Sir Thomas Browne and the Kabbalah

Today on the birth and death anniversary of the English seventeenth century literary figure, Sir Thomas Browne, its rewarding to look at aspects of the hermetic philosopher's little explored relationship to the kabbalah.

Its only recently that the many prejudices and misapprehensions which once surrounded the vital role and influence which esoteric ideas such as astrology, alchemy and the kabbalah wielded in intellectual history have finally eroded. It’s only now possible to acknowledge Sir Thomas Browne’s interest in the kabbalah as an integral component of his status as one of 17th century Europe's most learned scholars of comparative religion; his Discourse The Garden of Cyrus (1658) reveals him to be none other than one of England’s leading literary exponents of the kind of hermetic philosophy which John Dee (1527-1608) and his eldest son Arthur Dee (1579-1651)  both vigorously pursued.

One of the most valued of all hermetic traditions amongst adepts such as the Dee's, was the mystical Jewish teachings known as the kabbalah, in which number and letter assume magical significance. It was believed necessary to acquire knowledge of the Hebrew language by devout scholars such as Browne, primarily in order to read the word of God as revealed to his prophets in the original written form, namely Hebrew.

A familiarity with the 1711 Sales Auction Catalogue (an indispensable document in the study of Browne) swiftly reveals  the names of leading Hebrew scholars, along with Latin and Greek, Hebrew and even Ethiopian dictionaries as once shelved in his library.  Rather unsurprisingly there are also some jolly thumping big books on the kabbalah listed as once in Browne's library [1]. The two humanist scholars who first promoted esoteric topics as worthy of enquiry in the Renaissance, Marsilio Ficino (1433-99) and his successor, Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494) are both represented, as is, 'the supreme representative of Hermeticism in Post-Reformation Europe', Athanasius Kircher (1602-80).

While Ficino attempted to reconcile the wisdom of Hermeticism and Plato with the teachings of the Church, his successor, Pico della Mirandola (1463-94) focussed on promoting study of the Kabbalah. Pico della Mirandola was the first to seek in the Kabbalah proof of the Christian mysteries. Besides Greek and Latin he knew Hebrew, Chaldean and Arabic;  his Hebrew teachers introduced him to the kabbalah. One of the most startling of Mirandola’s  proposals was that no science gives surer conviction of the divinity of Christ than "magia" (i.e. the knowledge of the secrets of the heavenly bodies) than esoteric Jewish teaching.  Mirandola was an influential figure in the history of Western esotericism and would be taken seriously a century later in England when declaring, 'Angels only understand Hebrew' by would-be Angel conjurers. John and Arthur Dee.

However, the pre-eminent book which influenced the development of Christian kabbalah and which is listed in Browne's library, was by Francesco Giorgi (1467-1540). His book De Harmonia Mundi (1525) is a complex synthesis of Christianity, the kabbalah and the angelic hierarchies.

The seminal British scholar of esoteric philosophy, Francis Yates (1899-1981) wrote of  Giorgi -

'Giorgi's Cabalism, though primarily inspired by Pico della Mirandola, was enriched by the new waves of Hebrew studies which Venice with its renowned Jewish community was an important centre. Cabalistic writings flooded into Venice following the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492. Giorgi grafts Cabalist influence onto the traditions of his order. He develops that correlation between Hebrew and Christian angelic systems, already present in Pico, to a high degree of intensity. For Giorgi, with his Franciscan optimism, the angels are close indeed, and Cabala has brought them closer. He accepts the connections between angelic hierarchies and planetary spheres, and rises up happily through the stars to the angels, hearing all the way those harmonies on each level of the creation imparted by the Creator to his universe, founded on number and numerical laws of proportion The secret of Giorgi's universe was number, for it was built, so he believed, by its Architect as a perfectly proportioned Temple, in accordance with unalterable laws of cosmic geometry'.....In Giorgi's Christian Cabala, the angelic hierarchies of Pseudo-Dionysius are connected with the Sephiroth of the Cabala... The planets are linked to the angelic hierarchies and the Sephiroth'.[2]

It was while in London, engaged in a diplomatic errand that the Franciscan monk Giorgi met the Elizabethan magus John Dee. There is thus a quite distinct traceable link between the Renaissance founders of the Neoplatonic, Neopythagorean and Cabalist traditions, namely Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola via the Franciscan monk Giorgio and his advocacy of the Cabala to John Dee via his son Arthur Dee to Sir Thomas Browne. This hypothesis is strengthened by the fact that that both John Dee and Browne each possessed a copy of Giorgio’s highly-influential work De Harmonia Mundi. Unless that is Arthur Dee bequeathed his father's copy of De Harmonia Mundi  to Browne [2] but that would be no less of a strong link!

Browne’s respect for the Kabbalah can be discerned in his encyclopaedia Pseudodoxia Epidemica where one encounters the somewhat indignant exclamation - 

Astrologers, which pretend to be of Cabala with the Stars (such I mean as abuse that worthy Enquiry) have not been wanting in their deceptions; [4] 

Browne’s understanding of the kabbalah included an awareness that in the Hebrew alphabet each letter also denotes a number, of either fortunate or unlucky disposition thus-  

Cabalistical heads, who from that expression in Esay (Isaiah 34:4) do make a book of heaven, and read therein the great concernments of earth, do literally play on this, and from its semicircular figure, resembling the Hebrew letter כ Caph, whereby is signified the uncomfortable number of twenty, at which years Joseph was sold, which Jacob lived under Laban, and at which men were to go to war: do note a propriety in its signification; as thereby declaring the dismal Time of the Deluge. [5]  

There’s also evidence in Pseudodoxia Epidemica that Browne was familiar with one of the earliest and most influential of all kabbalistic texts, the legendary Book of Splendour. Also known as the Zohar (Hebrew: זֹהַר, lit. "Splendor" or "Radiance")  the foundational work in the literature of Jewish mystical thought it consists of commentary on aspects of the Torah (the five books of Moses) mythical cosmogony and mystical psychology. The Zohar also contains a discussion of the nature of God, the origin and structure of the universe, the nature of souls, redemption, the relationship of Ego to Darkness and "true self" to "The Light of God", and the relationship between the "universal energy" and man. [6]

Browne tantalizingly alludes to Moses de León (c. 1250 – 1305) known in Hebrew as Moshe ben Shem-Tov (משה בן שם-טוב די-ליאון),  the Spanish rabbi and Kabbalist considered to be the author of the Zohar in this remark-

'.....as M. Leo the Jew has excellently discoursed in his Genealogy of Love: defining beauty a formal grace, which delights and moves them to love which comprehend it. This grace say they, discoverable outwardly, is the resplendent and Ray of some interior and invisible beauty, and proceeds from the forms of compositions amiable.' [7] 

Although its recorded that as early as 1934 Joseph Blau wrote upon Browne’s interest in the Kabbalah, amazingly,  only in 1989 was it recognised that the leading scholar of Hebrew and the Kabbalah in 17th century Germany, Christian Knorr von Rosenroth (1636-89) has an interesting relationship to Browne.[8] The German scholar Von Rosenroth devoted many hours of his somewhat short life, completing what must have been a true labour of love, translating in total over 200,000 words of Browne’s colossal encyclopaedia Pseudodoxia Epidemica into German, completing his task in 1680 for publication in Frankfurt and Leipzig. Whether Browne was informed of this translation, late in his life isn't known, but it seems unlikely he wouldn't hear of it.

Browne’s esoteric inclinations are given full vent in his phantasmagorical discourse and supreme work of hermetic philosophy in English literature, The Garden of Cyrus (1658) in which the Kabbalah is alluded to several times.

The opening paragraph of chapter 3 of The Garden of Cyrus sees Browne move swiftly on from examples of the Quincunx pattern in gardening and art, to those in nature. In a paragraph of humorous and cosmic prose, he alludes to a French contemporary, the Hebrew scholar, astrologer and librarian to Cardinal Richelieu, Jaques Gafferel (1601-81). Browne was particularly interested in Gaffarel’s best-selling book, which had been translated into English as Unheard of Curiosities in 1650 in which the French kabbalist proposes an alternative to the Babylonian-Greek circle of animals or Zodiac.

Using the stars quite differently from the Babylonian-Greek circle of animals or Zodiac, Gaffarel describes how the letters of the Hebrew alphabet can be traced in the stars of the night-sky. Browne includes Gaffarel along with esoteric concepts of the 'music of the spheres' and the cosmic harmony of Pan's pipes as worthy of credulity thus-

Could we satisfy ourselves in the position of the lights above, or discover the wisdom of that order so invariably maintained in the fixed Stars of heaven; Could we have any light, why the stellary part of the first mass, separated into this order, that the Girdle of Orion should ever maintain its line, and the two Stars in Charles's Wain never leave pointing at the Pole-Star, we might abate the Pythagorical Music of the Spheres, the sevenfold Pipe of Pan; and the strange Cryptography of Gaffarell in his Starry Book of Heaven.

In his wide-ranging discourse of analogies and correspondences connecting the number five and quincunx pattern in art, nature and 'mystically considered’ Browne lets rip in rapid, near breathless enquiry, making note upon gardening, generation, germination, grafting, heredity, birth-marks, physiognomy, astrology, chess and skittles, archery and knuckle-stones, Egyptian hieroglyphs, architecture, optics, the camera obscura, acoustics and the healing power of music, among other topics of interest to the worthy 17th century Norwich physician.  

Given its free-ranging imaginative associations its almost predictable that the alphabet mysticism of the Kabbalah is included in this unique and idiosyncratic literary work. Browne speculates upon the properties of the letter He, the 5th letter in the Hebrew alphabet. His kabbalist enquiry includes one of the earliest recorded usages of the word ‘archetype’ in English.

The same number in the Hebrew mysteries and Cabalistical accounts was the character of Generation; declared by the letter He, the fifth in their Alphabet; According to that Cabalisticall Dogma: If Abram had not had this Letter added unto his Name he had remained fruitlesse, and without the power of generation: Not only because hereby the number of his Name attained two hundred forty eight, the number of the affirmative precepts, but because as increated natures there is a male and female, so in divine and intelligent productions, the mother of Life and Fountain of souls in Cabalistically Technology is called Binah; whose Seal and Character was He. So that being sterile before, he received the power of generation from that measure and mansion in the Archetype; and was made conformable unto Binah. [9] -

Its also in the 'mystically considered' chapter 5 of The Garden of Cyrus that Browne speculates upon the healing power of music upon the mind, using kabbalistic analogy thus-

Why the Cabalistical Doctors, who conceive the whole Sephiroth, or divine emanations to have guided the ten-stringed Harp of David, whereby he pacified the evil spirit of Saul, in strict numeration do begin with the Perihypate Meson, or si fa ut, and so place the Tiphereth answering C sol fa ut, upon the fifth string: [10]

Curiously the Sephirotic Tree of the kabbalah and the Quincunx pattern as illustrated in the frontispiece of The Garden of Cyrus have both been viewed as examples of 'stepped-down versions' of Indra's Net. In Hindu mythology the god Indra has a net which has a multifaceted jewel fixed at each knot, each jewel in turn reflects all the other jewels suspended in the net. The image of Indra's net is sometimes used to describe the interconnected relationship of the entire universe, not unlike either the Sephiroth tree of the kabbalah or Browne's intention in citing numerous examples of the Quincunx pattern in art, nature and mystically.

Browne however was not a solitary figure in his interest in the kabbalah in 17th century England. The Cambridge Platonists, in particular its leading members, Henry More (1614-87) the author of Conjectura Cabbalistica (1653), and Ralph Cudworth (1617-88) also had a keen interest in the mystical Jewish tradition of the kabbalah.

Well I hope today, on the anniversary of Sir Thomas Browne's birth and death (how Ouroboros-like is that) that this little essay convinces my reader of Browne's very real interest and understanding of the kabbalah. It is, however , because of his having interests in early modern science in tandem with topics such as the kabbalah, that Browne's place in European intellectual history remains ambiguous and paradoxical today ! 

Notes

[1] The 1711 Action Sales Catalogue was finally published in 1986 thanks to scholarship of the Yale University, American academic and Dean Emeritus of Yale University,  J.S. Finch (to whom I enjoyed a correspondence with until his death).

[2] The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age Frances Yates pub. RKP 1979

[3] De Harmonia Mundi  Venice 1525 1711 Sales Auction Catalogue page 2 no.33

[4] P.E. Bk 1 chapter 3

[5] P.E. Bk 1 chapter 4

[6] Wikipedia

[7] P.E. Book 6 chapter 11

[8] Alchemy of the Word: Cabala of the Renaissance Philip Beitchman pub. State University of New York Press, Albany 1989

[9] Genesis 27 verse 15 discusses the adding of H to Abram's name.
 Text here in chapter 5 includes a reference by Browne to - Archang. Dog. Cabal. Archangelus Burgonovus  (The apology of brother Archangulus of Burgonovo in defense of cabalistic doctrines against Rev. Peter Garzia’s attack on Mirandula from Hebrew wisdom, source of the Christian religion). Basel 1560, Bologna 1564. Also mentioned in Pistorius’s Artis cabalisticae scriptores Basel 1587

[10] 1 Samuel 17 verse 40

With thanks to Karmel Lee for her encouragement.

The Macclesfield Psalter: A Medieval Norwich Gem

Spike Bucklow's The Riddle of the Image: The Secret Science of Medieval Art (2014) is a scholarly, yet accessible analysis of medieval illuminated manuscripts. It includes a chapter on the recently discovered Macclesfield Psalter, a fascinating gem of medieval Norwich artistry.

The Macclesfield Psalter (Book of Psalms from the Old Testament) was produced around 1330. It contains 252 illustrated pages and is recognized as  an important discovery of a medieval manuscript in Britain. Amazingly, it was only discovered in 2004 after laying unidentified for centuries, when the library at Shirburn Castle was catalogued for sale. Cambridge University's Fitzwilliam Museum tried to buy it, but the initial bid was won by the Getty Museum of Malibu, California, for £1.7 million. The American museum had to gain permission to export the Psalter.  A temporary export bar was placed on the Psalter until 2005. The Fitzwilliam Museum, assisted by an £860,000 contribution from the UK Government's National Heritage Memorial Fund raised the £1.7 million needed to keep the Psalter in the United Kingdom. The Macclesfield Psalter is now owned by the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, however it is not currently on display as it's being restored.

The Macclesfield Psalter is noted for its vivid images, grotesques and humour. Its illustrations include amongst other curiosities, three-headed monsters with hairy noses, a dog in a bishop's costume, an ape doctor giving a false diagnosis to a bear patient, rabbits jousting and riding hounds, an armed knight confronting a giant snail and a giant skate terrorising a man. The newly-coined adjective 'pythonesque', alluding to the surreal animations of Terry Gilliam, is sometimes used to describe the Psalter's bizarre and occasionally obscene images; but in fact it is quite the reverse. Gilliam has recently confessed he copied from a book of medieval marginal illustrations as a source for animations for the 1975 film Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

There was concerned debate about which of the Psalter's pages would be appropriate for Queen Elizabeth II to view when she visited the Fitzwilliam in 2005.

The pages of the Macclesfield Psalter offer an intimate view of the medieval world and the beliefs, prejudices, follies and sentiments of its people. Doctors, priests, minstrels, mummers, farmers, dancers, tricksters and beggars mingle in the margins just as they would have done on the busy streets of medieval Norwich. The livelihoods of Norfolk’s farmers and Norwich’s weavers, seamstresses and dyers were closely connected to the Psalter through the flow of various materials, and as such it is testimony to the highly-developed crafts and skills which thrived in Norwich, a city of European stature in trade, commerce and artistic creativity during the Medieval era. If Norwich had not been a very wealthy city during the 14th century then materials such as gold and saffron would not have been obtainable in the illumination of the Psalter.

According to author Spike Bucklow, a senior research scientist at Hamilton Kerr Institute at the University of Cambridge, the Macclesfield Psalter was created by two equally gifted painters who worked and responded playfully to each other's ideas. Their patron was a member of a rich and powerful Norfolk family whose identity remains unknown. The painters’ workshop, Bucklow conjectures, was located in the parish of Saint George's at Tombland (from old Danish tomb empty and Land Space) in Norwich. The list of pigments found in the illuminations contained nothing that could not be obtained from in a Norwich workshop circa 1335. Indeed, the artist's studio in Tombland was located only a few minutes walk from the nearby church of Saint John Maddermarket, a quite specific allusion to the madder plant, once essential to the dyer's art.

Bucklow notes, 'the two anonymous artists who illuminated the Psalter purposefully left pigments off their palette to challenge and stretch themselves. They restricted their palette with supreme confidence knowing that lovers can see their beloved's beauty in even the most tarnished of mirrors.'

The two artists of the Macclesfield Psalter embedded several layers of meaning into their riddle-like art, some of which remain enigmatic and unsolvable to this day.

Bucklow continues - 'The most obvious part of the Psalter's visual form is its strange collection of everyday and hybrid creatures. Appreciating the form simply involves recognising that the painters wanted the reader to be able to revel in a riot of possibilities, whether apparently normal or abnormal. The sheer exuberant variety of animal, vegetable, mineral and monstrous decoration suggests a limitless imagination.'

However, he rejects the ideas of certain 1960's orientated counter-culture historians who claim that the many bizarre images in the Psalter were the product of painters who had ingested grain infected by ergot, a hallucinogen similar in effect to LSD.

What is certain is that from their everyday dealings in Norwich, the patron and painters of the Psalter were guided by Dominican Friars who eagerly integrated the ancient Classical world view with Christianity. They knew that everything in the material realm was limited and constantly changed either in time or space.

Crucially, throughout The Riddle of the Image Spike Bucklow displays a rare understanding of the alchemical imagination. He explains, for example, the spiritual significance of colour to the medieval artist, in the use of mosaic gold as opposed to 'true gold' thus-

'It is also appropriate that the 'likeness of gold', mosaic gold, was an alchemical pigment attributed to Moses, a legendary Old Testament father of alchemy. As a fabricated alchemical hybrid (of tin, sulphur, quicksilver and sal ammoniac) mosaic gold is also appropriate for the marginal creatures which are of course, also fabricated hybrids.'

Bucklow's understanding of the alchemical imagination, his ability to illuminate the seemingly long lost mind-set of medieval artists, in conjunction with his scientific background along with his ability to discourse in an erudite yet accessible style, makes his The Riddle of the Image: The Secret Science of Medieval Art a fascinating read. Further chapters on the Wilton diptych, the Westminster Retable and the Thornham Parva Retable simply confirm the importance of his ground-breaking research and study.

  

                              *    *   *   *   *  *  *  *

Neptune's  Creatures of the Deep: Sir Thomas Browne and Jorge Borges, North Sea Magical Realism and  the Macclesfield Psalter. 

An  interest in the strange creatures which once existed in the medieval imagination was revived and catalogued in the 20th century by the influential Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986). In his Book of Imaginary Beings (1967) Borges lists over 120 mythical creatures alluded to in classical antiquity, medieval folklore and world literature, finding it useful to consult the encyclopaedia Pseudodoxia Epidemica (1646-72) written by the Norwich physician and Hermetically-inclined philosopher, Sir Thomas Browne (1605-82) when discussing hybrid creatures such as the Amphisbaena (a two-headed serpent), Basilisks, Mandrakes, and the utterly weird so-called vegetable lamb of Tartary.

And in fact Sir Thomas Browne was one of the Argentine writer's favourite authors. Borges alluded to Browne in almost every one of his books, from his earliest to his last publication in his long life.

There are, I believe, at present two local contemporary artists, both of whom possess rich and fertile imaginations, which in tandem with well-developed painting techniques, are equally adept at dredging bizarre creatures from the depths of their unconscious psyche as inventively as the two Medieval a illustrators of the Macclesfield Psalter, almost seven hundred years ago.

Currently located in coastal towns twenty miles east of Norwich, North Sea Magical Realist artists Peter Rodulfo and Mark Burrell are inspired by the moods, hues and hidden depths of the North Sea, the working life and social culture of their respective coastal town of residence (Great Yarmouth and Lowestoft) as well as marine life in general, amongst other varied sources of inspiration and influence they each have.

Both artists also in their own inimitable way, occasionally conjure imaginary creatures equally bizarre as those in the Macclesfield Psalter, or alluded to in Browne's encyclopaedia Pseudodoxia Epidemica  or even collected by Jorge Borges ; as is evident in Mark Burrell's unsettling fish-man and the cuttle-fish character among the  crew of Peter Rodulfo's recent work, Waiting for the Captain.

'Waiting for the Captain' 120 x 100 cms. Peter Rodulfo (2015)

                                         
                       Mark Burrell's 'Fishman' (Unfinished)

Books consulted

* The Riddle of the Image: The Secret Science of Medieval Art by Spike Bucklow
    Reaktion Books London 2014

* Julian's Gospel: Illuminating the life and Revelations of Julian of Norwich.  Veronica Mary Rolf  pub. Orbis Books New York 2013
- includes a highly informative  chapter on Medieval Norwich.

* The Book of Imaginary Beings by Jorge Luis Borges (1957 revised and expanded 1968) pub. Penguin 1974

Aelita & The Heart of a Dog

"Touch my lips with your lips, the same way they do on Earth" commands Aelita,  Queen of Mars.

The early years of Soviet Russia witnessed bold experimentation in the arts. In particular, Science-fiction was hugely popular during the 1920's in Russia,  especially the novels of H.G.Wells, whose short stories often describe an advanced society shaped by scientific progress. Speculation upon scientific discovery and themes found in H.G Well's novels, inspired Russian novelists such as Mikhail Bulgakov, Aleksei Tolstoy and Alexander Belyaev to discuss the moral implications of scientific discoveries, both real and imaginary to a fast changing Russian society. Science-fiction also found expression in Russia in the newly emerging art form of mass entertainment, the cinema. 

Aelita

First screened in 1924, Aelita was one of the earliest of all science-fiction films. It tells of Los, a engineer living in Moscow who dreams of Aelita, the Queen of Mars. He builds a spaceship to take him to her, and they fall in love. However, Los soon finds himself involved in a proletarian uprising to establish a Martian Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Los's imaginary trip to Mars concludes with the engineer consigning the manuscript of his literary fantasy to the fire, solemnly uttering the Communist Party sentiment, 'We have more serious work to do'.

Intended as ideologically correct mass entertainment which could compete both in Russia and abroad with Hollywood, while also being art-house cinema of a quality equal to German Expressionist films such as Fritz Lang's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), the film critic Ben Sonnenberg wrote of Aelita-

"It has interplanetary travel, romance, murder, theft and fraud, a comic detective, thoughts about mankind's future in space (also comic) and political comment. Its scenes here on Earth are, well, earthbound: the acting is naturalistic. Its Mars, by contrast, is out of this world". 

The strength of Aelita as a film rests upon three solid foundations, a well-written script, its overall direction, and the originality of its set, decor and costumes.

Directed by Yakov Protaznov (1881-1945) the ‘King of Russian silent film’ Protaznov had already directed over 80 feature films between 1911 to 1918 when he was persuaded to return to Russia from France and Germany where he was developing a new career. Protaznov's skills as a film director successfully linked Russia's hitherto isolated film-industry with important trends in contemporary world cinema. Aelita's influence can be seen in films such as Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927) and later in the American Flash Gordon serial (1936).

The most original feature to modern viewers of Aelita are its Martian-style sets and costumes which were coordinated in the distinctive avant-garde style of Russian Constructivism by the Franco-Russian designer, Alexandra Exter (1882-1949).

The producers of Aelita struggled to acquire scarce resources such as 70,000 feet of negative film, aluminium and celluloid to build Mars and one of the most impressive cast and crew ever assembled in the 1920's for a film. The opening night of Aelita was unprecedented in Russian film. The theatre facade was decorated with 'giant figures of Aelita and Tuskub,the princess and King of Mars, surrounded by illuminated columns and geometric shapes approximating to the films 'Martian' decor and illuminated with flashing lights'.

The huge success of Aelita was propelled by factors such as the re-publication of Russian scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky's mathematical calculations which proposed that spaceflight was a real possibility. Tsiolkovsky's speculations sparked newspaper stories in 1924, the year of Aelita's release, about rockets and spaceships that would be carrying people into space. 

There was inevitably an ideological backlash to the success of Aelita. Criticized for its excessive budget and attacked for its Western-style escapism, commercialism and ideological compromise; with the emergence of another style and direction to Soviet cinema, notable from Sergei Eisenstein (1989-1948) Aelita was swiftly dropped from distribution and circulation. 

Today Aelita is regarded as a film of international significance. Its not rocket science to realize that its contribution to popular interest in space travel helped to plant the seeds of Russia's early dominance in the space race. The first generation of Soviet space engineers, Sergei Korolev (1907-66) and Valentin Glushko (1908-89) for example, were inspired not only by Tsiolkovsky's mathematical calculations, but also by science-fiction such as Aelita. The rocket engineer Vladimir Chelomei (1914-84) even named his proposed mission to send people to Mars Aelita, after watching the film as a 10 year old boy.

The script of Aelita was based upon a story written by Aleksei Tolstoy (1883-1945) upon his feted return to Russia in 1923. Tolstoy, like several other Russian authors, was inspired in his writing Aelita from reading the science-fiction of H.G.Wells.

H.G.Wells

The English author H.G.Wells (1866-1946) is often credited as being 'the father of science-fiction'. Because his novels are written in a clear, unsophisticated style, with few unproblematic nuances of meaning in translation, (unlike authors contemporary to him, the writings of D. H. Lawrence, Joseph Conrad and Virginia Woolf, for example),  Wells's short stories and the novels The Time Machine (1895)  The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) and The War of the Worlds (1898), were hugely popular with Russian readers as exciting adventure stories which involve discussion upon future scientific and technological progress. They subsequently influenced several early Soviet Russian science-fiction writers.  

H.G. Wells's novels became first available in  Russian translation as early as the 1890's and became even more popular after the 1917 Revolution. He visited Russia several times, both before and after the 1917 Revolution and during the era of Stalin. A great admirer of Russian culture, upon his first visit to Moscow in 1914, he attended a performance of Chekhov’s The Seagull with Olga Knipper and Stanislavsky in leading roles, declaring the play to be a revelation to him and that even if he had not known the drama he would have understood everything just by watching the wonderful acting.

Through his friendship with Maxim Gorky, H.G.Wells was introduced to, and discussed political matters with some of the highest-ranking Communist Party officials, including Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin. Well's high reputation among some Party members was such that Anatoly Lunacharsky, the first Soviet People's Commissar of Education, responsible for culture and education, in an introduction to a new six volume edition of H.G. Wells's writings in 1930, declared him to be, 'one of the best psychologists in contemporary literature'. And to this day H.G.Wells novels are listed on the Russian State education reading list.

Mikhail Bulgakov

One of H.G. Wells admirers was Mikhail Bulgakov (1888-1940) who published his novella The Fatal Eggs (Роковые яйца) in 1924. Also known as The Red Ray (Луч жизни) Bulgakov's story tells of an eccentric zoologist who accidentally discovers a ray which accelerates the growth. One influential source behind Bulgakov's short story was H. G. Wells's The Food of the Gods (1904) in which two scientists also discover a way to accelerate growth. Bulgakov's The Fatal Eggs even references The Food of the Gods in a conversation held between the zoologist Persikov and his assistant Ivanov who declares-

Do you understand, Vladir Ipatych,” he continued excitedly, “H.G.Wells’s heroes are nothing compared to you... and I thought that was all make-believe.. Remember his Food for the Gods !”
"Ah, that’s a novel, " Perisov replied.
"Yes, of course, but it’s famous!"
"I've forgotten it, "Persikov said. "I remember reading it, but I've forgotten it".

Bulgakov's short story The Fatal Eggs concludes in the death of a horde of giant snakes from cold weather, not dissimilar to the death of the aliens in Well's The War of the Worlds. One interpretation of Bulgakov's The Fatal Eggs is that, like the 1917 revolution, scientific experiments can set into motion events which become increasingly uncontrollable. In late 1924, Bulgakov wrote in his diary of his short story - 'Is it a satire? Or a provocative gesture? ... I'm afraid that I might be hauled off ... for all these heroic feats.' Bulgakov's fear of being admonished by Soviet officialdom were realized following the ban upon his subsequent novella, The Heart of a Dog (1925).

Inspired from a reading of H.G.Well's, The Island of Doctor Moreau in which Doctor Moreau, an eminent, but discredited scientist, creates human-like beings from animals through vivisection; the novel debates a number of philosophical themes, including pain and cruelty, moral responsibility, human identity, and human interference with nature. In a new Russian translation of The Island of Doctor Moreau in 1930, Mikhail Zavadovsky, a biologist and specialist in mental processes enthusiastically exclaimed of H.G. Well's portrayal of the human mind and its capacities-

'The central idea of this novel is that human will and knowledge will achieve this goal when, with a scalpel in his hand, man will be able to change and reorganize living organisms'.

H.G.Wells himself in an essay entitled The Limits of Individual Plasticity (1895), expressed a firm belief that the events depicted in The Island of Doctor Moreau are entirely possible if vivisection experiments were ever tested outside the confines of science fiction.

Heart of a Dog

Ever since Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) Science fiction has been closely linked to tales of medical horror. Mikhail Bulgakov, a qualified doctor, in his novella The Heart of a Dog (Собачье сердце,1925) tells of the genius Professor Preobrazhensky (preobraz being a word-play upon the Slavic word for transformation) who, one winter's day, entices a stray dog to his home in order to conduct a hideous experiment. Operating upon the dog, Preobrazhensky implants the pituitary gland and testes of an unknown person into the dog Sharik.

Although Professor Preobrazhensky warns his devoted assistant Bormethal against trying to create a genius artificially  .. 'what if the the dog had been given the pituitary gland of a great man, a Spinoza, instead of a criminal, alcoholic itinerant balalaika player?' he asks, nevertheless he proceeds with his experiment, with both grotesque and comic consequences.

There is a claustrophobic feel to Bulgakov's novella. The action rarely leaves the confines of  Preobrazhensky's seven room apartment. His servants obey him without hesitation and he himself represents the old order of Russia, authoritarian and respectful of foreign culture, attending the Bolshoi theatre and forever humming to himself an aria from Verdi's Aida ' On the Banks of the Nile' while conducting his surgical experiments. 

Bulgakov's novella has similarities in its thematic concerns with the European legend of Dr. Faustus, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein as well as H.G.Wells The Island of Doctor Moreau in its discussion upon the moral integrity of scientific experiments. According to one literary critic the message of The Heart of a Dog is that man must recognize the existence of limits to his powers; that there are realms, divine and natural, where he cannot tread without the danger of creating something blasphemous and unnatural- without carrying out a Satanic act. This idea was antithetical  to Communists, whose entire agenda was based on the notion that God does not exist, that nature was infinitely plastic, and that they could create a new, better man.

Bulgakov's novella displays Gogolian-Chekhovian buffoonery, ridiculing attempts to create a new Soviet superman and Communist party rhetoric such as- 

"Man will make it his purpose to master his own feelings, to raise his instincts to the heights of consciousness, to make them transparent, to extend the wires of his will into hidden recesses, and thereby to raise himself to a new plane, to create a higher social biologic type, or, if you please, a superman."

Because of his sharp, thinly-veiled criticism of Russian communism, Bulgakov's novella was immediately banned by Soviet officials and not officially published until 1987, almost 60 years since it was first penned.

The literary critic James Meek detected in The Heart of a Dog the influence of H.G. Wells, Gogol and Bulgakov's friend and contemporary Yevgeny Zamyatin (1884-1937) the author of We (1924). Zamyatin's highly-influential science-fiction novella depicts a future dystopia in which those rebelling against totalitarianism are surgically operated upon in order to make them obedient to the State. Zamyatin's novel predates and in all probability influenced the dystopian themed novels of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1931) and later in 1949 in George Orwell's 1984. 

Alexander Belyaev

The cross-referencing and shared influences between Russian and British science-fiction writers reached a new zenith in the author Alexander Belyaev (1884-1942). Belyaev also catered to Russian hopes and fears for scientific discovery to dramatically transform lives. His first story, Professor Dowell's Head ((Голова Профессора Доуэля, 1925) concerns itself with a head transplant. Subsequent stories feature a man with transplanted shark-gills, Amphibian Man ( (Человек-Амфибия, 1928) The Air Seller (Продавец воздуха, 1929) in which a gigantic air-machine literally hoovers up all military opposition, and KETs Star (Звезда КЭЦ, 1936) a tribute to the recently deceased Russian scientist,  Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857-1935).

Alexander Belyaev first read H.G. Wells when convalescing from tuberculosis as a young man and eventually met his literary hero in Leningrad in 1934. Like many Russian writers Belyaev lived a short, tragic life, dying from starvation in the Soviet town of Pushkin while it was occupied by the Nazis. (Yevgeny Zamyatin died in poverty of a heart attack in 1937 aged 53, Bulgakov died from an inherited kidney disorder aged 48).

In Belyaev's death one of the greatest examples of a love of literature transcending narrow Nationalist interests occurred. A Nazi officer and four soldiers carried Belyaev's starved body from his home and conducted a burial. The officer spoke a short eulogy at his grave, saying that when he was a boy, he had loved reading the writer's books translated into German.

Today, in a continuing reciprocation between Russian and English science-fiction writers, English readers are indebted to the translator Maria K. the pen name of Maria Igorevna Kuroschepova (b. 1975) for introducing Belyaev's works to a wider audience. 

Sources

Wikipedia (Aelita, H.G. Wells, Alexander Belyaev and The Heart of a Dog)


'The Reception of H.G..Wells in Europe', edited by Patrick Parringer and John S. Partington published by Bloomsbury Academic 2013
Chapters 'H.G.Wells in Russian literary Criticism 1890s-1940s' and 'Future Perfect: H.G.Wells and Bolshevik Russia, 1917-32'.

DVD sleeve notes to 1991 Kino International release of Aelita by David Shepard

Images

Top- A still from Aelita
Next - Photograph of H.G. Wells
Next -Photograph of Mikhail Bulgakov circa 1910
Next - A  1988 production in sepia of The Heart of a Dog
Last - A Photograph of Alexander Belyaev

The Golden Cockerel

Discoursing once more on Russian music, this time focusing on Rimsky-Korsakov's The Golden Cockerel  (previously Swan Lake and The Firebird) and Russian classical music in general.

Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (1844-1908) the composer of The Golden Cockerel (1907) was one of the 'Mighty Five', also known as 'The Mighty Handful' (Russian: Могучая кучка, Moguchaya kuchka) a group of amateur composers who aspired to create a music which was distinctly Russian. Utilizing folk-song and emphasising the 'asiatic' and oriental aspects of Russia's vast Empire, along with developing a highly original orchestral style and coloration, the 'Mighty Five' endeavoured to create music equal and antithetical to the Western Viennese tradition of music-making. However, in reality the 'Mighty Five' were only four of any significance, for music critic Cesar Cui never wrote any music which was Russian in either style or melody.

Although only amateurs, the four remaining composers of the 'Mighty Five' together created characteristic Russian music in subject-matter, melody, rhythm and orchestral colour. One fanciful way to contrast the styles and artistic temperament of these four Russian composers is to loosely juxtapose them to another group of equally ground-breaking composers, the British 'Fab Four' of 1960's pop music, the Beatles.

The highly-original genius of 'rebel' group member Modest Mussorgsky (1839-1881) was the composer of the epic national opera Boris Godunov with its sharp observations upon the relationship between church and State in Russia, and the hallucinatory nightmare tone-poem Night on a Bare Mountain. Mussorgsky also had a hedonistic streak of self-destructive bravado in him, resulting in his premature death from alcoholism aged just 42.  He's not unlike a kind of 'John Lennon' figure in his revolutionary ideals and love of the people to the Russian Nationalist composers.

Like Mussorgsky, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov was also self-taught. Over decades of industrious study he created his own unique sound and orchestral palette, which, combined with his ability to integrate folk-song from Russia's many regions into his music, resulted in his appointment as a professor at the prestigious Russian Conservatoire and becoming a leading figure of Russian music, particularly after Tchaikovsky's death in 1893. As a mainstream composer, especially in the popularity of his operas, many of which were regularly performed from the 1890's onwards, and long outliving Mussorgsky and Borodin, Rimsky-Korsakov roughly equates as the 'Paul' of the Russian 'Fab Four'.

The quieter, often overlooked, but no less talented, if not the most productive member of the Russian 'Fab Four', was the chemistry professor, Alexander Borodin (1833-1887). Borodin's tone-poem In the Steppes of Central Asia aurally depicts the geographical vastness of Russia's Imperial Empire, while his opera Prince Igor with its famous Polovtsian Dances, harks back to the splendour of Russia's early history. Borodin may be considered as the 'George' of the Russian Fab Four.

The group's mentor Balakirev, himself an original composer as his oriental tone-poems Islamey and Tamara demonstrate, performed the role of impresario not unlike Brian Epstein in his influence upon the group's image and ambitions. Cesar Cui (1835-1918 )  fulfills the role of  'Ringo' in this analogy.

Although he wrote over 15 operas, Rimsky-Korsakov is nowadays only known by many today for the miniaturist tone-poem, The Flight of the Bumble-Bee, however, a closer familiarity with his music reveals that during  a white-heat of creativity, he composed three great orchestral masterpieces - the suite Capriccio Espagnol, a dazzling pastiche of Spanish melodies, the gorgeous in 'Neo-oriental' orchestral colour, Scheherazade, an orchestral showcase and one of the most frequently recorded works in the classical music repertoire, and the stirring Russian Festival Easter Overture based upon the Slavic liturgy of the Orthodox Church. Miraculously, all three of these works for large-scale orchestra date from the single year span of 1887-1888.

Because Rimsky-Korsakov out-lived the tragically short lives of Mussorgsky and Borodin, he often took it upon himself to edit and complete his compatriot composers' unfinished works. It was not until an original manuscript of Mussorgsky's  tone-poem Night on a bare Mountain was discovered in the 1970's that the full extent of Rimsky-Korsakov's academic styled 'tidying-up' became known. Such are the differences between Mussorgsky's original, rough and vigorous aural depiction of a Witches Sabbath, to those of Rimsky-Korsakov's much better-known 'tidied' version, that the Dutch musicologist Francis Maes declared -

'Rimsky-Korsakov considered the work impossible in the form which Mussorgsky had written it. Rimsky-Korsakov's own version, therefore, cannot be fitted into the category of redactions and orchestrations; it is. rather, a radical composition, loosely based on the same thematic material but wholly different in structure, orchestral colouring, and expression, so much so, in fact, that Mussorgsky can no longer be considered its author.' [1]

Rimsky-Korsakov was paradoxically both a progressive and a conservative composer. His early style was based upon his mentor Balakirev, as well as Hector Berlioz, and Franz Liszt while in his latter development he was heavily influenced by Wagner and Debussy. Considered as directly influencing two generations of Russian composers, in particular Stravinsky, as well as non-Russian composers, Maurice Ravel, Claude Debussy, Paul Dukas and Ottorino Respighi, among others.

In his opera The Golden Cockerel Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov returned to a political theme. Transforming a poem by Pushkin, which in turn was based upon a tale by the American author Washington Irving, Rimsky-Korsakov's fairy-tale opera is in fact a thinly-disguised political statement which is highly critical of Russia's devastating military defeat in the Russo-Japanese war of 1904, its also a scathing attack upon Russian Imperialism and even ridicules on a personal level, the last of the Romanov's Tsar Nicholas II. Rimsky-Korsakov never lived to hear his opera performed. The stress caused from its being banned most probably exasperated his medical condition of angina.

Musically, Le Coq d'Or ( as it's frequently known  from its first production in Paris 1914) features some of Rimsky's most developed and radical tonal language. The combination of full orchestra, chorus and soloists including a colorata soprano, results in a musical palette awash with oriental-coloured scales and melodies, often to gorgeous effect and exemplary of Rimsky-Korsakov's so-called Neo-Oriental style, which he first conjured in his Antar symphony, and famously in his large-scale, Arabian-themed orchestral suite, Scheherazade (1888).

In the prologue to the first of three acts of Le Coq d'Or, an astrologer appears announcing a disclaimer- although the following fairy-tale happened far away, a long time ago, such tales can be instructive, he informs the audience. Whether with this disclaimer Rimsky-Korsakov hoped to outwit the Imperial Censors isn't known. A few years earlier his support for students during the 1905 revolution, had resulted in a temporary suspension of his professorship from the conservatoire and a ban on the performance of his works. However the very name of the fairy-tale's Tsar Dodon is a deliberate word-play upon the name of the extinct dodo bird and throughout the opera Rimsky-Korsakov ridicules Tsar Nicholas II personally through the character of Tsar Dodon.  

In the Introduction and Bridal Procession to the orchestral suite of  Le coq d'Or Rimsky-Korsakov employs the startling compositional device of a rapid change of key and mood; the opening alarm-call of the cockerel, announced by trumpet is swiftly followed by a brooding theme upon cellos, to depict the lugubrious mood of King Dodon in his palace. The Introduction quotes all the major themes and motifs of the opera, much of which is in Rimsky-Korsakov's highly-evocative 'neo-oriental' style, it also includes musical passages conjuring a dreamy fairy-tale world along with some exciting syncopated rhythms.

Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov's support for students during the 1905 Russian revolution resulted in his being suspended from his teaching position at the Conservatoire and a ban on the performance of his works. How exactly he hoped to outwit the Imperial Censor's scrutiny is unclear, the very name of the fairy-tale's central character, Tsar Dodon, is a deliberate word-play which strongly hints of the Tsar's likeness to the extinct dodo bird; and in fact throughout the opera Rimsky-Korsakov ridicules Tsar Nicholas II personally through the character of Tsar Dodon.

In the first act of the opera, King Dodon in his Palace, the grotesque and blundering Tsar Dodon, irritable, brooding and bored since youth, is presented by the astrologer with the gift of a golden cockerel which crows whenever a threat of danger to Dodon's kingdom occurs -

Cock-a-doodle-do
Watch out ! 
Be on guard !

However, Tsar Dodon prefers it when the golden cockerel crows the advice -    Go ahead and rule from your bed !

In essence, Rimsky-Korsakov portrays a Tsar who is suffering from the Russian psychological trait of Oblomovitis.

In Ivan Goncharov's hugely popular novel Oblomov (1859) the young nobleman Oblomov rarely leaves his room or bed and only moves from his bed to a chair in the first 50 pages of the novel. Incapable of making important decisions or of undertaking any significant action, the novel satirizes Russian nobility, whose social and economic function became increasingly questioned in mid-nineteenth century Russia. Allusion to Oblomov became well-known throughout Russia, as late as the 1920's, during the early years of the Soviet Republic, Vladimir Lenin declared, -  "the old Oblomov is still around, and we will need to wash, clean, rub and scrub him, before he can be of any real use."

The entrance of Queen Shemakha which is sung by a colorata soprano in the fairy-tale opera, includes extensive and intricate octatonic scales which are as experimental and radical as those of Claude Debussy (1862-1918).

Queen Shemakha introduces an explicitly erotic element to the opera when teasingly she declares to King Dodon -

Thou art to be pitied knowing
The Queen only in her garments.
I am not so bad without them.
When I go to sleep, I look a long time in the mirror,
I throw off all my garments...
I look and see if anywhere
There is a mole or any blemish on my body..
Over my marble thighs

On my breasts fall drops of liquid fire
And I have breasts indeed !
They vie with the glory of the southern roses
Magnificent and firm - and they are
As white, light, and translucent as a dream.....

Tsar Dodon's  response to Queen Shemakha's erotic invitation is to announce he has a stomach-ache. His downfall occurs when, after his ill-matched marriage to Queen Shemakha, the golden cockerel pecks him to death, perhaps an allusion by Rimsky-Korsakov to the rumour that Tsar Nicholas himself was henpecked by his wife, and that it was the Tsarina who ruled the roost of the Imperial Household. Its also worth remembering that the very symbol of the Romanov, that of the double-headed Imperial eagle, the true subject of Rimsky-Korsakov's 'fairy-tale'  bears an avian similarity to the cockerel.

Its little wonder that the opera The Golden Cockerel was immediately banned from theatrical performance by the Imperial Censors. Rimsky-Korsakov's harshest words were reserved for Tsar Nicholas II personally, the operatic chorus singing these words-

He is a tsar in rank and appearance
but a slave in body and soul.
In behaviour and attitude he is a real ape.
His head is devoid of true emotion
his spirit is terribly lethargic.
Among the beauties with their shining eyes
he looks like a ghost.

Ominously, as if alluding to the methods by which autocratic governments remain in power, Tsarina Shemakha warns - Whoever we don't like is done for.

while the chorus, representing the common people, anxiously ask of their future - What will we do without a Tsar ?

When an essentially conservative member of Russian society such as Rimsky-Korsakov feels it necessary to use music as a vehicle to denounce political and social wrongs of his age, the warning signals of a society about to radically transform itself may be imminent. The catalyst for such a transformation occurred shortly after Rimsky's death, through the great loss of life experienced by the Russian people during the first World War, which triggered the 1917 revolution, the abolishment of Imperial Romanov rule and the establishment of the Soviet Republic (1917-1989).

The impresario Sergei Diaghilev’s 1914 Parisian production in ballet form of The Golden Cockerel, (known as Le Coq d'Or from its French production)  in which the singers performed offstage, while mimers and dancers portrayed the characters onstage, became the model for Rimsky-Korsakov's one-time pupil, Igor Stravinsky’s own stage works. A close study of the score of Stravinsky's innovative puppet-drama Petroushka (1910-11) reveals that its radical harmonies derive ultimately from the experimental octatonicism of his teacher, Rimsky's opera. Such was the high regard in which  The Golden Cockerel was held that, when in December 1917, the composer Sergei Rachmaninov hastily left Russia for Helsinki with his wife and two daughters on an open sledge, among his few possessions he carried with him were a few notebooks with sketches of his own compositions including his unfinished opera Monna Vanna and two orchestral scores, one of which was The Golden Cockerel.

Sadly, Rimsky-Korsakov never lived to hear his opera The Golden Cockerel performed. The stress caused from its being banned by the Censors probably worsened his medical condition of angina and he died before its first performance. However his introduction of overt political statement in music paved the way for a younger generation of composers to either integrate or denounce political ideology in their music. The musicologist Marina Frolova-Walker proposed his opera The Golden Cockerel to be the forerunner of the anti-psychologistic and absurdist ideas which  culminate in 20th century 'anti-operas' such as Prokofiev's The Love for Three Oranges (1921) and Dmitri Shostakovich's The Nose (1930) and that it laid, "the foundation for modernist opera in Russia and beyond." [2] . Rimsky's name today is now celebrated as one of Russia's greatest composers, with the St Petersburg State Rimsky-Korsakov Conservatoire honouring him in its name.

Andrei Bely's Symbolist novel Petersburg (1913) also reflects the fevered atmosphere of the dying years of the Romanov dynasty. Set in the 'window on the west' city of Petersburg, and greatly admired by James Joyce for its fragmentary narrative, Bely's novel features a psychological cat-and-mouse game between a high ranking bureaucratic official and his decadent 'asiatic' would-be anarchist son. Sometimes hilarious, at other times sinister,  the backdrop of an often crepuscular city, whose citizens, not unlike the Dubliners  of Joyce's Ulysses (1922) become a central character of the novel. Bely's Petersburg  not only depicts the social tension of  Russia before the 1905 Revolution, but is a landmark work of 20th century literature.

There can't surely be any connection between Sir Thomas Browne and Norwich with early 20th century Russian history and music, can there ? Well, there's these two tenuous connections - Firstly, in 1922 the English author Virginia Woolf wrote an introduction to a selection of Sir Thomas Browne's writings for the prestigious Golden Cockerel publishing house. Secondly, Browne's Norwich associate, Arthur Dee (1579-1651) was the eldest son of  John Dee (1527-1609) who secured for him the post of court physician to Tsar Mikhail I.  After enduring 14 Moscow winters, sometime in the early 1630's, Arthur Dee left Moscow to retire at Norwich. He abandoned his alchemical writings to the care of the Imperial Library. Centuries later,  the charismatic, shaman-like figure of Rasputin gained access to the Imperial Library through his influence at the court of the last Romanov Tsar, Nicholas II. Rasputin is alleged to have stolen Arthur Dee's alchemical writings. They were later subsequently returned to the Imperial library.

I once imagined the possibility that a fairy-tale about a prophesying bird's introduction into a Royal household, which a whole Kingdom fatalistically begins to rely upon, may have symbolically alluded to what was a commonly-held concern of the time - the unhealthy influence of Rasputin upon Tsar Nicholas II and his family in matters of Russian politics. But no, the dates don't quite match up!

Although Milica of Montenegro and her sister Anastasia, both of whom were interested in Persian mysticism, spiritualism and occultism, are credited as introducing Rasputin to Tsar Nicholas I and his wife Alexandra in November 1905, Rasputin did not gain any real influence upon the Russian Royal family until 1908, long after Rimsky-Korsakov had completed The Golden Cockerel.

CDs

* Scheherazade - Berlin Philharmonic-Karajan 1967

* The Snow Maiden - Sadko -Mlada - Le coq d'or Suite

   Seattle Symphony - Gerard Schwarz - Naxos 2011

* Capriccio Espagnol- Russian Easter Overture etc.

   Seattle Symphony - Gerard Schwarz -Naxos 2011

* Borodin Symphonies 1 - 3 Gerard Schwarz -Naxos 2011

 * Pictures at an Exhibition (orch. Ravel) 

    Night on a Bare Mountain -original and Rimsky's version

    Ukrainian  National Symphony Orchestra  Naxos 2003

    

Books

[1] Maes, Francis; Arnold J. Pomerans and Erica Pomerans (translators) (2002) [1996].  A History of Russian Music: From Kamarinskaya to Babi Yar. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 

[2] Frolova-Walker, Marina (2005). "11. Russian opera; The first stirrings of modernism". In Mervyn Cooke. The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century Opera. London: Cambridge University Press.

* Natasha's Dance : A Cultural History of Russia.
   Orlando Figes Penguin 2003

  

*  From Russia: French and Russian Master Paintings 

    1870-1925  from Moscow and Saint Petersburg. 

    Royal Academy of Arts 2008

DVD  

The Golden Cockerel 

soloists Albert Schagidullin  and Olga Tritonova

with the Chorus of the Mariinsky theatre, Orchestre de Paris 

conducted by Kent Nagano  directed by Thomas Grimm 2003.

Pictures

Top - Ivan Bilibin: Court Astrologer and King Dodon

Video of Natalie Goncharov's art

Ivan Bilibin: King Dodon and the Queen of Shemakha

Below - Rimsky-Korsakov by Igor Repin

By a remarkable coincidence The Golden Cockerel  is currently being staged in a new production at the Mariinsky Theatre in Saint Petersburg, Russia. 

The World premiere of The Golden Cockerel was on 24 September 1909, at the Sergei Zimin Private Russian Opera, Moscow. It was  premiered at the Mariinsky Theatre on 14 February 1919  and the premiere of its latest production was on 25 December 2014, at Mariinsky-II, St Petersburg. Next performance, Sunday 1st February 2015.  Here's a trailer of the production.

Youth without Youth

'What do we do with time?...time, the supreme ambiguity of the human condition.'

Set in Europe on the brink of World War II, Mircea Eliade's novella Youth without Youth (1976) tells the story of Dominic Matei, an elderly polymath, linguist and expert in comparative religion who, when struck by lightning, not only miraculously recovers, but is rejuvenated and gains extraordinary powers. Youth without Youth also explores the myth of the eternal return, that is, the cyclic repetition of time, as well as the consequences of being granted the wish to fall in love one last time. 

In essence Eliade's novella debates upon the supreme ambiguity of the human condition, that of Time. As the narrator, Professor Matei declares - 'All men want to live long, to exceed, if possible, a hundred years; but in the vast majority of cases, once they reach the age of sixty or sixty-five and retire, i.e.become free to do what they want, they become bored. They discover they have nothing to do with their free time. And on the other hand, the older a man becomes the more the rhythm of interior time accelerates, so that those persons -those very few - who would know what to do with free time, do not succeed in doing much of importance'.

The symbolism of being struck by lightning is discussed in Mircea Eliade's Myths, Dreams and Mysteries (1957) in terms of a shamanistic experience thus - 'The man who has survived being struck by lightning acquires a "sensibility" not attainable at the level of ordinary experience; the revelation of the divine "choice" is manifested by the destruction of all the anterior structures: the "elect" becomes "another"; he feels himself to be not only dead and re-born, but born into existence which, while it is lived to all appearances in this world of ours, is framed in other existential dimensions. In terms of traditional shamanistic ideology, this experience is expressed as the combustion of the flesh and the breaking-up of the skeleton.....Now, this modification of the sensibility, acquired spontaneously by the shock of an extraordinary event, is what is laboriously sought for during the apprenticeship of those who are working to obtain the shamanistic gift'. 

Its interesting to note in the medieval Tarrochi divination cards arcana XVI depicts a tower being struck by lightning. It may allude to the destruction of fixed and inflexible thinking, and enlightenment through renewal and regeneration. 

Dominic Matei's new superhuman gifts of memory and comprehension attract the attention not only of journalists and the media, but also the Nazi Party. Obliged to assume a new identity and facial features, Matei begins to exercise his new powers and fulfill his lifelong quest, to understand the origins of human language and speech. He also encounters an alter-ego Doppelganger who conjures two roses from nowhere and asks him the question, 'Where do you want me to place the third rose?' A youthful in appearance Dominic Matei begins an odyssey which takes him from Bucharest to Monte Carlo, Switzerland, India, Malta and Dublin. During his travels he has the wish-fulfillment to fall deeply in love one last time granted to him with devastating consequences.

It's no coincidence that Dominic Matei's story begins at Easter and ends at Christmas, ending where it began, visiting friends at the Café Select in Bucharest, Romania; however, Dominic discovers he is now wearing hospital pajamas and no-one has heard of the historical events he mentions. In desperation he cites the Chinese philosopher Zhuang Zhou's story of the butterfly as an example of his fate. The full tale of Zhuang Zhou's dream within a dream goes as follows-

"Once upon a time, Zhuang Zhou dreamed he was a butterfly, a butterfly flitting about happily enjoying himself. He did not know that he was Zhou. Suddenly he awoke, and was palpably Zhou. He did not now know whether he was Zhou, who had dreamed of being a butterfly, or a butterfly who had dreamt that he was Zhou. Now, there must be a difference between Zhou and the butterfly. This is called the transformation of things."

Dominic Matei's story concludes with his body discovered laying frozen in the snow, no longer young but once more aged, clutching a rose.

The Romanian scholar Eliade Mircea (1907-86) emigrated to America in 1956 where he became a professor at Chicago University a year later. His novella Youth without Youth attracted the attention of American film director Francis Ford Coppola (b. 1938) (The Godfather, Apocalypse Now) to return to film after a ten year hiatus.

Coppola's adaptation of Youth without Youth (2007) focuses less on Dominic Matei's time spent in convalescence and transformation in hospital and far more time at the locations of Matei's extensive peregrinations. In an interview, Coppola said that he made the film as a meditation on time and consciousness, which he considers a "changing tapestry of illusion" but also admitted that his film may be appreciated as a beautiful love story, or as a mystery. He also stated-

"I was excited to discover in this tale.....the key themes that I most hope to understand better; time, consciousness, and the dream-like basis of reality. for me it is indeed a return to the ambitions I had for my work in cinema as a student".

Coppola's film adaptation of Youth without Youth also features a superb soundtrack by Osvaldo Golijov (b. 1961). Evoking the mysterious and melancholic, including music performed on the cembalon, as well as 1930's tango, it makes a strong contribution to the narrating of Dominic Matei's strange story. The composer Golijov said of his work on the film-

'Collaborating with Francis was an amazing dream. I never lost my sense of wonder. Working with a great hero of mine, of my late father and of my friends in Argentina. On each occasion I spent time with him, I felt it was possible to fulfill every dream in life'.

Not unlike P. D. Ouspensky's novella The Strange life of Ivan Osokin (1915) which also uses fiction as a vehicle to explore the esoteric concept of eternal recurrence, both the novella and film adaptation of Youth without Youth are ultimately flawed, as all attempts to popularize esoteric concepts result either in universal comprehension, in which case they are no longer esoteric but exoteric concepts, or worse, become trivialized. Mircea Eliade's genius as a scholar of comparative religion, like the Russian theosophist P.D. Ouspensky's, is best expressed in his non-fiction writings, complete with academic references and a fuller, developed exploration of esoteric concepts, without resorting to the short-hand restrictions of entertainment values. Nevertheless, both Eliade's novella and Coppola's film adaptation of Youth without Youth stimulates the mental faculty most seriously undernourished in modern society, namely, the imagination.

Wiki-link Mircea Eliade

Recommended reading

Mircea Eliade - The Myth of the Eternal Return (1945)
Mircea Eliade -  Myths, Dreams and Mysteries (1957)
Mircea Eliade -  The Sacred and the Profane (1959) 

Merivel: A Man of his Time

Returning some twenty plus years from  Restoration (1989) novelist Rose Tremain continues her tale of Sir Robert Merivel's life with an equally spellbinding sequel,  Merivel: A Man of his Time (2013).

Set primarily in 17th century Norfolk, with excursions to the glamour of the Court of Versailles and the French Alps,  the cares of the world now crowd around both King Charles II and his friend, the courtier and reluctant physician, Sir Robert Merivel, who is once more resident at the Norfolk manor of Bidnold.  Merivel's daughter Margaret, is now a young woman and securing her future is a primary concern of her at turns, frivolous and pleasure-seeking, self-analytical and serious-minded father. When King Charles leaves London and unexpectedly visits the Norfolk manor of Bidnold, consequences develop for both Sir Robert and his daughter Margaret.

Robert Merivel is at times a kind of 17th century Bertie Wooster figure whose primary preoccupations are fine food and wine and pleasure in general. Through the discovery under his mattress of  'the wedge' a long forgotten and crumbling autobiography, Merivel recounts past events in which he lived a life of pleasure before falling from grace with King Charles II. Eventually Merivel restores himself in the eyes of his royal friend through application of his medical skills in service to humanity in the crucible of horrors, the Plague and Great Fire of London.

There's almost an element of Fawlty Towers farce in some of the antics engaged upon by the two longest serving servants of Sir Robert's Bignold Manor, the temperamental and wall-eyed cook, Cattlebury and the doddery but loyal and devoted butler Will Gates, However, the dominant tone throughout Merivel is one of a muted valedictory farewell to life and its pleasures. Prone to melancholy and inexplicable weeping at the beauty of life, Sir Robert now in his maturity, muses upon life’s sadness, not only discovering he enjoys pleasures such as wine, food and sex less, but also reconciling himself to life’s inevitabilities, growing older, illness, and reconciling oneself to seeing those one loves departing from life. Loving life, often directionless, and paying heavily for the consequences of his follies, Robert Merivel is not without a serious and self-analytical side to his complex nature.

'And then I thought how Life itself is the greatest Theft of Time, and how all we can do is to watch as the days and months and years slip away from us and make off into the Darkness'.

Not wanting to post spoilers, suffice to say events in Merivel include Sir Robert's acquiring of a bear named Clarendon who has an influence upon him when later writing a philosophical treatise on whether or not animals possess souls, and Merivel's finding true love for the first time in the unhappily married Frenchwoman Louise, a serious student of the new science of chemistry.

With its medical theme (Merivel possesses a set of surgical instruments, a gift from King Charles II with the words, Merivel, Do not Sleep inscribed upon them) its location of Norfolk, and seventeenth century setting, Rose Tremain, in my humble view, may have let slip an opportunity to join literary figures such as Virginia Woolf, E.M.Forster, Jorge Luis Borges and W.G. Sebald, to express admiration, albeit through a casual nod, to one of the foremost literary figures of seventeenth century England, the Norwich-based physician Sir Thomas Browne (1605-82).

Several other leading figures of seventeenth century intellectual history are however alluded to in Merivel. Sir Robert fondly recalls his attending lectures by the famous anatomist Fabrius with rowdy German students and his close friend, the austere Quaker John Pearce cherishs a book by William Harvey. Self-analysis, not unlike that of the popular essayist Montaigne runs through Merivel's narrative. Although its regrettable that Sir Robert doesn't allude to either Browne's best-selling Religio Medici or his vanguard promotion of the English scientific revolution, Pseudodoxia Epidemica one likes to imagine these titles were once in the library of Merivel's Norfolk manor.

It has been said that "the single best adjective to describe Western Civilization at the opening of the seventeenth century was the word “Christian.” By the century’s end the single word that rightly characterized the West was “scientific.” Merivel attributes his own loss of religious Faith from the death of his parents through house-fire. Increasingly, as his life progresses, he places greater faith in his surgical instruments than in prayer when facing matters of life and death. The one and only time Merivel does speak with any semblance of religious conviction occurs in Restoration when addressing his Quaker fellow-workers at an asylum for the insane, when he advocates on the healing properties of music upon the minds of its inmates.

Digressing slightly, no small mention of Opium occurs in Merivel. First introduced into western medicine by Paracelsus as a pain-killer and anaesthetic, by the seventeenth century Thomas Sydenham (1624-89) the ‘father of English medicine' declared, "Among the remedies which it has pleased Almighty God to give to man to relieve his sufferings, none is so universal and so efficacious as opium". Throughout the seventeenth century opium became increasingly used in medicine. Sir Robert when performing a surgical operation on a cancer patient resorts to using the drug. In despondent mood, he also attempts to escape his miseries by repeatedly sending his servant to a Norwich apothecary for its purchase.

Opium is invariably associated with Oblivion in the densely-packed symbolism of Browne's Urn-Burial. A succinct and perceptive observation of its psychological effects in a typical fusion of philosophical stoicism, medical imagery and empirical observation can be found in the Discourse -

'There is no antidote against the Opium of Time, which temporally considereth all things'.

Browne’s commonplace notebooks includes observations upon dosage and effects of opium, while a fuller knowledge of the drug and even its recreational usage with sex can be found in Pseudodoxia Epidemica -

 '.....since Poppy hath obtained the Epithet of fruitful, and that fertility was Hieroglyphically described by Venus with an head of Poppy in her hand; the reason hereof was the multitude of seed within it self, and no such multiplying in human generation. And lastly, whereas they may seem to have this quality, since Opium it self is conceived to extimulate unto venery, and for that intent is sometimes used by Turks, Persians, and most oriental Nations; although Winclerus doth seem to favour the conceit, yet Amatus Lustanus, and Rodericus a Castro are against it; Garcias ab Horto refutes it from experiment; and they speak probably who affirm the intent and effect of eating Opium, is not so much to invigorate themselves in coition, as to prolong the Act, and spin out the motions of carnality'.

Its even been proposed that one reason why Browne’s prose reads unlike any other may have been due to an empirical familiarity with opium. During the decade of the Protectorate of Cromwell and the highly uncertain days which engendered an Endzeit Psychosis upon much of English society, it may have been tempting for Royalist supporters such as Browne to reach into the medicine cabinet.  Its also a curious coincidence that two of the leading figures of English Romanticism, the essayist De Quincey and the poet Coleridge, both of whom were great admirers of Browne’s baroque and labyrinthine literary style were also notorious for their recreational usage of opium.

Sir Thomas Browne’s literary diptych Urn-Burial and The Garden of Cyrus - each of which consists of five chapters, are respectively- a philosophical meditation upon a descending into darkness and death and a coming into light and life. They are intriguingly echoed in theme to the opening chapter of Restoration in which Merivel considers five differing ways his story can be said to begin, while the opening of Merivel-A Man of his Time has Sir Robert meditating upon five differing possibilities of how his life may leave the world.

Like Restoration, the first-person narrative throughout Merivel is fluid and utterly engaging. Rose Tremain has created a character who will be well-loved with a familiarity of his life and times. I won't be alone in discovering myself to identify with Sir Robert's all-too-human faults or having an empathy with him, reinforced in my case by Merivel's birthday falling on the 27th of January, mine also. Merivel muses upon the Zodiac sign of Aquarius thus -

'I was born under the constellation of Aquarius, the eleventh sign of the Zodiac, the sign of the water-butler, that humble but indispensable slave who fetches from wells and rivers the elements so vital to the human tissue. I imagine this Aquarius as an old, stooped man, his spine warped by the weight of a wooden yoke from which hang a pair of briming pails. On he staggers, day after day, year after year, with his precious burden, but as his strength is waning, he totters and stumbles and, as he moves through time, more and more water is spilled, thereby engendering in the bellies of the ancient gods an irritation stronger than thirst'.

I cannot recommend this novel enough, but to get the most out of Merivel its best to read the early life of Sir Robert Merivel in Rose Tremain’s Restoration first.

The novel Restoration was made into a film in 1995 with the one-time Hollywood bad-boy Robert Downey Jr. acting to the Manor born the role of Sir Robert Merivel (top and bottom photo). Rose Tremain however said of the film that while it had a beautiful texture to it she was disappointed with the film's storytelling. She also said that the film had no logic and so fails to move the audience. Her disappointment led her to take up scriptwriting. One can’t help thinking a more sensitive filming of the novel could have been made by a British direction and production, perhaps of the calibre of Merchant and Ivory. Rose Tremain herself has recently been appointed Chancellor of the University of East Anglia. She was among the University's earliest students in the 60's, reading English literature.

Finally, and I may be among the first to notice this - Sir Robert Merivel resides at the fictitiously named Bidnold Manor, he occasionally romps in the bed of a Lady Bathurst and has a bear named Clarendon. Those familiar with the geography of the so-called ‘golden Triangle' area of Norwich will know that near to Bignold school and adjacent to each other there is a Clarendon and a Bathurst road.

See Also

Rose Tremain

Restoration (novel)

Restoration (1995 film)