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1800s
Under the Yoke
Ivan Vazov
Lifespan | b. 1850 (Bulgaria), d. 1921
First Published | 1889, in Odessa
Original Language | Bulgarian
Original Title | Pod Igoto
Under the Yoke: A Romance of Bulgarian Liberty is a nineteenth-century historical drama written with patriotic fervor and a fiery passion that has been compared to Longfellow and even Tolstoy. The story is set in 1875–76 around the town of Bela Cherkva (Ivan Vazov’s hometown of Sopot) in a corner of Bulgaria struggling to throw off the Turkish “yoke.” But it is a false dawn (real emancipation did not come till 1886), ending in an abortive insurrection when help from Russia fails to materialize and the leading patriots find only martyrdom.
But it is not all doom and gloom: the heroes, including Dr. Sokoloff and the orphan girl Rada and Boicho Ognianoff (heroically in love too), are all caught up in the excitement of the uprising. Vazov chronicles their story against a backdrop of the meadows of the Balkan valleys, the watercourses and mills, the walnut and pear groves, as well as the cafés, the monasteries, and the farmsteads. There are many memorable set pieces, not least the final slaughter of the bandits at the mill.
Vazov was born before Bulgarian Liberation and died after the First World War, so his life was very much part of Bulgaria’s modern history. He was an unabashed patriot and Bulgaria’s national poet; his poems and prose revered the heroes who had made the liberation possible. This does not make him overly “domestic” for international readers; there is plenty to delight in this novel, which revealed Bulgaria’s artistic potential to the West. JHa
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1800s
The Child of Pleasure
Gabriele D’Annunzio
Lifespan | b. 1863 (Italy), d. 1938
First Published | 1898
First Published by | Treves (Milan)
Original Title | Il piacere
The Italian writer D’Annunzio—whose political ideas are frequently questioned as being possible precursors to Mussolini’s fascism—seems to write this first novel from the perspective of a Romantic poet. The book is lushly written, combining the author’s gorgeous, tightly crafted prose and, through the story’s main character, his poetry; it is also well worth reading for its descriptions of Rome.
The Child of Pleasure is both an examination and a criticism of the wealthy Italian upper classes and the transience of that rarefied social world. The protagonist, Andrea, is a young poet and aristocrat from distinguished lineage who has fallen in love with two women; after a duel leaves him with diminished health, he is torn by his desire for both, as well as by a spiritual rebirth gained through having nearly been killed in the duel. When the husband of one of the women falls into a great scandal, she is suddenly threatened with losing everything, including the passion for which she has compromised herself in order to be with Andrea.
The story’s strength comes from its assertion that the lifeblood of the characters is their reputation, without which they are barred from Rome’s pleasurable life. It is partly their maintenance of reputation and avoidance of scandal that serve to destroy them, physically and emotionally. The characters are rigidly confined within their social rules, and their desires are constantly thwarted; they are tormented by unfulfilled needs. JA
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1800s
Eline Vere
Louis Couperus
Lifespan | b. 1863 (Netherlands), d. 1923
First Published | 1889
First Published by | Van Kampen & Zoon
Original Title | Eline Vere. Een Haagsche Roman
Couperus’s first novel was an immediate success on publication in 1889; this is the jacket of an edition published in 1990.
“Eline, naturally that is me.”
First appearing as a serial in the journal Het Vaderland, Louis Couperus’s novel tells the story of the young and talented Eline Vere, who discovers a reality quite unlike what she has learned from her books. Falling in love with an opera singer, she finds that her passion dies out as quickly as it came, leaving her disillusioned. Yet shortly thereafter, Eline accepts another man’s proposal of marriage and, for a while, they experience an honest mutual affection. But her cousin Vincent is not convinced. As a determinist, to him such love equals childish idealism and nothing but a poetic flight from the truth that there is no free will and that no one is any more than a product of their specific time and place. Eline eventually breaks off her engagement.
In the spirit of Flaubert, Tolstoy, and Wilde, Couperus uses psychological realism to investigate the constant longing that threatens to consume the subject. What is it that we are, ever dissatisfiedly, looking for—and what if there is nothing to find? Who is more treacherous, the cynic or the romantic? And what do we do when we have lost the battle against reality? As Eline starts to question these things, her health deteriorates and she becomes depressed; she considers suicide but cannot find the courage to take her own life. When she dies accidentally of a morphine overdose, no questions are answered but we wonder whether there could be an alternative ending to the terror of loss, and whether there is any possibility of truthfulness.
Having achieved international acclaim early in life, in the Netherlands Couperus remained an ambivalently received dandy until the end of his life. The twentieth century saw a revival of public and academic interest in his work, and Eline Vere was made into a movie in the 1990s. MvdV
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1800s
Hunger
Knut Hamsun
Lifespan | b. 1859 (Norway), d. 1952
First Published | 1890, by Philipsen (Copenhagen)
Original Title | Sult
Nobel Prize for Literature | 1920
The jacket of Hunger—Sult in Norwegian—published as the first volume of Knut Hamsun’s Collected Works (Samlede Werker).
“This happened while I was walking around starving . . .”
Knut Hamsun’s reputation has suffered from his Nazi sympathies in and around the Second World War, but his early, semi-autobiographical portrait of the writer as a hungry young man is a seminal modernist classic, to be placed among Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground and Beckett’s Malone Dies. Hamsun, who won the Nobel Prize in 1920, was himself influenced by Dostoevsky, developing a kind of Nietzschean individualism that rebelled against both naturalism and the progressive literary politics associated with Ibsen. Set in Kristiania, the urban angst of Hunger prefigures the alienated cityscapes of Kakfa, but with an insistence on tensions between everyday economics and colloquial reverie worthy of James Kelman.
Told with the urgency of a breathless and starved present tense, the novel traces the various degradations of the narrator as he attempts to sustain himself through writing. Sometimes feverish from lack of food, other times merely contemptuous of humanity, the narrator has an overdeveloped sense of personal worth. The resulting encounters and misperceptions are both darkly existential and hilarious. Hunger gradually pulls apart the relation between need and dignity, inducing representations of madness that have an almost hallucinatory effect. The reading experience can become as delirious and confusing as the narrator’s condition. Juxtaposing his fantasies and petty crimes with no less petty strategies of revenge and dreams of respect, the novel is carefully balanced between affirming this writer as exceptional and revealing him as a deluded soul, comically lost to spite and stupidity. In ways that prefigure the intellectual down-and-outs of Beckett’s work, Hunger is an antidote for anyone planning a career as a starving writer. DM
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1800s
By the Open Sea
August Strindberg
Lifespan | b. 1849 (Sweden), d. 1912
First Published | 1890
First Published by | A. Bonniers Förlag (Stockholm)
Original Title | I havsbandet
When August Strindberg wrote By the Open Sea, he had fallen under the influence of Nietzsche’s “Superman” theories. He researched the fields of biology, geology, and geography to implement and authenticate the scientific method and to describe accurately a strong, intellectual man of science.
The novel has two main characters, Axel Borg, a fisheries inspector sent to investigate the dwindling supplies of herring, and the natural landscape of sea and islands, a constant source of fascination for the author. Snobbish and superior, Borg alienates the simple and down-to-earth fishermen, and assumes the stronger man’s right to oppress the weak. Taught by his father to suppress the feminine within him, he dominates and conquers a young woman, Maria, but in his own unconscious she takes on the role of anima, exposing the dark recesses of his mind. When under pressure from the locals and the locality, cracks begin to appear in his ego and his confidence begins to look like insecurity. His ideas become increasingly grandiose, and he experiments on himself in an attempt to control and conquer nature.
Borg is clearly Strindberg’s alter ego, a sensitive and lonely genius dragged down by the mediocrity of the common rabble. Pointing forward to his “Inferno” crisis of the 1890s, this psychological novel, which charts the frightening degeneration of a proud and intellectual man into a persecuted wreck, gives an interesting insight into Strindberg’s own state of mind at the time. UD
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1800s
La Bête Humaine
Émile Zola
Lifespan | b. 1840 (France), d. 1902
First Published | 1890
First Published by | Charpentier (Paris)
Original Language | French
La Bête Humaine was the seventeenth novel in Émile Zola’s twenty-novel series, Les Rougons-Macquart, through which he sought to follow the effects of heredity and environment on a single family, using the “scientific” terms central to late nineteenth-century Naturalism and to contemporary theories of degeneration and “hereditary taint.” La Bête Humaine was also a vehicle through which Zola explored the power and impact of the railway, bringing together his twin fascinations with criminality and railway life. The impersonal force of the train becomes inextricably linked in the novel with human violence and destructiveness, and in the character Jacques Lantier, a train driver tormented by his pathological desire to kill women, Zola depicted what a later generation would define as a serial killer. Murder is made inseparable from machine culture, and accident and psychopathology become indivisible. Lantier’s violent desires are stimulated when he glimpses the murder, driven by sexual jealousy, of Grandmorin, one of the directors of the railway company. His “itch for murder intensified like a physical lust at the sight of this pathetic corpse.” The effects of this murderous desire are played out in the rest of the novel.
Zola’s meticulous observation of the physical world is shown in his depictions of the railways, which paint in words the qualities of light and shadow, fire and smoke, that also acted as a magnet to the Impressionist painters of his time. LM
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1800s
Thaïs
Anatole France
Lifespan | b. 1844 (France), d. 1924
First Published | 1890
First Published by | Calmann-Lévy (Paris)
Nobel Prize for Literature | 1921
“Such was the sanctity of these holy men that even wild beasts felt their power. When a hermit was about to die, a lion came and dug a grave with its claws.”
Thaïs, a historical romance set in fourth-century Egypt, tells the story of two very different early Christians, and in doing so examines both the early church and the accepted conventionalities of piety in a new and provocative light. The novel describes the interaction of Paphnuce, the pious and ascetic Abbot of Aninoë, with the beautiful actress and courtesan Thaïs. Inspired by what he thinks is a vision from God, Paphnuce travels to Alexandria in order to convert Thaïs to Christianity, a religion she was baptized into but has since ignored. In the heady atmosphere of fourth-century Alexandria, Paphnuce argues the case for Christianity. The conversion a success, Thaïs retires to a convent to live out a life of purity and renunciation, but Paphnuce, his duty seemingly done, finds himself unexpectedly facing a host of new temptations. In his desire to become holy, his own motives become increasingly dubious until, in a dramatic conclusion, he is reunited with Thaïs and finally forced to question his own previously unshakable faith.
In its nuanced exploration of morality and human will, Thaïs exposes the inevitable contradictions inherent in the idea of purity, and challenges the reader’s expectations of both saints and sinners. Written in a dreamy, evocative style, the novel merges the exotic atmosphere and excitement of the historical romance with a philosophic exploration of the effects of trying to renounce desires in favor of spiritual salvation. AB
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1800s
The Kreutzer Sonata
Leo Tolstoy
Lifespan | b. 1828 (Russia), d. 1910
First Published | 1890 (Russia)
Original Title | Kreitserova sonata
Original Language | Russian
“In our day marriage is only a violence and falsehood.”
The Kreutzer Sonata proffers a blistering attack on the “false importance attached to sexual love.” It argues in favor of sexual abstinence (even within marriage), against contraception, and against sentimental ideas of romantic attachment. These morals are, in many respects, alien to the West today, but the novel cannot be simply dismissed as a reactionary rant. The idea that women will never enjoy equality with men while they are treated as sexual objects resonates with ongoing feminist debates. Here is the late Tolstoy at his most puritanical, following his famous late “conversion” to Christianity. If we were in any doubt that he shares the views advanced by the tormented protagonist, Pozdnyshev, he wrote a famous “Epilogue” the following year, an elaboration of his apologia for chastity and continence as befitting human dignity. The novel caused a scandal on its publication and attempts were made in Russia to ban it, though copies were widely circulated. Mere extracts were prohibited in America, and Theodore Roosevelt called Tolstoy a “sexual moral pervert.”
Set during a train journey, Pozdnyshev tells the narrator the story of how he came to kill his wife, blaming his actions on the sexual ethos of the times. Readers of Anna Karenina will know that the train in Tolstoy’s world can often be seen as a symbol of degraded modernity. The most compelling aspect of this novella is the psychologically acute depiction of obsessive male jealousy. Like Shakespeare’s Othello, Pozdnyshev’s conviction that his wife is having an affair with her music partner finds confirmation in trifles. The barrier between his inner pain and his polished, scrupulously polite social exterior, between private passion and public decorum, ultimately breaks down in his final murderous outburst. RM
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1800s
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Oscar Wilde
Lifespan | b. 1854 (Ireland), d. 1900
First Published | 1891
First Published by | Ward, Lock & Co. (London)
Given Name | Fingal O’Flahertie Wills
A lounging Dorian Gray contemplates the portrait that is destined to grow old while its subject enjoys eternal youth.
“How sad it is! I shall grow old, and horrid, and dreadful.”
“There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.” The series of aphorisms that make up the “Preface” of Oscar Wilde’s only novel was his response to those critics who had questioned the immorality and unhealthiness of the story after its scandalous first appearance in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine. However, for all its transgressive delights, The Picture of Dorian Gray could easily be read as a profoundly moral book, even a cautionary tale against the dangers of vice. Dorian’s descent into moral squalor is neither admirab
le, as can be seen in his peremptory rejection of his fiancée, the actress Sybil Vain, nor enviable. Indeed the beautiful boy is the least interesting character in the book that bears his name.
After the artist Basil Hallward paints Dorian’s picture, his subject’s frivolous wish for immortality comes true. As the picture of him grows old and corrupt, Dorian himself continues to appear fresh and innocent for decades, despite the lusts and depravity of his private life. To be sure, it is the epigrammatic wit of Lord Henry Wotton that encourages Dorian on his quest for sensuality and sensation, but Dorian’s values pervert the deeply serious Wildean ethic that they superficially resemble. Whereas Oscar Wilde’s essays advocate individualism and self-realization as a route to a richer life and a more just society, Dorian follows a path of hedonism, self-indulgence, and the objectification of others. It is, nonetheless, a story that poignantly reflects Wilde’s own double life and anticipates his own fall into ignominy and shame. The conceit on which it is based—the painting in the attic—seems immediately to mutate from fiction into the stuff of myth. RM
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1001 Books: You Must Read Before You Die Page 24