Fustian Sacrifices on the Altar of Love: the Poet Pablo Neruda and the Murderess Mrs Pearcey

I mentioned in an earlier post my attendance at a wedding when we heard from the altar, at the bridegroom’s request, a recitation of Siempre (‘Always’), a characteristic rodomontade by Pablo Neruda.

I am not jealous

of what came before me.

Come with a man

on your shoulders,

come with a hundred men in your hair,

come with a thousand men between your breasts and your feet,

This boast invites a challenge, coming as it does from an arch philanderer and from a husband who in pursuit of other women abandoned an inconvenient wife and their ailing infant daughter, a choice of moral worth little different from that of Rainer Maria Rilke whose daughter was similarly abandoned, before the age of one, to be sacrificed on the altar of art.
See:  https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2014/08/the-irreconcilable-sententiousness-of.html

That Anglo-Saxons shrink from such declarations as too operetta-ish was borne in on me when I read today the love letters of possibly England’s most notorious murderess Mary Pearcey (hanged 1890).

Novelettish professions of  sacrificial love:
the Kentish Town murderess Mary Pearcey and
the Chilean Nobel-Prize-winning poet, Pablo Neruda. 

Mary killed the wife and baby of her lover in an attack described as a bloodbath after inviting her victim to afternoon tea. The noted English criminologist, Fryniwyd Tennyson Jesse, disdains the ‘fustian emotions’ of the killer and suggests they were fired by the romantic novelettes (shades of Madame Bovary) that were such a feature of railway bookstalls of the period. 

Five Percent Fervency.
Indeed, the emotions are ‘fustian’ – in the sense of overblown declarations of love – should we choose to judge Mary by the melodramatic appeals to her lover found in her letters, but whose fervency can be quantified as no more than five percent in intensity when measured on the Latin scale of Neruda’s vulgar overwrought declamatory promises. Mary wrote, aged twenty-four:

I would see you married fifty times over – yes,

I could bear that far better

than parting with you for ever

and that is what it would be

if you went out of England.

Murder following English afternoon tea seems well-mannered and modest when you consider Mary’s actions as commensurate with the sacrifices she was prepared to make in sustaining her affair with her married lover and, certainly, they are decidedly moderate when compared with the satyriatic effusions of the Nobel Prize winning Neruda, who is regarded as a provocative object of controversy by Chilean feminists.

So . . . two somewhat novelettish  professions of undying sacrificial love . . . from a buffo-sonorous Nobel-winning Chilean poet and a sordid murderess from Kentish Town . . . I leave you to judge the precise gamut of their credibility.
    

Scene Glimpsed by Nietzsche from his Carriage Window on Ascension Day, May 10th 1888, Year Zero.

Sunstruck, a green hill. 

The lone tree bleeds green shadows.

Racial memory!

Anonymous: after Adrian van der Venn
The Sun Striking a Small Mirror
Engraving from Emblemata by
Johannes de Brune, 1624.
(1888 was Nietzsche’s Year Zero for Umwertung aller Werte, 
‘Revaluation of All Values’. So we might assume the rigour of his
thought would have at once rejected the mediation of Christian atavism 
in interpreting such raw phenomena as a tree and a hill and the sun,
reproachful, lest he see them shrivel into the absurd artifice of the
emblemata of Redemptory Faith — the one immortal blemish of mankind.)

•

From Logos to Blood.

Hannah Arendt seems to almost explain Nietzsche when she writes of another conflicted cradle-Christian in these terms: ‘The main thing was to have no illusions and accept no thoughts – no theoretical systems – that would blind you to reality.'

Nietzsche’s mission to reforge the German language and fashion it into a revolutionary polemical weapon is as reformative as Luther's and Goethe’s trail-blazing testaments to enlightenment, yet characterised by a new muscular effortlessness that made his Thus Spake Zarathustra an exemplar for modern aphoristic brevity.

The reader of Nietzsche’s works can trace this reshaping of German and Germanity in – remarkably – a single key text composed of one recurring phrase that seems to stand as an article of faith across four centuries for five Germanophone thinkers: Luther, Goethe, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein and Hess.

The text? The New Testament (John Verse 1, Chapter1): ‘In the beginning was the Word . . . ’ 

Luther’s Bibel (1522): Luther rejects the original Greek concept of Logos (wisdom) for the primal Wort, the Word of incarnate belief.

Goethe’s Faust (1808): Faust determines to restate John Verse 1, and hesitates on the word ‘Word’, wavering between choices of ‘Thought’ and ‘Power' until, finally, he settles on ‘Deed’. — ‘Und schreibe getrost: im Anfang war die Tat! And write assured: In the beginning was the Deed!’

Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra (1885): ‘I have brought the German language to a state of perfection. After Luther and Goethe, a third step had to be taken . . . look and see . . . if vigour, flexibility, and euphony have ever consorted so well in our language . . . my style is . . . a play of symmetries of every kind . . . This enters the very vowels [assonance]. Once spirit was God, then it became man, and now it even becometh populace. I love only what a person hath written with his blood. Write with blood, and thou wilt find that blood is spirit.’

So, at the end of the 19th Century, the upholder of the German spirit no longer hesitated between Word, Thought and Deed when the sought-after impulse towards creation appeared to him to be a belief in Dionysian Blood.

Until . . .

Hermann Hess’s Peter Camenzind (1904): ‘In the beginning was the myth.’ (Opening sentence of first novel by a tyro-mythologist.)

Before the return to a post-Luther Goethean tradition.

Ludwig Wittgenstein On Certainty (1951) written in the year of his death.  As to the perception of truth revealed by language ‘ . . . it is not a kind of seeing on our part; it is our acting, which lies at the bottom of the language-game.’ (Then Wittgenstein quotes Goethe’s Faust) ‘. . . and write with confidence “In the beginning was the deed.” '

•

Palimpsestic effect on the senses.

For a similar palimpsestic effect on the senses see the House that looks like Hitler:
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2017/07/a-simile-is-deceived-appearance-house.html

For an intimate insight into the psyche of a committed Nazi, whose Anglophobic thoughts are preserved within the covers of Goethe’s Faust, see:
Between life and death . . . January 14 1944 . . . Franz Lüdtke’s ‘Ostvisionen’ for Colonisation to the Baltic Coast

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2018/02/between-life-and-death-january-14-1944.html

•

Catherine Eisner believes passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to literary craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and psychoactive pharmacology to explore the dark side of motivation, and ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes. Within these disciplines Eisner’s fictions seek to explore variant literary forms derived from psychotherapy and criminology to trace the traumas of characters in extremis. Compulsive recurring sub-themes in her narratives examine sibling rivalry, rivalrous cousinhood, pathological imposture, financial chicanery, and the effects of non-familial male pheromones on pubescence, 

see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/sister-morphine.html

and Listen Close to Me (2011)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/published-this-autumn-listen-close-to.html 
and A Bad Case (2015)
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/a-bad-case-and-other-adventures-of.html

Year Zero ‘A Thing with One Face’ : Prescient Words of the Godfather Who Foresaw the Birth of Winston Smith.

To my mind, in literary terms, there are two epochs that begin with Year Zero. 

The first Year Zero I have mentioned a number of times in these posts – 1888 – defined by Nietzsche’s Umwerthung aller Werthe (Revaluation of All Values).

But rereading the October–December 1944 issue of Penguin New Writing I stumbled on a date whose similarly reduplicative digits reminded me that George Orwell had predicted Year Zero to be almost certainly 1944 for the Revaluation of All Values for a Generation  . . . for the citation refer to Chapter One of Nineteen Eighty-Four and Winston’s first entry in his diary . . . 

April 4th, 1984.                                                                                                     He [Winston Smith] sat back. A sense of complete helplessness had descended upon him. To begin with, he did not know with any certainty that this was 1984. It must be round about that date, since he was fairly sure that his age was thirty-nine, and he believed that he had been born in 1944 or 1945; but it was never possible nowadays to pin down any date within a year or two.

So for Winston, the Epoch of The Last Man in Europe (being the dystopian novel’s original title) commenced no earlier than 1944.

How prescient, then, of Louis MacNeice to publish his Prayer before birth in that same year (in Penguin New Writing four years before the drafting of Nineteen Eighty-Four), almost you would think as a godfatherly charm against O’Brien’s vision of totalitarian tyranny : ‘If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – for ever.’

The precursors of Winston’s future plight in Big Brother’s dystopia are truly remarkable . . . the threats to ‘freeze my humanity . . . . dragoon me into a lethal automaton’ . . . rats, truth drugs, and the ‘wise lies’ of propaganda . . .   and the lure of the elusive pastures of the Golden Country . . . and the menacing Man Who Thinks He is God . . .  

Prayer before birth

                             I am not yet born ; O hear me.
                             Let not the bloodsucking bat or the rat or the stoat or the
                                   club-footed ghoul come near me.

                             I am not yet born ; console me.
                             I fear that the human race may with tall walls wall me,
                                   with strong drugs dope me, with wise lies lure me,
                                         on black racks rack me, in blood-baths roll me.

                             I am not yet born ; provide me
                             With water to dandle me, grass to grow for me, trees to talk
                                   to me, sky to sing to me, birds and a white light
                                          in the back of my mind to guide me.

                             I am not yet born ; forgive me
                             For the sins that in me the world shall commit, my words
                                  when they speak me, my thoughts when they think me,
                                        my treason engendered by traitors beyond me,
                                             my life when they murder by means of my
                                                   hands, my death when they live me.

                             I am not yet born ; rehearse me
                             In the parts I must play and the cues I must take when
                                  old men lecture me, bureaucrats hector me, mountains
                                       frown at me, lovers laugh at me, the white
                                             waves call me to folly and the desert calls
                                                  me to doom and the beggar refuses
                                                         my gift and my children curse me.

                             I am not yet born ; O hear me,
                             Let not the man who is beast or who thinks he is God
                                   come near me.

                             I am not yet born ; O fill me
                             With strength against those who would freeze my
                                   humanity, would dragoon me into a lethal automaton,
                                        would make me a cog in a machine, a thing with
                                              one face, a thing, and against all those
                                                   who would dissipate my entirety, would
                                                          blow me like thistledown hither and
                                                               thither or hither and thither
                                                                   like water held in the
                                                                         hands would spill me.

                             Let them not make me a stone and let them not spill me.
                             Otherwise kill me. 

    Louis MacNeice                             
(1944)                             

Let them not spill me.
Otherwise kill me.

            

                

Phoney Aphorisms for D-r Tchékhov with Other Doubtful Observations and Flourishes

To tell the truth, the writing of my as-yet-unpublished crime novel, D-r Tchékhov, Detektiv,  was of such a lengthy gestation (since my days as a febrile sixteen-year-old, actually*), I can no longer tell whether the aphorisms I’ve Englished from his observations are my own confections or those of my protagonist.

Can the same fate befall these phoney utterances, I sometimes speculate, as the misattribution that befell the phrase: ‘I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it’? (Attributed to Voltaire but an aphorism composed by Englishwoman Evelyn Beatrice Hall as an illustration of Voltaire’s beliefs.) 

This misattribution recalls the schoolgirl, Catherine Winkworth, who, learning of General Napier’s conquest of Sindh (1843), remarked to her teacher that Napier’s victorious despatch to the Empire should have been Peccavi (Latin for ‘I have sinned’), a perfect pun that has usually been credited to Napier.

Which raises the question of women as superior phrase-makers standing in the shadows of great men yet nimble-minded enough to equally fill the declamatory breach with a memorable quip if called upon.

Well, here is a questionable selection of my own attempts for uncertain posterity. 

(I should add that my voluminous notes for this sprawling project are in storage, so I shan’t balk at Chekhovian scholars separating the wheat from the chaff and pointing out for me authentic utterances of Anton’s to distinguish them from the inauthentic.)

Aphorisms, Epigrams, Prophecies, Grotesqueries and Paradoxes.

Apropros Goethe : Tchékhov wrote, ‘I am considering a novel to rival Elective Affinities for Russian readers called Comfortable Assumptions.’

Fish and guests smell after three days, Tchékhov mused. In truth, that year at Madame Lintvaryova’s country villa in the Ukraine he had grown restless after two.

Nature’s an idiot, fate is a fool, and life isn’t worth a cracked half kopeck.

Follow Duty too close at the heels and it will strike out your teeth.

Anton thought, ‘A tragical plot may yet produce a comical conclusion.’

A doctor, as everyone should know, enjoys being at a duel. 

While a noose is still running there’s still time to pray.

‘If the doctor cures, the sun sees it, if the doctor kills, the dirt hides it.’ Anton could think only of a century’s end, the sun sinking into dissipation and ruin. He thought: ‘Palliating the symptoms will not affect the cause.’

His natty necktie was adrift but his tongue was knotted.

The room smelled of not having been smoked in.

He has the greatest blind-side who thinks he has none.

‘A rich apothecary, a corruptible doctor.’

‘At this moment I see no good reason to live,’ Tchékhov confided to his brother, ‘but then I remembered an editor had commissioned a magazine article on the poor schools and I recognised that I could not die issueless.’

A sacred mystery, like the pure empyrean fire, can – with faith – be entered solely but never divined, for how else could a mystery ever remain so?

‘All fiction, by definition, is unnecessary,’ thought Anton sourly, ‘with the possible exception of the Bible. There is nothing so deceitful as the deceptions of art.’

Russian Character.

He saw his dispensary-maid approaching.  She was new to the job and had any number of complaints. But he let her grumble – it showed she was interested in her work.

Russia – a nation of horse-copers where each rogue passes on his losses to the next man.

He had reached an age when the only subjects in which he was interested were fourteen-year-old girls and four-year-old horses. The man was so dyed in deviltry that his black would take no other hue.

Ivanishche scratched raw scalings from his bald spot with a somewhat hairier forefinger.

‘They’re poisoning off all the extra people, you see, sir, so there’s more land for the masters!’ 

The infinite credulity of the disenthralled serf.

Life is mad, licentious, turbulent and then, ultimately, unutterably dull.

Man is composed of 60% water; water strives to seek its own level; 60% of a Russian’s soul desires to plunge at once over the side of a ferry boat.

Wittingly, she had struck an attitude which perfectly expressed the evils of the self-serving autocracy. Offhand. Cruel. Doctrinaire. Unforgiving. Proud. Rude.

He was inclined to count his kopecks as if they were roubles, then would gamble them all away like an extravagant vagrant.

‘Russia, Russia,’ he said softly. ‘A ziggurat to Babeldom.’

Beware! The Russian bear runs fastest when reaching greater heights.
(It is commonly assumed that since bears have fore legs shorter than hind legs they are disadvantaged in running downhill. This is a fallacy.)

A drunkard: The abandonment of one whose essential expression is that of an intestable lunatic at the limits of idiocy.

His family had lived so close in those days they would stand on each other’s toes and tongues.

Nothing must be done hurriedly but the killing of a louse.

To the infant dreaming philosopher, who preferred to sit at his study books instead of laying the table, his mother would raise her finger and scold: ‘You know what ‘thought’ done – he planted a feather in the midden and ‘thought’ it would grow a hen!’

Yashka’s wispy beard gave him the appearance of a man who had recently attempted to eat a sprat and who has not removed the fishtail from his chin. 

In the middle of the forest, the rail-track was reckoned to be laid so crooked the enginemen would throw crooked logs grown at night into the firebox – or so it was said.

He was overcome by an otiose afternoonish oblomovshchina and smiled as he recalled from his library the title-page of his own copy  of Oblomov, which he had deleted and reinscribed Drowsey’s Recollections of Nothing – a title, he recorded, embossed on one of the false spines of the imaginary books with which Charles Dickens decorated his study.

The Russian land is like my fur-coat (he decided).  One side is the parfleshed, scraped meadow; the other-side is the secret bristling forest.

He regarded lovingly – and with an unfeigned tribal fealty – the powerful, brachycelaphic, over-stuffed cushion of a head. Authentic homo russicus.

(A brothel.) A beady-eyed old beldame opened the door, wiping her mouth with a dish rag. Anton thought : ‘A bawd named Babylon, the Mother of Harlots, drunk with the blood of saints.’

One of Tchékhov’s (Repeatable) Jokes.

A howl of adenoidal laughter erupting from the cadets almost drowned the punchline, but Anton was able to make out the last few words, ‘You said it, not me!’

(To satisfy the curious reader the jest recorded by Tchékhov has been traced: An old muzhik appears at the front desk of his local police station and timorously complains to the gendarme.  ‘A Swiss soldier has stolen my Russian watch,’ he claims. The policeman shakes his fist at the old man in fury. ‘Make sense, grandad,’ the policeman says. ‘A Swiss soldier stealing a Russian watch?  Surely you mean a Russian soldier has stolen your Swiss watch!’ The old muzhik grins slyly. ‘You said it, not me.’ 

Observations and Flourishes.

Anton had a sensation (not unfamiliar) as of being obliged to act a part in private theatricals at short notice; he had not an idea what to say, and yet his cue waited.

Anton recalled that moment when as a young man he had glimpsed the Tsar in person, a great distance off, in a restless province reviewing troops; and he remembered reflecting at the time how he could not deny that, in profile, the Emperor’s incused head resembled the obverse of a large, rather worn silver rouble; a coin, as it were, thinned by too much superstitious rubbing whose usage was to be touched by every hand in the Empire.

If only like a wild creature he could lick himself whole again. 

He took a sedative and sat down.

In the cold, dark, foul garret, he set his mind to retaining the loose collar with a multiple compression clamp designed for aseptic resection of the gut. A recto-tenacular pile-clip, therefore, must perform the office of a cuff link.

As he said to himself, brooding, some things were to be seen but once in the great game, and it was worthwhile seeing them, even if life were the shorter for it.

His belly protruded; a corporation as resilient as an old medicine ball.

The furious, fatuous, semi-moronic longing for the company of women.

A drug addict: Deipotent. Impenitent. Invincible. Insensate. Narcotised.

Somewhere in the Forest Zone tigers prowl to the music of Tchaikowsky.

The veil that covers the face seldom covers beauty.

He swung out his leg and dismounted smoothly, like a well-turned period.

Military Sketches.

‘Constancy in a long marriage! I tell you, it’s the ultimate perversion!’ The General made a long arm and patted his wife’s withered hand. ‘But then, I’m a complete deviant.’

Idle officers cannot remain long without a war. Soldiers in peacetime are like chimneys in summer – tædium vitæ.

‘In her day a better horse never rose to a fence,’ he muttered.

‘Beware the hind parts of a restive horse and all sides of a priest.’

The little sergeant’s speech broadened as soon as he stood at ease.

Nothing like blood, sir, in horses, dogs and men.’

Tchékhov could imagine the medical officer’s dismay at his dismal posting, as he moped in slow decline, from Knight Hospitaller to then come down, at last, to corns and bunions, idleness and drink.

His endurance of the garrison’s grim entertainments at least compared no worse than his attendance, the year past, at a Christmas party on a padded Violent Ward held for the criminally insane.

In those pages of his journal where he entered his imprest accounts, D-r Tchékhov drew a new line, and itemised his latest expenses – viz. the handout to a battalion commander beseiged by creditors. ‘In Act I,’ he wrote, ‘a respectable man, “X”, borrows a hundred roubles from “A”, and in the course of all four acts he does not pay it back.’ He smiled, and added: ‘To make an enemy is to lend a man money, and ask it of him again.’ To be spared the outgo, the Tsar’s yawning functionary then crossed out ‘expenses, sundry’ and wrote ‘expenses, general’.

Russian Officialdom.

As matters stand, a roaring horse is the only creature which can whistle in the streets without getting locked up.

What a country is ours when, to survive, the righteous man must be ever on his guard, seething with unworthy suspicions, and cannot confide in his most intimate friend, nor in the woman he worships, nor in his own brother!

Anton knew that he, himself, was among the first rank in the long catalogue of enemies of the state under surveillance by the despotic Political Department; not even new-born babes-in-arms were free from suspicion. A dame who kept a forbidden crèche of toddlers had been condemned for harbouring an illegal assembly of infants.

In the Customs Houses they treated a revolver with flippancy, but regarded typewriters as more dangerous than dynamite. No! In these oppressive times, the writer was like a whipped cur and his neck was in the noose of an editorial choke-chain, for there was no subject safe from the Tsar’s forbidding system of mental drill. 

Death is terrible, but still more terrible is the thought that you might live forever and never die. To live one must have something to hang on to. In this country only the body works, not the spirit.

Self-confessional psychoanalysis. 

However glib the psychoanalysis, the truth was that – willing-unwilling – he had persisted, somehow, in confusing his aversion to snakes with the caresses of women. Yet the phobia was so vulgarly commonplace! He knew very well that – despite recognising how unreconciled these foolish conflicting emotions remained – he would not cease to fear the Princess’s glissant arms writhing inside her long sleeves; and would not cease calumniating such women as pythonesses. Yes, Tchékhov confessed, like the pythonesses he condemned he was severe in his strictures. (Tchékhov’s snake phobia – ophidiophobia – was manifested in the mongooses he adored as pets and trained for snake-hunting in the woods.)

He had no wish to remain a moment longer at this dismal spot and dwell upon his own end; his heart suddenly leapt with a passion and he gripped the harness fiercely, shaken by the knowledge that he had no other mortal wish than the desire to probe life ever deeper, to live it to the full, to race the whole gamut of experiences, follies, loves, and sacrifices, to squeeze the orange dry, and then to die quite young, having gone the full compass, the needle pointing home.

I don’t want anything. To die innominate, unperpetuated – as the Great Anon – should be our early resolve,’ he concluded.

Tomorrow there will be another layer of sediment in my soul. Look what a fool stands among you!

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

*My grandfather had a number of leftist political idealists as his friends, and one in particular was a subscriber to the Moscow State Publishing House (he was a remittance man who could afford the luxury of ideals).  Grandfather, as an artist and sculptor, was in the habit of bartering his artistic products for gifts; a sketch for a hat or a cigar, say.  A number of these gifts secured the works of Chekhov and Gorki which I read in my early teens.  They made a great impression on me at an early age. (For example, Gorki’s description of a night under the stars is paraphrased in my Man in a Wardrobe text published in the literary journal Ambit 191 in 2008.)

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

For excerpts from my as-yet-unpublished crime novel, D-r Tchékhov, Detektiv, see
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2014/02/khar-r-r-kai-khar-r-r-kai-khar-r-r-kai.html
or
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/01/d-r-tchekhov-skirmish-with-wolves-and.html
or
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/dead-wife-new-hat-femme-morte-chapeau.html
or
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/inductive-detection.html
or
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/03/winter-rules-and-le-diable-boiteux.html

This long lost crime novel by Chekhov (he, himself, referred to such a work in progress in 1888) charts the misadventures of morphia-addict D-r Anton Tchékhov, aged 28 years, as he investigates the mysterious duelling death of an aristocratic cadet in a remote snowbound northern garrison. In a contest between the animistic pagan beliefs of a Cheremissian shaman-medicineman and his own psychopathological insights as a graduate doctor, Tchékhov, weakened by tubercular fevers and drug dependency, succeeds in solving the case and saving the life of a young prostitute, Mariya.  

Winter Rules and Le Diable Boiteux.

Another excerpt from my as-yet-unpublished crime novel, D-r Tchékhov, Detektiv, see
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2014/02/khar-r-r-kai-khar-r-r-kai-khar-r-r-kai.html
or
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/01/d-r-tchekhov-skirmish-with-wolves-and.html
or
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/dead-wife-new-hat-femme-morte-chapeau.html
or
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/inductive-detection.html

This long lost crime novel by Chekhov (he, himself, referred to such a work in progress in 1888) charts the misadventures of morphia-addict, D-r Anton Tchékhov, aged 28 years, as he investigates the mysterious duelling death of an aristocratic cadet in a remote snowbound northern garrison. In a contest between the animistic pagan beliefs of a Cheremissian shaman-medicineman and his own psychopathological insights as a graduate doctor, Tchékhov, weakened by tubercular fevers and drug dependency, succeeds in solving the case and saving the life of a young prostitute, Mariya.  
     In this extract we catch up with him as he leaves the garrison ballroom late at night in answer to the General’s order for the attendance of a doctor at the duelling ground.

-----------------

In the lobby Anton saw Mariya’s shoulders shake in solitary weeping. 

     He would very much have liked to take her in his arms ; to relive even for one second the breathless span of their mis-tryst.   

     Tears stained the dark red silk of her basquine ; the skirt’s belt was studded with bright rivets like a prison door. 

     He felt a quickening of the pulse, instinct with desire.

     The General brought his guest the adjutant’s polushubok – a short sheepskin coat – which Anton hastily buttoned on, pausing only to cover his dancing pumps with his galoshes.

     The gasoliers effloresced as the General opened the door.

Winter Rules

To a hungry man with a drunken headache whose every nerve shatters at the sound of breaking glass, the moon can appear, after a banquet, as an unbroken dish of slops above the rooftops. 

     So the moon appeared to D-r Tchékhov.

     Anton stood where he was bid – en prise – a hired hand waiting to be taken.

     A meteor fell and he winced as shooting pains attacked his right arm, but whether this was due to the tightness of the adjutant’s coat or his hacking cough he could not be sure.

     The General shouted for escorts to form an undertaker squad. Odd to see the General in ancient felt top-boots yet still cutting a dash in his swagger uniform.

     Shivering in third-wear uniforms and government-issue camelhair hooded bashlyki, two young ensigns, and the two bruised angel-faced recruits relieved from punishment fatigues – now thoroughly shorn and chastened – unstrapped a stretcher from the ambulance wagon’s kit of nosilki.

     Supreme in his vicegerency, the General beckoned to Tchékhov to fall into line.

     The two ensigns formed the vanguard, each carrying a bull’s-eye kerosin lantern with a reflector which sent lampblack shadows swinging in the moonlight.

     The party advanced through an inner archway and across a court towards an embattled parapet between two gun embrasures where, by a snow-covered merlon, a dark robed penitent stood with bowed head awaiting their approach.

     At the sight of a priest, Anton – as ever – shivered in apprehension. His right shoulder continued to twinge, and a new pain gnawed at his left subclavicular region ; all the conclusive signs, in truth, of the incipient tuberculosis his conscious mind had dismissed.*
     However, he could not fail to be aware of the fact that the inflammation of his leg had not subsided and, in consequence, his limp was, to his burning shame, growing hourly more pronounced.  

     To be outrun by a priest was more than he could bear.

     The General had called for the college chaplain as soon as they were clear of the ballroom, with precise orders to seal a vow from him of absolute discretion.

     Father Abiathar (so named† with forlorn expectations by his Bishop) had all the bored manner of a priest who was feeling Mondayish even though it was a Saturday, and his eyes (Anton thought) had the cunning look of a mendicant prior dismissed for simony who had been driven to peddle indulgences in bulk.

     His cincture was tight over his grain-sack belly and he smelled of pickled herring. His breath declared the buffet had allowed him a skinful of the chasse-cousin rotgut they reserved for the clergy.

     ‘Nowadays our fellows crawl out from all sorts of unexpected holes,’ said the General, sotto voce. 

     The General spoke gravely of their special mission and ordered the priest to bless his six-man snatch-squad. 

      As the only two non-combatants present, Father Abiathar and D-r Tchékhov were assigned to the rear of the column.

      Anton thought : ‘Like flies, a doctor or a priest can enter any house. Just as the the First Functionary of the Empire, the Secret Police Chief Count Shuvalov, had a right of Audience, by day and night, with the Tsar and could walk into the Emperor’s cabinet or bedchamber at any hour without risking his imperial displeasure. In this we share the advantage of the house-fly. We enter unannounced and roam at will.’

      Anton had learned from the General that the priest was called Brimstone by the students and most of the Camp. 

     He was tolerated yet heartily loathed.

     ‘It’s as useless as shooting at ravens as clergy,’ the General had said.

     To augment his meagre salary of one hundred and fifty roubles a year there were innumerable fees this Levite could exact, and he fined soldiers fifteen kopecks who had not communicated in Lent, and likewise extracted dues from the Old Ritualists.

      After he pocketed his fee the priest would wring his hands and lower his eyes like a monk who held the Chair for Abjectness. 

      ‘He speaks as though he would creep into one’s mouth,’ the General had added in disgust.

      The Levitical caste was a subject of continuing fascination for Anton and he committed to memory the details of Brimstone’s broad-brimmed, wideawake hat, his large heavy boots, the patched, dingy brown cassock and coarse hodden-gray over-mantle attached to a worn capuche which clung to his head to protect his ears.  

      Within these fuscous robes Father Abiathar concealed his priestcraft : a portable altar in a satchel, a miracle-working triptych from his collection of tchudotvornikh icons, and a crucifix wrapped in his stole, which he clutched for warmth, his hands thrust up his sleeves.

      A series of steps descended the ramparts to a path leading to the forest edge.

      They stepped out on to a tableland laid with linen-white snow.

      Under the soaring revetment the soldiers’ lamps guided them to the first of the raised logging roads covered in impacted snow.

      To keep his spirits up (and to terrify the body-snatching crew) the General sang, in his staunchest basso profundo, a verse by Nekrasov :

            In the sepulchres, King Winter said,
            With flowers of ice I deck the dead ;
            I freeze the blood in the living veins,
            And in living heads I freeze the brains.

And, as he sang, Anton’s blood, too, seemed to turn to ice as the party struck out from the shelter of the garrison and stepped into the teeth of a north wind.

     ‘In cold like this it’s Winter Rules!’ the General shouted grimly.

      Anton painfully limped ahead, outstripped the column, and drew abreast of the General who linked arms.  The two men put their heads down to face the whip of the wind.

     ‘Ten paces is the minimum but the Prince would have been perfectly within his rights to shoot at eight. At minus twenty degrees your hand’s so palsied by the chills, and the light’s so dim, that – even if you were to find a line of sight to guide your aim – you’d be more likely to wing the other fella’s second!’

     The path – lined with stunted birch and pine – began to fall away sharply. Tchékhov realised the solid going underfoot was due to successive squads of cadets beating a path to the exercise grounds which lay ahead. A deceptive surface was sprinkled with a powdering of diamond-glinting snow.  

     Beneath his feet was a skin of trodden ice which covered the tangled dead sedges, dried cotton grass and other reliquiæ of a muskeg.

     They crossed a boundary rail polished by friction from generations of Academy cadets. Anton noticed the General’s eyes never ceased to search the snow for signs of the duellists’ trail.

     The General found his second wind and, to pass the time, began to tell of sporting contests he had witnessed when he was a cadet. 

     ‘There was young Nezlobin – a very small youth – who had a dispute with his classmate Mychetzky, who was very stout. Words ran high on both sides, so little Nezlobin calls him out. Mychetzky, however, won’t have it. ‘You are so little,’ he said, ‘that I might fire at you a dozen times without hitting, whereas, the chance is that you may shoot me at the first fire.’ ‘To convince you I don’t want to take advantage of you,’ says little Nezlobin, ‘you shall chalk my size upon your body, and all hits out of the ring shall go for nothing!’ 

     Anton laughed with delight. The General paused and offered a swig from his hip-flask which Anton declined.

     ‘My God, you’re an incorporated temperance society!’ exploded the General. 

     But, under the pretext of coughing into his handkerchief, Anton managed to take a deep pull from Old Vańuška’s berézovka.  

      Soon his veins were on fire.

      ‘They were always sparring,’ resumed the General. ‘Mychetzky broke his ankle once, falling off his horse. Blamed Nezlobin for crossing his path on an exercise so they set to wrangling once more. So Nezlobin challenges him and Mychetzky accepted.  But being very lame, Mychetzky requests that he might have a prop. ‘Suppose,’ says he, ‘I lean against this road sign.’ Nezlobin, then points to a farther sign at a cross-roads a verst distant and says, ‘With pleasure, on condition that I may lean against the next.’  The joke settled the quarrel. A pity the same could not be said of the Prince.’

Le Diable Boiteux.

Curiously, at that moment, they, too, reached a junction where their path joined a corduroy road from the forest which led to the garrison by a lower route. Here, at last, two sets of footprints were visible, entering and leaving a gate giving on to the exercise grounds.   

     The old frontier scout released a grunt of satisfaction.

     ‘The Prince’s footsteps. Small heels. Impression of spurs in the deeper places. Let’s follow the scent.’

      The single set of tracks leading to the butts was regularly paced yet the returning tracks were of a different character, suggesting the dragging left foot of a limping man, so the General concluded.

     ‘Le Diable Boiteux!’ Anton whispered.

     Most fascinating of all, the two sets of tracks became three at a point where they passed close to a prostrate pine and other fagotage and led beyond, across a terrain broken by hairy tussocks and the fallen shafts of reed clumps. 

     To Anton, the springiness of their prints on the quaggy snow suggested the mossy ground and slippery pine needles underneath.

     ‘Ahah!’ exclaimed the General. ‘Enter Kulikov.’

     ‘How can you be so sure?’ urged Tchékhov, immediately rushing to the defence of the young Class-Lance-Corporal Pomidorchik.  

     The bearer party halted.

     ‘Understand this, Antosha,’ the General knelt beside the meeting place, ‘the first set of tracks pauses here, heels close together, then continues in the same direction, suggesting the acknowledgement by a senior of a junior officer’s salute.’ 

     ‘And...?’

     He straightened, stiffly, and continued.

     ‘Do-ye-see? Kulikov takes the shortcut through the forest, meets up with his adversary, salutes, crosses the tracks from the rear and joins the Prince on the lefthand side.’

     ‘I don’t see how...’

     ‘Regulations. Quote : ‘When officers are walking together, the junior officer should at all times position himself on the left so the senior officer’s saluting arm is disengaged.’ See?’

     ‘Perfectly. Our Imperial Table of Ranks is even written on the remotest Russian snow.’

     Anton rubbed his eyes. He saw only – imperfectly – that the muddle of the tracks in the snow was like a profusion of those slovenly typographical misprints on a galley proof with which he was so familiar – and which he was too fatigued to correct. 

     And Kulikov?  Where was he?

     ‘In quod. Under lock and key.’

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
*    In fact, as was later proved, the right lung was badly affected, and emphysema was found to have spread to the left lung. At the end of Tchékhov’s life a relapse of pleurisy was complicated by an intestinal catarrh which indicated that the tuberculosis had spread to the abdominal region.

†    ‘Father of Excellence” - see Samuel xxiii, 9.