PimPhilipse's meanderings

Finished book 4 of De Rerum Natura and started with book 5. This starts with cosmology, which blends nicely with my past of studying Physics.
Book 4 amazed me greatly by consistently describing sight as being facilitated by all objects around us casting off little images of themselves (simulacrae), that are then captured by our eyes. Not your standard optics course!
But better than the alternative model of the ancients where the eyes are supposed to emit beams that scan the environment actively.

Then Вечные спутники. I finished the chapter 'Akropolis', where the author travels through Italy to Greece. His description of Florence makes a good reading exercise for me, having spent a week there in the fall of 2007.
Traveling east, at first he dislikes what he sees in Greece, but arriving in Athens all ends well. The final paragraph:

I'm writing these lines on a fall night, under the monotonous sound of rain and wind, in my room in St. Petersburg. Next to me on my table are lying two smal pieces of really ancient marmor from the Parthenon. The precious ... marmor still sparkles in the light of the lamp. And I look at it with superstitious love, as a pious pilgrim at a relic, brought from a faraway country.

I decided to skip (for the moment) the chapter on Daphnis and Chloe, and the one on Marc Aurelius, instead diving in the one on Plinius Minor. This is again quite readable, but for purposes of reference I've ordered the letters of Pliny in a nice german/latin edition.

I'm looking forward to following your thread, Pim. Unfortunately I cannot read Russian. I think we have a few Russian readers/speakers in the group, but you might want to translate, or at least transliterate the Cyrillic, so more of us can follow you.

What is the Russian book you quoted? I love that quote!

Вечные Спутники can be transliterated as Vechnye Sputniki, and translated as Eternal Companions. It contains a number of essays of Merezhkovsky on various authors throughout the centuries. Apart from the ones I already mentioned these are Calderon, Cervantes, Montaigne, Flaubert, Ibsen, Dostoyevsky, Goncharov, Maykov and Pushkin. They are presented as his personal and hyper-subjective ideas. For example, he is presenting Pliny as a crypto-christian because of the good treatment Pliny gives his slaves (according to the letters).
I'm not aware of the existence of a translated version.

Thank you! I can't find any translations either. From Wiki, he seems to be rather a crackpot. mmmm.
I admire and envy your Russian skills, Pim.

Sure, he's a nut. But as long as he has style, he can get away with it.

Many of my favourite authors write things that I disagree with, but their writing more than makes up for it.

My Russian skills are low to moderate, so I don't expect to understand everything perfectly. I'm glad I've found some non-trivial literature where I can follow the main discourse without looking up more than 10 words per page.

Pliny was in the mail today!
Talkative person, this will take a phased read. I guess I could read one book (out of 10) at a time.
Letter 9 is one that I already found fragments of in Вечные Спутники. It describes the Roman ideal of Otium quite well:

http://ancienthistory.about.com/library/bl/bl_text_plinyltrs1.htm

It is surprising how if you take each day singly here in the city you pass or seem to pass your time reasonably enough when you take stock thereof, but how, when you put the days together, you are dissatisfied with yourself. If you ask any one, "What have you been doing to-day?" he will say, "Oh, I have been attending a coming-of-age function; I was at a betrothal or a wedding; so-and-so asked me to witness the signing of a will; I have been acting as witness to A, or I have been in consultation with B." All these occupations appear of paramount importance on the day in question, but if you remember that you repeat the round day after day, they seem a sheer waste of time, especially when you have got away from them into the country; for then the thought occurs to you, "What a number of days I have frittered away in these chilly formalities!" That is how I feel when I am at my Laurentine Villa and busy reading or writing, or even when I am giving my body a thorough rest and so repairing the pillars of my mind. I hear nothing and say nothing to give me vexation; no one comes backbiting a third party, and I myself have no fault to find with any one except it be with myself when my pen does not run to my liking. I have no hopes and fears to worry me, no rumours to disturb my rest. I hold converse with myself and with my books. 'Tis a genuine and honest life; such leisure is delicious and honourable, and one might say that it is much more attractive than any business. The sea, the shore, these are the true secret haunts of the Muses, and how many inspirations they give me, how they prompt my musings! Do, I beg of you, as soon as ever you can, turn your back on the din, the idle chatter, and the frivolous occupations of Rome, and give yourself up to study or recreation. It is better, as our friend Attilius once very wittily and very truly said, to have no occupation than to be occupied with nothingness. Farewell.

http://www.vroma.org/~hwalker/Pliny/Pliny01-09-L.html

MIRUM est, quam singulis diebus in urbe ratio aut constet aut constare videatur, pluribus iunctisque non constet. Nam, si quem interroges, "Hodie quid egisti " respondeat: "Officio togae virilis interfui; sponsalia aut nuptias frequentavi; ille me ad signandum testamentum, ille in advocationem, ille in consilium rogavit." Haec quo die feceris, necessaria; eadem, si quotidie fecisse te reputes, inania videntur, multo magis, cum secesseris. Tunc enim subit recordatio: "Quot dies quam frigidis rebus absumpsi! Quod evenit mihi, postquam in Laurentino meo aut lego aliquid aut scribo aut etiam corpori vaco, cuius fulturis animus sustinetur. Nihil audio, quod audisse, nihil dico, quod dixisse paeniteat; nemo apud me quemquam sinistris sermonibus carpit, neminem ipse reprehendo, nisi tamen me, cum parum comode scribo; nulla spe, nullo timore sollicitor, nullis rumoribus inquietor, mecum tantum et cum libellis loquor. O rectam sinceramque vitam! o dulce otium honestumque ac paene omni negotio pulchrius! O mare, o litus, verum secretumque #mouseion, quam multa invenitis, quam multa dictatis! Proinde tu quoque strepitum istum inanemque discursum et multum ineptos labores, ut primum fuerit occasio, relinque teque studiis vel otio trade. Satius est enim, ut Atilius noster eruditissime simul et facetissime dixit, otiosum esse quam nihil agere Vale.

Lots of books arrived in the mail the last days, all TBR (honestly!)

The Fiery Angel, thanks to DavidX
Der Hoffnung kleines Orchester: Bulat Okudzava : Lieder und Lyrik (Europäische Hochschulschriften. Reihe 16, Slawische Sprachen und Literaturen), on the Russian singer-songwriter.
Baba Yaga: The Ambiguous Mother and Witch of the Russian Folktale (International Folkloristics)
D.S. Merezkovskij als Literaturkritiker: Versuch einer religiösen Begründung der Kunst (Slavica helvetica)
D.S. Merezhkovsky in Exile: The Master of the Genre of Biographie Romancee (American University Studies Series XII, Slavic Languages and Literature)

And from a brick-and-mortar store:

Wolken boven E : gedichten ; & Rotterdams dagboek: Bilingual Russian/Dutch poetry by Борис Рыжий
Verzamelde werken. Dl. V: Misdaad en straf a.k.a. Crime and Punishment.

My interest in Merezhkovsky started late 2007 when I read his The Romance of Leonardo Da Vinci after a holiday in Florence. I rather liked it, looked for a few minutes at an e-text version, but decided that was still way too difficult for me.
Then early this year I found Вечные Спутники as e-text. To my utter surprise I was able to understand entire sentences and guess the meaning of still more others. Moreover, he treats subjects that I either already am acquainted with, or that I am willing to study.
So I consulted with a number of online shops that carry Russian books, and my next candidate for reading became his bio-novel Данте (Dante). It had a forword that I tried to read, and this contained the statement that M. had written a movie scenario of Данте, had submitted that to a number of Hollywood studios, and had to be consoled by Zinaida Hippius who wrote to him in 1937: “Who would like a film without music, without kissing and comic effects? The current ‘climate’ of Europe is so heated, the smell of war is so perceptible, who needs old Dante? It is significant, that Hollywood is making a film ‘The life of Hitler’. And this extinguishes any interest in ‘The life of Dante’”.
The Hippius quote was from the book D.S. Merezhkovsky in Exile. I quickly learned that this was sold by a company called Peter Lang Publishing, and their web site listed some 300 other books on slavic studies, three of which I really had to order as well.

Crime and Punishment should serve as a preparation on Merezhkovsky’s chapter on Dostoyevsky, which seems to focus on the figure of Raskolnikov. But I’ve started the attack on the new pile with Baba Yaga. The first 40 pages deal with the literature on the subject. My only serious reading on the subject was in V. IA. Propp “Historical roots of the wonder-tale” which dates from 1946 and is somewhat Marxist in its considerations (although not enough for those then in power), but luckily not all his assumptions are discarded.

Your thread is fascinating, PimPhilipse! I was envisaging "eternal Sputniks", as in spacecraft - I guess that's my science fictional leanings showing through ...

Finished Baba Yaga.
The focus was on the roles of Baba Yaga in the various types of fairy tales, following the Aarne-Thompson index.
On the motif "Difficult Tasks", like building a palace in one day: there were also folk rituals where a task had to be performed in one day in order to cause an improbable event to happen. As late as 1944 women of a certain village were reported to have woven a large linen cloth in one day in order to ensure their husbands' safe return from the war.
(The effectivity was not reported.)

The Dedalus Book of Russian Decadence: Perversity, Despair and Collapse: Fascinating stuff. The Fin de siècle clearly was much more final in Russia than in West European countries.

D.S. Merezhkovsky in Exile: The Master of the Genre of Biographie Romancee: This covers the period of his life between 1919 and 1941, so there is no direct connection with the abovementioned book (in which there are three poems by Merezhkovsky). But the social and religious reform that he was already preaching around 1900 only became a stronger element of his writing after the revolution. What we need, he tells us, is a Third Testament, that of the Spirit and the Mother. When this has been received, the existing churches will cast off all that is evil in them, and Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant religions will merge into one big family. Of course, communist repression of the Orthodox church sort of interfered with his grand scheme, so this influences his choice of subject. His biographies of Dante and of St John of the Cross were subsidized by Mussolini and Franco, and the book contains the text of a letter Merezhkovsky wrote to Mussolini. This letter describes Dante's fight against the Florentines as an early episode in the struggle against communism, and urges Mussolini to consider this as an example to be followed.

Данте: I've been struggling with this biography by Merezhkovsky since February, and I'm now about half way. Dante, banished from his native city, has for a while travelled with the German emperor, hoping that Florence would be conquered by the imperial troops, so that the banishment could be ended by force. But the expedition fails, and Dante goes to Verona to live at the court of Can Grande della Scala. Merezhkovsky tells that many exiles lived in Verona, waiting for better times, in a state of half-consciousness, “like the companions of Ulysses under the spell of Circe”. Reading this, it is hard not to think of the Russian exiles in Paris.

>1 PimPhilipse: Hey PimPhilipse,

To which De rerum natura do you refer: that of Lucretius or that of Bacon? Back in the mists of antiquity, I studied Bacon extensively. His work formed part of my dissertation. I checked out your profile page and noticed you belonged to a fairy tale readers group. I've been dipping in and out of Beautiful Angiola a collection of Sicilian folk and fairy tales. Have you any suggestions for other collections?

P.S. Even if you have skipped Merezhkovsky's chapter on Daphnis and Chloe, you should read the actual novel. It is quite funny and lovely. Additionally, it explores the relationship between art and nature in an interesting fashion.

>11 urania1:: Lucretius.

In the list of Bacon's works on Wikipedia, I cannot find any work named De Rerum Natura:

Essays (1597)
The Elements of the Common Law of England (1597)
A Declaration of the Practises & Treasons Attempted and Committed by Robert, late Earl of Essex and his Complices (1601)
Francis Bacon His Apology, in Certain Imputations Concerning the late Earl of Essex (1604)
Certain Considerations Touching the Better Pacification and Edification of the Church of England (1604)
Valerius Terminus of the Interpretation of Nature (1604)
The Proficience and Advancement of Learning (1605)
De sapientia veterum liber (1609)
The Charge of Sir Francis Bacon, Knight, the King's Attorney-General, Touching Duels (1614)
The Wisdom of the Ancients (1619)
Novum Organum (1620)
The History of the Reign of King Henry the Seventh (1622)
Apophthegms, New and Old (1625)
The Translation of Certain Psalms (1625)
The New Atlantis (1626)
Sylva Sylvarum (1627)
Scripta in naturali et universli philisophia (pub. 1653)
Baconiana, Or Certain Genuine Remains Of Sr. Francis Bacon (pub. posth. 1679)

So was your thesis on one of these works? The Interpretation of Nature perhaps? Scripta in naturali et universli philisophia?

I tried to read Daphnis and Chloe earlier this year, but I guess the pastoral genre doesn't really work for me, so I left off. But when I've finished the fun chapters, I'll try again.

I'm not at home right now, so you'll have to wait for an inventory of my fairy-tale collection (as far as they're in English, I assume).

Ah Pim,

My mistake. Bacon drew extensively from Lucretius, quoted him often, etc. Back in the day, I read everything that Bacon wrote (15 volumes worth I think). Bacon was one of the figures with whom I dealt in me sainted dissertation. I have frequently taught The New Atlantis. I have a side interest in Utopian fiction (although Bacon's New Atlantis sounds like a nightmare part of which has been realized). Methinks I need to return to the scene of my old crimes and reread Sir Francis again. By the way have your read Tommaso Campanella's La città del Sole, another interesting example of early Utopian fiction.

If you are familiar with Bacon's Life, English Renaissance (now Early Modern) history, and Shakespeare ephemera, then you might enjoy No Bed for Bacon. It is one of the funniest books I have ever read. Tom Stoppard plagiarized extensively from this book for the screenplay of Shakespeare in Love. Stoppard, of course, denies such high jinks, even denies ever having read the book. Such a disappointment since I do so adore Stoppard. Of course Shakespeare was a plagiarist as well, so perhaps I should not be so hard on Stoppard.

Read first 200 pages of Peter and Alexis, about Peter the Great and his son. This is the third part of the "Antichrist" trilogy, and eschatology is really rolling here.

First four chapters of Crime and Punishment. Liked it so far. I can already imagine Merezhkovsky's comments, but I'll wait with reading them until I'm done with this.

>13 urania1:
I've never read utopian fiction, but I might, in the future. No Bed for Bacon certainly looks interesting. TBB.

C&P: the deed is done, session at police station in progress, can't help thinking of The Tell-Tale Heart by E. Allan Poe.
Of course, Do and Poe have completely different agendas...

Halfway through Dmitri Sergeevitch Merezhkovsky and the Silver Age. This gives a lot of background information that will make Вечные Спутники easier to digest. Basically, the Symbolists were early on inspired by Nietzsche's Übermensch from Also sprach Zarathustra, and later rejected him again. So some of the Спутники (from путь - road and с - with, unfortunately the word fellow-traveler is already taken) like Pushkin, Pliny and Montaigne are praised for combining Paganism and Christianism in a balanced way, Flaubert, Ibsen and Dostoyevsky are castigated for their pessimism. Daphnis and Chloe were translated and published into Russian by Merezhkovsky, the essay on them is supposed to celebrate the pure joyful Paganism. So this should inspire me to attack these chapters again.

Pim, your thread is fascinating. I can see that I'm going to have to order Peter and Alexis. Do you know if the other parts of the trilogy are available in English?

The Dante sounds interesting as well. I take it that you are reading it in Russian?

I have Julian the Apostate and Peter and Alexis as POD reprint, both through Amazon, and Leonardo Da Vinci as a second hand pocket.

I'm reading Dante in Russian, I'm aware of the existence of an Italian version. The problem with M. is that you can transcribe his name in so many ways. The page http://www.riseofthewest.com/dcmiscell/dm04.htm gives an overview of his publications.

Yesterday I went to a lecture of my old student club, "Christiaan Huygens". Some years ago, the club had republished the Cosmotheoros, where he speculates on life on other planets. Imagine my surprise when I see a reference to this book in Peter and Alexis:

Peter with a calm countenance, as though nothing whatever had happened, turned to Avramoff and asked him the reason why the publication of the astronomer Huyghen's
work, Contemplation or Description of Heavenly and Earthly Bodies, had been delayed so long.

For a moment Avramoff was taken aback, but he instantly recovered and looking straight into the Tsar's eyes he said with firmness :

" That book is exceedingly blasphemous ; it has been written, not with ink but with hellish charcoal, and therefore it is only fit to be burnt."

" What does the blasphemy consist of ? "
" The rotation of the earth round the sun is asserted, as well as the existence of a plurality of worlds, and all those worlds are supposed to be like ours, with human beings, meadows, fields, woods, animals, and everything else just as we have it. And in this sly and subtle way the author tries to glorify and establish Nature (which means selfexistent life), while a God-Creator is dispensed with."

Other quote for library lovers:

Tichon had just fastened new numbers on some quarto and octavo volumes which were described in the old catalogue under No. 473 as The Philosophy of Francis Bacon in English, 3 vols. ; under No. 308, Meditationes de Prima Philosophia, by Descartes, in Dutch"; under No. 532, Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, by Isaac Newton. Returning the books to their places, Tichon found at the back of the shelf an old mouse-eaten octavo, No. 461, Leonardo da Vinci, a treatise on painting, in German. This was the first German translation of Trattato delta Pittura, issued at Amsterdam, in the year 1582 ; a leaflet with a wood-cut portrait of Leonardo had been placed in the book. Tichon gazed intently at this face, strange, unknown, and yet so familiar, as if he had once seen it in a dream. He thought that Simon the magician, who could fly in the air, must surely have had a similar face.

Pim,

Regarding the quote for library lovers, it sounds like my dissertation has come back to haunt me. Whence comes aforementioned quotation? Peter and Alexis?

>20 urania1:

Correct. You may consult the rather clumsy OCR'd version (or the scanned pages) at http://www.archive.org/details/peteralexisroman00mere

I've already found it. Indeed, I've taken several files and converted to mobi format for Kindle reading. I think I've found a better way to format, with chapter links and all the rest, but that will have to wait for a while.

Apparently my brave idea of faithfully logging all my reads was way too optimistic, but here are the highlights of last month.

The Seeker. Nice Merezhkovskij bio with translation of some poetry (and russian text in the end notes!). Explanation of his role in the Symbolist group, his own conception of Symbolism, his movement towards and away from Nietzsche, religious ideas, his methods of literary criticism, exemplified by some chapters of Вечные Спутники, in short: everything the budding Merezhkovskij-specialist needs.

Dmitri Sergeevitch Merezhkovsky and the Silver Age. Merezhkovskij bio that focuses on the pre-revolutionary period, describing how the decadents-symbolists interacted with the revolutionaries, striving for religious reforms etc. Also very useful.

Peter and Alexis. Yes, the characters are mostly of cardboard, you know already that Alexis is going to be killed by Peter, but I enjoyed it anyway. The descriptions of the events are full of rich details (not only the torture scenes) and original parallels drawn by the author (or someone speaking for him). The last part is full of sectarians, first a group of self-immolators, then a group that is into religious orgies. Finally, the scene goes to the library where the thoughts of Newton are recalled:

He remembered also the discussion between Glück and James Bruce over Newton's Commentaries on the Apocalypse, he could hear the dry, short, wooden laughter of Bruce, and his words, which had at the time echoed in Tichon's soul with such alarming presentiment. Bruce had said, " At the very time that Newton was writing his Commentaries, here at the other extreme of the world, here in Muscovy, wild fanatics, named Raskolniks, were also commenting in their rude,
uninstructed way upon the Apocalyse, and drawing conclusions almost identical with those of Newton. The Raskolniks daily expect the end of the world ; some of them sleep in coffins, and sing funeral hymns ; others burn themselves alive. How extraordinary this coincidence of imaginations ! That the extreme West and the extreme East, the greatest enlighenment and the greatest ignorance, should meet in a single Apocalyptic conception ! A fact which in itself is enough to make one believe that the end of the world is drawing nigh ; that we shall all go to the devil very soon ! " Newton's prophecy as repeated by Glück assumed a new and vivid significance, " Hypotheses non fingo! I don't make hypotheses ! Like a moth to the fire, a comet rushes to the sun. From the fusion of these the heat of the sun will so increase, that the earth will be consumed. It is written in the scriptures : ' The heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements
shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be consumed.' Then will be fulfilled
the two prophecies ; that of the man of science who knew, and that of the ignorant who had faith."

Julian the Apostate. Reprint of the original english translation of 1899. Ghastly scan, but good reading, if you accept the same preconditions as the ones for Peter and Alexis. In this period Merezhkovskij is still under the influence of Nietzsche: Julian is definitely striving to be an Übermensch. He tries to provoke the christians by calling the leaders of all sects for a council, knowing that they will forget all about brotherly love. Indeed, they start to quarrel immediately. To my delight, Merezhkovskij introduces us to the followers of the Gospel of Judas:

"Blessed are our proud and unsubdued brothers, Cain, Ham and the dwellers in Sodom and Gomorra!" thus preached the Cainites, "they were of the family of the higher Sophia, the Hidden Wisdom. Come unto us, all ye who are persecuted, all ye who revolt, all ye who have been overcome. Blessed is Judas! He alone of the Apostles was initiated into the Higher Knowledge, the Gnosis. He sold Christ, that Christ might die and rise again, because Judas knew that the death of Christ would save the world. Those who are initiated in our wisdom should break-through all limits, should
dare all, despise property, and trample all desire for it under foot, and giving themselves up to all sins and all the lusts of the flesh, they should attain a blessed loathing of the flesh and the highest spiritual purity!"

Note that the text we currently know as the Gospel of Judas was only discovered in the 1970’s.

Вечные Спутники Now being blessed with knowledge of the agenda of M., I’m much more able to follow his thoughts, even in Russian. Chapters:
Daphnis and Chloe: sees them as Adam and Eve of heathendom, which should eventually be reconciled with christendom. Nice connection with St. Francis at the end.
Marcus Aurelius: living in a time of decay, connections with fin de siècle.
Calderon: spanish playwright that I’d never heard of. M. considers him a fellow symbolist.
Cervantes: in progress.

Scribal Culture and the Making of the Hebrew Bible. Fascinating. The author discusses the ancient middle eastern notions of "author" and "book" (scroll/tablet/...), then applies this to Deuteronomy and Jeremia in order to postulate a possible edition history.

De scharlaken stad. Set in Rome in the 1520's, Haasse follows a few more or less famous people, focusing on Giovanni Borgia who is troubled by his uncertain parentage. Not entirely convincing, but nice scenes.

PimPhilipse - Scribal Culture and the Making of the Hebrew Bible sounds fascinating. I'm curious how readable it is.

>25 dchaikin:: Well, the style is pretty academic, evidence is heaped upon the reader, no sweeping statements but carefully phrased theories...
I especially liked the treatment of the Babylonian scribal culture, which is quite well documented: the curriculum of the schools is known, they had their classics to read, and they might make their own copy of a classic if they had a day off.

Fascinating thread Pim. My compliments. I have been obsessed with Julian the Apostate ever since reading Gore Vidal's novel Julian several years ago. I am searching for a copy of the Merezhkovskij book.

Are you familiar with The Treatise of the Three Imposters?

Here is a link to the text, if you are interested.

http://www.infidels.org/library/historical/unknown/three_impostors.html

#26 - Thanks!

>27 DavidX:: I knew of the existence of the work, but I've never read it. Militant enlightenment! I decided to look it up in Radical Enlightenment, and behold! 5 pages are devoted to this text, basically (according to Jonathan Israel) a rip-off of the Ethica, but notable for its efficiency in spreading the ideas.

Indeed, my search for the origins of scripture was inspired by the chapter of the Tractatus Theologico-Political Treatise that points out some of the inconsistencies of holy writ.

Thanks for the link!

Arrived today: Л. Толстой и Достоевский. Вечные спутники by Merezhkovsky. This was written in 1900-1902 (it appeared as a series in Mir Iskusstva).

On the cover: the painting "What is Truth?" by Nikolai Nikolaevich Ge.



This seems a pretty early example of treating both authors in a single book. As a matter of fact, I started out reading books of T. and D. after being pointed to them in Der Untergang des Abendlandes. (7449 860). Umrisse einer Morphologie der Weltgeschichte. Then there's Tolstoy or Dostoevsky: An Essay in Contrast, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Nietzsche, and probably more. The russian doesn't look too hard, so I'll try to read a few pages now and then.

I just picked up Solitude, Vanity, Night: An Anthology of Czech Decadent Poetry edited and translated by Kirsten Lodge who edited and translated the poetry in The Dedalus Book of Russian Decadence. The Czechs are rather more fatal and final than the western european decadents like the Russians. Wonderful stuff.

I am working my way through the eastern decadents. I am quite smitten with Fyodor Sologub by the way. I loved the Sologub stories in the Dedalus collection.

The Tractatus Theologico-Political Treatise is fascinating and is very similar to Treatise of the Three Imposters. I have been reading parts of it online. I will pick up a copy asap. I am intrigued.

Pim - you read some fascinating books. As many of these (I am guessing) have no english translation, they are out of my grasp. Any comments on important or interesting points would be gratefully received.

The Dostoevsky / Tolstoy books are of particular interest. I have been reading Berlin on Tolstoy, and seem to be spending much time thinking on what he (B.) says in this regard. In addition, I know I need to do something about my shameful neglect of D. (don't tell Murr).

So any themes that come out of your reading of these books would find a ready audience.

>32 zenomax:: A version of the T/D book is available in english at http://www.archive.org/details/tolstoiasmanarti00mereuoft.

I'll try to see how complete it is (the foreword of the russian version seems to be lacking), but this should satisfy some of your thirst.

>32 zenomax: The online english version seems to follow the russian version up to the part where it states on page 310:

NOTE. The author has continued the above subject in a
Study of the Religion of Tolstoi and Dostoevski.
Whether this Study shall be given to the English
and American public will depend upon the reception
accorded to his foregoing book. ED.

As far as I know, this has never been followed up.

Thanks Pim.

Een man uit het dal van Spoleto. This was a reread: I originally read the book in 1987. But now, being on holiday in Spoleto and having visited Assisi last year, I was much better equipped to deal with the striking St. Francis bio-thingy of Helene Nolthenius. The striking element is the division in three parts: first ca. 100 pages of historical sources from the 13th century, centering around Assisi but mentioning St. Francis only marginally, then about the same amount of material from the Franciscans (Thomas of Celano, Bonaventura etc.) and finally the author's attempt to create some order in the data. She does a good job matching the historical data with the legends, sifting out stories that seem to be included only 'because saints do such things'. In the chapter on mysticism she quotes contemporary psychologic research. Only when she gets to the miracles and supernatural legends she does not take enough distance to my taste, but overall I enjoyed the read very much. In fact I acquired in Assisi Fonti francescane with all the legends in a handy bedside format so I can marvel about all the miracles.

Two weeks ago I visited the second-hand charity store in our village where everything costs one Euro. Among the cartloads of useless books I found a small number that were deemed worth to occupy space in my library, among which the Fables of La Fontaine.
Yesterday this gained an enormous amount of status when I found in a second-hand bookstore in Utrecht the collected works of Крылов, containing russian translations of many of these fables. Actually they are more elaborations, see what he does with The Fox and the Crow, up to the end of the speech of the fox:

Maître Corbeau, sur son arbre perché,
Tenoit en son bec un fromage.
Maître Renard, par l'odeur alléché,
Lui tint à peu prè ce langage:
"Hé! bonjour, Monsieur du Corbeau.
Que vous êtes jolie! que vous me semblez beau!
Sans mentir, si votre ramage
Se rapporte à votre plumage,
Vous êtes le phénix des hôtes de ces bois.”

Ворона где-то бог послал кусочек сыру;
На ель Ворона взгромоздясь,
Позабтракать было совсем уж собралась,
Да позадумалась , а сыр во рту держала.
На ту беду Лиса близехонько бежала;
Вдруг сырный дух Лису остановил:
Лисица видит сыр, Лисицу сыр пленил.
Плутовка в дереву на ципочках подходит;
Вертит хвостом, с Вороны глас не сводит
И говорит так сладко, чуть дыша:
“Голубушка, как хороша!
Ну что за шейка, что за глазки!
Рассказывать, так, право, сказки!
Какие перушки! Какой носок!
И, верно, ангельский быть должен голосок!
Спой, светик, не стыдись! Что, ежели сестрица,
При красоте такой и петь ты мастерица, -
Ведь ты б у нас была царь-птица!”

The Crow has somewhere obtained a piece of cheese
And was sitting on top of a pine-tree,
He was completely ready for his breakfast,
He was thinking things over, holding the cheese in his beak.
Unfortunately, the Fox passed by;
The smell of cheese made the Fox halt:
The little Fox sees the cheese, the cheese has captured the little Fox.
Mischieveously she goes tip-toe to the tree
Wags her tail, doen not take her eye off the Crow
And speaks thus sweetly, ...
“My little dove, how good!
Now, what neck, what eyes!
It’s really like a fairy-tale being told!
What fethers! What beak!
And, truly, the voice should be angelic!
Sing, dear, don’t be ashamed! What, if you're my sister,
Through such beauty singing you’re the misstress, -
Let’s see, you should be the tsar of birds!”

Crime and Punishment. In Dutch. And with a much more boring cover than this one:



I wanted to finish this before the Les Miserables read, in order to be able to compare Dostoevsky and Hugo. Whatever Nathalie Babel Brown may say in Hugo and Dostoevsky, it's still real Dostoevsky, and since as a reader you're always, so to say, next to our anti-hero, with his brooding and all that, it is much more confronting that the Karamazovs, where Alyosha is still one of the nicer people around.

So pim, what does N Babel Brown say in Hugo and Dostoevsky?

In the first chapter she makes a mapping between protagonists of C&P and Les Mis. I'm not at home right now, so from the back of my head:

Raskolnikov - Valjean
Porifiri Petrovich - Javert
Sonia - Myriel

and a couple of others. Her theory is that D. reused these personages as a kind of archetypes.
Having come sufficiently far in Les Mis to be able to judge for myself how useful this mapping is, I am now prepared to continue reading Hugo and Dostoevsky and trying to make sense of it. Or, I would be, if the Les Mis group read wasn't sucking up my reading cycles.
It struck me that Brown's method has a parallel in software design: the latest fad there is something called "design patterns". In a design pattern you identify "objects" or "actors" that have well-defined interactions among each other, causing something desirable to happen. The pattern can then be used in applications that looks as if they have nothing in common.
So maybe Brown has identified a "novel design pattern".

I'm finding this interesting. I read Les Mis in advance of the Salon read. I also picked up Crime and Punishment (bookstore) and Hugo and Dostoevsky (library) at the time, but have not been able to read them yet. (Crime & Punishment will be my first Dostoevsky.)

Carry on!

yes, maybe in the sense that they are Jungian archetypes, or at least mythological stereotypes common to all stories.

Dostoevsky was a huge fan of Hugo, as I'm sure you know. On the other hand, Dostoevsky also had his own archetypes that he uses again and again: the redeeemed prostitute, the tormented loner, the cynical manipulator of the world, the little marginal man, the hysterical young woman etc etc. These types first appear in his earliest short fictions, and then reappear in one form or another all the way through the rest of his career. So perhaps D is reusing his own archetypes rather than Hugo's.

D does mention the impact of 'Les Mis' on his work, but in connection with The Idiot rather than Crime and Punishment.

I would like to read Brown's book. Seems like it has lots of fruitful ideas to offer.

D on H:

Hugo is certainly prone to be too long winded in his description of details, but he gives us most marvellous effects of observation, which would have been lost to the world but for him.

Letter to Madam Altschevsky 1876