Love and Wheat / Wheat and Death

GRUSHENKO: To die . . . before the harvest. The crops, the grains, fields of rippling wheat. Wheat. All there is in life is wheat. . . . Oh, wheat! Lots of wheat! Fields of wheat! A tremendous amount of wheat. . . . Yellow wheat. Red wheat. Wheat with feathers. Cream of wheat.

SONJA: The last traces of the shimmering dusk are setting behind the quickly darkening evening, and it’s only noon. Soon we shall be covered by wheat.
NATASHA: Did you say . . . wheat?
SONJA AND NATASHA: Wheat . . .
GRUSHENKO: Wheat! I’m dead, they’re talking about wheat.

In its historical setting, plot, characters and atmosphere, Woody Allen’s feature film Love and Death (1975) parodies the nineteenth-century Russian novel in general and Tolstoy in particular. At the time of the film’s release, this would have been obvious to many viewers who had not necessarily read War and Peace from cover to cover: King Vidor’s spectacular big-screen adaptation of the novel, starring Audrey Hepburn and Henry Fonda among other famous names, had been released less than two decades previously, in 1956. And by the mid-1970s, when Woody Allen shot his film in Hungary, there were more than a half a dozen cinematic versions of Anna Karenina in existence. Through the names of its characters, their morbid love lives, their frequent agonising over the existence of God, and in verbal allusions such as a madcap dialogue involving wordplay on the titles of Dostoevsky’s novels, Love and Death also makes reference to Russia’s other towering nineteenth-century literary figure. Nor were Hollywood versions of Dostoevsky’s novels lacking; they included a 1958 MGM production of The Brothers Karamazov, starring Yul Brynner as a bald Dmitri Karamazov.

In general, Love and Death employs comic versions of the types and situations one might expect to find in a classic Russian novel. Although they are obviously important as somehow a quintessentially Russian leitmotiv, the film’s allusions to wheat would seem harder to pin down, however. On the eve of his duel with aristocrat and marksman Anton Lebedekov (Harold Gould), the bumbling Boris Grushenko (Woody Allen), who since boyhood has had visions of a white-robed, scythe-wielding Death, waxes lyrical about fields of rippling wheat and dying before the harvest. At the end of the film, Grushenko, having been executed by firing squad for his botched attempt to assassinate Napoleon, is being led away by the aforementioned Grim Reaper when his cousin Sonja (Diane Keaton) and Natasha (Jessica Harper) fall into a trance and begin uttering the word “wheat” in a droning threnody. What Russian novel might these ecstatic evocations of wheat be alluding to?

In Love and Death, the wheat motif occurs at liminal moments, on the threshold of death, between this world and the next, when the characters’ gaze seems to be fixed on some plane beyond the visible. In Tolstoy, however, the references to wheat would seem to be firmly rooted in this world rather than the next. For Tolstoy’s characters, wheat has an economic and an agronomic sooner than a metaphysical meaning. For example, in War and Peace, after giving his wife a thrashing, Yakov Alpatych, Bolkonsky’s estate manager, takes tea with innkeeper and grain dealer Ferapontov, and they talk about the price of wheat and how the weather is likely to affect the harvest. In Anna Karenina, Levin takes pleasure in the “velvety” vistas of green wheat he sees when out riding on his estate. Although Tolstoy does not explicitly mention the fact, we may assume that the said velvety vistas of wheat ripple. But otherwise, Levin’s interest is pragmatic: the harvesting of the wheat, the delivery of the wheat, how much money the wheat is expected to fetch at market.

It is to Dostoevsky that we must turn if we are to glean hints as to the mystical meaning of wheat that is seemingly parodied in Grushenko’s ecstatic vision. The epigraph to The Brothers Karamazov is the parable of the grain of wheat from the Gospel according to St John: “Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit” (John 12:24). Elder Zosima quotes the verse to Alexey Karamazov when he tells him of the terrifying fate he has foreseen looking in his brother Dmitri Karamazov’s eyes. Symbolist poet Vyacheslav Ivanov suggested a link between the name of the character Dmitri, who in the novel makes a spiritual descensus ad inferos, and Demeter, the goddess of the grain, whose daughter Persephone is abducted by Hades/Pluto and becomes queen of the underworld (i).

Notwithstanding the eschatological corn of wheat in The Brothers Karamazov, in Dostoevsky’s novels fields of wheat, rippling or otherwise, are wholly absent. Unlike landed aristocrat Count Leo Tolstoy, Dostoevsky “nearly never attempts to describe a rural landscape or the open country” (ii). The rural landscapes of boundless Russia do figure prominently in the novels of Ivan Turgenev, however. In Fathers and Sons, for example, the sight of rippling fields (a “waving sea”) of ripening wheat and whitening rye dispel Bazarov’s friend Arkadi’s melancholy thoughts. The natural world is part of the immanent reality within which Turgenev’s characters develop. But it is very much an eschatological wheat field that can be found in After Death (После Смерти, 1915), Yevgeny Bauer’s silent film adaptation of Turgenev’s short story “Clara Militch”. Yakov Aratov, a young, melancholy and rather reclusive man of twenty-five, a photography enthusiast who lives with his maiden aunt, rejects impetuous actress Clara Militch when she unexpectedly declares her love. She goes on to commit suicide by poison, dying on stage during a performance, and subsequently appears to Aratov in a dream, beckoning him to follow her. In Turgenev’s story, the landscape of the next world is barren, lifeless: Aratov dreams he is “on a bare steppe, strewn with big stones, under a lowering sky” (iii). But in Bauer’s film, the ghost of Clara Militch—wreathed with flowers, like Persephone when Hades snatches her down into the underworld—approaches Aratov through a field of ripe wheat.

Aratov becomes obsessed with Clara Militch, falling in love “with a dead woman, whom he had not even liked in her lifetime” (iv). In the story, she appears to him again in his sleep, this time at the end of a convoluted dream, which shifts from a sinister manor-house to a withered orchard and then to a lake, which symbolises the waters over which the dead cross to the other world. The dream (of the kind that Jung was to call the adumbratio) foreshadows Aratov’s death: he awakes to find the ghostly presence of Clara Militch in his room, he is enraptured and goes to her, they are united in a kiss, and he falls into a delirium, later dying with a rapturous smile on his lips. In the film, however, the scene of the second dream is the same wheat field as in the first vision. This time, Aratov is asleep in the corn; Clara Militch awakens him and they embrace, their eyes eerily fixed on some point above and beyond the frame, rather like Grushenko and Sonja in the scene in Love and Death where Woody Allen’s character, likewise on the threshold of death, is transported by his vision of fields of rippling wheat and cream of wheat.

One and a half decades after After Death, wheat fields were to be central to the imagery of a rather un-Chekhovian outburst appended to the text of Uncle Vanya in Jed Harris’s 1930 production of the play, whose cast included major silent film-era star Lillian Gish, in the rôle of Helena. The production had a twelve-week run at the Cort Theatre on Broadway and then toured Boston, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and Chicago, before returning in triumph to New York. The Chekhovian awkward pause was deemed to be too subtle for American theatregoers, and so the play’s translator, Rose Caylor, padded out the silences with additional dialogue of her own invention. Nor were Chekhov’s ambiguous, muted endings to the taste of Americans accustomed to emotionally rousing Hollywood climaxes: Caylor expands and embellishes on Sonya’s final line, “We shall rest,” with the result that, as Laurence Senelick puts it in his history of Chekhov in performance, her words are “edulcorated into sentimental gush” (v):

We shall be happy because we shall have everything . . . The wheat fields will be there, and the blue cornflowers – And the woods in the spring! And Mother, and those we loved . . . and who loved us in return . . . And those who, in this existence, didn’t love us. She sobs suddenly. They’ll love us . . . They’ll want us . . . She weeps passionately, agonizedly. This is the suffering about which, in that future, she will speak to God. This, and not the other, is the truth. And so she weeps. (vi)

Sonja’s closing speech in Love and Death could almost be an indirect parody of Sonya’s effusion in Caylor’s sentimentalised version of Chekhov. A contemporary account of the Jed Harris production describes the “Chekhov spirit” as a “sad, amusing dream”; like the male cast of Love and Death, Astroff, Serebrakoff and Uncle Vanya are accoutred with the visual signifiers of nineteenth-century Russianness: “long whiskers” and “tall boots” (vii). The “wheat fields” are the culmination of this nostalgic vision of the pre-Soviet Russian spirit, one that can be found in almost every film and costume drama set in the period of the classic Russian novel.

Expressing vaguely mystical yearning, maudlin tragedy and premonition of death in an image that conjures up the boundless expanses of Mother Russia, the wheat motif in Love and Death ultimately alludes to and parodies not the Russian novel or drama but the reception of Russian literature in the western imagination and popular culture, a highly stylised and simplified version of nineteenth-century Russianness.

(i) Ksana Blank, Dostoevsky’s Dialectics and the Problem of Sin, Northwestern University Press, Evanston, 2010, p. 41.

(ii) George Steiner, Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1967, p. 90.

(iii) Ivan Turgenev, Dream Tales and Prose Poems, translated by Constance Garnett, Macmillan and Co., New York, 1897, p. 54.

(iv) Ibid, p. 75.

(v) Laurence Senelick, The Chekhov Theatre. A Century of the Plays in Performance, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1997, p. 181.

(vi) Anton Chekhov, Uncle Vanya, translated and adapted by Rose Caylor, Covici Friede Inc., New York, 1930. 

(vii) Arthur Bigelow Paine, Life and Lillian Gish, The Macmillan Company, New York, 1932, p. 276-277. 

Cartea de grâu, ed. Șerban Anghelescu, Cosmin Manolache, Lila Pasima, Editura Martor, Bucharest, 2014, pp. 37-41.

The venom of our age (2)

Nationalism is the venom of modern history. Nothing is more bestially absurd than the readiness of human beings to incinerate or slaughter one another in the name of nationhood and under the infantile spell of a flag. Citizenship is a bilateral arrangement that is, that ought always to be subject to critical examination and, if need be, abrogation. The death of Socrates outweighs the survival of Athens. Nothing dignifies French history more surely than the willingness of Frenchmen to go to the brink of communal collapse, to weaken the bonds of nationhood drastically (as they in fact did) over the Dreyfus case. (...) Dr Johnson (...) defined patriotism as the last refuge of a scoundrel. It seems to me doubtful whether the human animal will manage to survive if it does not learn to do without frontiers and passports, if it cannot grasp that we are all guests of each other, as we are of this scarred and poisoned earth. 

George Steiner, "The Cleric of Treason," The New Yorker, 8 December 1980; George Steiner: A Reader, Penguin: Harmondsworth, 1984, pp. 195-96.

Ego diurnus / ego nocturnus

Language of Dreams. [...] It is a language of Images and Sensations, the various dialects of which are far less different from each other, than the various Day-Languages of Nations. Proved even by the Dream Books of different Countries and ages. 2. The images either direct, as when a Letter reminds me of itself, or symbolic -- as Darkness for Calamity. Again, either anticipation or reminiscence. 3. These latter either grounded on some analogy, as to see a friend passing over a broad and deep water = Death, or seemingly arbitrary, as in the signification of Colors, different animals etc. 4. Frequently ironical: as if the fortunes of the Ego diurnus appeared exceedingly droll and ridiculous to the Ego nocturnus -- Dung = Gold etc. So in Nature, Man, Baboon, Horse, Ass. Cats' love and Rage--. 5. Probably a still deeper Dream, or Ὑπερόνειρος, of which there remains only an imageless but profound Presentiment or Boding [...] 6. The Prophets, and the Laws of Moses, the most majestic Instances.-- 7. Prophetic combinations, if there be such, = the instincts previous to the use and to the organ [...] 9. The Conscience -- the Unity of Day and Night [...] Are there two Consciences, the earthly and the Spiritual? -- 10. The sensuous Nature a Lexicon raisonné of Words, treating of, not being, spiritual things -- Our fall at once implied and produced a resistance, this a more or less confused Echo, and this a secondary Echo etc. -- And thus deeming the Echo to be the Words, the Words became Things -- Ἐιδολολατρεῖα. [...] 10. [...] The importance of the Gastric and especially the hepatic -- and the paramouncy of the Ganglionic over the Cerebral in Sleep. The Liver, and lower Abdomen -- the Engastrimuthi, and the prophetic power of diseased Life in the ancient Oracles, hard by Streams and Caverns of deleterious influences -- these numerous in early Paganism, then decreased and with them the Oracles.

 

Entry 4409, May 1818, The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Kathleen Coburn, Volume 3 (Text): 1808-1819, Bollingen Series 50, Princeton University Press, 1973.

The venom of our age

Nationalism is the venom of our age. It has brought Europe to the edge of ruin. It drives the new states of Asia and Africa like crazed lemmings. By proclaiming himself a Ghanaian, a Nicaraguan, a Maltese, a man spares himself vexation. He need not ravel out what he is, where his humanity lies. He becomes one of an armed, coherent pack. Every mob impulse in modern politics, every totalitarian design, feeds on nationalism, on the drug of hatred which makes human beings bare their teeth across a wall, across ten yards of waste ground.

George Steiner, "A Kind of Survivor", Language and Silence. Essays 1958-1966, Penguin: Harmondsworth, 1969, pp. 132-33.

See also Husk and kernel.

Maculae

Bellarmin (1) makes sweating and crowding one of the chief torments of Hell, which Lessius (2) (no doubt after an actual and careful survey,) affirms to be exactly a Dutch mile (about a league and a half English,), in diameter. But Ribera (3), grounding his map on deductions from the Apocalypse, makes it 200 Italian miles. Lessius, it may be presumed, was a Protestant, for whom, of course, a smaller Hell would suffice.

In the early part of the last century an enquiry was published by the Rev. Tobias Swinden, into the nature and place of Hell (4). The former, according to this Divine, had been accurately understood, burning being the punishment, and the duration without end; but as to the "local habitation" of the reprobate, all opinions had been erroneous. Drexelius (5) had estimated the sum total of the damned at one hundred thousand millions, all of whom, (like Lessius) he calculated might be contained within a square German mile, and not stowed closer than negroes in a Liverpool slave ship: but this appeared to the English Theologian "a poor, mean, and narrow conception both of the numbers of the damned, and of the dimensions of Hell"; for if their immateriality and compressibility were to be alleged, you might as well, he said, squeeze them at once into a common baker's oven. His ideas were upon a grander scale. There was not room enough, according to him, in the centre of the earth for "Eternal Tophet". Burnet's (6) absorpt sun he thought a much more noble idea of such a furnace of fire. But his own opinion was, that Tophet was our very Sun, which must be acknowledged by all to be capacious enough for the purpose. The time of the sun's creation is a strong reason for admitting the hypothesis, being just after the fall of the Devil and his angels. It is true that the sun is said to have been made on the fourth day; but light, and evening and morning, are mentioned as having previously existed; now these as proceeding from the sun, could not have been before it; making on the fourth day therefore can only mean putting it in motion. The darkness which is predicated of Tophet may at first, he admits, seem an objection, but it exists in the maculae, the spots of the sun, which may be deep caverns and dens, proper seats of the blackness of darkness. Upon this hypothesis, the reason why sun-worship has been found so widely extended becomes manifest; it would be as peculiarly acceptable to Satan, as serpent-worship is known to have been.

This was indeed making the souls of the wicked of some use, as Nero did the Christian when he rolled them up in tow, dipt them in pitch, and set fire to them, as torches to light up the streets of Rome. They were so many living wicks of Asbestos, fed with the inextinguishable oil of divine vengeance, that they might be burning and shining lights to the world. If Jonathan Edwards (7) had seen this book he might have adopted its hypothesis as a new proof of "the glory of God in the damnation of sinners".

With what feelings could this man have looked at the setting sun?

[Robert Southey and S. T. Coleridge], Omniana or Horae Otiosiores, Longman, 1812. No. 17 "Hell".

(1) Roberto Francesco Romolo Bellarmino (1542-1621). Italian Jesuit and Cardinal, who played a rôle in the Galileo affair.
(2) Leonardus Lessius (1554-1623). Flemish Jesuit.
(3) Francisco Ribera (1537-1591). Spanish Jesuit, who, in 1585, published a commentary on the Apocalypse.
(4) Tobias Swinden, M. A. Late Rector of Caxton in Kent, An Enquiry into the Nature and Place of Hell. Shewing I. The Reasonableness of a Future State. II. The Punishments of the next Life. III. The several Opinions concerning the Place of Hell. IV. That the Fire of Hell is not metaphorical, but real. V. The improbability of that Fire's being in, or about the Center of the Earth. VI. The probability of the Sun's being the Local Hell, with Reasons for this Conjecture; and the Objections from Atheism, Philosophy, and the Holy Scriptures Answered. With a Supplement, wherein the Notions of Abp. Tillotson, Dr. Lupton, and Others, as to the Eternity of Hell Torments, are impartially represented. And the Rev. Mr. Wall's Sentiments of this learned Work. The Second Edition. London: Printed by H. P. for Tho. Astley, at the Dolphin and Crown in St. Paul's Church-Yard, 1727.
(5) Jeremias Drexel (1581-1638). Bavarian Jesuit. He calculates the volume of Hell in Infernus damnatorum carcerus et rogus (1623), the second part of his work on eternity, De aeternitate considerationes.
(6) Thomas Burnet (1635-1715). English theologian and cosmogonist.
(7) Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758). American preacher and theologian. 

Een bleeke, weeke made

Ik ben de hazel-noot. - Een bleeke, weeke made
bewoont mijn kamer, en die blind is, en die knaagt.
Ik ben die van mijn zaad een duisternis verzade.
En ’k word een leêgt’, die klaagt noch vraagt.

’k Verlaat me-zelf; ’k lijd aan me-zelven ijle schade.
Ik ben ’t aanhoudend maal, in een gesloten kring,
van eene domme, duldelooze, ondankb’re made.
Maar raak’ de vinger van een kind me, dat me rade:
hij hoort mijn holte; ik luid; ik zing.

Karel van den Woestijne (1878-1929), Het bergmeer (1928)

I am the hazelnut. A maggot pale and soft
Tenants my chamber, and it is blind, and it gnaws.
I am the one who with his seed the darkness gluts.
A void am I, whence issues neither plaint nor plea.

I quit myself, endure my own hollow ruin.
Tightly encysted, I am the constant repast
Of a witless, insufferable, ingrate maggot.
But let a child’s divining finger tap me:
He hears my hollowness; I resound, I sing.

trans. Alistair Ian Blyth

The great anti-babel of metaphysical Science

Preparatory to the great anti-babel of metaphysical Science all sorts of materials psychological and logical must be brought together/some fit, some unfit--and as even this takes ages even before the commencement of the building, the Fetchers and Carriers build Cots and Houses of them, each according to his own Fancy, with different cements--still however they are but orderly Cumuli of materials, that must surely be taken to pieces--some times 5 or 10 stones may be taken at once, unloosened--etc.

Entry 3254, Spring 1808, The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Kathleen Coburn, Volume 3 (Text): 1808-1819, Bollingen Series 50, Princeton University Press, 1973.

Âmes écrevisses

Il existe des âmes écrevisses reculant continuellement vers les ténèbres, rétrogradant dans la vie plutôt qu'elles n'y avancent, employant l'expérience à augmenter leur difformité, empirant sans cesse, et s'empreignant de plus en plus d'une noirceur croissante.

Victor Hugo, Les Misérables, I, iv, 2

There exist crab-like souls that continually retreat into the shadows, that retrogress in life rather than advancing, drawing on experience to augment their deformity, ceaselessly increasing in evil, and becoming more and more saturated with deepening darkness.

L'enfer c'est les autres

No matter how insipid a man might be, he is more terrifying than the most demonic character from Dostoevsky. (...) I would rather travel the length of Dante's Hell than the few dozen metres between here and the tobacconist's on the other side of the road.

Emil Brumaru, letter to Lucian Raicu, 10 December 1978,

Cerșetorul de cafea, 2nd edition, Iași: Polirom, 2014, p. 341.

The torments of beanismus

11. [...] Nam videmus eos qui vagantes, cantantes, cursitantes, vociferantes, balantes, bacchantes, clamitantes, vorantes, potantes, ingurgitantes, mendicantes, hiantes, boantes, in curta tunica saltantes, nullum angulum intactum relinquunt, hoc malo potissimum detineri, urgeri, torqueri. Sive contra, quia in claustris, carceribus, cellis, ergastulis, angulis, cameris scholasticis, tanquam pistrinis, mille repagulis, compedibus, vincti, catenati, ligati, servati, ob inopiam aëris purioris in hunc affectum prolabuntur, aut prolapsi confirmantur.

12. Somnus et hoc loco aliquid potest. Qui enim ex iis glires agunt, magis divexantur, ut noctu hiantes, ronchantes, sternutantes, furzantes, cachantes, schnarchantes, etc. Hiantibus praesertim magis periculi subest, noctu enim, animalcula, ut cimines, pulices, culices, tineae, vespertiliones os intrantes, irrepantes, permerdantes, et mentem perturbantes, divexantes, subtile serum exiccantes, et mala alia excientes, et dilaniant. Idem quoquo de vigilia esto judicium.

Cariollinus Tevetio Crufenas, Themata Medica, de Beanorum, Archibeanorum, Beanulorum et Cornutorum quorumque affectibus et curatione, Typographi Wolphgangi Blass ins Horn (ca. 1626), included in Nugae Venales, sive Thesaurus Ridendi et Jocandi. Ad Gravissimos Severissimos Viros, Patres Melancholicorum Conscriptos. Editio ultima auctior et correctior. Anno 1689. Prostant apud Neminem; sed tamen Ubique.

11. For, we see those who, roaming around, singing, running back and forth, crying aloud, bleating, revelling, shouting, guzzling, drinking, gorging, begging, gaping, yelling, jumping around in short under-garments, leave no nook untouched are above all held down, burdened, tortured by this illness. Or contrariwise, because they are cloistered, imprisoned, in cells, workhouses, crannies, schoolrooms, as if in pounding mills, behind a thousand bars, in fetters, bound, shackled, tied up, under guard, from a want of fresh air they sink into this malady, or having sunk into it they are reinforced in it. 

12. Sleep too has an effect on the matter. For, those who turn themselves into dormice are ravaged in a greater degree, since at night they gape, snore, sneeze, furzen, fret, schnarchen, etc. Danger lurks for the gapers in particular, for at night small animals such as bugs, fleas, gnats, moths, and bats, entering the mouth, creeping inside, shitting everywhere, and disturbing the mind, ravaging, drying out the saliva, and producing other injuries, wretchedly torture and dilacerate these wretched little asses. Let the same judgement also apply to when they are awake.

trans. Alistair Ian Blyth

 

Image from Orationes duae, De ritu et modo depositionis beanorum, Strasbourg: Dolhopff, 1680.  

Facsimile: University of Mannheim CAMENA - Lateinische Texte der Frühen Neuzeit, Corpus Automatum Multiplex Electorum Neolatinitatis Auctorum, DFG-project CAMENA, Heidelberg-Mannheim

Polyolbiosis

Ships, and their Picturesqueness — / Have I noticed the approximation to Round and Rondure, in the Square and triangular Forms — and that pleasure which depends on the subtle Sense of Est quod non est? — Balance: Synthesis of Antithesis? — and secondly (and if I have not directly or by Implication anticipated it, of first-rate importance to me), that which in my last night’s Dose I called the Polyolbiosis of each appearance from the recollections of so many others subtly combining with it

 

The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Kathleen Coburn, Volume 2 (1804-1808), Part 1, London and New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962, entry 2061.

Polyolbiosis — compound dream word that coalesced during laudanum reverie, a hapax legomenon unique to Coleridge: "state of polyvalent beatitude" (ὄλβιος, ον happy, blessed, -ωσις suffix forming nouns of process or condition)

The cockroach in Russian literature (6): Dostoevsky (3)

Один из двух мужчин, бывших в комнате, был еще очень молодой человек, лет двадцати пяти, тот самый Обноскин, о котором давеча упоминал дядя, восхваляя его ум и мораль. Этот господин мне чрезвычайно не понравился: всё в нем сбивалось на какой-то шик дурного тона; костюм его, несмотря на шик, был как-то потерт и скуден; в лице его было что-то как будто тоже потертое. Белобрысые, тонкие, тараканьи усы и неудавшаяся клочковатая бороденка, очевидно, предназначены были предъявлять человека независимого и, может быть, вольнодумца.

Федор Достоевский, Село Степанчиково и его обитатели. Из записок неизвестного (1859)

One of the two gentlemen in the room was a man still young, twenty-five years of age, the very same Obnoskin whom my uncle had mentioned that afternoon, praising his intellect and morals. This gentleman was not at all to my liking: everything about him somehow smacked of tasteless chic; his attire, despite being chic, was somewhat shabby and common; his face also betrayed something somehow threadbare. His thin, colourless, cockroach moustaches* and wispy failure of a goatee were evidently intended to display that he was an independent and, perhaps, free-thinking character. 

Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Village of Stepanchikovo and Its Inhabitants. From the Notes of an Anonymous Author (1859)

(translation: Alistair Ian Blyth)

* "Cockroach moustaches", cf. Mandelshtam's "Stalin Epigram" of November 1933:

Тараканьи смеются усища (l. 7)

His cockroach moustaches chortle

The "Malbrough theme" (тема Мальбрука) (4)

On peut, à la cour, prendre pied de deux façons: dans les nuées, on est auguste ; dans la boue, on est puissant.

Dans le premier cas, on est de l'Olympe. Dans le second cas, on est de la garde-robe.

Qui est de l'Olympe n'a que la foudre ; qui est de la garde-robe a la police.

La garde-robe contient tous les instruments de règne, et parfois, car elle est traître, le châtiment. Héliogabale y vient mourir. Alors elle s'appelle les latrines.

Victor Hugo, L'Homme qui rit (1869), Deuxième partie: Par ordre du roi, Livre premier: Éternelle présence du passé: Les hommes reflètent l'homme, VIII. Inferi

At court one can gain a foothold in two ways: in the clouds, one is august; in the muck, one is powerful. 

In the first case, one belongs to Olympus. In the second case, one belongs to the closet.

He who belongs to Olympus has only thunder; he who belongs to the closet has policy.

The closet contains all the instruments of rule, and sometimes, for it is treacherous, punishment. Thither comes Heliogabalus to die. Then it is called the jakes.

Nations policées, pays incultes

Ne sortons point de notre continent, tant que la terre y est habitable. Les peuples barbares sont venus autrefois du Nord, inonder le Midi de l'Europe. Veut-on prévenir une seconde révolution aussi funeste? C'est aux nations éclairées et policées, d'apporter les arts de la civilisation dans les antres et les rochers soumis à la grande Ourse. Rendons ces bois, s'il est possible, dignes d'être habités. On ne les quittera plus, pour dévaster nos villes et nos guérêts. Étendons la lumiere jusqu'au Nord, avant que le Nord répande de nouveau ses ténébres sur nous. Une des raisons qui doivent engager toute l'Europe à contenir la Russie dans les limites que la fortune a données jusqu'à présent à cet Empire ; c'est que réduite à tourner ses efforts vers le Pôle, elle y soumettra de proche en proche, toutes les petites Nations que la Nature a semées comme par hazard dans les arides plaines qui bordent les mers glaciales. Ces Peuples grossiront, à la vérité, la masse de ce corps pesant et formidable ; mais ils ne pourront de long-temps se réunir pour une invasion. Le chef-d'œuvre de la politique Européenne seroit peut-être de diviser ces pays incultes, entre les trois Puissances du Nord, les plus voisines du Pôle. Après avoir rendu à la Pologne sa liberté, dont l'abus, qu'elle en fait, ne sera jamais funeste qu'à elle-même, il seroit à souhaiter qu'on pût étendre les limites de la Suede et du Danemarck, dans les régions infécondes de la Sibérie et de la Tartarie. Si ces trois corps se balançoient dans les progrès de leur domination, leur équilibre soutiendroit celui de l'Europe entière. C'est ici qu'on peut appliquer d'une manière utile aux Peuples, la maxime imaginée par la tyrannie, pour les fouler impunément ; divisez pour régner. Si les États de l'Europe veulent être libres, indépendans ; qu'ils ne laissent aucun Empire s'aggrandit au point d'en accabler un autre. L'oppression d'un seul entraîneroit la ruine de plusieurs, et bientôt le bouleversement de tous. La police et la culture, sont les deux moyens de prévenir une si grande révolution ; parce qu'elles enchaînent les hommes par leurs occupations, et les attachent tous à leur pays natal, pars les travaux que la Nature y exige.

Continuation de l'histoire générale des voyages, ou collection nouvelle 1°. Des relations de voyages par mer, découvertes, observations, descriptions, Omises dans celle de feu M. l'Abbé Prévost, ou publiées depuis cet Ouvrage. 2°. Des voyages par terre, faits dans toutes les parties du monde. Contenant. Ce qu'il y a de plus remarquable et de mieux avéré dans les Pays où les Voyageurs ont pénétré; touchant leur situation, leur étendue, leurs limites, leurs divisions, leur climats, leur terroir, leurs productions, leurs Lacs, leurs Rivières, leurs Montagnes, leurs Mines, leurs Habitations, leur principales Villes, leurs Ports, leurs Rades, et Avec l'Histoire, les Mœurs et les Usages des Habitans; leur Religion, leur Gouvernement, leurs Arts, leurs Sciences, leur Commerce, leurs Manufactures, etc. Tome XIX. Paris, Panckoucke, 1770.

La géographie magique d'une planète inconnue

Aussi bien, c'est une impression douloureuse, à mesure qu'on va plus loin, de perdre, ville à ville et pays à pays, tout ce bel univers qu'on s'est créé jeune, par les lectures, par les tableaux et par les rêves. Le monde qui se compose ainsi dans la tête des enfants est si riche et si beau, qu'on ne sait s'il est le résultat exagéré d'idées apprises, ou si c'est un ressouvenir d'une existence antérieure et la géographie magique d'une planète inconnue. Si admirables que soient certains aspects et certaines contrées, il n'en est point dont l'imagination s'étonne complétement, et qui lui présentent quelque chose de stupéfiant et d'inouï. Je fais exception à l'égard des touristes anglais, qui semblant n'avoir jamais rien vu ni rien imaginé. 

Gérard de Nerval, Voyage en Orient

It is a painful impression indeed, the further one goes, to lose, town after town and country after country, that whole beautiful world that is created in childhood through reading books, through pictures and through dreams. The world that thus takes shape in children's heads is so rich and beautiful that you do not know whether it is the exaggerated result of ideas you have learned or whether it is a recollection of a previous existence and the magical geography of an unknown planet. No matter how remarkable certain sights and certain regions might be, there is none that completely surprises the imagination or that presents it with anything astounding or unheard of. I except English tourists, who seem never to have seen or imagined anything.

Shadows that in darkness dwell

 John Dowland (1563-1626), Flow My Tears (Second Booke of Songes or Ayres, 1600)

5

Hark! you shadows that in darkness dwell,

Learn to contemn light.

Happy, happy they that in hell

Feel not the world's despite.

The cicatrix

Scars can be literal or metaphorical, physical or psychical. The scar is the memory of the wound, imprinted on the warp and weft of the flesh or in the incrassate tissue of the brain. Every scar is unique, the trace left by an unrepeatable concatenation of circumstances and events that culminate in a trauma affecting the body or mind

But the one scar that is common to all is the umbilical cicatrix. It is the primordial scar; it is the mark that unites all men (and, indeed, all living things not born from the seed or egg). For, no man can enter the world without the cord that bound him to the womb being severed and leaving its trace. The umbilicus thus also marks us as separate distinct individuals. For the scholastics, it was a subject of fierce debate whether Adam and Eve, the only humans not to have been formed in the womb, possessed a naval, the umbilical scar. Were their bellies smooth, unblemished, or when God moulded them from the red earth and the rib respectively did He fashion them an umbilicus in order not to be incomplete? Likewise, when God removed the rib from Adam's breast from which to shape Eve, did it leave a scar?

What is certain is that the scar is to be found only in the fallen world, a place of toil, disease, violence, natural shocks and heartaches. We enter the world in a state of original sin, and this entrance is thenceforth and forever marked by a scar. The umbilicus, as the first scar, is the nexus whence all other physical scars radiate, the primal node of a web of accidents, mishaps, injuries and illnesses that forms an intricate and unique map of our passage through the world. Each body has its own uniquely patterned web of scars, and each scar tells its own story. The cicatrix is thus the imprint and bearer of memory, a sign by which man is revealed in his uniqueness, in the particularity of his own unrepeatable acts and sufferings, and the marks made on him by the latter.

When Odysseus returns to Ithaca disguised as a wandering beggar, his old nurse, Eurycleia, recognises him by the scar on his leg, when, bidden by the unwitting Penelope, she washes his feet in the basin of ringing bronze. The cicatrix, once revealed, aches for its tale to be told. And at this moment of agonising suspense in the flow of Homer's epic, when it seems that Odysseus might be unmasked before he can exact his revenge on the upstart suitors, the narrative breaks off and the listener is taken back to Parnassus, whither the young Odysseus had journeyed to visit Autolycus, his mother's father, beloved of cunning Hermes. And thus begins the story of one of the most famous scars in all of literature. Hunting with the sons of Autolycus, among the windy hollows of Mount Parnassus, Odysseus corners a boar, within a glade on the steep forest-clad slopes. Charging from its deep, bosky lair, where neither the rainy winds blow nor the bright rays of Helios ever strike, the boar gashes Odysseus' thigh with its tusk, and in his turn the resourceful son of Laertes transfixes the beast with his spear. In the halls of Autolycus, on the hunters' return, the wound demands that its tale be told, the same as the scar (oulê) will demand that its memory be unfolded by the rhapsode once it is secretly revealed in the halls of Odysseus many years later, after the war on the windy plain of Troy and the many years of bitter wandering that followed. Unlike in the Odyssey, it is significant that in the Iliad, the epic of the wrath of Achilles, a narrative of never-ending fresh wounds, the word oulê (scarred-over wound, cicatrix) does not occur once.

Thus, the recounting of the wound is like a scar that forms a break in the tissue of the narrative. A text itself might be full of scars, if the author, like an over-zealous surgeon, wields the critic's knife, hacking away at even the flesh of healthy passages. Cicatricosus (full of scars) is the adjective used by Roman rhetorician Quntillian in his Institutio Oratoria to describe the bloodless works of those orators who cannot resist tinkering with their manuscripts whenever they have them in their hands, in the belief that every first draft must necessarily be riddled with faults. (1) Of course, for the Romans, who for everyday purposes wrote by incising letters with a stylus upon waxed tablets, a text could be a reticulation of scars in quite a literal sense.

The mind, too, has been likened to a waxed tablet, upon which impressions are imprinted. Impressions and thoughts are incised in the mind, each leaving a deeper or shallower scar. In the Satyricon, it is said that the man of true culture must smooth all irritation (scabitudo, from scabies, "roughness") from his mind without leaving any scar. (2) Ataraxy would therefore be a state of supreme scarlessness. But just as none can enter life unscarred, life itself cannot be lived without incurring or inflicting scars. And the cicatrix is both memory and the inscription of a tale.

(1) Quintillian, Instituio Oratoria 10 4.3. Sunt enim qui ad omnia scripta tanquam vitiosa redeant et, quasi nihil fas sit rectum ess quod primum est, melius existiment quidquid est aliud, idque faciant, quotiens librum in manus resumpserunt, similes medicis etiam integra sectantibus. accidit itaque ut cicatricosa sint et exasanguis et cura pejora. 

(2) Petronius, Satyricon 99. Tantum omnem scabitudinem animo tanquam bonarum artium magister delevet sine cicatrice.

De daemonibus (3): species and habitats

[Thracian] Are there many species (γένη) of daemons, Marcus, I asked? 

 

“Many indeed,” he said, “and of every shape and form, so that the air above us and around us is full of them, full too are the earth and the sea and the innermost (μυχαιτάτους), deepest places. [...] Altogether,” he said, “there are six species of daemons,” but I do not know whether he was dividing them according to their habitats or because the demonic race as a whole takes corporeal form, and the hexade is [intrinsically] corporeal and earthly [...] In his barbarous native tongue, he named the first species the Leliurium (1), which means the igneous (διάπυρον). This species moves around in the air above us, because all species of demon are kept out of the regions around the moon, the same as the unhallowed are kept out of a holy sanctuary. The second species moves around in the air surrounding us, which is why many call them aerial demons. The third species is the earthly. The fourth dwells in fresh and salt water, the fifth below the earth. The last species abhors the light and is barely sentient (μισοφαὲς καὶ δυσαίσθητον).”

Michael Psellus, Dialogus de Daemonum Energeia seu Operatione (PG 122: 841b-845a)

trans. Alistair Ian Blyth

(1) Gilbert Gaulmin (Michaelis Pselli De Operatione daemonum Dialogus, 1615) conjectures that Psellus coined this word, which occurs nowhere else, by combining the Hebrew lel [i.e., לַיִל] “night” and ur [i.e., אוֹר] “fire”. 

 

 De daemonibus (1): corporeality

 

De daemonibus (2): physiological processes 

The narrowing chambers of hell

"In each of the hot and secret countries to which that man went he kept a harem, he tortured witnesses, he amassed shameful gold; but certainly he would have said with steady eyes that he did it to the glory of the Lord. My own theology is sufficiently expressed by asking, which Lord? Anyhow, there is this about such evil, that it opens door after door in hell, and always into smaller and smaller chambers. This is the real case against crime, that a man does not become wilder and wilder, but only meaner and meaner." 

G. K. Chesterton, "The Sign of the Broken Sword", The Innocence of Father Brown, 1911

Husk and kernel

The foundation of any national character is human nature. A national character is simply a particular colouring taken on by human nature, a particular cystallisation of it. (. . .)  Reactionaries seek to excise and destroy the deepest and most essentially human aspects of a nation's character; they promulgate its most inhuman and superficial aspects. They prefer the husk to the kernel. When they promulgate nationalism, reactionaries try to destroy what people share at a deep level; they recognise only what people share at the most superficial level. (. . .) It is important to understand what is primary and what is secondary. Of course, there is such a thing as national character. Nevertheless, far from being the foundation of human nature, it is simply one of the many colours, the many timbres, that human nature takes on. During the twentieth century the importance of national character has been hugely exaggerated. This has happened in both great and small nations. (. . .) The nationalism of a small nation can, with treacherous ease, become detached from its roots in what is noble and human. It then becomes pitiful, making the nation appear smaller rather than greater.

Vasily Grossman, An Armenian Sketchbook, translated from the Russian by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler, with an introduction and notes by Robert Chandler and Yurky Bit-Yunan, New York Review of Books, New York, 2013, pp. 15-16.

Original: Василий Гроссман,  Добро вам, Собрание сочинений в четырех томах, Москва, Аграф, 1998

De daemonibus (2): physiological processes

[Thracian:] And I asked him whether daemons were endowed with affectivity (ἐμπαθεῖς). “Yes, indeed,” he said, “just as some of them even discharge sperm and breed worms from that sperm.” But it is incredible that daemons should be capable of secretion (περίττωσιν) or possess animal-like genital organs, said I. “They do not possess organs,” he said. “They are, however, capable of secretion, on this point you may believe me.” But surely they must feed the same as we do, said I. “Some are nourished by indrawn breath (δι’ ἐισπνοῆς),” he said, “like breath (πνεῦμα) in the bronchial tubes and the sinews, and some by moisture, feeding not through a mouth, as we do, but in the manner of a sponge or a shellfish, absorbing the external moisture surrounding them and then expelling a spermatic accretion. Not all demons are capable of this, however, but only those species that are conjoined to solid matter, those that shun the light, and those that dwell in water or underground.”

Michael Psellus, Dialogus de Daemonum Energeia seu Operatione (PG 122: 840c-841a)

trans. Alistair Ian Blyth

 

De daemonibus (1): corporeality 

De daemonibus (1): corporeality

Timotheus: How then, if they are not corporeal (μὴ σῶμα ὄντες), are they visible to our external vision (τοῖς ἐκτὸς ὄμασσιν)? 

Thracian: But my dear fellow, the demonic race (τὸ δαιμόνιον φῦλον) is not incorporeal (ἀσώματον); they operate by means of bodies and upon bodies. [...] Basil the Great, explicating the words of Isaiah: Howl ye idols, says, “demons secretly sit before idols, delighting in the pleasure of the polluted sacrifices (τῶν μιασμάτων). The same as greedy dogs come to hang around a butcher's shop, where there is blood and gore, so too the greedy demons eagerly take their pleasure from the blood and steaming fat of the sacrifices, wallowing around the altars and the idols erected to themselves. And indeed their bodies feed thereby, being made of air or fire or a mixture of the two elements.” Again, the divine Basil, an observer of invisible things that are indistinct to us, not only demons, but also the immaculate angels, contends that they are embodied as tenuous, airy, unadulterated spirits (πνεύματα). And he cites as evidence the words of David, the most famous of the prophets: “Who maketh his angels spirits; his messengers a flaming fire” (Ps. 104,4).  [...]

Timotheus: Why then are they lauded as being incorporeal in so many places in the Scriptures?

Thracian: Because with both writers outside the Church and even the earliest writers within the Church it is customary to use the term body for that which is grosser, while that which is more tenuous, that which is elusive (διαφυγγάνον) to the eye and impalpable, is wont to be called incorporeal, not only by our writers, but also by many of the pagans.

Michael Psellus, Dialogus de Daemonum Energeia seu Operatione (PG 122: 836b-837b)

trans. Alistair Ian Blyth

The soul's katastasis

ᾍδης λέγεται ἡ ἐκ τοῦ ὁρωμένου πρὸς τὸ ἀειδὲς καὶ ἀθέατον κατάστασις τῆς ψχῆς. οὐδὲν γὰρ ἄλλο οἱ παρά τε τῶν ἔξωθεν, καὶ τῆς θέιας γραφῆς σημαίνει τὸ ὄνομα τοῦτο, ἐν ᾧ τὴν ψυχὴν γίνεσθαι λέγουσιν ἀπολυθείσαν τοῦ σώματος.

Theophanes, Homil. viii. pag. 50

Hades signifies the soul's being brought forth (katastasis tês psukhês)* out of the visible and into the formless and invisible (or: the soul's being re-established out of the visible and in the formless and invisible, or: the soul's transference from the visible to the formless and invisible, or: the soul's assumption of the condition of the invisible and formless after that of the visible). For, both writers outside the Church and the holy texts say that the word signifies nothing other than the soul's being loosed from the body.

* animae domicilium (malim ego, animae status, vel potius transitus, ut legatur μετάστασις, quemadmodum in prorsus simili loco Theophylacti).

κατάστασις apud recentiores Graecos non est statio, sed ipsa hominis conditio, ritus, ordo, constitutio, et mores (according to later Greek writers, katastasis is not man's fixed place, but his condition, religious usage, rank, makeup, and customs) - Johann Caspar Suizer, Thesaurus Ecclesiasticus e Patribus Graecis (1728)

Sleep and death

Καθεύδοντα καὶ νεκρὸν, τὸν ἐν ἁμαρτίαις φησί. Καὶ γὰρ δυσωδίας πνεῖ, ὡς  ὁ νεκρὸς, καὶ ἀνενέργητός ἐστιν, ὡς ὁ καθεύδων, καὶ οὐδὲν ὁρᾷ, ὡς ἐκεῖνος, ἀλλ' ὀνειρώττει καὶ φαντάζεται.

Chrysostomus Homil. xviii in Epist. ad Ephesos, pag. 851.

Dormientem et mortuum eum dicit, qui in peccatis est. Etenim tetrum odorem spirat, ut mortuus, et non potest operari, ut qui dormit, neque quidquam videt, ut ille, sed somniat et varia sibi fingit.

trans. Johann Caspar Suizer

By him that sleeps and the dead he means him that is in sin, for he both gives off a noisome stench, like the dead, and is inactive, like one that is asleep, and like him sees nothing, but is dreaming and hatching illusions.

La peur de l'enfer

Et puis, il y a cette histoire curieuse que rapporte Ségur et qui me paraît vraie :

« En 1787, dans une auberge près de Moulins, un vieil homme se mourait, ami de Diderot, formé par les philosophes. Les prêtres des environs étaient sur les dents : ils avaient tout tenté en vain ; le bonhomme ne voulait pas des derniers sacrements, il était panthéiste. M. de Rollebon, qui passait et ne croyait à rien, gagea contre le curé de Moulins qu'il ne lui faudrait pas deux heures pour ramener le malade à des sentiments chrétiens. Le curé tint le pari et perdit : entreprise à trois heures du matin, le malade se confessa à cinq heures et mourut à sept. " Êtes-vous si fort dans l'art de la dispute? demanda le curé, vous l'emportez sur les nôtres! -- Je n'ai pas disputé, répondit M. de Rollebon, je lui ai fait peur de l'enfer. " »

Jean-Paul Sartre, La nausée, 1938

Apophany

Vivre dans le monde comme dans un immense musée d'étrangeté, plein de jouets curieux, bariolés, qui changent d'aspect, que quelque-fois comme des petits enfants nous cassons pour voie comment ils étaient faits dedans - et déçus, nous nous apercevons qu'ils étaient vides.

Giorgio de Chirico

 

To live in the world as if in an immense museum of strangeness, filled with curious, colourful toys of shifting appearance, which sometimes like little children we break open to see how they have been made, and find to our disappointment that they are hollow.

The twittering dead

Of the ferryman across the "Waters of Death" there is no trace in the Old Testament. Spirits are supposed rather to "fly away" to their abode (Ps. 90:10). The bird-like form assumed by the soul for its journey was a wide-spread belief of antiquity, and appears probably in the word "twitter" that is used of the voice of ghosts in Isa. 8:19; 29:4. This idea was not unknown to the Babylonians. In Ishtar's Descent (obv. 10) we read of the shades, "They are clothed like a bird in a garment of feathers."

Lewis Bayles Paton, "The Hebrew Idea of the Future Life. III. Bablyonian Influence in the Doctrine of Sheol", The Biblical World, Vol. 35, No. 3 (Mar., 1910), p. 164.

Isa. 8:19: οἱ κενολογοῦνται "the twitterers", lit. "the empty-talkers"

Titivillus

Des démonologues du moyen âge mentionnent le démon Tintinillus comme ayant pour mission de recueillir dans une grand sac les versets des psaumes que les moines sautent en bredouillant, les syllabes mangées, les oraisons écourtées.

(Curiosités théologiques, 1861)

D'autres légendes rappelaient aux copistes le soin qu'ils devaient apporter à reproduire les textes exactement. Il existait, disait-on, un démon appelé Titivilitarius ou Titivillus, le vétileux, par corruption d'un mot populaire de l'ancienne latinité, et ce démon apportait tous les matins en enfer un plein sac des lettres que les religieux avaient omises, soit dans leurs copies, soit dans leurs psalmodies de nuit. 

(Franklin, Dictionnaire historique des arts, métier et professions exercés dans Paris depuis le treizième siècle, 1906)

External and internal darkness

Tenebrae apud inferos, duplices. Illas Corporis voco, et exteriores, has Animi et interiores. Illae Corporis, tenebras Aegyptias, horribiles, crassissimas, manu palpandas longe superant. Ignis apud inferos ardere potest, lucere non potest. Quod Sapientia de tenebris Aegyptiis asseruit, idem de Orcinianis dicendum: Una catena tenebrarum omnes erunt colligati,

clausi tenebris et carcere caeco.

De hac tenebrarum poena Chrysostomus: Plorabimus, omnes tristissime, inquit, flamma nobis vehementius incumbente. Neminem videbimus praeter condemnatos nobiscum, et immanem solitudinem. Quis potest verbis consequi, quam formidabiles pavores a tenebris exorientur, quae in animis nostris extabunt? Quemadmodum ignis illic non habet vim resolvendi, sic nec lucere potest: alioqui non essent tenebrae.

At tenebrae interiores illae, longe horribiliores sunt, quas Theologi Poenam damni, seu, Divinae visionis privationem vocant. Hoc omnino suppliciorum summum est, quo Deus hominem punire potest. Nam uti, Videre Deum, ipsissima beatitudo est, et summa beatorum felicitas: ita, Deum videre non posse, maxima damnatorum poena est, e qua inexplicabilis in eorum voluntate nascitur tristitia.

Jeremias Drexelius, Infernus Damnatorum et Carcer et Rogus Aeternitatis Pars II. 1633

In hell there are two kinds of darkness. The first is external and corporeal, the second internal and spiritual. The corporeal darkness by far surpasses the terrifying, dense, palpable darkness that afflicted Egypt. The fire in hell burns, but sheds no light. What Holy Wisdom declared of the darkness of Egypt may also be said of the darkness of Hell: All were bound with the same fetters of darkness,

shut in darkness and the blind prison. (1)

On the punishment of darkness Chrysostom says the following: We shall all lament most piteously when the fire violently assails us. We shall see none but our fellows in damnation and nothing but a vast solitude. Who can express in words the terrifying darkness-engendered dismay that will exist in our souls? Just as the fire has no power to consume, so too it is unable to give light: otherwise there would be no darkness.

But more terrifying by far is the interior darkness, which the theologians name Poena damni, or privation of the sight of God. This is the highest of the torments whereby God may punish man. For the sight of God is beatitude itself, and the highest bliss of the blessed: thus, not to be able to see God is the greatest punishment of the damned, whence arises in their wills an indescribable sadness.

(1) Virgil, Aeneid, 6, 732

Ici parmi la bourbe et le fient du monde

La présomption est notre maladie naturelle et originelle. La plus calamiteuse et frêle de toutes les créatures c'est l'homme, et quant et quant la plus orgueilleuse. Elle se sent et se voit logée ici parmi la bourbe et le fient du monde, attachée et clouée à la pire, plus morte et croupie partie de l'univers, au dernier étage du logis, et le plus éloigné de la voûte céleste, avec les animaux de la pire condition des trois : et se va plantant par imagination au-dessus du cercle de la Lune, et ramenant le ciel sous ses pieds. 

Montaigne, Apologie de Raimond Sebond

Our natural and native malady is that we are overweening. Man is the most ruinous, the frailest of all creatures, and at the same time the most prideful. This creature knows and sees himself to be quartered here amongst the mire and dung of the world, fettered and nailed to the worst, deadest and most stagnant part of the universe, on the bottommost floor of the building, farthest from the celestial vault, in the third and worst category of the beasts; and yet in his imagination he sets himself above the circle of the Moon, bringing the heavens under his feet.

De stultorum natura (3)

He hath a soule drownd in a lumpe of flesh, or is a peece of earth that Prometheus put not halfe his proportion of fire into. A thing that hath neither edge of desire, nor feeling of affection in it; the most dangerous creature for confirming an Atheist, who would sweare his soule were nothing but the bare temperature of his body. He sleepes as hee goes, and his thoughts seldome reach an inch further than his eies. 

John Donne, The True Character of a Dunce

The Vogouls (6) Modern poetry (2)

Youwan Shestalow (Юван Николаевич Шесталов) (1937-2011)

ērγəŋ mākemn, mōjtəŋ mākemn

ōsta, ōsta joχtŭmākem.

wojkan χāľkwet rāmγantēγət,

ūjriśakwet lujγantēγət.

χotta χallew mowalāli,

māńśi ērįγ sujŭmlāli...

at tōlįγpas, at χarįγlas,

māńśi ērįγ ōs sujŭmlas!

mirŭm, simeke rātχati,

ērγe sujtuŋkw' akwtoχ pati!

To my song-rich land, to my story-rich land once more, once more I have come. The white birch trees are whispering, the birds are twittering. Where the seamew laughs, there Vogul song rings forth... It has not faded away, it has not died out, Vogul song yet rings forth! While the heart of my people still beats, their song will ever ring forth!

l. 2 joχti, cf. Hungarian jut
l. 3 χāľ, cf. Finnish koivu
l. 5 χallew, Samoyed word
l. 6 mowalāli, cf. Hungarian nevet (dialect and obsolete mövet)
l. 7 sujŭmlāli, from sujmi "to begin to ring" with frequentative suffix -lāl
l. 8 χariγli, cf. Hungarian hervad
l. 9 mir, Russian word; sim, cf. Hungarian szív, Finnish sydän 

Vogul text from: Béla Kálmán, Vogul Chrestomathy. Developmental Work on Material in West Siberian Uralic Languages. Indiana University Publications. Uralic and Altaic Series, Vol. 46. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, Mouton & Co., The Hague, 1965.

The Vogouls (5) Modern poetry

Youwan Shestalow (Юван Николаевич Шесталов) (1937-2011)

χōtal śarmat χuriŋ āγi
kit saγaγe saγijāγe.
āŋkwatike - simkem tōli,
wōrkem jiki, mākem ērγi.
tūjtχatike - kāskem χōli,
witkem tisti, simkem śarγi.

The sun is like a beautiful girl braiding two plaits of her hair. When the sun shines, my heart melts, my forest dances, my land sings. When the sun hides, my gladness dies, my water grieves, my heart aches.

l. 2 kit, cf. Hungarian két, Finnish kaksi
l. 3 āŋkwatike, precative mood; tōli, cf. Hungarian olvad, Finnish sula. 

l. 5 tūjtχatike, precative mood; χōli, cf. Hungarian hal-, Finnish kuole-. 

l. 6 wit, cf. Hungarian víz, Finnish vesi. 

Vogul text from: Béla Kálmán, Vogul Chrestomathy. Developmental Work on Material in West Siberian Uralic Languages. Indiana University Publications. Uralic and Altaic Series, Vol. 46. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, Mouton & Co., The Hague, 1965.

Universality of the belief in hell (6)

According to Jochelson (1), among the Koryak there exist two conceptions of the abode of the departed. One soul of the deceased may rise to the Supreme Being, this idea being very indefinite, but another one goes to the underground world, that of ‘people of the ancient times’, peninelau, and the description of the future life of the departed is based on their life in this world. The peninelau live in the underground world in similar villages and in a similar way to their manner of life on earth, and the new-comer at once finds his place among his relatives. At the entrance to this underworld are found dogs as guardians, and a person who used to beat his dog during his life on earth will be stopped by them, though, in order to propitiate the guardians, he can carry in his mittens the fins of fishes, of which they are very fond.

M. A. Czaplicka, Aboriginal Siberia: A Study in Social Anthropology, Oxford, 1914.

(1) Memoir of the Jessup North Pacific Expedition

The Vogouls (4) Sacred poetry

A Vogul of the northern Ural. (Collection of the Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography). M. A. Czaplicka, Aboriginal Siberia: A Study in Social Anthropology, Oxford, 1914.

from The Heroic Song of the Elder of the Middle Section of the Ob, Ajäs-god

[...]
My water on one side: the wide-watered, wide Ob [vitä χarä, χarä Ās]; -
Numi-Sorńi [Upper golden Sky] my royal father
called me, Ajäs-god elder, here.
My water on the other side, sacred lake flowing with sacred water;
Numi-Sorńi my royal father
charmed me, Ajäs-god elder, here.
These stretched-out [settling], far flung seven regions,
they all exist through my power;
my many shabby-coated poor people [sawiñ sāχip saw kuńärėm]
they all exist through my power.
[...]
I inhabit the wide water of the nourishing Ob,
I inhabit the wide water of the fish-abounding Ob.
In this dwelling-place of mine
my many shabby-coated men [sawiñ sāχip saw γumin],
my many shabby-coated women [sawiñ sāχip sāw nēm],
when they are touched by disease of diseased flesh,
when they are touched by sickness of sick bone,
they come to me to pray.
[...]

Translated (from Bernát Munkácsi's Hungarian translation of the Vogul original) by Bálint Sebestyén. Vogul Folklore. Collected by Bernát Munkácsi. Selected and edited by Otto J. Sadovszky and Mihály Hoppál. Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest, and International Society for Trans-Oceanic Research, Los Angeles, 1995.

The language(s) of the dead

De Lingua etiam et sermone Mortuorum oriuntur quaestiunculae. Mortuorum Dialogos finxere multi, sed qua lingua colloquuntur mortui, nescio. Materna, inquies, seu vernacula, qua usi sunt in terris: ut Graeci loquantur Graece: Latini Latine, et sic de caeteris gentibus. Sed tempora mutantur, et populi, et linguae, de saeculo in saeculum. Hodierni Romani Veterum Latinorum non callent linguam: nec quamcunque Latinitatem, vulgus Italorum: Qui confabulabuntur hi populi cum suo Romulo, aut Numa? Celtarum et Scytharum linguas non retinent hodie, qui easdem sedes per occidentem et septentrionem incolunt. Denique quid fiet a nobis, incolis hujusce Insulae, qui tot habuimus origines et linguas? Britannice loquemur in corporibus aëriis: vel Saxonice, vel Normanice, vel ut hodie fit mixte et composite? Alteram fore suspicor Linguarum confusionem, Babelis illa graviorem, si in hunc modum vita futura ordinanda esset. 

 Thomas Burnet, De Statu Mortuorum et Resurgentium Tractatus, London, 1727, p. 89, recte 93

The minor questions of the language and speech of the dead now arise.* Many have invented Dialogues of the Dead, but in which tongue the dead converse with each other I know not. In the mother tongue or the vernacular they used in their own countries, you will say, and thus Greeks would speak Greek, Latins Latin, and so on for every other nation. But the times, as well as peoples and languages, are forever changing. Today's Romans, the Italian rabble, would be ignorant of the language of the ancient Latins and any Latinity whatever: by what means will such people talk to their Romulus or their Numa? The languages of the Celts and the Scythians, who inhabit the same homelands in the West and North, no longer survive. What then of us, the inhabitants of this Island, who have had so many different origins and languages? Will we speak British in our aerial bodies, or Saxon, or Norman, or the present-day composite tongue? I suspect that there would be another Confusion of Tongues, worse than that of Babel, if the future life were arranged in this way.

* Burnet has been discussing whether there be a polity of the dead in their aerial state during the interval between death and the resurrection. Will the dead form a promiscuous republic, or will they be separated according to their various nations, e.g. French, Spanish, German, British, etc.?

The Vogouls (3) Theology, eschatology

On the 14th of May [1692], he embarked at Solikamskoi, and crossing the little River of Usolkat, half a League from this City, he entered the Kama again, and crossed that River from Europe to Asia, arriving in the Country of the first Tartars of Siberia, called Wogulski, which is indifferently well people, and a most pleasant Country all along the Banks of the Susawaia, having on it all Sorts of Flowers and odoriferous Herbs; with prodigious Numbers of Deer, and all Sorts of Game. As the Tartars of Wogul upon this River are Heathens, he had the Curiosity to go on Shore to talk with them, concerning their Belief and Manner of Life. (...) M. Isbrant, the Muscovite Minister, asked them if they had any Knowledge of a God, and if they did not believe there was a supreme Being in Heaven, who created all Things, and governs the World by his good Providence, and who gives Rain and fair Weather? They answered, it was not unlikely, seeing the Sun and Moon, which they worshipped, and the other Stars, were placed in the Firmament, and that there was doubtless a Power that ruled them: But they would by no means agree, that there was a Devil, because he had never made himself known to them: Yet they do not deny the Resurrection of the Dead, but know nothing of what is to become of them.

John Mottley, The Life of Peter the Great, Emperor of all Russia. The second edition, with curious Copper Plates, and Maps. London. Printed for M. Cooper, in Pater-noster Row. 1755.

Description de la Moldavie

La Moldavie est une des plus belles et des plus agréables Provinces de l'Europe. On y voit de grandes Campagnes, qui font arrosées de diverses rivières, dont la principale est la Moldava, qui serpente à-peu-prés comme la Seine, et qui semble par tous ces détours vouloir porter l'abondance partout. Toutes ses eaux rendroient en effet les Campagnes trés-fertiles, et contribüeroient assurément à faire de cette Province, une des meilleures et des plus riches de l'Europe, si elle étoit moins exposée qu'elle n'est aux insultes des Turcs et des Tartares.

P H. Avril, Voyage en divers Etats d'Europe et d'Asie. Entrepris pour découvrir un nouveau Chemin à la Chine. Contenant Plusiers Remarques curieuses de Physique, de Geographie, d'Hydrographie et d'Histoire. Avec une Description de la grande Tartarie, et des differens Peuples qui l'habitent. Paris, 1692.

The Vogouls (2) Character, social organisation

The Vogouls are hardly of a middling stature, have generally black hair, and for the most part a scanty beard. They have some traits of the Kalmouks in the style of their physiognomy. They are of a gay disposition, teachable, honest, laborious, and acute; but sloveny and fickle, inclined to be disorderly and passionate to excess. Their women are robest, civil, laborious, and generally speaking well made. (...) They distinguish themselves into tribes or races; and commonly a Vogoul village is only composed of one family, whose chief or elder performs the functions of a staroste or mayor of the village. 

Russia, or a Compleat Historical Account of All the Nations which Compose that Empire. London. Printed for J. Nichols; T. Cadell in the Strand; H. Payne, Pall-Mall; and N. Conant, Fleet Street. 1780. 2 volumes in 8vo. 10 shillings.

The Vogouls (1) Ethnonym, territory, language

These people are sometimes called Vagouls and Vagoulitzes; but the appellation they give themselves is Mansi. They are of Finnish extraction as well as their language, but this latter has so many peculiarities of its own, and comprehends such a number of different dialects, that it has often, with good reason, been taken for a distinct language. The Vogouls have established their habitations in the forests on the northern side of Mount Oural, extending themselves to the westward, and still farther on the plains to the eastward of this chain of mountains. The disposition of their abode is such, that the houses are continued along the borders of a number of little rivers which fall into the Kama and Irtisch, on the borders of Solikamsk and Verghotouria, not far from the rivers Kolva, Vischoura, and Tawda. Here they have dwelt for time immemorial, and are possessed of traditions which have a great conformity with history. Some authors pretend that they are the brethren of the ancient Ougrians, or of the present Hungarians, and found their conjecture on the situation of the Vogoul territory, and the striking resemblance there is between the languages of the two nations. This people was subjected to the dominion of Russia at the same time with Siberia.

Russia, or a Compleat Historical Account of All the Nations which Compose that Empire. London. Printed for J. Nichols; T. Cadell in the Strand; H. Payne, Pall-Mall; and N. Conant, Fleet Street. 1780. 2 volumes in 8vo. 10 shillings.