Violating the Sabbath

I got up planning on getting to work on "Love Stinks." I did get a section written - all of two pages.

I also had calendared two publications for sending off "Road Tripping" and a few other publications for my short stories.

Then the Wi-Fi went out. 

Which left me writing letters for the snail mail.

I also decided it was time to take a bike ride.

Around 11, after the bike ride, I took a walk down to McClure's. Two walks - I forgot my debit card.

When the Wi-Fi came back, I checked the email, did some reading. 

 Is There a French National Dish? On the History and Making of French Cuisine 

The Essence of Good Policy: Lyrical counsel from thirteenth-century Persia.  

 Learning is intended to fortify religious practice and not to gratify worldly traffic. Whoever prostituted his temperance, piety, and science gathered his harvest into a heap and set fire to it.

An intemperate man of learning is like a blind linkboy. He shows the road to others but sees it not himself.

A kingdom is embellished by the wise, and religion rendered illustrious by the pious. Kings stand more in need of the company of the intelligent than the intelligent do of the society of kings. If, O king, you will listen to my advice, in all your archives you cannot find a wiser maxim than this: Entrust your concerns only to the learned—notwithstanding business is not a learned man’s concern.

Three things have no durability without their concomitants: property without trade, knowledge without debate, or a sovereignty without government.

Nora Seligman Favorov 

Anna Berman: First of all, who is Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaya?

Nora Seligman Favorov: Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaya is the greatest Russian writer fans of nineteenth-century literature have never heard of. Most educated Anglophone readers today know Tolstoy, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Gogol, and the more sophisticated might know Pushkin, Lermontov, Goncharov, Leskov, and a few others. These names represent a tiny fraction of what educated nineteenth-century Russians were reading. Nadezhda was the most prolific and popular of a trio of writing sisters who were known as the “Russian Brontës.”

***

That story points to the dedication it required—and to some extent still requires—to study these women writers. I know things have gotten a bit easier, but their works are still not widely available in Russian.  And for Anglophone readers, we desperately need more translations (!). So let’s talk about what readers will find in Khvoshchinskaya’s novels when translations like yours are published. What makes her special as a writer and what are the main themes she addresses?

Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaya was extremely prolific, with over a dozen novels and two dozen tales. At this point I’ve read less than a quarter of what she published, but there are two particularly prominent themes that I see her bring forward in subtle yet powerful ways. One is the harm caused by the social constraints placed on noblewomen—and yes, both her readers and protagonists were largely members of the nobility—and the other is the mechanisms by which money served as both a symptom and cause of many of the social maladies afflicting Russian society in her day. In the first case, she brilliantly constructs plots and fills them with small details that make clear in a way I’ve never seen before how nineteenth-century Russian noblewomen tended to be trapped by a combination of provincial prejudices and social constraints coupled with a lack of education and access to knowledge and power. Her female protagonists span the spectrum from intelligent and well-meaning to manipulative and heartless, but in every case the reader gets a sense of how little agency they have in their lives. Both The Boarding-School Girl and her magnum opus, Ursa Major, feature heroines who exercise what freedom is available to them, but in many of her works, including The Brother, there seems to be no freedom to exercise. As for the money theme, her plots illustrate how it is stolen with impunity by people in power, how it traps the weak-willed in unhappy marriages, and how the lack of ways to earn it constrained women’s freedom. Clearly, Khvoshchinskaya’s intimate involvement in her family’s efforts to survive after her father was wrongly accused of embezzlement play a role here.

Thanks to the Paris Review, I finally read a short story by William Gass:  Summer Bees 

It sometimes seems to me, in morbidly fanciful moments, as if age were aimed at, not simply suffered, for I fled my youth as if it were a disease. I wanted adolescence as I wanted its acne. And I can believe those who argue that memory is not enough to establish the reality of the self, because the selves I remember I remember like photos in the family album: that knickered kid, that bald scrawny brat, that fuzz and fat faced second louie, that solemn owl in his flat black hat—they are relatives of mine at best, school chums scarcely recollected, unidentified individuals who have somehow slunk into the group and grin at the blank beside their name. I can unearth someone shouting slogans in a German street, but that loud rowdy could never have been played by the softvoiced and suety professor I have since become; nor can I long for you any longer in the old way—that pain is also past— since the lover who lingered over you like a nurse through an illness—I see that now—is now another man, no longer a lover of any kind, just as you are, Lou, a different set of lips, another pair of breasts, some further furry tunnel.

I always am, and never was; but who wants to be what they have been? Only those like Lou whose souls are the same as their skins; those whose bodies have beauty and skill, grace and accomplishment. Time is an enemy of matter, not of mind, and history (as I said to Governali), history, so long as it is tied to Time like a tin can to the wedding car, can only be a recital of … tents. There were tents, men slouching in grainsacky heaps, stacked arms. You

The Paris Review has partially published it interview of Gas here. Gas comes across as a rather wild child.

Then I went to work on "Road Tripping" - adding the pieces I had sketched out since the original, then also some points that came to me at work on Friday about cars, and corrected a few problems of syntax and typos. I ran it through the Google Docs grammar checker. When I downloaded, I discovered a problem. I had lost all my changes. Then I went back to it. I finished about an hour ago.

When I finally got around to submitting anything, it was:

1. "The Psychotic Ape Pays A Visit" to Hexagon Speculative Magazine. I have started bugging the Canadians.
2. "True Love Ways Gone Astray" went to L’Esprit Literary Review. A stretch, but I did do a little revising, and I want to see if anyone picks up on the existential undertones.

We had another big downpour. Not sure if the drought is over.

sch