Pasternak, "Nikoloz Baratashvili"

An essay on this Georgian poet by this Russian man of letters and translator from the Georgian.  You can read the original as part of this collection.

Among Baratashvili's poems is "Georgia's Fate."  Its hero, the last Georgian Tsar Heraclius II, is on the cusp of letting his war-plagued homeland fall under Russia's protection.  He excuses such a desire with the understanding that he can spare his country further incursions by its Eastern neighbors.  Once free from violence it could, he imagines, finally enjoy the fruits of peacetime diligence and enlightenment.

This was the Georgia into which Nikoloz Baratashvili, the greatest Georgian poet of the new era, was born.  The Georgian nobility married into the Russian nobility and, in so doing, entered the arena of Russian governmental concerns and the highest intellectual interests of both Petersburg and Europe.  The previously existent Western influence was now strengthened.

The circle of several princely families in which Nikoloz Baratashvili grew up was the same progressive circle where, thanks in all likelihood to Griboedov, both Pushkin and Lermontov ended up in the Georgian Caucasus. 

In addition to this motley eastern foreign land, which Tbilisi certainly offered its visitors, they also encountered a powerful, kindred leaven which evoked life in their souls, propelling to the surface the most natural, the most slumbering, and the most repressed elements from within them.  Everything in this circle was much like it was in Petersburg: wine, cards, razor-sharp wit, French conversation, skirt-chasing, and that audacious pride ever ready to parry the slightest slip into arrogance.  The circle was just as well-acquainted with debts and creditors, hatching plots, and landing in military jails as it was with endless blather, plaintive tears, and the composition, at the age of eighteen, of burning, impetuous verse of unrepeatable spiritualization – and, after all this, with dying young.

The father of Nikoloz Baratashvili was an impoverished marshal of the Georgian nobility who had squandered his fortune on receptions and banquets.  The life of his son Nikoloz was marked by few happenings and spent in penury and obscurity, the price for his father's luxuries.

Baratashvili was born on November 22, 1816 in Tbilisi.  He studied at a parish school and finished gymnasium.  His dreams of a military career were dashed just like the leg he had broken as a boy, leaving him lame his entire life.  His other wish – to complete his education at a Russian university – similarly did not come true.  His father's troubles and the need to support his family forced him to look for work as a government official.  After having served in minor positions with various administrative duties he was appointed as the assistant to a district commander in Ganja in 1845.  On the trip there he fell ill from a particularly pernicious form of malaria that was rampant in the area and died on October 9 of the same year. 

This series of bureaucratic positions diametrically opposes our notions of Baratashvili; in fact, it seems more like his reflection in a crooked mirror.  His true traits were sharp and significant.  These traits persisted in the minds of his contemporaries and were preserved with devotion.

As a child Baratashvili was a mischievous and venturesome lad; in school he was a good chum.  As an adult he would infuriate Tbilisi society with his pranks and the venom behind his mockery.  His habit of telling the truth to people's faces made him seem deranged.

It was the sister of Nino Griboedova, Princess Ekaterina Chavchavadze, whom he really loved.  But she married another man.  He would spend his whole life beset by this festering wound, a wound he salted with the tenderness and zeal of his lyric poetry and the scores he had to settle with the upper echelon of the Georgian aristocracy.  For him the sovereign Mingrelian Princess Dadiani was the beloved, the brightest star that could ever grace his firmament.

Baratashvili was surrounded by literati: Grigol Orbeliani was his uncle; Alexander Chavchavadze a friend of his father's. 

Yet his own writings were accorded so little significance that he could scarcely hope to see them in print in the near future.  His further projects were foiled by his premature demise.  Perhaps the way in which his poetry lies before us does not represent its definitive edition; perhaps the author would have preferred to subject his works to further selection and polishing.  The trace of genius that remained in these poems, however, is so great as to imbue them with perfection arguably more final, more significant than if the author had actually had more time to tend to their appearance.

Baratashvili's lyric poetry is distinguished by its notes of pessimism, motifs of solitude, and the general mood of Weltschmerz.

Happy days and their belief in man and the receptivity of posterity allow artists to express only the main idea in their works, almost not touching upon secondary matters, all in the hope that the reader's imagination alone will fill in the missing details.  Hence we can explain the imprecision in language and fecundity found in the classics, so natural in the ease of their very general and abstract problems.

Artist renegades of a gloomy stripe love talking to the very end.  They are meticulously clear from a lack of faith in the powers of others.  Lermontov's intelligibility is insistent and arrogant.  His details conquer us with almost supernatural force.  Between his hyphens we discover what we should have been left to figure out by ourselves.  This is the magical reading of our thoughts from a distance.  The secret to such an effect was possessed by Baratashvili.

His dreaminess commingled with fragments of life and everyday activity.  In his oeuvre one finds an individual imprint unique to him alone, in which nevertheless the particularities of his age are registered.  His descriptions in "Dusk on Mtatsminda" and "Nights on the Kabakhi" would not have exerted such a magical effect upon us if, along with being descriptions of the state of the soul, they had not been even more astonishing descriptions of nature.  The bursts in the visual element in his peerless, mad, and inspired "Merani" cannot be compared with anything else.  This is the symbol of the faith of a great personality in the throes of struggle, convinced of his immortality and that aim and meaning mark the movement of human history.  

Baratashvili's best verse has already been mentioned above: namely, the poems dedicated to Ekaterina Chavchavadze as well as all those from the final two years of his life, including the stunning "Blue flower."

In 1893 his ashes were transferred from Ganja to Tbilisi.  On October 21, 1945, following the lead of Georgia, his homeland, the entire country solemnly celebrated the centennial of his death.

The Ring of Thoth

There is undoubtedly no more romantic vocation than that of the Egyptologist.  Every young soul fascinated with the greatest civilization that ever was will at one time or another have fancied himself a decipherer of ancient riddles and symbols.  After years in splendid scholarly isolation, he will see the fruits of his labor as another gilded tomb is unearthed and another series of mystic rituals uncovered.  Whatever you may think of Ancient Egypt, it owns permanent property in our imagination precisely because so much of it has yet to be explained, the technology of the Pharaohs and their peons being so remarkably advanced (such as the embalming methods, which have never been duplicated) as to make many believe it the achievement of extraterrestrials.  And some elements of the otherworldly surely inform this well-known tale. 

We begin with a brief if cluttered review of the accomplishments of a young British academic by the name of John Vansittart Smith.  Our man may make some claim to lofty provenance, yet the bookends of his nomenclature could not be any more common.  Smith was once an up-and-coming zoologist, a "second Darwin" according to those compulsive labelers we find indigenous to all societies at all times, who eventually turned his attention to chemistry and garnered equal acclaim.  He dabbled in metals – he is very much an alchemist in his relentless self-aggrandizement – before shifting specializations once more and joining the Oriental Society.  Soon thereafter he was deemed a full-fledged expert on Ancient Egypt, as if that job description could ever really apply to the subject matter.  It is in this role, then, that our burgeoning academic finds his way to that most enchanting of European metropolises, the City of Lights:

He set himself to collect materials for a work which should unite the research of Lepsius and the ingenuity of Champollion.  The preparation of his magnum opus entailed many hurried visits to the magnificent Egyptian collections of the Louvre, upon the last of which, no longer ago than the middle of last October, he became involved in a most strange and noteworthy adventure.  The trains had been slow and the Channel had been rough, so that the student arrived in Paris in a somewhat befogged and feverish condition.  On reaching the Hotel de France, in the Rue Laffitte, he had thrown himself upon a sofa for a couple of hours, but finding that he was unable to sleep, he determined, in spite of his fatigue, to make his way to the Louvre, settle the point which he had come to decide, and take the evening train back to Dieppe.  Having come to his conclusion, he donned his greatcoat, for it was a raw rainy day, and made his way across the Boulevard des Italiens and down the Avenue de l'Opera.  Once in the Louvre he was on familiar ground, and he speedily made his way to the collection of papyri which it was his intention to consult.

A rainy Paris in October would be heaven enough for anyone with the faintest romantic streak, but we stand at merely the threshold of our discoveries.  Smith proceeds into the museum where our noticeably ornithic scholar ("His high-beaked nose and prominent chin had something of the same acute and incisive character which distinguished his intellect") overhears a snatch of conversation between two Englishmen punctuated by the observation, "What a queer-looking mortal!"  Further comments imply that they may be talking about Smith, whose birdlike features, odd "pecking motion with which, in conversation he threw out his objections and retorts," and general fineness of feature all suggest a resemblance to our titular god.  He turns to find out, "to his surprise and relief," that he was mistaken: the subject of discussion was "one of the Louvre attendants":

He moved his position slightly in order to catch a glimpse of the man's face.  He started as his eyes fell upon it.  It was indeed the very face with which his studies had made him familiar.  The regular statuesque features, broad brow, well-rounded chin, and dusky complexion were the exact counterpart of the innumerable statues, mummy-cases, and pictures which adorned the walls of the apartment.  The thing was beyond all coincidence.  The man must be an Egyptian.  The national angularity of the shoulders and narrowness of the hips were alone sufficient to identify him.

Who this alleged descendant of the pharaohs may be and what secrets he may possess need no further mention on these pages.  What we can say is Smith is such an exemplary student that he retreats to a dark corner of the world's most famous museum to edit his notes on those papyri and watch the soporific twilight limit his ambitions – and that will do.

Our author is still read with avidity in dozens of languages, but almost exclusively thanks to the immortal glory of perhaps the most recognizable literary figure of all time (elsewhere I bestowed this honor upon this character but may have to retract that comment).  Such is the price of renown: even those of discernible public influence during their lifetimes such as Conan Doyle cannot possibly tame the vicissitudes of taste.  For better or worse Holmes and Conan Doyle will be bound together for all eternity, like Melville and his whale or Nabokov and his mermaid or nymphet or whatever that poor girl was in the end.  The creation outgrows the creator and assumes an uneven proportion of the laurels.  Laurels that (usually posthumously) adorn the brow of the literary genius whom all know by reputation, but not, sadly, by word and deed.  For that reason alone would the judicious reader be wise to explore the other works of Holmes's designer, if only to find passages as soft and menacing as this:

The complete silence was impressive.  Neither outside nor inside was there a creak or a murmur.  He was alone with the dead men of a dead civilisation.  What though the outer city reeked of the garish nineteenth century!  In all this chamber there was scarce an article, from the shrivelled ear of wheat to the pigment-box of the painter, which had not held its own against four thousand years.  Here was the flotsam and jetsam washed up by the great ocean of time from that far-off empire.  From stately Thebes, from lordly Luxor, from the great temples of Heliopolis, from a hundred rifled tombs, these relics had been brought.  The student glanced around at the long-silent figures who flickered vaguely up through the gloom, at the busy toilers who were now so restful, and he fell into a reverent and thoughtful mood.  An unwonted sense of his own youth and insignificance came over him. 

So great is the power of Egypt that it can render even an insufferable egomaniac like Smith helpless and unripe before its magnificent legacy, but I think that was evident from the very beginning.  Four thousand years ago never felt so palpable, so immediately accessible, as when they leapt from the papyrus to the naked, barely trained eye.  Even to an evolutionary Renaissance man like Smith. 

The Boy Who Followed Ripley

It is hard not to like Tom Ripley.  Handsome, educated, well-dressed and mannered, he pursues a life of leisure the only way it should be pursued: with vigor and determination.  Yes, his lovely French wife at times will baffle the reader with her tolerance (what would a pretty rich girl see in a working-class American who, on more than one occasion, has exhibited a certain physical indifference to her charms?), but perhaps what Heloise Plisson needs is the space afforded her by a well-structured if fundamentally loveless marriage.  Loveless?  Very much so, because the only person for whom Tom Ripley can feel anything akin to love is Tom Ripley.  Which may explain the lens through which we may wish to view the events of this novel. 

We begin one August day in Belle Ombre, that humble French mansion, and Tom's domestic issues with ants, which might lead us to think that he has lixiviated crime from his abiding interest in self- perfection.  But almost immediately we are reminded that Tom is still profiting from the Derwatt controversy, and we know what they say about retired criminals.  Tom's attention is, however, quickly diverted by the appearance of an American teenager by the name of Billy, whom he finds loitering in the vicinity of Belle Ombre.  That Billy more than hints at a knowledge (he stares a little too long at Tom's Derwatts) of the tenebrous reputation of Tom Ripley surprises no one, least of all Tom.  Yet it is Billy's own presence in France – intercontinental truancy is not the most common of occurrences – that makes Tom wonder about the boy's identity.   In our internet age Billy, or whoever Billy really is, could have been traced in a matter of hours.  It takes a couple of days and the perusal of a few newspapers for Tom to make a more than educated guess:

He got up restlessly, went near the window where there was a bit more light, and looked at the People column on the back page of the Trib.  Frank Sinatra was making another final appearance, this time in a forthcoming film.  Sixteen-year-old Frank Pierson, favourite son of the late superfood tycoon John Pierson, had taken off from the family home in Maine, and the family was anxious after nearly three weeks with no word from him.  Frank had been extremely upset by his father's death in July.

It spoils nothing to reveal that Billy and Frank are one and the same (Highsmith apparently subscribes to the anti-whodunit tenets endorsed by, among others, this famous director),  but it is "his father's death in July" that arrests Tom's musings.  John Pierson, you see, had years before been paralyzed below the waist by an assassination attempt clearly inspired (the text admits as much) by the shooting of this politician.  He had coped by burying himself in his work, although without diminishing our pity we note that it is much easier to handle such a situation when you rank among the world's most financially privileged.  His death was mysterious in that he, well, fell off a cliff.  An unrailed cliff where he would watch the sun descend every evening – and off which he could have very easily been pushed.  The death is ruled a suicide, but one domestic employee claims that right before the tragedy she espied none other than Frank lurking nearby.

What happens next does not seem to dovetail with what we know of Tom Ripley.  Usually keen on divorcing himself from scandalous figures, the master of Belle Ombre takes a shine to Frank for reasons that are never elucidated.  Does he empathize with Frank for possibly having killed his father with the same stolid iciness with which Tom once dispatched a close friend?  Is there, as sex-obsessed literary critics love to imagine, a more personal subtext?  Or does Tom simply detect in Frank the banal mendacity of the jilted teenager?  Frank is more than a little infatuated with a coeval called Teresa, although their only carnal experience was woefully unsuccessful.  His account of the events of the day his father died reference this generally forgotten work which could not be any farther from Frank's shallow, untested morals, perfect proof that a bad reader will inflict any interpretation on a text if it suits his purposes.  As Tom contemplates a way to return Frank to his family, who has already set his older brother Johnnie (whose passport Frank pilfered) and a private investigator on his trail, Tom and Frank will become partners – not really in crime but in shenanigans.  One could even imagine that Tom, who comes from a poor family, might take a distinct pleasure showing European culture to his moneyed confederate who cannot be reasonably expected to know much about the world's most glorious continent.  So they traipse across Europe – we will leave it to the curious reader to discover precisely where – and Tom constantly beholds Frank and wonders whether he had the testicular fortitude to murder his own wheelchair-bound father.  A father that really did nothing wrong to his son except ignore him for the sake of accumulating even greater bullion.     

Perhaps the most amazing quality of this series is how intact Highsmith voice remains.  Each segment of the Ripliad was published in a different decade, and yet the works flow as if they were serialized without interruption.  Tom does not age substantially; it is the circumstances and environment around him which vacillate, and he simply responds to their movements.  A much-quoted passage about Tom's lack of contrition will not be rehashed here; suffice it to say that, for all his charm and resourcefulness, Tom Ripley is completely insane.  He is insane because he thinks that what has happened – all the suffering he has caused, all the wealth he has stolen – was the direct result of destiny spurred on by his brilliant schemes.  But what separates Highsmith's most memorable character from other murderous madmen is the noticeable absence of ambition: Tom does not seek renown, does not want for great affluence or power (his marriage to Heloise and the per annum she receives would be enough without his extramarital income projects), and is about as politically and religiously disaffected as an intelligent person can be.  But can we really loathe someone who practices Bach on the harpsichord and reads Goethe?  We might want to ask all those people on Mr. Ripley's conscience.  If, of course, he had one.

Goethe, "Nähe des Geliebten"

A work ("The lover's closeness") by this German man of letters.  You can read the original here.

Of you I think beneath the sun's sweet wrath 
On sea-kissed rays; 
Of you I think as moonlight paints its path
In brightest maze.  

'Tis you I see upon the dust-blurred road,
That distant shape;
When in deep night, upon a bridge's folds,
A wand'rer shakes.

'Tis you I hear as softest rustles jut   
In rising wave;
When in still copse I listen and find but
A silent grave.

However far, my soul you still have grazed –
To me so near!  
The sinking sun retreats as starlight stays –
Were you but here!

Hunger

Sitting in our perfectly heated homes and reading about the misery of  generations past should dispel any doubts about the progress of human technology.  And this film by Henning Carlsen should cast out any romantic notions of a cold, crisp winter in turn-of-the-century Christiania, which for three hundred years was how we referred to this city.

 

We do not know the full name of Pontus (Per Oscarsson), our protagonist, doomed to suffer the indignity of poverty and the greater indignity of famine.  Although the majority of Norwegians at this time were very poor, he stands out among his fellow citizens, and not only because he hails from some rustic province.  They stare at him as he drinks out of a fountain, they stare at him because he is too puny and myopic to meet the simple job criterion "nice young men in good health."  He refuses charity of any kind and insists that he is anything but poor and hungry,  since these are the basest of human conditions.  There is something child-like in his spastic movements and collisions with passers-by, the way he talks to his shoes, bows to the walls of a room as he leaves them one last time, follows people and says silly and provocative things, spouts pseudo-ironic statements that are supposed to demonstrate his talent to the world, and, of course, supplies endless excuses for why a man of his stature could possibly have such an appearance.  “Why don’t you go back to the country?” asks his long-suffering landlady.  Well, there he can assure himself of literary failure.

 

The story is based on an eponymous novel (Sult) by Knut Hamsun, who also lived in destitution before his star rose sufficiently high to garner him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1920.  Many have complained that there are too many Laureates from the Scandinavian countries, who won a fifth of all Literature Nobels through 1974 (culminating in the infamous awarding of the prize that year to two of the judges), but none until this past year.  Whatever one may think of his credentials as a writer, Hamsun's portrait is accurate: Pontus's life is banal, boring, and depressing, with episodic expressions of frustration, public scorn, and brief hope.  There are no prostitutes with a heart of gold (as in some of the works of this writer whose portrait hangs in the editor's office), conniving tricksters, or cruel gentlemen or ladies to twist the knife any deeper.   Everyone treats Pontus in roughly the same way, that is, they pity him but understand his refusal to pity himself as arrogance bordering on madness.  When he pawns his vest to give an even lowlier welt binder a bit of money, he reprimands him when the binder realizes that he has pawned one of his last possessions to get it (Pontus doesn't even have a coat), a perfect example of both his benevolence towards society (giving it a part of himself, like his writing), and his rancor when he is told that he should keep his generosity.

 

What is most remarkable, however, but just as accurate, is how small Pontus's world really is.  Time and again he comes across the same policemen, society folk, and wretched welt binder, and drops in on the same pawnbroker and newspaper editor.  Policemen in particular are accorded a special place among his gripes because their job is to maintain the status quo of a society that has not accepted him yet ("I know the police,"  he says, "they always deny the facts").  Somehow, towards the end of the film, we understand that Pontus will be accepted eventually.  Oscarsson, who fasted for weeks to take on the role, has a face you will not soon forget.  Not because he is desperate and gaunt and filthy, but because he so detests pity, charity and anything that he or anyone else has not earned.  He is so proud and principled as to seem irrational, and he knows no compromises.  He would rather die than succumb to the vulgar temptations of conventional living.  There is a certain beatific refulgence in his expression in the film's final shot, which is pleasing to heart and mind.  And if you know who Ylajali is, you can also make a proud Norwegian smile.