The Sandman

The second story in our first Hoffmann discussion was "The Sandman" (1815), which is shorter and rather different from "The Golden Pot" - it still has elements of fantasy and horror, but can't really be called a fairy tale. Nathanael, another student, is visited by a peddler he's sure is a horrific figure from his childhood, his late father's friend Coppelius, who would cruelly tease and insult him and his siblings when they were young.

In a letter to his friend Lothar, Nathanael describes how, at the end of the evening, his mother would morosely announce that "the Sandman is coming," and it was time to go to bed. When young Nathanael asked, she explained that "the Sandman is coming" is just a way of saying, "you children are tired, so it's time to go to bed," but he didn't believe her - because, lying in bed, he could hear someone come into the house with heavy, dragging footsteps. When he finally gets up the nerve to explore, he discovers that the guest is Coppelius, come to engage in alchemical experiments with Nathanael's father. Nathanael suspects that Coppelius is responsible for his father's death in a strange accident, but at least the frightening old man was out of their lives.

Nathanael is deeply disturbed by the seeming reappearance of Coppelius at his door, but Lothar and his sister Clara (who, as it happens, is engaged to Nathanael) encourage him to be reasonable, not be consumed by the fright he's had, not to dwell undully on the sad childhood events recalled to mind. Clara's level-headed counsel:

If there is a dark power which malevolently and treacherously places a thread within us, with which to hold us and draw us down a perilous and pernicious path that we would never otherwise have set foot on - if there is such a power, then it must take the same form as we do, it must become our very self; for only inn this way can we believe in it and give it the scope it requires to accomplish its secret task. If our minds...are resolute enough to recognize alien and malevolent influences for what they are and to proceed tranquilly along the path to which our inclinations and our vocation have directed us, the uncanny power must surely perish in a vain struggle...

The poetically-minded Nathanael tries to heed this advice, and when the peddler returns he lets him in and buys a little spy-glass from him. When he looks out his window through the spy-glass, he sees and immediately falls in love with the girl across the street, Olimpia. But there's something decidedly...unusual about Olimpia that the enchanted Nathanael just can't see. Has he fallen to the terror of Coppelius after all?

Nathanael, like Anselmus in "The Golden Pot," possesses the poetic heart of the Romantic ideal, but the two stories seem to draw rather different conclusions about the value and meaning of a life so inclined. I'm definitely curious about the rest of the stories on the schedule.

The Golden Pot

This year the library book group is all about the Germans, and our first readings are the stories of E.T.A. Hoffmann. Hoffmann (1776-1822) was a major figure in German romantic literature, though he was also a notable composer, artist and lawyer. His stories have characteristics of horror, fantasy, and fairy tale, and feature imagery of mirrors, eyes, lenses, and mechanical devices - he's credited with writing the first detective story (Mademoiselle de Scudéri), and was the author of "The Nutcracker and the Mouse King," which, of course, provided the inspiration for Tchaikovsky's Christmas ballet.

"The Golden Pot" (1814) is a literary fairly tale. The clumsy (and whiny) student Anselmus of Dresden has a run-in with an apple-seller who happens to be the very picture of the fairy tale hag-witch. She curses him cryptically, and he walks away, tripping over things and complaining about his life, until, in the shade of an elder tree, he has a strange vision of a crystal voice and a blue-eyed snake.

As Anselmus begins to fall in love with the snake, he's drawn back to earth by his friend Sub-Rector Paulmann, who's urging him to take a job transcribing mysterious ancient manuscripts in the library of the eccentric Archivist Lindhorst. Apparently, for all his clumsiness, Anselmus is noted for his beautiful hand. Anselmus accepts the job, and strange things begin to happen at the Archivist's house - including the reappearance of his beloved green snake.

Meanwhile, Sub-Rector Paulmann's daughter, Veronica, has her sights set on Anselmus, having heard that he's destined to be an important civil servant some day. Veronica enlists the help of the old witch to ensure that Anselmus will be hers.

The story was kind of hard going for the first 50 pages or so - it grabbed my interest at the point in which one of the Archivist's daughters explains to Anselmus the magical back story, and it finally becomes clear that something definitive is happening. But even then, the lines between good and evil were unclear; it was uncertain whether the reader should be rooting for Veronica or the green snake to win Anselmus's affections, or whether the evil force was the Archivist or the old woman. This uncertainty stands out, because, of course, moral ambiguity is not normally a characteristic of fairly tales.

At the very least, Hoffmann retains the fairy tale happy ending, and all around, I was pleased with the first story.

Gogol on Stage

I joined my library book club mid-term (in January), when they started reading Bulgakov (see here, here, and here) but in the fall they had read Gogol, of whom Bulgakov had been a great admirer. So it was through that channel that I heard about the performance of Disappearing Acts: Stories of Nikolai Gogol at the Piven Theater Workshop.

I'd read Gogol on several occasions, though none very recently, so I prepared by re-reading the two stories to be performed, "Overcoat" and "Nose." Gogol is far more readable than I generally think of him as being. (Do you ever unconsciously retain false impressions of a book, author or genre that somehow prove impervious to repeated contrary experience? For example, I always think I enjoy southern literature far more than I ever end up actually enjoying it when I read it, and I always forget how much I like science memoir until I read another one.)

The plays turned out to be exceptionally good. The performance was held in a tiny theater in a cultural center up near Northwestern University - the house probably seats around 50, with the seats and stage at grade with one another. Definitely one of the more intimate theater experiences I've enjoyed. The stories were dramatized in-house (I think), and were performed in a storytelling style, with the ensemble taking on the functions of both narration and portrayal, which the cast worked well.

"We all come out of Gogol's 'Overcoat'," Dostoevsky is often quoted as describing his own generation of Russian writers; the modern response is usually that this is more evidently true of the generation that included Beckett and Kafka. It's not hard to see the Kafka in Gogol (or, properly, the other way around), particularly when reading Gogol with Kafka-on-the-brain, as I've been. Noses don't just vanish and assume false identities any more than traveling salesmen wake up transformed into june bugs, for example; it's also not hard to imagine that G. and K. could have related well to each others' home bureaucracies. But the resemblance was especially vivid with Gogol on the stage - with the overcoat not just emotive, but actually anthropomorphic.

I'll definitely be going back to read more Gogol now - and, I hope, back to Piven next season.

The Devil Takes Moscow

I've been trying to figure out how to write about The Master and Margarita for a while now. It was the final title we read in the library book group this spring, and quite challenging. Fairly considered Bulgakov's unfinished masterwork, it's highly critical of Soviet society and thus wasn't published until 1966, 26 years after the author's death, and even then in a censored edition. Copies were circulated underground among members of the intellectual classes long before that.

Synopsis: One unseasonably warm April, a mysterious foreign magician, Wolland, arrives in Moscow. His retinue: a ghostly Master of Ceremonies with a cracked pince-nez; a vile, fanged demon-type; a large, talking black cat with a mean vodka habit; a naked witch. Hijinks ensue; then hysteria; then terror, as the foreigner turns out to be the very Devil, and a Moscow that has lost its ability to believe in either God or Satan must cope with a visitation by actual evil.

A leading literary figure is decapitated by a streetcar; a young poet is declared insane; a theater manager finds himself mysteriously transported to Yalta; Wolland's single magic performance rains chaos (and eventually fire) on the city. Meanwhile, in an autobiographical gesture on Bulgakov's part, a writer (The Master) whose finest work is an abandoned novel about Pontious Pilate, lives in ignominy, and his lover (Margarita) sells her soul to Wolland to assuage the Master's disgrace.

I have no hope of doing this justice - it's difficult to describe, and is something of a favorite among students of Russian literature, with its many layers of social commentary and political criticism and Christology and Faustian themes. The annotation provided in this 1995 translation by Diana Burgin and Katherine Tiernan O'Connor is exquisite and enlightening. It's a piece that will surely deserve to be revisited.

Heart of a Dog - Mikhail Bulgakov (1925)

This was the second short work for our February group discussion, and though it was a faster read than The Fatal Eggs, it was also much darker.

Synopsis: Sharik, a mangy Moscow mutt, is taken in and nursed to robust health by Professor Preobrazhensky, a physician. The dog is bright, affectionate, devoted to his rescuer...until the operation, in which the Professor and his assistant implant Sharik with the testicles and pituitary gland salvaged from the body of a petty criminal, lately killed in a bar brawl.

Miraculously, Sharik survives the surgery, and rapidly begins to take human form - he begins to speak, walks on hind legs, loses his fur, wears clothes, reads Engels. Sharik becomes more and more human with time; or, rather, he becomes more and more the caricature of the vilest, most vulgar proletarian, terrorizing the home and lives of his creators.

If Sharik (who, as a man, improbably dubs himself Polygraph Polygraphovich Sharikov) is the slovenly Plebian, Preobrazhensky embodies the bourgeois ideal, living comfortably, operating his practice, wishing only to be left alone by his local committee. Little wonder, perhaps, that Heart of a Dog wasn't published in Russian until 1987 (at which time it apparently made no little splash).

Reading these two works has made me rather more aware and curious about the political change through the earliest years of the Soviet era - we in the West have an impression of that period as one of uniform bleakness, when, really, they were packed with nuance and tumult. Definitely looking forward to the final Bulgakov work on the syllabus, The Master and Margarita, and our group discussions.

The Fatal Eggs - Mikhail Bulgakov (1926)

First book for the library book group. I had to smile when I bought this one, since the frog is kind of a personal symbol (for complex reasons I'll have to explain some other time - but seriously, isn't he cute?).

Synopsis: The scene is Moscow, 1928 (the near future, at the time of writing). Stalin is comfortably installed and is even starting to solve those niggling, post-revolutionary annoyances like the urban housing crisis. One Professor Persikov, zoologist, indifferent to politics and all other concerns outside the bounds of biology, is innocently studying his frogs when he inadvertently discovers a powerful new form of light.

The "red ray," as he dubs it, violently accelerates cellular growth - in the light of the ray, organisms grow at lightning speed, to enormous sizes, reproducing to the point of almost instantaneous overcrowding, at which point they turn to devour each other.

I did mention that Bulgakov was an anti-Soviet satirist, yes? Good.

In between interviews with state journalists, spent carefully dissimulating the significance of his discovery, Persikov runs a few rounds of red ray experiments with his frogs, then writes to an American zoologist to order some more interesting specimen - specifically, a selection of eggs from several of the larger species of snake native to North America.

Meanwhile, back on the farm...a poultry plague is ravaging the Russian countryside, killing every chicken within hundreds of square miles in a matter of days. To remedy this, the government sets up a state farm, commandeers a few of Persikov's red ray chambers (over his frenzied objections) and orders a few cases of chicken eggs from the West.

Two shipments of eggs. One Soviet bureaucracy. Care to guess what happens?

Naturally, the reptile eggs go to the state farm, and the hen eggs to the infuriated Persikov. A few shots of the red ray, and little villages across Russia are suddenly being terrorized by forty-foot-long rattlesnakes. Oh, yes.

One thing I'm curious about, that I hope comes up in our discussion, is the actual social position of the research scientist in early Stalin-era Russia. There's never been a place or time when the practice of science hasn't been politicized (usually, though not always, to the chagrin of the scientists themselves), and I'd like to know more about how that played out under the unique circumstances of that era.

Soviet Sci-Fi

I've had a few brief experiences participating in book groups in the past, and since moving to Chicagoland, I've made a few attempts to find a group to join. This is easier said than done, if you're going in blind - it's not as though there's some national internet repository for matching up would-be book groupies (?) to each other - and the few possibilities I've been able to follow up with haven't worked out.

So recently I decided to take advantage of mid-term sign-up for one of the groups sponsored by my local library. This one seems fairly serious, with a focus on hefty-ish fiction and a leader who formerly taught literature in Russia. (I had to draft the grammar of that last phrase several times. Russian former literature professor? Former Russian literature professor? Russian former professor of literature?)

Apparently, they spent last fall on Gogol, but the readings from now though May are all Mikhail Bulgakov. I can't say I previously knew much about Bulgakov (1891-1940) beyond his name. He was born in Kiev to Russian parents. Both his grandfathers were priests, and his father was a theology professor, but Bulgakov himself trained as a doctor and served in a medical capacity in World War I and the Russian Civil War.

Eventually, Bulgakov abandoned medicine to devote himself to literature, but, being a critic of the Soviet regime, found his hands tied by censorship within a decade - this despite having Stalin himself as a particular fan. In fact, rather than granting permission for Bulgakov to emigrate, Stalin found him work as a theatrical satirist. Still, much of his work of lay unpublished in a desk drawer until long after his death, at age 48, from inherited kidney disease.

Our February discussion will cover two shorter works (around 100 pages each) - The Fatal Eggs and Heart of a Dog - both works of science fiction, in its earlier sense; that is, more Jules Verne than Star Trek. I've started on the first, and so far, it's promising.

(Note: The plaque in the photo is installed at the Bulgakov museum in Kiev. I think. Half the site was in Russian.)