by Patrick Olivelle, in the Oxford World Classics, which is based on Franklin Edgerton’s 1924 reconstruction of the original Sanskrit text. It is worth reading for anyone interested in the oldest traditions of popular fantasy literature.
Sept. 280. Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade, Crimes de l’Amour (Gay et Doucé) [1881] 272 pages (+12) [Kindle, in French]
My eighteenth-century reading project is up to the Marquis de Sade, who was probably (at least according to some critics) one of the three most important French prose fiction writers of the later eighteenth century (just before and after the Revolution), along with the similar if less extreme Pierre Choderlos de Laclos and the early science fiction writer Sébastien Mercier, who are also on my planned reading list; mainly I will be reading a couple of secondary works, but I wanted to read a few of his non-pornographic writings to get an idea of him as a literary author. I downloaded this old book from Project Gutenberg which was published by the nineteenth-century “erotic” publishing house, Gay et Doucé, thinking it was the complete short story collection Crimes de l’Amour, but it was actually only the preliminary essay “Idée sur les Romans” and the first story, “Juliette et Raunai”, together with a fairly long and very confused “Notice bio-bibliographique” by Pierre Gustave Brunet. The essay by Sade gives his views on literature, and the story, set at the time of the Protestant “Conspiracy of Amboise”, gives a typical example of his writing style when he is not writing pornography, so it really did have what I was looking for. (I hadn’t realized that the name of this publishing house, named for its two partners, became a term for “homosexual” in France; possibly the origin of the English use of “gay”?)
I also downloaded (separately) Sade’s early “Dialogue entre un prêtre et un moribond”, about twelve pages, which was an attack on religion. I’m also thinking of reading his novel Aline et Valcours, but that may be more than I can take; he’s not really a very good writer, even without considering his subject matter.
Sept. 5
81. Marguerite de Navarre, Clement Marot, etc, (various selections from the Internet) [mid-16th century] [in French or Spanish]
This week I have been reading a lot of Middle French poetry, mostly by Clement Marot, from the sixteenth century from various sources on the Internet. I won’t even try to estimate the number of pages as they were almost all unpaged HTML. I started with a few short poems by Marguerite, but mostly I was reading Marot, and mostly from the website ClementMarot.com. This website based in Holland had two of his longer poems, Enfer and Avantnaissance, all forty-two of his Chansons, and many of his Rondeaux, Ballades, Epistres and Epigrammes. Most had translations into English and/or Dutch. (It also had his translation of the Psalms, but I didn’t read that.) From other sites I read a few poems, including the long Egloge au Roys soubz noms de Pan et Robin. I’ve also been reading some Spanish poetry from the same period from two print anthologies I have, mainly by Garcilaso de las Vegas.
Sept. 1582. Articles on Spanish poetry from Criticón (15 articles, 310 pages, in Spanish)
I’ve been following up on my reading of Garcilaso de las Vegas by reading a number of articles from a journal I found on a Cervantes web page, called Criticón. For my comments on the particular articles see my thread.
Roig, Adrien, ¿Quienes fueron Salicio y Nemoroso? (Criticón, 4, 1978) 37 pages — This article asks what real persons the characters of Salicio and Nemorosa in Garcilaso’s Eglogas are intended to represent. It discusses past answers, and concludes that Nemerosa (as is generally accepted) is Garcilaso himself, that Elisa and Galatea both represent Isabel Freyre (again the most common view) and proposes the new view that Salicio is Sá de Miranda. Given how little I know about the literature of the period, the article had many things that were new to me about these persons and their relationships, but I don’t really find it that useful to speculate about real people who may or may not be hidden under fictional characters; I’m more interested in how the characters function within the fiction of the poems.
Carrizo Rueda, Sofia, Otra fuente para el soneto V de Garcilaso y la suerte del culto al amor (Criticón, 38, 1987) 10 pages — The article discusses similarities between Garcilaso’s fifth sonnet and a canción of Juan de Mena which was probably a “source” for it. The images in both poems belong to a long tradition going back to the Bible and classical antiquity; Renaissance poetry was more about successful reworkings of older material than about “originality” in the nineteenth-century sense.
Granja, Agustín de la, Garcilaso y la ninfa “degollada” (Criticón, 69, 1997) 10 pages — The article offers a new solution to a crux in Garcilaso’s third Egloga.
Ly, Nadine, La rescritura del soneto primero de Garcilaso (Criticón, 74, 1998) 21 pages — The article reprints nineteen later poems which were based on Garcilaso’s first sonnet, itself based on poems of Ovid, Dante and Petrarch. It discusses the Renaissance-Baroque tradition of rescritura (rewriting) as a standard literary practice and suggests reasons why this particular sonnet was so popular with later writers.
Perez López José Luis, La fecha de nacimiento de Garcilaso de la Vega a la luz de un nuevo documento biográfico (Criticón, 78, 2000) 13 pages — The article discusses a newly-found document which confirms the likelihood that Garcilaso was born about 1498 rather than the more traditional date of 1501. The 1498 date seems to have become established, to judge by later articles.
Morros Mestres, Bienvenido, La canción IV de Garcilaso como un infierno de amor: de Garci Sánchez de Badajoz y el Cariteo a Bernardo Tasso (Criticón, 80, 2000) 29 pages — Written by a major scholar of Garcilaso’s poetry, this article discusses various sources/analogues of his fourth Canción and analyses (I think overanalyses) its connections with contemporary philosophical theories of the powers or faculties of the soul.
Madelpeuch, Florence, La inmediatez paradójica o la relación amorosa imposible en las Églogas de Garcilaso de Vega (Criticón, 97-98, 2006) 14 pages — Perhaps the best of all the articles on the Eglogas, because it ignores the question of who the characters “really” were and focuses on what they are actually saying and what it means. It makes a very interesting analogy with the Renaissance attitude toward history.
Morros Mestres, Bienvenido, La muerte de Isabel Freyre y el amor napolitano de Garcilaso: Para un cronología de sus églogas y de otros poemos (Criticón, 105, 2009) 31 pages — This was another article trying to connect the Eglogas with Garcilaso’s biography.
Ramajo Caño, Antonio, “No las francesas armas . . .”: la huella clásica en un epitafio de Garcilaso (Criticón, 113, 2011) 15 pages — This article discusses the use of classical rhetorical topics in his sixteenth sonnet, written as an epitaph for his brother.
Béhar, Roland, Garcilaso de la Vego o la sugestión de la imagen (Criticón, 114, 2012) 23 pages — The article discusses the visual imagery in Garcilaso’s poetry in connection with other poets, artists, and writers on art of the time, as well as classical models, It had some very interesting material.
Gargano, Antonio, “Las estrañas virtudes y hazañs de los hombres”: Épica y panegírico en la Égloga Segunda de Garcilaso de la Vega (Criticón, 115, 2012) 33 pages — The article discusses the influence of the theorists of the “Second Sophistic”, especially Hermogenes, and the poetry of Claudian, on the literary theories of the Renaissance, especially with regard to the basilikòs logos (praise of princes). It gives a close reading of the second half of Garcilaso’s second Egloga.
González Soriano, José Miguel, El Diálogo entre la cabeza y la gorra de Gutierre de Cetina y su precedente italiano Filotimo (Criticón, 80, 2000) 22 pages — I next turned to one of Garcilaso’s early followers, Gutierre de Cetina. Besides a few short poems, I started by reading his very interesting Diálogo entre la cabeza y la gorra, a satire in the tradition of Lucian (unpaged HTML). This article discusses the dialogue and its major source, Pandolfo Collenuccio’s Filotimo, an Italian work.
Pérez-Abadín Barro, Soledad, La poesía de Francisco de la Torre: un proyecto editorial frustrado (Criticón, 90, 2004) 29 pages — The dates of Francisco de la Torre are unknown and controversial; the first printed edition of his poetry was edited by Quevedo, who treated him as a contemporary of Garsilaso, but many modern scholars put him much later, some even suggesting that the name was just a pseudonym of Quevedo himself or his secretary. I read a few of his short poems in a couple anthologies, and then read this article. The author uses an earlier projected edition of his works which never appeared as a hook for discussing the little that is known and the much that is guessed at about his life. The article also has much information about the royal and ecclesiastical censorship in the Siglo de Oro.
Pineda, Victoria, El resplandor de Garcilaso: Nuevos apuntes para una teoria de los estilos en las Anotaciones de Herrera (Criticón, 87-89, 2003) 10 pages — This article discusses Fernando de Herrera’s Annotaciones to his edition of the works of Garcilaso as a work of literary theory, with special attention to his use of resplandor and other metaphors using light.
Martinez Lopez, Maria José, Garcilaso a lo divino: de la letra a la idea (Criticón, 74, 1998) 13 pages — later in the sixteenth century, as the ideology and censorship of the Counter-Reformation became heavier, Sebastián de Córdoba decided to “translate” the secular poetry of Garcilaso into religious verse in a work called Garcilaso a lo divino. This article discusses the work. Judging by the samples included, the poetry was not surprisingly very mediocre.
Sept. 3083. Angharad Price, The Life of Rebecca Jones [2002, Eng. tr. 2010] 160 pages [Kindle]
The Life of Rebecca Jones is the story of the author’s family told as if it is the autobiography of her great-aunt Rebecca. The characters are all real. It actually sounds like an autobiography and some reviewers on Amazon seem to have taken it as nonfiction until the last few sentences. Rebecca was born in 1905, and the novel ends about the time it was written. The novel was written in Welsh and won many awards; the translation is very smooth. The book is an enjoyable short novel about life in an isolated mountain valley in Wales through the twentieth century, written very simply.
October 1184. Juan Ruiz, Arcipreste de Hita, Libro de buen amor [1330, rev. 1343] 397 pages [in Spanish]
One of the half-dozen best-known works from mediaeval Spain, the Arcipreste’s Libro de buen amor is at first sight a compendium of seemingly random episodes, in a form of long-lined verse called “cuaderna via”, occasionally interspersed with poems in a more songlike short line. One of the critical disputes concerning the poem is whether or not it was composed as a unity or put together from poems written for other purposes.
The edition I read was a bilingual, with the original mediaeval text and a modern Spanish translation on facing pages. The difference between the two is not actually that great; apart from a few words, which have disappeared from modern Spanish but are easy to guess at from their equivalents in French, the difference is mostly in spelling.
The theme through most of the book is the narrator’s various attempted but generally unsuccessful love affairs. There is one long episode concerning the courting of Doña Endrina through the mediation of Doña Urraca, an old woman also called Trotaconventos. Both “urraca” and “trotaconvento” are words signifying a bawd. This episode was the main reason I was reading the book, as it was a source for La Celestina which is next on my sixteenth-century project. In the course of this episode, there are many short “examples” which are taken from Aesop or other collections of animal stories.
Another long episode is an allegory of a war between Don Carnal and Doña Cuaresma, that is Sir Flesh and Lady Lent, in which Don Amor also plays a part. There is also a long elegy for Trotaconventos which stands out.
Apparently another critical problem is whether the author is a free-thinker critical of the church, who is sympathetic to the love attempts of the narrator, or a moralizing satirist. The book is so full of irony that it is difficult to decide what are his real inclinations. Whatever his intentions, the book with its varied subject matter is very interesting and enjoyable.
Oct. 1585. Anton Chekhov, Anton Chekhov’s Short Stories Selected and edited by Ralph E. Matlaw (Norton critical edition) [1979] 368 pages
I’m on a short story binge this month, mainly because one of my friends is reading stories and I want to discuss them with her, but also to catch up on my numbers after my worst reading month in the last fifteen years.
A Norton critical edition (the first edition; there is a newer version titled more accurately Selected Stories), this book contained thirty-four of Chekhov’s short stories, in chronological order, from the early, very short comic stories like Chameleon [1884], Oysters [1884], and A Living Chronology [1885], through his “middle period” of more serious stories in the later 1880's, and his masterpieces from the 1890's, to his last two stories, The Bishop [1902] and The Betrothed [1903]. Particular highlights were The Darling [1899] and The Lady with the Dog [1899], but all of these stories are worth reading. It was I think a fairly representative selection of his best work other than the plays and longer works.
Oct. 15
86. Charlotte Perkins Gilman,The Yellow Wallpaper [1892] 10 pages
The Yellow Wallpaper has been read both as a masterpiece of horror fiction and as an early feminist work; it is both, and a very powerful story. I will be following it up this week with her short novel, Herland.
Oct. 16
87. Virginia Woolf, Monday or Tuesday: Eight Stories [1921] 54 pages
Monday or Tuesday was Virginia Woolf’s first collection of stories, and the book that, together with Jacob’s Room a year later, established her reputation as an experimental writer (her previous works were more conventional.) If you enjoy that kind of modernist writing, and I do, this is one of the earliest examples.
Oct. 1888. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland [1915] 124 pages
One of my favorite science fiction stories (from when I used to read a lot of science fiction) was Joanna Russ’ “When It Changed”, published in Harlan Ellison’s Again Dangerous Visions anthology in 1972. Gilman’s utopian novel Herland, written more than a half-century earlier, is based on the same premise: male explorers discover a society composed entirely of women, and have a hard time accepting that it is a stable society which in no way misses the presence of men. In Russ’ story, it is on another planet; in Gilman’s novel, it is in a lost and hidden valley. Both Russ and Gilman were socialist-feminists; in some respects Gilman seems more radical: while on Russ’ Whileaway the society is based on lesbian couples and nuclear families, in Herland child rearing is socialized and the friendships among the women are not exclusive couples.
The plot of the novel has three male adventurers with a small biplane find the hidden valley. One, Terry, is a “macho” male, who never manages to accept the fact that women can accomplish what he finds in Herland, and eventually gets expelled from Herland for his tendencies to violence; another, Jeff, idealizes women; the third, Van, the narrator of the book, is, like Gilman herself, a sociologist, who tries to understand the society, and he provides us with our information about it. The basic ideology of Herland is a kind of universal Motherhood; they have a Mother Goddess but there is no worship and they do not understand the concept. The narrator promises to tell us about the economic system but never gets around to it; but we do learn that it is an egalitarian society with no classes. There is somewhat of a didactic feeling about the book, but Gilman balances it with adventure as well as a book of this type can. Apparently the book was influenced by Bellamy’s Looking Backward. She had previously written another “utopian” novel, unconnected with this one, and followed Herland up with a sequel called Her in Ourland, with Van and his wife, Ellador, from Herland, in the contemporary world of the First World War; the three books are sometimes linked as the Herland trilogy.
Oct. 2289. Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried [1990] 211 pages
It seems as though every important war gives rise to one or two works of real literature (e.g. The Red Badge of Courage, All Quiet on the Western Front, Red Cavalry). I’m not talking about historical novels, which are written after a considerable interval (the definitions range from 25 to 50 years) from research, but novels by persons who were or might have been involved in the events described. I would say that The Things They Carried is in that sense the main literary response to the Vietnam War.
The book is what is often called a “novel in stories”; it alternates stories set during the war with stories about the narrator (essentially the author, but somewhat fictionalized) trying to come to grips with his wartime experience decades later. These are “war stories” but not the type of story which glorifies the war or presents heroic actions; the characters are young men who are thrust into a war none of them really believes in and have to adapt and survive, both physically and mentally. It blends humor and tragedy in a very human way and gives a very real sense of what the war meant to those who were caught up in it. The stories were mostly published separately in the 1980's before being combined into the novel.
Oct. 2490. Kate Chopin, The Awakening and Selected Short Stories [1891-1896] 158 pages [Kindle]
Kate Chopin was a noted author in her own time as a regional writer; most of her work is set in Louisiana. She was largely forgotten until she was rediscovered as a feminist author in the 1970s, although she denied being a feminist or a suffragist. This e-book contained the short novel The Awakening and eight short stories. The Awakening, published in 1894, is the story of a bored and rather neglected middle-class housewife who falls in love at an island resort and “awakens” to the idea that she is an independent person with interests outside her home and family. This certainly seems like a feminist theme, and was controversial at the time it was written, although it is not particularly shocking today.
The book also contained eight short stories, which were all interesting: Beyond the Bayou [1891, pub. 1893] is a symbolic story about a woman who breaks through a literal mental barrier, Ma’ame Pélagie [1892, pub. 1893] is a regional story about the postwar South, Désirée’s Baby [1892, pub. 1893] takes on the theme of interracial relationships. The other stories included were A Respectable Woman [1894], The Kiss [1894, pub. 1895], A Pair of Silk Stockings [1896, pub. 1897], The Locket [1897, pub. 1969], and A Reflection [1899, pub. 1932]. I also read separately The Story of an Hour [1894], which was not included in the book.
Oct. 2791. Elias Lönnrot, The Kalevala [1849, tr. 1989] 734 pages [Kindle]
This month’s reading for a group I am in on Goodreads, The Kalevala is an epic poem in Finnish, stitched together by Elias Lönnrot from oral tradition going back to the early middle ages, first in 1835 and later in a much longer form in 1849. There are at least a half-dozen complete English translations; I chose the 1989 translation by Keith Bosley in the Oxford World Classics, which is available in Open Library.
I called it an epic, but it really something unique. It is based on oral stories which Lönnrot and his colleagues collected in the Karelian region on both sides of the border between Finland, then a province of the Russian Empire, and northwestern Russia. However, he reworked them to make his epic, so it is really not an authentic study in folklore. On the other hand, he did not rework them as radically as Homer did the oral sources of the Iliad and the Odyssey, to make them into a real unity. The stories are really just episodes, only connected by being about the same individuals and by references to a mysterious artifact called the Sampo. Perhaps the closest analogy is the Elder Edda from Iceland. The original stories are in a form of verse called the Kalevala meter, which is a type of trochaic tetrameter; Bosley does not follow this as consistently as some of the earlier versions, but he still manages to convey an idea of the poetic style of the epic.
After a short prologue the poem begins with a creation myth, ending with the creation of the first man, Väinämöinen, and the first ten of the fifty cantos tell stories about him and his quest for a bride in the Northland, in the course of which his friend, the smith Ilmarinen, forges the Sampo for Louhi, the Mistress of the North. Both men are unsuccessful in gaining the bride.There follow five cantos about a man names Lemminkäinen and his quest for a bride, in the course of which he dies but is brought back to life by his mother. The story then returns to Väinämöinen for three cantos, who goes to the Tuonela, the land of the dead, to find spells to build a boat, to seek a bride. However the intended bride prefers his friend Ilmarinen, and there follow seven cantos about Ilmarinen’s quests to win her hand, and about their wedding and return home. We then come back to Lemminkäinen, who is angry for not having been invited to wedding and kills the Master of the North, but flees and hides from the Northlanders’ revenge. Then follows a completely unrelated episode about a man named Kullervo. After the death of Kullervo, the poem returns to Ilmarinen, who forges a bride out of gold but is unable to bring her to life. Then Väinämöinen and Ilmarinen decide to steal the Sampo. After a battle at sea, Louhi hides the sun and moon, but is eventually forced to return them to the sky. Finally in canto 50 there is a very distorted account of the birth of Jesus, who becomes King of Karelia, and Väinämöinen sails away.
Apparently, in a kind of reverse euhemerism, Väinämöinen and Ilmarinen were originally pagan gods who have been humanized as heros. This was an extremely interesting book. It was one of the sources of The Lord of the Rings according to Wikipedia.
Oct. 2892. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations [1776, 5th ed. 1789, mod. ed. 1937] 976 pages
The Wealth of Nations is a book that has been on my reading list for a long time; my friends gave it to me as a farewell present when I moved to another state after my junior year in high school back in 1969. Somehow I never found time to read it until now.
It is a highly significant and influential work, which was the first to try to really understand and describe the capitalist system, and defend it against both the vestiges left behind by feudalism and the mercantilist ideology of the time it was written. He devotes much space to explaining why import duties (i.e. tariffs) are a bad idea, as detrimental to the countries which impose them as to those which they are imposed against; it is amazing that after a quarter of a millennium there are politicians who still think they are some sort of a panacea.
Naturally, being the first attempt of its kind, there is much that is mistaken, and much that has simply become obsolete due to the further development of capitalism, especially in his discussions of the role of gold and silver and the banking system, but there is also much which has stood the test of time and seems really prophetic. He was writing in the first years of the industrial revolution, and his model of capitalism was still based largely on artisanal production or small factories; he underestimates the role of corporations, which he considers inefficient compared to individual ownership or partnerships.
He tries to take a historical view, although his history is rather inadequate by modern standards and he tries to apply capitalist categories to earlier economic formations where they do not really apply. He ends the book with a proposal for English unity with the colonies, which was already too late in 1776 and even more so in 1789, the date of the last edition published during his lifetime, which is the basis of the Modern Library edition I read. The book has an introduction and notes by Edwin Cannan, first published in 1937. One of the problems I had with it is that there is no clear distinction between Cannan’s footnotes and Smith’s.
In any event it is a foundational work which I am glad to have finally read.
Oct. 3193. Stephen King, The Dead Zone [1979] 567 pages
After reading several long books this month, I decided to relax and read a horror novel before Halloween. Despite being from Maine, I had never read anything by Stephen King, because I thought he only wrote paranormal horror, and I am too much of a materialist to take that seriously; but although there is a paranormal plot in this novel, it is not the source of the horror. Actually, the paranormal is the positive side, the horror is all from humans: a serial rapist-murderer, and a politician.
To tell the truth, I chose this particular King book because I had read somewhere on the Internet that it predicted the rise of Donald Tr**p, which is more like what I consider a horror story. In fact, there was almost nothing that is specific to Tr**p, except that the villain, Greg Stillson, has a history of fraudulent real estate transactions. Unlike the real President, he was never caught, much less convicted. There was also a similarity in that he acts like a buffoon to convince people he is harmless. Otherwise he is a fairly generic right-wing demagogue. What I disliked in the book was less the paranormal aspect than the way it presented assassination as a legitimate response, which I think is politically dangerous; these right-wing politicians need to be answered politically by mass action, not individual terrorism that just plays into their hands.
I will admit that King really is a better writer, in terms of style and technique, than I had expected from a best-selling author. The book is set in the late sixties and early seventies, and King gets the atmosphere right, unlike most of the novels I have read about that period: there are antiwar protests but no drug-crazed hippies, for example. That gave it a star more than I would have given it based on the plot.
54. Oscar Wilde, Vera; or, The Nihilists [1880, pub. 1882] 147 pages
Oscar Wilde’s first play, Vera was a dramatic and critical failure, which folded after a week and has seldom been performed since. Although the title is perhaps suggested by Vera Zasulich, an attempted assassin and later a member of the Menshevik party, it has nothing to do with any real people or events. Even if I knew nothing about Russian history, I would have to say that the plot of this play is totally ridiculous, and it certainly shows none of the talent of his later plays.