The first decade of the twentieth century was a strange, largely forgotten time. Our minds tend to jump from the comfortable traditions of what we think of as the “Victorian Age” (even when we’re not talking about Britain) to the hectic anything-goes world that followed the Great War — from Trollope and Turgenev to Ulysses and Céline. But in between came a world of misty modernism that dealt in Symbols and Heavenly Ladies and was fascinated by Bergson and Scriabin and Nietzsche and the occult, all of which was blown away by the Guns of August; in Russian literature, Andrei Bely is still remembered, but the most popular prose writer of the period, Leonid Andreev, is not. That is largely, of course, because he wasn’t as great a writer as Bely, but it’s unfair to call him a purveyor of “hysterical melodrama” and a “footnote to Russian literary history” as Stephen Hutchings does; the History of Russian Literature I reviewed here is more to the point in calling him “the first fully accomplished existentialist writer in Russian literature.” He’s uneven — I’ve quit a couple of stories in the middle — but when he’s at his best, he’s well worth reading, and one novella I can recommend is the 1906 Губернатор [The governor, tr. by Maurice Magnus as His Excellency the Governor].
There is essentially no plot, just a situation: a governor-general is obsessed by his memories of ordering a mob of protesting workers to be fired on during the revolutionary year of 1905, and awaits the assassination he (and everyone in the city) knows is coming. He doesn’t try to avoid it; quite the reverse: he insists on going out without protection and follows the same path every day. It starts (I quote the Magnus translation) “Fifteen days had passed since that memorable occurrence, and yet it filled his mind — as though Time itself had lost its ascendancy over thought and things, or else had stopped like a broken clock” and continues with a description of “that memorable occurrence”:
The affair was simple enough of itself — though sad, of course. The workmen in a suburban factory, after a three weeks’ strike, had gathered — some thousand strong — together with their women and children, their old and disabled, and had appeared before him with demands which he as Governor could not grant. And they had carried themselves impudently and defiantly; had screamed; insulted the officials — and one woman, who seemed quite beside herself, had plucked at his sleeve till the seam gave way. Then when his staff had led him back on to the balcony (he still only wanted to speak with them and pacify them) the workmen had begun to throw stones, had broken a number of windows, and wounded the Chief of Police. Then his rage got the better of him and he gave the signal with his handkerchief!
The people were so turbulent that they had to be shot at a second time; and so there were dead — forty-seven according to the count; — among them nine women and three children, singularly enough all girls!… The number of the wounded was even greater.
At the end, of course, he is assassinated (on one of his walks). In between, he thinks and remembers and thinks some more. But it’s done in such a vivid way, with well-used repetition, that the reader doesn’t get bored, and what particularly struck me is that Andreev’s governor is an obvious model for Bely’s Apollon Apollonovich in Peterburg (see this post) — not only that, but the variations on “Детки все перемерли. Детки все перемерли. Детки-детки-детки все перемерли” (“The children are all dead! The children are all dead! The children… the children… the children have all died!”) that keep ringing in his head prefigure the brilliant repetitions of phrases and sound patterns in Bely (whose novel is also set in 1905). And I suspect there may also be an influence on Tynyanov’s Смерть Вазир-Мухтара [The death of the vazir-mukhtar] (see this post). I’ll be reading more Andreev (see this post for my earlier experience with him).
Oh, and one bit that amused me: at one point a couple of workers are boozing it up in a dive (and being observed by a government spy), and one of them says plaintively “Уважаешь ты меня, Ваня?” [Do you respect me, Vanya?]. One of the first cliches I learned about Russian men is that when they get drunk, at some point they wind up asking each other that, and it gave me quite a start, and a good laugh, to run across it in such an unexpected context.
Britain has the word “Edwardian” for precisely that decade, although it would be a still more useful term if the eponymous King-Emperor-Goat had survived until 1914.
It is the Age of Saki.
In Russian literature it is called “Silver Age”. Mostly applied to poetry and art, though. No great novels (by popularity and general acclaim) in that period, alas.
“Late Belle-Époque”?
The first decade of the twentieth century is certainly not forgotten in Austria. Arguably it is the period that visitors most obsess over – Klimt, Schiele, Rilke, Kraus, Schnitzler, Freud, Mahler, etc.
But despite all that cultural flourishing, there are also no truly great Austrian novels from that decade. Or even vaguely remembered novels. An interesting phenomenon. Was everyone so taken up with all the new things happening in the world that no one had time for a long novel?
Andreev as photographer:
https://godsandfoolishgrandeur.blogspot.com/2014/08/leonid-andreyev-his-autochromes-and-two.html
“Late Belle-Époque”?
“Gay Nineties: the Sequel”?
The first word that came to my mind was “twilight”, probably because of this sentence from a fictional guidebook quoted in Little, Big, by John Crowley, a novel that has been mentioned here.
“From the beginning the cult had an Anglophile twist, and interested correspondents included the poet Yeats, J. M. Barrie, several well-known illustrators, and the sort of ‘poetic’ personality that was allowed to flourish in that happy twilight before the Great War, and that has disappeared in the harsh light of the present day.”
E. M. Forster seemed like he really understood the shape of things—in Britain, but not just in Britain—in his late Edwardian writing: A Room With a View (1908), Howard’s End (1910), and even, allegorically, “The Machine Stops” (1909). Howard’s End is the most trenchant in that respect, although possibly the weakest of Forster’s “major” novels (although I’m not fully qualified to make that judgement, not having read Maurice).
Good points. I tend to mentally ascribe Forster to a much later date, for some reason. Probably because his sensibility is so modern (and he also lived until 1970.)
(Just checked the date for A Passage to India, which I would not have correctly assigned to 1924.)
A fair bit of Kipling’s work falls into that period too, including Just So Stories and Kim. He’s not an author who I’d misdate, but I do think he is considerably underrated – for (understandable, but misguided) political reasons.
Whether or not anyone was publishing good novels in Vienna in the ten years before 1914, quite a lot of important, exciting, and rapidly-changing stuff was happening during that period in the world of painting. Maybe in Paris more than anywhere else, but also in Germany and Italy and etc. etc. You can already see a hint of bad developments to come in the extent to which certain folks spent more time editing the polemical manifestos for their latest -ism than in actually painting, but lots of worthwhile actual paintings did get painted. The coming of the war arguably derailed all of this to a large extent, with the new innovations popping up during the war in neutral parts of Europe being either silly (Switzerland, Dada) or boring (Netherlands, De Stijl). But it was certainly not a static period where everyone was just lolling around listlessly while waiting for the inevitable catastrophe. I have just been reading one take on this period in the early chapters of Morgan Falconer’s _How to Be Avant-Garde: Modern Artists and the Quest to End Art_.
I hope you’re not implying that I was unaware of that; I am as fond of Carl E. Schorske’s Fin-de-Siècle Vienna as the next dilettante, and I used to have Mucha posters adorning my dorm room. I did not say nothing happened in that decade, I said that in the general cultural memory it had largely gotten lost in the shuffle between the more prominent epochs that preceded and followed it. You are, of course, free to disagree.
@dm, jwb
I believe that Austrian writers of larger works in this period were not aiming at commercial success or even a four-figure readership:
https://mediengeschichte.dnb.de/DBSMZBN/Content/DE/AesthetikDesBuches/09-oskar-kokoschka-die-traeumenden-knaben.html
—
Der junge Hermann Bahr, der Fechner, Helmholtz und Wundt gelesen hatte, nahm dies einmal ganz wörtlich: „Ich will gar nicht mehr schreiben. Schreiben in Sätzen“, notierte er in sein Skizzenbuch, „[s]ondern nur wenn die Außenwelt auf meinen Nerv drückt, auf meinen Tintenstift drücken, als Antwort, wenn die Außenwelt einen Fleck auf die Seele, einen Fleck aufs Papier machen.“
https://bahr.univie.ac.at/sites/all/ks/1-zur-kritik.pdf
I don’t know what “general cultural memory” might be, and why it would privilege the timeline of literature over that of painting. People still stand in lines to see Picassos painted in that period, and in perhaps smaller lines to see stuff painted in that period by Franz Marc or Sonia Delauney or Kazimir Malevich or Frantisek Kupka or Umberto Boccioni etc etc. Who stands in line for dead novelists?
“We will sing of great crowds excited by work, by pleasure, and by riot; we will sing of the multicolored, polyphonic tides of revolution in the modern capitals; we will sing of the vibrant nightly fervor of arsenals and shipyards blazing with violent electric moons; greedy railway stations that devour smoke-plumed serpents; factories hung on clouds by the crooked lines of their smoke; bridges that stride the rivers like giant gymnasts, flashing in the sun with a glitter of knives; adventurous steamers that sniff the horizon; deep-chested locomotives whose wheels paw the tracks like the hooves of enormous steel horses bridled by tubing; and the sleek flight of planes whose propellers chatter in the wind like banners and seem to cheer like an enthusiastic crowd.” From 1909, and not very “Victorian”-sounding! (point 11 in this: https://www.italianfuturism.org/manifestos/foundingmanifesto/ )
Ah yes, the Futurists — good call! It’s true that a number of the wild-eyed modernist movements got started before WWI, but my impression is that people tend not to remember that. I may, as always, be wrong.
It is certainly possible that many people standing in line to see an exhibit of wild-eyed modernist paintings from 1912 could not tell you without consulting the text on the wall whether the paintings predated or postdated the War …
This past winter the Guggenheim had a better-than-I-expected show entitled _Harmony and Dissonance: Orphism in Paris, 1910–1930_, which covered both pre- and post-, although I thought the best stuff mostly skewed early.
Expressionism is known by anyone here in Germany with more than a passing interest in modern art to be mostly a pre-WWI phenomenon, simply because so many of the main proponents died in the war.
I always had the impression that all the wild-eyed modernist phenomena started around 1900, but were ignored by establishment critics who thought their world and their class’s hegemony would last forever, until it suddenly didn’t.
Who stands in line for dead novelists?
That is unnecessary, and would be pointless if done. Their works are out of copyright, and available everywhere.
@Hans: Indeed, and not just expressionism. I have been known to argue when in a perhaps-gloomy mood that the entire history of painting as a distinct and valuable artform in Western Europe began sometime shortly before A.D. 1300 in Siena when some local avant-gardists thought they were just too cool to just copy Byzantine icons and then ended quite specifically on March 4, 1916 when Franz Marc was killed by shrapnel from a French shell colliding with his skull somewhere near Verdun. All aesthetically-interesting paintings since that date are merely the result of prior artistic momentum/inertia belatedly expressing itself while predictably running down to entropy and stasis.
Spengler could well have agreed precisely.
Spengler has his appeal, to those who find reality displeasingly complex. Do we not all have such moments?
(I find beer to be a better solution to such problems than Spengler, myself, but de gustibus …)
Ale, man, ale’s the stuff to drink…
And malt does more than Milton can
To justify God’s ways to man.
A pretext to cite my favourite poem from that collection:
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/A_Shropshire_Lad/The_Immortal_Part
Though not my favourite Housman, which is (of course):
https://allpoetry.com/Fragment-of-a-Greek-Tragedy
(Amusingly, they seem to have added an “AI” analysis, which neatly illustrates the, um, lack of intelligence of Automated Plagiarism Engines. Initially, I took it for the production of a stupendously dense human being, before I noticed the tag, but the human stupidity on display is meta-stupidiity: it was that of whoever thought adding “AI analyses” of poems was a good idea.)