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major writers, biographical notes, and literary criticism

major writers, biographical notes, and literary criticism

Mary

March 7, 2017 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

Mary (1926) is Vladimir Nabokov’s first novel. It was written in Berlin and appeared as Mashenka under his pen name of V. Sirin, which he used to distinguish himself from his father – a writer and politician who was also called Vladimir Nabokov.

Mary

The novel was completely ignored at the time of its first publication – and yet it is a marvellous debut, full of subtle touches and an admirable restraint in telling three stories simultaneously. It is the tale of a first young love, an account of political exile, and the evocation of a dawning poetic imagination.

It is also full of what were to become the hallmarks of Nabokov’s mature literary style – verbal playfulness, ironic twists of story line, the juxtaposition of tenderness with the grotesque, and beautiful evocations of the textures of everyday life.


Mary – critical commentary

The love story

At its most obvious and superficial level, this is a story about a youthful love affair. Ganin is a sensitive teenage boy living on a country estate in Russia at the time of the First World War. He sees a pretty girl at an outdoor musical event and falls in love with her.

In the idyllic summer days that follow they meet in the countryside. His later memories of youthful rapture and erotic exploration are mingled with his sense of freedom and appreciation of the natural world of which he feels himself a part. The whole of this experience is summoned from memory whilst he is in exile.

In the autumn Ganin and Mary both return to St Petersburg and find their opportunities for privacy are severely curtailed. There is a brief attempt at consummating their romance – but it fails. The relationship then dwindles as they are forced apart – yet Ganin keeps the memory of it alive as a significant event in his life.

When Ganin sees Mary’s photograph as the wife of the vulgarian Alfyorov, it re-awakens these memories and fuels him with the desire to recapture his first true love. He detaches himself from his current mistress Lyudmila, and ignores the attentions of Klara, his busty neighbour in the Berlin pension. He plans to intercept Mary when she arrives at the station. But when she finally reaches Berlin to join her husband, Ganin suddenly realises that his perfect experience with Mary is a thing of the past:

As Ganin looked up at the skeletal roof in the etherial sky he realised with merciless clarity that  his affair with Mary was ended forever.  It had lasted no more than four days –  four days which were perhaps the happiest days of his life. But now he had exhausted his memories, was sated by them, and the image of Mary … remained in the house of ghosts, which itself was already a memory. Other than that image no Mary existed, nor could exist.

Nabokov’s great skill here is in evoking the delicious nature of an early romantic experience, recollected in a later and dramatically different period which spells its doom. It is significant that Mary is never dramatised: she is only summoned via Ganin’s memories of their time together. He cannot go back to his lost love, just as he will never go back to his homeland.

Memory and epiphany

Ganin is in exile. He has left behind his native Russia and like other exiles he been cut off from the emotional comforts of his birthplace. But he is maintaining a fragile intellectual stability by two means. The first is by keeping ‘the past’ alive with active efforts of reminiscence. The other is by an equally vigorous effort in appreciating the current pleasures of the material world in which he finds himself.

These moments of appreciation are fleeting experiences of aesthetic and sensory pleasure. He notices the shifting moods and textures of the world around him. Surrounded by vulgarity and desperation, he rescues from it precious moments of insight.

The trajectory of exile

At its deepest level the novel is about emigration and exile, and in one sense the imagined character of Mary, Ganin’s first true love, acts as a metaphor for the loss of homeland. Ganin has grown up in the idyllic world of an aristocratic Russian country estate for which he has very deep feelings. These are mingled with his feelings for the young girl Mary.

But he is separated from both by his participation in the Civil War which follows the revolution of 1917-18. When he is injured and on the losing side, he is forced to flee the country he loves in order to survive. Hence his temporary presence in the seedy pension in Berlin – the ‘first’ centre of emigration.

He is surrounded by the other flotsam and jetsam thrown up by political upheavals in his mother country: the old poet Podtyagin, the crapulous Alfronov, and two homosexual ballet dancers. Podtyagin is stranded without a visa, waiting to travel on to the ‘second’ centre of emigration – Paris. But it seems likely that he will die from heart failure before he makes the journey.

Ganin also feels as if he must move on – but he chooses what was to become the most celebrated route for exiles within a decade of the novel’s publication in 1926. This route was into southern France and the Mediterranean ports, from which it was possible to continue the journey westwards. In this sense Nabokov accurately prophesied his own future.

Like many other exiles from the Stalinist Soviet Union and Hitler’s Germany, Nabokov was forced to travel from Berlin in Germany then on to Paris in France, and finally to the Mediterranean coast. Hoping for safe transport to a neutral country such as Portugal, he eventually went to America. There is a very well-documented account of this escape route, much of which was organised by the American ‘special agent’ Varian Fry.

Double time-scheme

The narrative also takes place on two separate chronological planes at the same time. Events in the pension unfold between Monday and Saturday of a single week. Saturday is the day when Ganin has decided to leave Berlin, and it is the day when Mary is due to arrive.

But Ganin’s recollections of his youthful love affair and the country he has lost go back over the previous ten years. This period spans his summer romance with Mary, their return to Saint Petersburg, the end of his schooling, and his participation in the Civil War and its aftermath.

These two chrolologies are woven together quite seamlessly and present the reader with an unbroken narrative flow. This is a very skillful control of narrative in such a young writer, as Nabokov was at the time of the novel’s composition.


Mary – study resources

Mary Mary – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

Mary Mary – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

Mary Mashenka – Russian version – Amazon UK

Mary Mashenka – Russian version – Amazon US

Mary The Cambridge Companion to Nabokov Amazon UK

Mary Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years – Biography: Vol 1 – Amazon UK

Mary Vladimir Nabokov: American Years – Biography: Vol 2 – Amazon UK

Mary Zembla – the official Nabokov web site

Mary The Paris Review – Interview with Vladimir Nabokov

Mary Nabokov’s first English editions – Bob Nelson collection

Mary Vladimir Nabokov at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Mary Vladimir Nabokov at Mantex – tutorials, web links, study materials


Mary

first edition 1926


Mary – plot summary

1. Ganin is staying in a Russian-run boarding house in Berlin. A fellow guest Alfronov is expecting his wife to arrive from Russia.

2. Ganin is bored by his loveless affair with Lyudmila. He compares notes on life in exile with Alfronov.

3. An evocation of Berlin at night.

4. Ganin breaks off relations with Lyudmila, then wallows in the pleasure of reminiscences about Russia. He reconstructs the memory of recovering from typhus and forms the image of a girl. He reflects on the evanescence of even the most pleasant memories. Back at the pension he is caught by fellow guest Klara snooping in Alfronov’s desk, where he sees a photograph of his childhood sweetheart Mary, to whom Alfronov is now married.

5. Ganin and the old poet Podtyagin exchange reflections on memories.

6. Ganin recalls his first meeting with Mary and his first experiences of poetic epiphany.

7. He receives a letter from Lyudmila which he tears up and throws away without reading.

8. He lives in his memories of Russia and Mary, recalling their idyllic meetings in summer. His reveries are interrupted when his neighbour Podtyagin has a heart attack.

9. Next day Alfyonov receives a telegram confirming his wife’s arrival at the week end. Ganin recalls the last of his summer meetings with Mary. They both return to St Petersburg in the autumn. They try but fail to consummate the relationship. In the war years that follow, they gradually lose touch with each other.

10. Lyudmila sends a message of complaint, but Ganin prepares to leave Berlin at the week end.

11. Ganin helps Podtyagin to apply for an exit visa – which the old man leaves on a bus.

12. Podtyagin despairs of his lost passport.

13. Ganin packs his suitcases and reads old letters from Mary – written to him whilst serving during the Civil War in Yalta.

14. There is an unsuccessful party at the pension to celebrate Ganin’s departure.

15. Ganin recalls his retreat from the war. Wounded in the head, he sails to Constantinople. The party in. The pension degenerates badly. 

16. Mary’s husband Alfyonov passes out in a drunken stupor. In the early morning Ganin takes leave of the poet Podtyagin.

17. Ganin goes to the station to meet Mary and rescue her from her appalling husband. But he suddenly realises that she is now a completed memory that he must leave behind. He takes a train instead, heading for France and the Mediterranean coast.


Mary – principal characters
Lev Glebovich Ganin

a young Russian exile in Berlin
Aleksey Ivanovich Alfyorov

the Russian husband of Mary
Lydia Nikolaevna Dorn

the landlady of the pension
Lyudmila Rubanski

Ganin’s lover in Berlin
Klara

a busty resident at the pension in love with Ganin
Anton Sergeyevich Podtyagin

an old popular Russian poet
Mary Alfyorov

Ganin’s youthful love, who never appears

© Roy Johnson 2017


More on Vladimir Nabokov
More on literary studies
Nabokov’s Complete Short Stories


Filed Under: Vladimir Nabokov Tagged With: Literary studies, Russian literature, The novel, Vladimir Nabokov

Memoirs of a Novelist

February 27, 2011 by Roy Johnson

Virginia Woolf’s earliest stories and experiments

Memoirs of a Novelist is a charming collection of short stories written in the earliest phase of Virginia Woolf’s career as a writer of modernist fiction when she was only twenty-four years old. Up to that point she had only produced essays and book reviews. And in fact the spirit of the essay lingers over these meditations and fictional constructs which have in common the role of women in society. It is interesting to note the continuity between these early exercises and the same themes she pursued in her mature works.

Memoirs of a NovelistPhyllis and Rosamond for instance introduces many of the issues she explored in her later writings – the apparently empty lives of ordinary young women who went unrecognised by history; everyday life as a subject for fiction; the inequality of the sexes; and (almost as if Jane Austen were a contemporary) the ambiguous prospect of marriage as the only possible career structure for young females.

The authorial voice is witty and allusive, and the narrative sparkles with clever generalisations and quasi-philosophic reflections offered in a satirical mode.

They seem indigenous to the drawing-room, as though, born in silk evening robes, they had never tread a rougher earth than the Turkey carpet, or reclined on a harsher ground than the arm chair or the sofa To see them in a drawing room full of well dressed men and women, is to see the merchant in the Stock Exchange, or the barrister in the Temple.

Another story, The Mysterious Case of Miss V deals with the theme she would develop later in her 1924 essay Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown – the unknown life of an ordinary person. In this version the narrator reflects on the life of a woman whom she has seen occasionally but knows nothing about. Fired by a sudden inclination to discover at least something about her, she visits the building where she lives – only to discover that she has just died.

The longest piece in the collection is The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn It was written when Woolf was visiting Blo’ Norton Hall in Norfolk, and conjures up a picture of the idealised fictional past she was to bring to a state of high art in Orlando. Mistress Joan feels a deep rapport with the rhythms and concerns of everyday life as she faces the prospect of leaving her status as a single woman behind (which is something Woolf would do only a few years later).

The finest item in the collection is its title story Memoirs of a Novelist, which is a complex meditation on the nature of biography, something she would go on exploring throughout her life. The complexity comes from Woolf’s deft handling of the layers of fictionality within the story.

An unnamed narrator gives us an account of a two volume biography of a Victorian lady novelist Miss Willatt, written by her friend Miss Linsett (both of course completely fictitious). In ony a few pages Woolf manages to conjure up an amusingly unflattering picture of the author, and by criticising the conventions of biography as it was conducted in the late nineteenth century, she offers a critique of both the biographer herself and what can be known about human being from the record left by others. These were issues that Woolf would pursue in her own fiction and biographies (Orlando, Flush, Roger Fry) throughout the rest of her life.

The story was turned down by the Cornhill Magazine when she submitted it for publication. Since that time Virginia Woolf has established a reputation which far outstrips the writers they accepted. This is a unique glimpse into the workshop of an artist who went on to become the greatest writer of her generation, and one of the most important innovators in the genre of the short story.

Memoirs of a Novelist Buy the book at Amazon UK

Memoirs of a Novelist Buy the book at Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2011


Virginia Woolf, Memoirs of a Novelist, London: Hesperus, 2006, pp.96, ISBN: 1843914239


More on Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf – web links
Virginia Woolf – greatest works
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Filed Under: Virginia Woolf Tagged With: Bloomsbury Group, Literary studies, Modernism, The Short Story, Virginia Woolf

Memoirs of a Revolutionary

August 4, 2012 by Roy Johnson

an extraordinary life in radical left politics 1905-1941

Memoirs of a Revolutionary the autobiography of one of the most remarkable writers in the first half of the twentieth century, and yet his work is hardly known outside a small coterie of admirers. He was a novelist, a poet, a historian, and a political activist. His parents were Russian emigrees; he was born in Belgium; he wrote in French; and he died in political exile in Mexico in 1947. Memoirs of a Revolutionary is a new edition of his political autobiography, which stretches from his youth in Brussels, Lille, and Paris, to his participation in the Russian revolution. It covers his days as a Left Oppositionist, and his eventual exile at the hand of Stalin, to his last desperate years searching for escape on a ‘planet without a passport’ until he was finally able to record this deposition of courage and fortitude.


Memoirs of a Revolutionary
The first pages are filled with an account of his youthful ideals – mainly centred on a form of libertarianism and anarchism, though recollected from a politically mature point of view. There is remarkably little about his own personal life except his admiration for his father, the fact that he never went to school, and the poor life he eked out as a typesetter and a machine tool draughtsman.

His story really begins in Paris, where he lived amongst the poorest, giving language lessons, doing translation work, and writing articles for left-wing newspapers and magazines. It was 1909, and all sorts of political groups were active and (as was often the case) at war with each other – anarcho-syndicalists, Christian democrats, ‘illegalists’ (robbers) and exiled Russian revolutionaries, towards whom Serge felt drawn.

As the editor of a left-wing newspaper he was asked to give evidence against an anarchist gang who carried out a series of desperate raids in 1910. He refused, and was sent to jail for five years. He summarises this next half decade, since the details of his incarceration were transformed into the content of his first documentary novel Men in Prison.

It cannot be stressed too strongly how almost all of Serge’s writing was produced under enormous constraints of time and resources. He wrote whilst in exile, in hiding, and in transit. There were few opportunities for revision, fact-checking, or the sort of re-drafting that most authors take for granted. Everything was produced white-hot – which might account for his direct, compressed, and telegraphic style.

On release from jail he went to Barcelona and took part in the 1917 uprising (something he documents in his second novel, Birth of our Power), but feeling that the real revolution was taking place in Russia, he volunteered for ‘repatriation’ to a country in which he had never set foot, arriving in Petrograd in 1919.

Almost immediately he was recruited into the services of the Third Communist International because of his language skills and knowledge of western Europe, even though at this time he was not a member of the Communist Party.

He committed himself to the Bolsheviks, whilst at the same time being aware of their weaknesses and mistakes – the greatest of which he believed to be the creation of the Cheka, the secret police or state-within-a-state which changed its name frequently but not its pernicious effects.

He paints an unflinchingly honest picture of the Revolution and its aftermath – the disjuncture between official propaganda and the reality of mass starvation, the black market, failed production, and an economy run on useless banknotes.

After a failed attempt to create a self-sufficient commune amongst the famine and poverty in the countryside, he decided that the future of the Revolution lay in the West, and moved to work secretly for the Communist International in Berlin.

Victor Serge - portraitHe worked as a secret agent, using multiple identities and the cover of a job as journalist and editor. His real job there was to assist the promotion of the German Revolution ‘planned’ for October 1923. This was a period when Marxist orthodoxy thought that revolutions could be planned and organised according to theoretical principles, without troubling to analyse or face any social facts. When the revolution failed to take place, he de-camped to Prague. However, even though conditions there were less severe, he felt unable to act effectively, and so, as a Trotsky supporting oppositionist and at the worst possible time, he loyally returned to Leningrad in 1926.

The number of famous people he knew personally is astonishing – political figures such as Zinoviev, Maxim Gorky, Lenin, Trotsky, and Georg Lukacs, but also artists and poets such as Anna Akhmatova, her husband Nikolai Gumilev, plus Alexander Blok and Sergei Yesenin – all of whom he wrote about in his Literature and Revolution.

At times his account reads like a novel, which is not surprising since the narrative is composed of vivid character sketches, scenes recounted from participants’ points of view, sparkling atmospherics and mise en scene, sensational episodes, sudden murders or suicides, and all the time a dramatic tension created by his efforts to survive when all around him are being imprisoned and shot.

If there’s a chapter that’s less briskly paced than the rest, it’s that dealing with the expulsion of the Left-Oppositionists from the Party into exile, jail, and (later) extermination. But Serge’s justification is that of writing as ‘testament’. He passionately wished to place on record the tragic ‘betrayal of the revolution’ exactly as it unfolded.

This period (1926-1928) was followed by the first of the show trials – fabricated crimes in which nobody believed which were used as an excuse to eliminate any traces of criticism of the executive. The punishment for pre-determined outcomes was imprisonment and a bullet in the back of the head.

All of this repression was taking place at the same time as the central committee was responsible for more or less criminal levels of mismanagement of the economy . Famines were created through deliberate stupidity; millions of people were displaced from their land; millions more starved to death. This is the period which forms the background to what many people believe is Serge’s greatest novel, The Case of Comrade Tulayev

In 1933 Serge was finally arrested by the secret police, imprisoned, and when he refused to confess to his non-existent crimes was exiled to Kazakhstan for three years. He records this experience in the third volume of his first trilogy, Midnight in the Century.

He was saved from extinction by the reputation as a writer he had built up in western Europe – particularly France. In the literary conferences called in 1935 and 1936 his case was raised and calls made for his release. Eventually Romain Rolland made a personal appeal to Stalin, and Serge was released.

The police stole his manuscripts and his belongings, but he was deported to Belgium. Even there he was pursued by lies and slander propagated from Moscow. This vilification was accepted by European left-wing parties which were in the process of setting up the Popular Front in co-operation with Stalin against fascism.

Stalin repaid this gullibility with cynical betrayal in the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939 (and its secret protocols) which was rapidly followed by the Nazi invasion of France. Hundreds of artists and intellectuals (as well as refugees from the Spanish Civil War) crowded into southern France hoping to gain visas for the Americas. Serge was in the company of people such as Alma Mahler, André Breton, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Leon Feuchtwangler, and Walter Benjamin (who committed suicide on the Spanish border).

Serge made it to Mexico in 1941 – and that’s where his memoir ends, though he was to live another six years in Mexico city – persecuted and shot at by the same agents of Stalin who had murdered Trotsky with an ice pick in 1940. Serge kept on writing until the very end, producing political analyses and also his two greatest novels The Case of Comrade Tulayev and Unforgiving Years. He died of a heart attack in 1947.

If you have never read this classic memoir before, make sure you get this new edition. When it was first released by Oxford University Press in the 1960s one eighth of it was cut on economy grounds. The missing sections have now been restored and the whole of Peter Sedgwick’s remarkable translation is now presented in its entirety for the first time.

Memoirs of a Revolutionary Buy the book at Amazon UK

Memoirs of a Revolutionary Buy the book at Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2012


Victor Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary, New York: New York Review Books, 2012, pp.521, ISBN: 1590174518


More on Victor Serge
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Filed Under: Victor Serge Tagged With: Biography, Cultural history, Memoirs of a Revolutionary, Politics, Victor Serge

Men at Arms

March 18, 2018 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, study guide, commentary, web links

Men at Arms (1952) is the first volume of Evelyn Waugh’s trilogy Sword of Honour. The novels cover events in the second world war seen largely from the point of view of a willing volunteer – Guy Crouchback. He is eager to serve his country and has old-fashioned views on chivalry and the role of the English gentleman. The two later volumes are Officers and Gentlemen (1955) and Unconditional Surrender (1961). They can be read separately, but their significance is far greater when considered as a whole.

Men at Arms


Men at Arms – commentary

Guy Crouchback has the pressure of tradition and inheritance upon him. His family has a distinguished history and a country estate in the West Country (which is being used as a convent at the opening of the novel). His elder brother was killed on his first day of combat in the First World War. Another brother went mad and died. He has an elder sister, but under the conventions of primogeniture, neither she nor her offspring are eligible as inheritors of the family name and estate. Guy has been married but is now divorced and childless.

Moreover, as a practising Catholic, he believes he should not re-marry – which is why he embarks on the comic but painful episode in which he attempts to seduce his ex-wife Virginia in Claridges Hotel. Since the Catholic Church does not recognise divorce, she is the one woman with whom he can engage sexually without breaking any of the Church’s moral sanctions.

The planned seduction does not go well, and the promiscuous Virginia reproaches him in a particularly cruel manner. So – the continuity of the Crouchback ‘name’ via male inheritance rests firmly on Guy’s shoulders, but he feels there is very little he can do about it.

It is interesting to note that following a divorce which has clearly left him emotionally bruised, Guy is made happiest by what are essentially fourth form japes against the headmaster figure (Ritchie-Hook) in the episodes with Apthorpe’s ‘thunder box’. Guy tries to be honourable, but he is emotionally immature.

History of the text

Evelyn Waugh originally wrote and published the three volumes of the Sword of Honour trilogy as stand-alone novels. Men at Arms was published in 1952 , then followed by Officers and Gentlemen in 1955, and Unconditional Surrender in 1961. The separate volumes are united by the figure of Guy Crouchback, whose development and misadventures they trace.

But when the sequence was completed, Waugh edited the texts to make the trilogy a more coherent whole. The edits are fairly minor and do not change any significant episodes of the plot. For a detailed examination of the parallels and constructive differences, see the excellent introduction and explanatory notes to the Penguin edition of Sword of Honour edited by Angus Calder.

Even though the novels can be understood and enjoyed as separate fictional entities, it is clear that Waugh conceived of the trilogy as a whole. There are recurring characters about whom the reader only learns more fully when they appear in later volumes.

For instance, it is not made apparent in this first volume that the morally dubious character Trimmer is already known to Virginia, Guy’s ex-wife. We do not learn these details until the second volume of the trilogy when Trimmer is on leave in Glasgow and spends a few days with Virginia in a hotel. And it is not until the third volume that we learn Virginia bears Trimmer’s child, which Guy adopts as his own, following her death.

Humour

Waugh exploits both dramatic irony and elements of farce and black humour throughout the novel – and the trilogy. Even the titles of the three volumes are deeply ironic. The first, Men at Arms, is largely concerned with Guy’s failure to become engaged in a war for which he is a willing volunteer. He spends the majority of the novel in training and preparing for combat which does not materialise. The only military action he sees is a farcical (and completely unnecessary) night raid organised by his commander Ritchie-Hook, who emerges from the engagement with the severed head of an African guard as a trophy.

Similarly, the second volume, Officers and Gentlemen, is about the failure of the officer class (largely recruited from upper-class families) to show any proper leadership or competence. The third volume, Unconditional Surrender is about the ironic reversals of fortune that lead to Guy Crouchback’s compromise with his failed military and personal life.

Much of the humour is generated by the tension between Guy’s calm and stoical acceptance of all the trivial disciplines of military life and the comic efforts of his colleagues to avoid it. A prime example in Men at Arms is the episode of Apthorpe and his ‘thunder box’.

Apthorpe has bought a portable chemical toilet from a government official and wishes to reserve it for his private use. He hides it in various locations at their training camp, against the orders of their officer, the disciplinarian Ritchie-Hook, who pursues the matter with official notices banning access: Out of Bounds to all ranks below Brigadier.

Apthorpe clings to his possession for no other reason than a neurotic fear that he might contract veneral disease from the seat of a shared toilet. The conflict completely dominates Apthorpe’s existence, and the matter is not resolved until finally the brass-bound oak box is blown up in an explosion.

Guy supports Apthorpe’s efforts and remains loyal to him, whilst himself conforming to orthodox military discipline. When they are sent to Africa on a reconaissance expedition, Apthorpe contracts a tropical disease. Guy goes to comfort him in hospital, smuggling in a bottle of whisky against orders as a gift. Apthorpe finishes the bottle, and the alcohol kills him.

Guy thus emerges as something of a ‘holy fool’ character – the innocent who blunders into misfortunes. All his mistakes, large and small, are recorded in a confidential dossier that follows him round his various postings, and effectively prevents his being promoted.


Men at Arms – study resources

Men at Arms – Penguin – Amazon UK

Men at Arms – Penguin – Amazon US

The Sword of Honour trilogy – Paperback – Amazon UK

Sword of Honour – DVD film – Amazon UK
Channel 4 TV series adaptation – with Daniel Craig

Evelyn Waugh: A Life Revisited – Amazon UK

Men at Arms

Evelyn Waugh – by Henry Lamb


Men at Arms – plot summary

In 1939, shocked by news of the Hitler-Stalin pact, Guy Crouchback leaves his family’s second home in Italy to fight in the war. His brother-in-law Box-Binder discourages him, and he is unable to obtain a position. Guy’s father introduces him to Major Tickeridge, who recruits him to the Royal Corps of Halberdiers.

He undertakes officer training along with fellow recruit Apthorpe and the rather dubious Trimmer. At a Sunday lunch party he meets the bloodthirsty and eccentric Colonel Ritchie-Hook. Guy actually enjoys the routines and the companionship of the officer’s mess. On vacation in London he meets his selfish ex-wife and her second husband Tommy Blackhouse, from whom she is also divorced.

Guy’s unit is transferred to an uncomfortable former school on the coast. He makes an effort to be sociable, but still feels alienated. Guy and Apthorpe both join the local Yatch Club. The new brigadier Ritchie-Hook arrives and gives all the officers a dressing- down.

On leave Guy goes to London with the intention of seducing Virginia – but he finds her with Tommy Blackhouse, and Apthorpe keeps interrupting his efforts. Virginia rejects him scornfully anyway.

On return Ritchie-Hook has transformed their headquarters and established a new disciplined order. Apthorpe introduces his chemical toilet and begins a farcical episode of hide and seek with Ritchie-Hook. The ‘thunder-box’ is eventually destroyed in an explosion.

The brigade move to Scotland. Guy is not promoted in the new appointments, but Apthorpe becomes a captain, making him even more vainglorious and snobbish. There is petty competition for military superiority. The brigade is split up, with some personnel despatched to France. Guy’s group are reunited with Ritchie-Hook in Aldershot.

Preparations for transfer to France are shambolic. Guy’s unit muster for the anticipated invasion of Ireland by defending the Cornish coast. Ridiculous rumours flourish. They are eventually embark at Liverpool to sail for Dakar in French Senegal.

Ritchie-Hook is hoping for an attack on the Vichy French, but higher command calls it off. Instead, he organises an unofficial raid on the coast, led by Guy and his men, from which Ritchie-Hook returns with the severed head of an African guard.

The Halberdiers move on to Sierra Leone. Guy visits Apthorpe who is delirious with fever in hospital. He smuggles in a bottle of whisky – but this kills Apthorpe. Guy is dismissed from the Halberdiers and flown back to England along with the injured Ritchie-Hook.


Men at Arms – principal characters
Broome the Crouchback estate in Somerset
Guy Crouchback idealistic divorced Roman Catholic
Angela Box-Bender Guy’s sister
Arthur Box-Bender Angela’s husband, a Member of Parliament
Virginia Troy Guy’s louche ex-wife
Tommy Blackhouse Virginia’s second husband
Apthorpe Guy’s colleague in training
Colonel Ben Ritchie-Hook a reckless maverick warmonger
Ambrose Goodall a churchman with connections at Broome
Trimmer McTavish a womaniser, spiv, and ex-hairdresser

© Roy Johnson 2018


More on Evelyn Waugh
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Filed Under: Evelyn Waugh Tagged With: English literature, Evelyn Waugh, Literary studies, Men at Arms, The novel

Men in Prison

August 22, 2010 by Roy Johnson

the forging of revolutionary consciousness

In common with many other revolutionary writers, Victor Serge turned to fiction as a result of being excluded from active political life when he was expelled from the Communist Party as a Left Oppositionist in 1927. Writing in exile under extremely difficult conditions, he set himself the task of presenting in fictional form an account of revolutionary developments during the first three decades of the twentieth century – in most of which he had been personally involved. Men in Prison is the first volume in two separate trilogies he created to cover this historical period.

Men in Prison It’s a fictionalised account of his own experience of having been imprisoned by the French authorities between 1912 and 1917 because of his sympathies for a group of anarchists. Its form is the traditional one for jail memoirs of overcoming a lack of possibilities in terms of plot by splitting the material into separate chapters dealing with the common tropes of imprisonment — its topography, warders, fellow inmates, survival, resistance, food, work, and the prisoner’s endless problem of dealing with passage of time.

The prisoners spend long, poorly paid hours in workshops – ‘the rule is work and silence’ – with severe punishments for infractions of rule and discipline. The weak and poor are driven into the ground, bad conditions create bad health, men expire horribly after a lifetime of work, misery, and deprivation, and any possibilities of resistance or rebellion are crushed between very narrow limits. It requires colossal efforts of will and self-discipline merely to stay human and survive.

All of this is an accurate reflection of life in the outside world – particularly that prior to 1914. The world, that is, seen from a proletarian point of view. In his attempt to create a new kind of novel Serge not only allies himself with the working class politically, but tries to reflect much of its consciousness and culture in his literary method.

the form of the classical novel seemed to me impoverished and outmoded, centring as it does upon a few beings artificially detached from the world … My first novel had no central character; its subject was not myself, nor this or that person, but simply men and prison.

Men in Prison is densely studded with the portraits and potted biographies of his fellow prisoners, rich in illustrative anecdote, in analysis of human behaviour, and in factual accounts of the details of penal regulations and their practical effects on the lives of inmates. Using a fast, vigorous style Serge populates his novel with everything from the thumbnail sketch, through silhouettes, to the condensed biography which will offer the essential facts of someone’s life. Not what they think they are, what their motives might be, or what extenuating circumstances they might plead, but what they have done – manslaughter, fifteen years penal servitude, learnt five languages, robbed banks, or written a book on Goethe.

Ex-Captain Meslier, accountant … an intelligent, ageless face ravaged by fever, struggle, debauchery, and alcohol. The Indo-Chinese and Sahara campaigns. Alcohol. Left for dead, riddled with javelin wounds, one night of battle in the African jungle. Legion of Honour. Alcohol. Wild nights in Paris. Alcohol … had written to his mistress, a demi-mondaine infatuated by this mad hero: ‘Fifty francs tonight, or I’ll kill you’ … paid only thirty month’s imprisonment for that slit throat … In the lines he used to bow to passing buddies, then he let fly at them with horrible insults behind a friendly glance. In church on Sunday, he would sometimes sit down at the organ and play amazing pieces by Bach or Handel by heart.

The characters come off the page thick and fast – a dazzling cast list of humanity – all treated quite fairly according to character as manifest through acts in the material world. Captain Meslier has participated in France’s imperial plunder, but he is not to be reduced to a military caricature and is credited with his playing of classics – which says far more about the psychology of colonialism than a naively committed piece of propagandist fiction.

Serge’s form of narrative address presents an interesting example of the way in which political attitude is given an aesthetic formulation. Instead of selecting and sticking to a single mode (the first person singular would have been the most obvious) he uses all possibilities, swinging freely from one to another. From the first person – ‘I was no longer a man, a man in prison’ – to the impersonal third – ‘man imprisoned differs from man in general, even in his outward appearance’ – to the personal – ‘He is still wearing the cause of his good or bad fortune … an ordinary beige overcoat’ – and back to the second – ‘Yesterday you had a thousand worries’. Sometimes in this mode, from within the narrative itself, a person is given hortatory encouragement and addressed personally – ‘Defend yourself Legris, show you’re a man like the others’. But undoubtedly the most significant is his use of the first plural, the collective voice – we:

I have not lost the years it has taken from me. We have committed great errors comrades. We wanted to be revolutionaries: we were only rebels. We must become termites, boring obstinately, patiently, all our lives. In the end, the dyke will crumble.

This is a fresh and an ideological approach to narrative that he was to develop in the novels that followed. Men in Prison is the initial volume of Serge’s first triptych that documents his political move from anarcho-individualism towards revolutionary organisation, patience, and planning. He started from that new position in his next novel, Birth of Our Power.

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© Roy Johnson 2010


Victor Serge, Men in Prison, London: Pluto Press, 1978, pp.260, ISBN: 090461350X


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Metamorphosis

February 2, 2010 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, characters, video, study resources

Metamorphosis (1915) is truly one of Kafka’s masterpieces – a stunning parable which lends itself to psychological, sociological, or existential interpretations. It’s the tale of a man who wakes up one morning and finds himself transformed into a giant insect. His family are horrified, gradually disown him, and he dies of neglect, with a rotting apple lodged in his side.

Franz Kafka is one of the most important and influential fiction writers of the early twentieth century. He was a novelist and writer of short stories whose works, only after his death, came to be regarded as one of the major achievements of twentieth century literature.

Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka


Metamorphosis – plot summary

Gregor Samsa awakes one morning to find himself transformed from a human being into a giant insect. Rather than lament his transformation, Gregor worries about how he will get to his job as a traveling salesman; Gregor is the sole financial provider for his parents and sister, Grete, and their comfort is dependent on his ability to work.

MetamorphosisWhen Gregor’s supervisor arrives at the house and demands Gregor come out of his room, Gregor manages to roll out of bed and unlock his door. His appearance horrifies his family and supervisor; his supervisor flees while his family chases him back into his room.

Grete attempts to care for her brother by providing him with milk and the stale, rotten food he now prefers. Gregor also develops the fears of an insect, being effectively shooed away by hissing voices and stamping feet. However, Gregor remains a devoted and loving son, and takes to hiding beneath a sofa whenever someone enters his room in order to shield them from his horrifying appearance. When alone, he amuses himself by looking out of his window and crawling up the walls and on the ceiling.

No longer able to rely on Gregor’s income, the other family members take on jobs and Grete’s caretaking deteriorates. One day, when Gregor emerges from his room, his father chases him around the dining room table and pelts him with apples. One of the apples becomes embedded in his back, causing an infection. Due to his infection and his hunger, he is soon barely able to move at all.

MetamorphosisLater, his parents take in lodgers and use Gregor’s room as a dumping area for unwanted objects. Gregor becomes dirty, covered in dust and old bits of rotten food. One day, Gregor hears Grete playing her violin to entertain the lodgers. Gregor is attracted to the music, and slowly walks into the dining room despite himself, entertaining a fantasy of getting his beloved sister to join him in his room and play her violin for him. The lodgers see him and give notice, refusing to pay the rent they owe, even threatening to sue the family for harboring him while they stayed there. Grete determines that the monstrous vermin is no longer Gregor, since Gregor would have left them out of love and taken their burden away. She suggests that they must get rid of it. Gregor retreats to his room and collapses, finally succumbing to his wound, and dying alone.

The point of view shifts as, upon discovery of his corpse, the family feels an enormous burden has been lifted from them, and start planning for the future again. The family discovers that they aren’t doing financially badly at all, especially since, following Gregor’s demise, they can take a smaller flat. The brief process of forgetting Gregor and shutting him from their lives is quickly completed.


Study resources

Red button Metamorphosis – Oxford World Classics – Amazon UK

Red button Metamorphosis – Oxford World Classics – Amazon US

Red button Metamorphosis – Dover Thrift – Amazon UK

Red button Metamorphosis – Dover Thrift – Amazon US

Red button Metamorphosis – Norton Critical Editions – Amazon US

Red button Metamorphosis – Cliffs Notes – Amazon UK

Red button Metamorphosis – Max Notes – Amazon UK

Red button Metamorphosis – eBook format at Project Gutenburg

Red button Metamorphosis – audioBook version at LibriVox

Red button Metamorphosis – A Study: Nabokov on Kafka – 1989 Peter Medak film

Henry James The Cambridge Companion to Kafka – Amazon UK


Franz Kafka: An Illustrated LifeFranz Kafka: Illustrated Life This is a photographic biography that offers an intimate portrait in an attractive format. A lively text is accompanied by over 100 evocative images, many in colour and some previously unpublished. They depict the author’s world – family, friends, and artistic circle in old Prague – together with original book jackets, letters, and other ephemera. This is an excellent starting point for beginners which captures fin de siecle Europe beautifully.
Franz Kafka greatest works Buy the book at Amazon UK
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Principal characters
Gregor Samsa travelling salesman who supports his family
Mr Samsa his lazy father, who owes money to Gregor’s boss
Grete Samsa Gregor’s younger sister, who tends him at first
Mrs Samsa Gregor’s mother, who cannot bear to look at him
The chief clerk Gregor’s boss, to whom Mr Samsa owes money
Tenants three tenants who provide an income for the family

Vladimir Nabokov – Lecture on Metamorphosis

Metamorphosis – A Study: Nabokov on Kafka


Vladimir Nabokov’s copy of Metamorphosis

Kafka - Nabokov


Photomontage

Kafka, family photos, and old Prague


Kafka - manuscript page

a page of Kafka’s manuscript


Further reading

Red button Jeremy Adler, Franz Kafka (Overlook Illustrated Lives), Gerald Duckworth, 2004.

Red button Mark Anderson. Kafka’s Clothes: Ornament and Aestheticism in the Habsburg Fin de Siecle, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992

Red button Louis Begley, The Tremendous Words I have Inside my Head: Franz Kafka: A Biographical Essay, Atlas Illustrated editions, 2008.

Red button Harold Bloom, Franz Kafka: Modern Critical Essays, New York: Chelsea House, 1986.

Red button Harold Bloom, Franz Kafka (Bloom’s Major Novelists), Chelsea House Publishers, 2003.

Red button Elizabeth Boa, Kafka: Gender, Class, and Race in the Letters and Fictions, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996.

Red button Max Brod, Franz Kafka: A Biography, Da Capo Press, 1995.

Red button Max Brod (ed), The Diaries of Franz Kafka, Schoken Books, 1988.

Red button Elias Canetti, Kafka’s Other Trial: The Letters to Felice, Schocken Books, 1989.

Red button Stanley Corngold, Lambent Traces: Franz Kafka, Princeton University Press, 2006.

Red button W.J. Dodd (ed), Kafka: The Metamorphosis, The Trial, and The Castle, London: Longman, 1995.

Red button Carolin Duttlinger, Kafka and Photography, Oxford: Oxford Universit Press, 2007.

Red button Angel Flores (ed), The Kafka Debate, New York: Gordian Press, 1977.

Red button Sander Gilman, Franz Kafka (Critical Lives), Reaktion Books, 2007.

Red button Sander Gilman, Franz Kafka: The Jewish Patient, London: Routledge, 1995.

Red button Ronald Gray, Kafka: A Collection of Critical Essays, Prentice Hall, 1962.

Red button Ronald Hayman, A Biography of Kafka, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2001.

Red button Franz Kafka, The Blue Octavo Notebooks, Exact Change, 1998.

Red button Franz Kafka, The Trial (Complete Audiobooks), Naxos Audiobooks, 2007.

Red button David Zane Mairowitz, Introducing Kafka, Icon Books, 2007.

Red button Julian Preece (ed), The Cambridge Companion to Kafka, Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Red button Ronald Spiers, and Beatrice Sandberg, Franz Kafka, London: Macmillan, 1997.

Red button Walter H. Sokel, The Myth of Power and the Self: Essays on Franz Kafka, Wayne State University Press, 2001.

Red button Ritchie Robertson, Kafka: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, 2004.

Red button Ritchie Robertson, Kafka: Judaism, Politics, and Literature, Clarendon Press, 1987.

Red button James Rolleston (ed), A Companion to the Works of Franz Kafka, Camden House, 2006.

Red button Michael Wood, Franz Kafka (Writers and Their Work), Northcote House, 1998.

 


Mont Blanc pen - Kafka edition

Mont Blanc – special Franz Kafka edition


Other works by Franz Kafka

The TrialThe Trial is Kafka’s one indisputably successful novel – a haunting and original study in existential anxiety, paranoia, and persecution. Joseph K is accused one day of being guilty – but not told what crime he has committed. He wrestles hopelessly with legal officials and a nightmare-like court which acts on arbitrary rules, striving to find justice. In the end he fails, only to be killed ‘like a dog’. Kafka gave expression to modern anxiety three decades before most people even started feeling it. This is a novel which stands outside literary norms – a superb achievement of literary modernism. Be prepared for black humour as well as mind-bending contradictions and deeply etched literary expressionism. Read the stories and The Trial as a start and a minimum.
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The Man who DisappearedAmerika (also known as The Man who Disappeared) is Kafka’s first attempt at a novel. He is renowned for documenting the horrors of modern life, but Kafka also had a lighter and amusing side. This is incomplete, like so much else he wrote. It’s the story of Karl Rossmann who after an embarrassing sexual misadventure is expelled from his European home and goes to live in an imaginary United States (which of course Kafka had never visited). The story is deeply symbolic – as usual – and an interesting supplement to the central texts. In fact it’s a reverse ‘Rags to Riches’ story, because Karl starts his engagement with the American Dream quite successfully – but by the end of the novel he is destitute. The first chapter is frequently anthologised as ‘The Stoker’.
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Franz Kafka – web links

Kafka Franz Kafka at Mantex
Biographical notes, book reviews and study guides on the major works, video presentations and documentaries, adaptations for cinema and television, and links to Kafka archives.

Franz Kafka web links Franz Kafka at Project Gutenberg
A major collection of free eTexts in a variety of formats – in both English and German.

Franz Kafka web links Franz Kafka at Wikipedia
Biographical notes, social background, survey of the stories and novels, publishing history, translations, critical interpretation, and extensive bibliographies.

Franz Kafka web links Franz Kafka at the Internet Movie Database
Adaptations for the cinema and television – in various languages. Full details of directors, actors, production features, box office, film reviews, and even quizzes.

Franz Kafka video Kafka in Love
Video photomontage featuring portraits of Kafka, his friends and family, and locations in Prague – with a rather schmaltzy soundtrack in Yiddish and English.

Franz Kafka web links Kafka-Metamorphosis
A public Wiki dedicated to Kafka and his work, featuring the short stories, interpretations, and further web links.

Franz Kafka web links Kafka Society of America
Academic group with annual meetings and publications. Also features links to other Kafka-related sites

Franz Kafka web links Oxford Kafka Research Centre
Academic group based at Oxford University that tracks current research and meetings. [Doesn’t seem to have been updated since 2012.]

Franz Kafka web links The Kafka Project
Critical editions and translations of Kafka’s work in several languages, plus articles, literary criticism, bibliographies.

Franz Kafka Tribute to Franz Kafka
Individual fan site (created by ‘Herzogbr’) featuring a collection of texts, reviews, and enthusiast essays. Badly in need of updating, but contains some interesting gems.

Kafka photos Finding Kafka in Prague
Quirky compilation of photos locating Kafka in his home town – with surrealist additions and weird sound track.

Red button Who Owns Kafka?
Essay by Judith Butler from the London Review of Books on the contentious issues of ownership of Kafka’s manuscripts where they are currently held in Israel – complete with podcast.

Red button The Kafka Archive – latest news
Guardian newspaper report on the suitcase full of Kafka and Max Brod’s papers released by Israeli library.

Red button Franz Kafka: an illustrated life
Book review of a charming short biography with some unusual period photos of Kafka and Prague.

© Roy Johnson 2010


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Metamorphosis and Other Stories

July 18, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Franz Kafka is one of the most original and idiosyncratic writers of the twentieth century. He published very little during his own lifetime; he lived for literature (in fact he said “I am literature”); he wasn’t formally a great novelist or writer of short stories; and yet he put his stamp on literature to such an extent that his name has become an adjective – and we now speak of Kafkaesque situations and circumstances.

The Metamorphosis and Other StoriesThese tend to be scenarios in which the individual is trapped in madly contradictory situations, confronted by bureaucratic and totalitarian forces over which he has no control. That’s why Kafka’s reputation soared in the 1930s and 1940s. He prophesied the sort of state which condemned individuals as guilty – but didn’t tell them of what they were being accused. He spelled out the mad logic of the show trials long before they took place, and he is quite rightly regarded as a precursor of modern existentialism..

Metamorphosis is a superb piece of imaginative fiction. A young commercial salesman wakes up one morning to find that he has been transformed into giant insect. He is horrified – and so is his family, who shun him, neglect him, and eventually kill him. The tale admits to several levels of interpretation, and like most pieces of rich fiction it is dense with contextual symbols, metaphors, and suggestive allusions.

This collection also includes three other major short works – The Judgement, In the Penal Colony, and Letter to his Father. The first was written in a single creative burst during one night and concerns an Oedipal conflict between father and son which ends with the father condemning the son to death. The second is a horrifying account of someone undergoing torture in a way which prophecies what was to happen in the concentration camps (of both Russia and Germany) only a few years later. The famous letter to his father (which was never posted) is yet another a soul-searching psychological investigation of the relation between father and son. And for those who have not come across the lighter side of his writing, there’s also a collection of his first-ever published works – fragmentary pieces, to which he gives the title ‘Meditations’.

I was glad to see that in his introduction, Ritchie Robertson mentioned Nadine Gordimer’s magnificent short story Letter to his Son, which presents his father Herman Kafka’s hypothetical response to his neurotic son’s letter from beyond the grave. It’s a marvellous presentation of the other side of the picture.

The translation notes make very pertinent reference to the difficulty of rendering Kafka’s extraordinarily complex syntax. His writing is an odd mixture of startlingly dramatic images or situations, surrounded by endlessly convoluted descriptions and speculations, with deeply nested conditional clauses that can lead on from one page to the next in huge Teutonic paragraphs.

These new editions from OUP offer full value in terms of critical apparatus surrounding the text. There’s a lengthy introduction, a chronology of Kafka’s life, an essay on the new translation, explanatory notes, and an extended bibliography. This volume is an ideal starting point for anyone who has not read Kafka before.

© Roy Johnson 2009

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Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis and Other Stories, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, pp.146, ISBN 0199238553


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Midnight in the Century

August 21, 2010 by Roy Johnson

revolutionaries face betrayal and defeat

Victor Serge is one of the most undeservedly neglected writers of the twentieth century. He wrote under extremely difficult conditions, much of the time whilst living in exile – in his adopted homeland Russia, in France, and in Mexico. He frequently had to write in secret and he smuggled his work out of the Soviet Union to be published in France and Spain. His writing was banned throughout the communist period in Russia, and it has only been available there quite recently. Midnight in the Century is the third volume in his first trilogy documenting the struggle for left wing ideals against the tyranny and totalitarian power of Stalin and all he stood for.

Midnight in the Century His novels are presented in the form of self-contained chapters that sometimes appear to have very little connection with each other. Characters are developed, then suddenly seem to disappear, only to pop up again later in a different context. What Serge was doing was trying to capture the chaotic state of a world in political flux, and create representative figures rather than outstanding individuals – though in the end what he produced turned out to be not unlike the traditional European novel.

He was writing as a witness to history – putting on record the terrible events and dilemmas faced by those who wished to keep a radical political view of the world alive. when it was faced by two totalitarian nightmares at the same time – Nazism and Stalinism. That’s why this novel is called Midnight in the Century. Loyal communist party members who had fought to free their country from Tsarist oppression were confronted by a government which betrayed their revolution, and the slightest criticism they made of the Stalinist regime was interpreted as an act of sabotage, aiding the Nazis. [It is no accident that those two systems of terror eventually united to fight on the same side.]

These grave diggers were born to understand each other. Enemies and brothers. In Germany, one is burying an aborted democracy, the child of an aborted revolution. In Russia, the other is burying a victorious revolution born of a weak proletariat and left on its own by the rest of the world. Both of them are leading those they serve – the bourgeoisie in Germany, the bureaucracy here at home – towards a catastrophe.

Serge’s central figures are the idealists, the left-oppositionists who believe in the revolution and work in a self-sacrificing manner for its success. But they are surrounded on all sides by members of the corrupt bureaucracy who are the agents of its betrayal. Of course it is easy to see with seventy years’ hindsight that these left oppositionists, for all their honour, bravery, and discipline – were still searching for a version of the ideological myth that had been imposed on the entire Soviet state – the notion that there was a single, unifying theory which would explain world history and allow the future to be planned.

Midnight in the Century is set in the 1930s, in the period of Stalin’s consolidation of power and his elimination of all opposition. Mikhail Kostov, a university lecturer in Historical Materialism is a left oppositionist sympathiser. He is arrested, thrown into a horrible prison, and left there until he is so demoralised that he writes the ‘confession’ required of him. This results in his being exiled to a remote outpost which is a squalid backwater of the Soviet state. Even there, official diktats and target production quotas are used to oppress the ragged bunch of exiles, peasants, and prisoners who live a pitiful existence of what Marx called ‘rural idiocy’ without even enough to eat.

Stalin’s so-called planned economy is shown to be a complete disaster, based as it is on a combination of wish-fulfilment, lies, and official propaganda. Those few people still capable of any independent thought keep their spirits alive by sending secret messages to their colleagues in similar circumstances. All of them are surrounded by spies, informers, and willing agents of a duplicitous state. Official government policies are based on a form of what we would now call Political Correctness – a series of policies completely out of touch with the reality of people’s lives.

As Stalin manoeuvers the Central Committee into yet another bout of oppression launched in the name of preserving democracy, its waves of terror are shown rippling throughout the archipelago of the GULAG. The regional governor has his quota of detainees to produce, but is driven to distraction because they will not confess to crimes they did not commit. As the oppositionists are all rounded up for yet another spell in prison, the youngest of them escapes, and the novel ends with him in a far flung corner of the Soviet empire, working on a construction site that is building a new Secret Police headquarters.

The novel was written in France between 1936 and 1938 when Serge was finally exiled from the USSR. It lacks the dramatic intensity of his two final masterpieces, The Case of Comrade Tulayev and Unforgiving Years which he wrote in Mexico. But in it he was honing his style, which is his own special brand of literary modernism. The narrative passes from one character to another with seamless transitions, and as it does so he is very fond of entering the point of view of the character on whom the narrative rests, and showing events from that character’s point of view – often using the second person ‘you’. This can sometimes be seen as an outer narrator commenting on the character, and other times the character reflecting on him or herself. Kostrov reflects on the failures of his past and his present ill health as he endures solitary confinement:

You knew very well that you were breaking her heart. Now this pale memory is breaking your heart. For your life is over. You’re still attached to it since your flesh still remembers these feelings. Of no importance. You think you’re unique and that the universe would be empty without you. In reality you occupy in the world the place of an ant in the grass. The ant moves along carrying a louse-egg – a momentous task for which it was born. You crush it without knowing, without being aware of it. Without the ant itself being aware of it. Nothing changes. There will be ants until the end of the world who will bravely carry louse-eggs through the tunnels of the city. Don’t suffer on account of your nullity. Let it reassure you. You lose as little when you lose yourself – and the world loses nothing. You can see very well from up in an aeroplane, that cities are ant hills.

Serge also has what might be called a supra-continental viewpoint from which to depict events. No matter how anguished and personally tragic a character’s situation, we are repeatedly reminded that all of us are specs of dust in any Great Scheme of Things. Not that there is any great scheme – even that psychologically consoling idea is kept at bay. There is only struggle, and the will to be rational and try to understand things. These are the small crumbs of comfort he offers us from this, the bleakest moment in Europe’s history.

Despite the fact that many people might find the subject matter of this novel somewhat specialised or esoteric, the central issues Serge dramatises are fundamental to a full understanding of the ideological and political history of the twentieth century. The sad fact is that in some parts of the world they are still being played out – now, in the twenty-first.

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© Roy Johnson 2010


Victor Serge, Midnight in the Century, London: Writers and Readers, 1982, pp.246, ISBN: 090461395X


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Mikhail Bulgakov – a guide

September 17, 2009 by Roy Johnson

major works in English translation

Apart from the relatively straightforward and restrained Checkhovian style of his early work, A Country Doctor’s Notebook, most of Mikhail Bulgakov’s writing is characterised by a florid prose style, rich images, and startling metaphors. He also plays freely with science fiction, political allegory, and sudden shifts into the absurd.

You might keep in mind that almost all of what he wrote was either censored, banned, or simply not published in his own lifetime. Even though some of his work was popular when it appeared in the 1920s, his reputation as a major Russian writer has only been established since his writing has been gathered together and published in the post-1960s.

 

Mikhail Bulgakov - Heart of a DogThe Heart of a Dog (1925) A rich, successful Moscow professor befriends a stray dog and attempts a scientific experiment by transplanting into it the testicles and pituitary gland of a recently deceased man. A worryingly human animal is then turned on the loose, and the professor’s hitherto respectable life becomes a nightmare beyond endurance. An absurd and superbly comic story, this classic novel can also be read as a fierce parable of the Russian Revolution.

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Mikhail Bulgakov Black Snow - Click for details at Amazon Black Snow: A Theatrical Novel (1920s) When Maxudov’s bid to take his own life fails, he dramatises the novel whose failure provoked the suicide attempt. To the resentment of literary Moscow, his play is accepted by the legendary Independent Theatre and he plunges into a vortex of inflated egos. With each rehearsal more sparks fly and the chances of the play being performed recede. This is a back-stage novel and a brilliant satire on his ten-year love-hate relationship with Stanislavsky and the Moscow Arts Theatre.
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Mikhail Bulgakov A Country Doctor's Notebook - Click for details at AmazonA Country Doctor’s Notebook (1925) With the ink still wet on his diploma, the twenty-five year old Dr Mikhail Bulgakov was flung into the depths of rural Russia which, in 1916-17, was still largely unaffected by such novelties as the motor car, the telephone or electric light. How his alter-ego copes (and fails to cope) with the new and often appalling responsibilities of a lone practitioner in a vast country practice – in blizzards, pursued by wolves and on the eve of Revolution – is described in Bulgakov’s delightful blend of candid realism and imaginative exuberance.
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Mikhail Bulgakov The Fatal Eggs - Click for details at AmazonThe Fatal Eggs (1924) Professor Persikov discovers a new form of light ray whose effect is to accelerate growth in primitive organisms. But when this ray is shone on the wrong batch of eggs, the Professor finds himself both the unwilling creator of giant hybrids, and the focus of a merciless press campaign. For it seems the propaganda machine has turned its gaze on him, distorting his nature in the very way his ‘innocent’ tampering created the monster snakes and crocodiles that now terrorise the neighbourhood. An inspired work of science fiction and a biting political allegory.
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Mikhail Bulgakov The Master and Margerita - Click for details at AmazonThe Master and Margarita (1940/1973) is a wonderful mixture of realism and fantasy which offers a satirical view of communist Russia. The story involves the arrival of the Devil into Moscow, interspersed with chapters dealing with Pontius Pilate and the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, plus other sections related to an artist and his relationships with his art and his lover. All three layers of the story are blended with spellbinding imaginative force. The novel is a multilayered critique of the Soviet society in general and its literary establishment specifically. It begins with Satan visiting Moscow in 1935, joining a conversation of a critic and a poet, busily debating the existence of Jesus Christ and the Devil. It then evolves into a whole scale indictment of the corruption, greed, narrow-mindedness, and widespread paranoia of Stalinist Russia. Banned but widely read, the novel firmly secured Bulgakov’s place among the pantheon of the greatest of Russian writers.
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© Roy Johnson 2004


Filed Under: Mikhail Bulgakov Tagged With: Literary studies, Mikhail Bulgakov, Modernism, Russian literature

Mikhail Bulgakov biography

September 17, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Mikhail Bulgakov biographylife, works, political persecution

Mikhail Bulgakov (1891—1940) was born in Kiev in the Ukraine into a family of intellectuals. His father was a professor at the Theological Academy. From 1901 to 1904, Mikhail attended the First Kiev Gymnasium. The teachers of the Gymnasium exerted a great influence on the formation of Mikhail’s literary taste, and his favourite authors became Gogol, Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Saltykov-Shchedrin, and Dickens. He graduated as a doctor from Kiev University, specialising in venereology. In 1913 he married Tatyana Lappa, and moved into provincial villages, where he practised as an itinerant doctor. For a short time he became addicted to morphine, but his wife helped him kick the habit. During the revolution he was drafted by the White Army and worked as a field doctor, but then gave up medicine for literature. In his autobiography, Bulgakov recalls how he started writing : “Once in 1919 when I was travelling at night by train I wrote a short story. In the town where the train stopped, I took the story to the publisher of the newspaper who published the story”.

In 1921 he moved to Moscow and wrote for emigrée newspapers and worked for the literary department of the People’s Commissariat of Education. His journalism was also published in Berlin, which was the main centre for Russian emigration at the time. (Vladimir Nabokov lived and worked there at the same period.) In 1924 he divorced his first wife and married Liubov Evgenevna Belozerskaia. Bulgakov began writing the story about the Civil War in Ukraine in 1923, which he published in the journal Rossiia under the title The White Guard.

From 1925 onwards, Bulgakov was closely associated with the Moscow Arts Theatre, which was dominated by the figure of its founder Konstantin Stanislavsky and his theories of method acting. By 1928 he had three plays running in Moscow theatres, one of which — The Day of the Turbins — was a favourite of Stalin’s, even though it presented a sympathetic portrayal of White (counter-revolutionary) officers. Nevertheless, as Stalin’s reactionary grip on power tightened, Bulgakov’s work was increasingly criticised, and then banned. In 1929 he wrote a letter appealing for help to Maxim Gorky, who was in favour with the authorities:

All my plays have been banned; not a line of mine is being printed anywhere; I have no work ready, and not a kopeck of royalties is coming in from any source; not a single institution, not a single individual will reply to my applications…

He also wrote to the Soviet government requesting permission to emigrate, and as a result of this received a personal telephone call from Stalin. But he was never allowed out of the country, and never saw the rest of his family again. They had all settled in Paris – the ‘second’ centre of Russian emigration at that time.

Bulgakov began writing Master and Margarita in 1928, and the novel still shows some traces of its earliest drafts. But he burned the manuscript along with all his other works in progress in a Gogolian fit of despair in 1930. However, by 1933 he had resumed work on it.

In 1932 he married for the third time to Elena Sergeevna Shilovskaia. During the 1930s Bulgakov was employed as an assistant producer at the Moscow Arts Theatre, and he was also librettist and consultant at the Bolshoi Theatre. Stalin’s favour protected him from the worst of the arrests, torture, and executions which characterised the reign of terror at that time – but his works remained unpublished and banned.

In 1937 he diagnosed his own neurosclerosis and predicted that he would die in 1939. He was correct to within only three months. He spent the last years of his life working on what was to be his masterpiece, The Master and Margarita.

© Roy Johnson 2004


The Master and MargeritaThe Master and Margarita (1940/1973) is a wonderful mixture of realism and fantasy which offers a satirical view of communist Russia. The story involves the arrival of the Devil into Moscow, interspersed with chapters dealing with Pontius Pilate and the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, plus other sections related to an artist and his relationships with his art and his lover. All three layers of the story are blended with spellbinding imaginative force.
Mikhail Bulgakov biography - The Master and Margerita Buy the book here


Filed Under: Mikhail Bulgakov Tagged With: Biography, Literary studies, Mikhail Bulgakov, Modernism, Russian literature, The Master and Margerita

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