Between life and death . . . January 14 1944 . . . Franz Lüdtke’s ‘Ostvisionen’ for Colonisation to the Baltic Coast

I write only the truth . . .

. . . how extraordinary while clearing the family attic, only last week, to find a copy of Goethe’s Faust, published in Leipzig (1920 Insel Verlag), and clearly a souvenir from my father’s duties in the Psychological Warfare Division of SHAEF (General Eisenhower’s Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force) when, during WW2, his rôle was concerned with the military intelligence to be gleaned from the closest scrutiny of captured enemy documents, the specialism of the G-2 Documents Section. 

Am I to believe that it was my father’s own copy, when between its ultra-thin pages I found the 1944 newspaper clipping of the poem you see in my photograph, snipped from the NSDAP’s Völkischer Beobachter?  I don’t think so. 

But I do believe my father retained the cutting as an intimate insight into the psyche of a committed Nazi who, by the precious fragment’s preservation within the covers of Goethe's magnum opus, had – even as the thousand year Reich trembled before the Allies – disclosed evidently his continuing blind allegiance to the romantic völkischen Nationalismus ideology of those demagogues pledged to Führer, Volk und Vaterland.

Oh come on! I hear you protest. Is it possible after seven decades to deduce so much from such meagre clues? I’ll answer in a moment but, first, the poem (according to my own perception of it at the moment it fell into my hands): 

                                       Between life and death

                                       Narrow our path whose hedges
                                       Wreathe destiny and sorrow.
                                       Narrow the highstrung bridges  
                                       That stretch from life to death now.
                                       While other lips were silent,
                                       Eyes spoke with our truer sight,
                                       Our wishes surge ascendent,
                                       Higher, freer in the light.

                                       We stride on hour by hour
                                       Seeking the half-seen footpath,
                                       Yet, from the fields’ young verdure
                                       Sprouts the new sown aftermath.
                                       Destiny? My own? And yours?
                                       Our fate is running like sand.
                                       Life and death a single course
                                       Aloft in the divine hand.

Zwischen Leben und Tod
by Franz Lüdtke

                                       Zwischen Leben und Tod

                                       Schmal unser Weg. Wir pflücken
                                       Kränze aus Glück und Not.
                                       Schmal die wiegenden Brücken
                                       Zwischen Leben und Tod.
                                       Unsere Lippen schweigen,
                                       Nur unser Auge spricht. 
                                       Unsere Wünsche steigen
                                       Höher, freier ins Licht.

                                       Stunde um Stunde schreiten
                                       Wir den helldunklen Pfad –
                                       Aber aus Ackerbreiten
                                       Sprießt die ewige Saat!
                                       Schicksal? Meines? Und deines?
                                       Schicksal verrinnt wie Sand.
                                       Leben und Tod sind eines
                                       In der göttlichen Hand . . . 

A proselytiser for the mystical recovery of a Greater Germany. 

In the divine hand . . .  In der göttlichen Hand . . .  well, the author of this poem, Franz Lüdtke, by these words evokes in my view the statement, some seven years earlier, pronounced by the Reich Minister for Church Affairs, Hanns Kerrl, in 1937: ‘There has now risen a new authority as to what Christ and Christianity is. This new authority is Adolph Hitler.’

Consider, then, the nature of Franz Lüdtke as an NSDAP propagandist, a passionate proselytiser for the mystical recovery of a Greater Germany that would see the Nazi ideology of Lebensraum realised by territorial expansion eastwards, absorbing Poland and encompassing the eastern borderlands that ran from the Baltic states to Transylvania and the Black Sea.

Consider Lüdtke’s Eastward-visionariness – his Ostvisionen – his conviction, as chief of the Foreign Policy Department of the Nazi party, that Ostlande could be recovered from Slavic thraldom for Großdeutschland by the Reich’s triumphant Eastern colonisation.

The significance of the marginal notations in Faust on page 201 by our unknown Nazi Goethephile should then become clear . . . for it is between pages 200 and 201 that Lüdtke’s valedictory poem was pressed by his devotee.

I want to build a thousand bridges.

For, as I removed the cutting of Zwischen Leben und Tod, I read beneath it Goethe’s text, the words of Mephistopheles addressed to Faust, singled out by a jagged pencilled bracket:

                                       Ich wollt indes wohl tausend Brücken bauen.
                                       Nicht Kunst und Wissenschaft allein . . .

                                       I want to build a thousand bridges.
                                       Not by art and science alone . . .

Is there not a mystical connexion intended here by the unknown German reader? Does not the reader of both Lüdtke and Goethe – precariously keeping the faith on January 14 1944, the very day the Wehrmacht are routed and their retreat from Leningrad begins – still believe that the Reich of a Thousand Bridges can yet endure, even though the path to victory crosses a measureless abyss in a treacherous murk – helldunklen – half-lit by enemy tracer fire. 

Notwithstanding this initial interpretation, I yet believe the mood of the poem is suggestive of an almost heretical admission by Lüdtke of leaderlessness insofar as destiny's path is half-seen.

An insinuendo . . . the lisping English reviled.

Further pencilled scribblings identified in Faust yield more of the unknown disciple’s steadfast völkisch-nationalistisch rationale; a rationale moreover coloured by the cultural refinement of Anglophobia and state instituted antisemitism. 

Page 166, for instance, has a marginal checkmark beside a text that leads to the mocking Goethean aphorism . . .

                                       So bringt der West den Schwarm . . .

                                      Und . . . [Sie] lispeln englisch,  wenn sie lügen.

. . . a double meaning that could suggest unholy fiends are set to bring a swarm of evil forces from the West and that they lisp like English when they lie.

Hence one speculates to propose that these characteristic marginal checkmarks against the ‘Swarm of Lisping English’ are pencilled there to draw attention to further significances for the German reader of 1944 . . . namely, the afflicted tongue of Moses, an archetypal speech defect that would doubtless resonate as a redoubled insinuendo . . . the lisp slander . . .  the sly variant of the gross blood libel that impugns Die Juden who allegedly rule England (see Juden beherrschen England, Nordland-Berlin, 1939, below), a revival a millenias-old shibboleth over which Nazified anti-semites could gloat.

A volume from my father’s collection of antisemitic propaganda brought back
from WW2 service overseas and, judging from the over-stamping on the
cover, this 1939 copy of Juden beherrschen England (‘Jews rule England’) was
an exhibit from a mission by T-Force, an operational arm of Twelfth Army
Group, possibly seized by them as evidence in indictments against war
criminals during the Nuremberg Trials at which my father was an
interpreter for interrogations.

Verso . . . the newspaper cutting.

I cannot refrain from adding a footnote

I write only the truth . . .

On the reverse of the Lüdtke poem cutting is a sneering dispatch from Ankara, dated the previous day, referring to the November 1943 Cairo Conference at which Roosevelt, Churchill and Tschiangkaischek determined the Allied position against Japan and the future of postwar Asia. The propagandist’s despatch begins: ‘The Germans must have tremendous power if the Allied military authorities, out of concern for the safety of Roosevelt and Churchill, found it necessary to make their meeting place a veritable fortress.’ 

There is a perverse irony, perhaps, in that usage of ‘Fortress’ when you consider that following defeat in the Desert war, in the very month of the Cairo Conference (November 1943), the Desert Fox, Field Marshall Rommel, his life shortly to end on the orders of Hitler, was appointed commander of Fortress Europe .

See also http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2018/05/scene-glimpsed-by-nietzsche-from-his.html

See also http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/rates-of-exchange-ici-francais.html

•

For a tragedy of a native German’s alienation in the face of the NSDAP’s inexorable rise to power incited by antisemitism see also my The Eleven Surviving Works of L v. K at the South Bank Poetry Library
http://poetrymagazines.org.uk/magazine/recordbfb6.html?id=9440

•

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

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!

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*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.)

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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.  

‘Khar-r-r-kai! Khar-r-r-kai! Khar-r-r-kai! Khaos!’ Chekhov’s talking raven.

News promoted by a recent BBC wildlife documentary claiming that the Corvus genus of the Corvidæ family – crows and ravens – boasts the most intelligent creatures to be found anywhere in the animal kingdom – both in the lab and in the wild – jolted a memory . . . and I recalled the penultimate chapter of my as-yet-unpublished crime novel, D-r Tchékhov, Detektiv, in which a talking raven’s prophecies awaken in the writer atavistic instincts that defy his own psychopathological insights as a graduate doctor and draw him closer to the animistic pagan beliefs of a Cheremissian shaman-medicineman.

In the following passage, D-r Anton Tchékhov, aged 28 years, having investigated the mysterious duelling death of an aristocratic cadet in a remote snowbound northern garrison, mounts up to observe the burial party.

An Unwreathed Burial.

Huge flickering shadows danced like elusive spirits over the Prince’s shroud.
    The cadets, Kulikov and Toichina, handed their torches to the ritual torch-bearer, and mounted as one. On their backs were strapped entrenching tools.
    In the moonlight, their horses had a silver sheen, a pale metallic bloom.
    Snow began to fall. 
    Old Ivanishche plunged his spurs into his steed and, with a persuasive word, tugged at the traces.
    The sledge went burrowing through the storm carrying its grisly load.
    Tchékhov shrugged, thumbed in the direction of the old feldsher and, in a husky solemn voice which veiled his drollery, said to the General : ‘Over the grand panslavic plain roams a race of mischievous men.’
    From the General a half groan was followed by a horse laugh.
    Now and again the moon showed through the snow clouds gathering above the forest.
    Where the lower track descended to the exercise grounds the burial duty sheered away through the gap in the boundary fence.
    Kulikov raised his hands smartly to his cap.  Neither prince nor plebeian, he played his part well, without gaucherie – with natural grace – a dash of the Oriental in the uniform of the Occident, patrolling the pregnable western wall of his Tsar’s empire.
    Under the hood, in the shadows of the grey cloak, the cavernous grin of Old Vańuška widened and yawned like Death himself.
    ‘I saw Death mounted on horseback and did not draw back,’ breathed Anton pensively, his words turning to ice.
    Ivanishche stabbed his finger at the dead body.
    ‘A kucher daresn’t stop when he’s harnessed to a soul.’ He larraped the shaft-horse and the attendant cadets galloped after at a fast lick favoured by a following wind like two outriders of the gale.
    ‘Death gleans men, one after another,’  Anton thought, ‘it knows its business.’
    The watching figure paused until the riders vanished, moved by an impulse to chase their strange journeying to the last post.    
    Some things were to be seen but once in the great game, he brooded, and it was worthwhile seeing them, even if life were the shorter for it.
    Anton kept well into the shadows of the trees fringing the side of the path.
    Ahead of him he could hear Ivanishche singing in a cracked voice a chant du cosaque composed by the hard-drinking Cossack leader Davidoff at the time of Napoleon’s disastrous retreat from Moscow.

Half a kopeck for the master,
Silver on the horse’s feet,
Good oats for the charger fleet ;
A crust for you – you’ll ride the faster.

   (‘A crust,’ mused Anton. Now Ivanishche was out of earshot of the Camp, the Tcheremis apostate must be referring to his humiliating, enforced vow of allegiance to the Tsar. Anton knew that any unbelievers among the new conscripts were forced at gunpoint to eat bread from the blade-tip of the adjutant’s sword, and repeat : ‘Thank you for bread and salt ... Spasibo za khleb da sol.’)
    Their massy shadow like a rolling black ball bowled along the length of the duelling pitch at which point the cantering hacks were swallowed by the greater shadow of the vast forest.
    They were moving at a break-neck pace, high-tailing it through the trees, Kulikov running a short hair second. The only way Anton could distinguish them in the darkness was the fact that the rump of Ivanishche’s horse had a white patch, and that the entrenching tool by his side glinted at a certain angle.
    So much ice had become attached to the hoofs of Old Roarer, that the unfortunate creature seemed to be walking on stilts, no two of which were the same length, and, to make matters worse, Anton had almost lost all feeling in his own extremities due to the intense cold.  He should have liked to walk on foot to restore his circulation but he could not for he feared losing the party among the trees.
    Soon the éskort emerged on to open ground, a vast snowy plain of infinite desolation, and the shadow of a ridge appeared on which could be seen the dark outlines of the tumuli which marked the site of the ancient burial grounds.
    At the foot of the rise was an abandoned fortalice, the forpost of the garrison’s western defences and, since the cholera epidemic, unoccupied save for crows and ravens.
    A raven, rousant, perched on one of the isolation huts took wing.
    (During those cholera months, a scene had presented itself, the General had said, which few minds could conceive or pens depict. ‘The ghastly countenances of those poor fellows presented a dismal sight, their sunken eyes ever darting after you, beseeching assistance.’ Ivanishche had worked like a madman, unthinking of the danger, administering relief by pouring water over the livid bodies of soldiers labouring under the pangs of premature dissolution, their faces dewed with the cold and clammy damp of death. In the final days, only Ivanishche had summoned the courage to remain beside the pallets of his charges, as they died in agony, and only Ivanishche had walked alive from that dreadful place.)
    When Tchékhov neared the crown of the ridge he saw the stars had ceased their pulsing and shone steadily on a slope of scattered graves.
    A huge mass of rock projected on the north eastern face.
    Drawing closer to the cemetery, and shielded by a kurgan barrow which broke the skyline, Anton was able to observe the gravediggers about their tasks, as the old feldsher dismounted from the rusty roan and unloaded his grim cargo.
    ‘Lay ’im on them big stones,’ Kulikov was instructed by his mentor.
    Anton heard a crunt from a cudgel as the feldsher smashed the ice, then Old Ivanishche, raised his axe to cleave the frozen soil for the grave.
    Anton could distinguish the Tcheremis graves from the rest, as their plots lay feet-first to the southeast with their headstones to northwest.
    In that Golgotha there were skulls of all sizes. The unconsecrated plots lay between the cholera cemetery and the Jewish burial ground, the furthermost from the town, where the collapsed sarcophagi – with their indecipherable pseudo-Hebraic inscriptions memorialising long departed hakams – had fallen into the vaults beneath, until the exilic graves had become, Anton mused, like ‘...tombs even of themselves’, recalling Goethe’s essay in a schoolbook, printed more than half a century earlier.
    On the ground, outside the cholera victims’ enclosure, a sleigh in which the soldiers’ corpses had been carried, and pieces of wood remaining from the boards used to make the coffins, had been left to rot (for they were not burnt according to superstition lest the faces of the corpses became blistered).
    The Tcheremis burial ground – their sacred šügarla - was a forlorn bare place without any fenced reshetka ; and in place of the Christian krestel – the grave cross – was a mensur of undressed rock.
    Evidently, the Tcheremis yüzo had chosen the grave site with care.
    By the light of the carriage lamp on the sleigh the men quickly broke the ice-lens beneath the surface snow, and penetrated the softer strata of an interpermafrost talik which lay unfrozen below.
    Judging from the burial tailings from the dig, which appeared to steam, a thermal spring flowed through the ice core at this point.
    The Prince was buried unwreathed.
    Tchékhov overheard Old Vańuška’s muttered explanation to Kulikov : ‘Khadoško keäš.’*
    Anton murmured : ‘Just as I shall lie alone in my grave so shall I live alone.’
    There was no ceremony ; no Mass of Requiem ; simply the cries of a raven.
    ‘Khar-r-r-kai! Khar-r-r-kai! Khar-r-r-kai! K-k-kopai awk-up, k-k-koldan! O-o-rrt, khr-r-romoi, khor-r-roniat kr-r-raplenogo kor-r-rju kovar-r-rnogo kr-r-rasavtsa-fr-r-ranta! Sokr-r-rushenniy! Pokar-r-ranniy! Jar-r-r-r - Kor-r-rak, kur-r-rier kar-r-ry. k-kar-r-rkayu kr-r-rah i Khaos!’
    Ivanishche laughed, inexplicably,† as the shaman put the Prince to bed with a shovel at last, buried with his teeth upward, facing southeast.
    ‘Quork!’‡ the raven cried.
    Anton observed Old Ivanishche toss a crust on to the burial mound, and place an abundant supply of cooked leavings on the grave to discourage the return to the barracks of the famished spirit of the departed.
    ‘R-r-a-ab!’§ the raven jeered, seizing one of the offerings.
    ‘Ra-ab!’ yelled Ivanishche in the same malevolent voice and shook his fist.
    When Anton turned the mare and piloted her towards the railhead, the last glimpse of Ivanishche he was destined to carry with him was of the Tcheremis warlock spitting thrice into the pit to sanctify the new-made grave.
    The mare seemed to know the way and they passed beyond the dissenter’s tombstones where rude wreaths hung upon little pine crosses.
    An upspringing breeze caught a garland and cast it over the edge of a bluff which, as he advanced, to Anton’s surprise, was revealed to be carved by the upper reaches of the river.
    Below, beside a log chute, were the wreaths of the departed, clinging to a spit of ice thick enough to bear a railway train.
    A dark wreath, encircled with a saw-edge of ice, detached itself and began to drift downstream.
    ‘Such a beginning, such an end.’
    Anton’s words were stopped by a ruckling cough, and he shuddered, thinking of the youth’s eternal sleep, his mouth full of mould, reduced to adipocere in a pit.
    He shivered.
    Fresh horns of ice several inches thick had formed on the nose of the mare and he urged her forward.
    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.

                      ______________________________________________

*    To die by one’s own hand is ‘to die out of grace’ (Tcheremiss).
†    On the contrary, quite explicable, when compared with Tchékhov’s transliterated raven cries. (See Glossary below. ) The cries resemble in Russian : ‘Spit! Spit! Spit! Dig your trench, O Wizard! Look there, Lame One! There is buried the treacherous beau-galant, blighted with sores! Failed! Punished! I, Korak, messenger of retribution, prophesy failure and Chaos!’ 
‡    ‘Korka’ means ‘Crust of bread’.
§    The cry resembles ‘Rab’, meaning ‘Slave’. 

Glossary of Raven Speech

Tchékhov’s study of ravens is documented at length in his private writings, a product, perhaps, of his bird-hunting youth and his visits to the Taganrog bird market as a child. The caging of wild songbirds is a Russian custom which Tchékhov was never to abandon, and his deepest affection was reserved for the family Corvidæ – indeed, his affinity with ravens extends further ; like Tchékhov they share a gift for mimicry and may live over forty years. (Tchékhov was to die in his forty-fourth year.)
    Significantly, a talking raven is mentioned in Tchékhov’s story, After the Theatre, 1892, and, in this same year, to satisfy his reawakening animism, he acquired a tame crow, ‘Karkasha’ and a raven, ‘Voron Voronovich’.
    Cheremisian and Russian raven legends are recorded in his notebooks :

The onomatoeic ‘Kh'er’ correlates closely with the stem present in most  European words for ‘raven’. Greek = korax. Tcheremis = korak.  Old Icelandic = krakr, &c. That magical powers are attributed to the raven Old Vańuška had learned from Mari folklore, particularly, I suspect, the fable of the resurrection of a dismembered corpse. The Mari people believe strongly that a raven digs a hole in the ground to find the source of the Water of Life ; that is why the raven lives so long. If a man’s limbs are severed the Tcheremis sends a raven with a bowl to bring back the Water of Life to make the man whole again. Is this why Vańuška feared the powers of the raven? It is the custom of the Tcheremis to wash themselves on Easter eve, ‘before the raven washes himself’, that is why the Mari people retire to bed early.  They wish to use the Water of Life before the raven reaches it.  When there is a drought the Tcheremisians make Raven’s kasha so the ravens bring them rain. The cult of the all-seeing raven, I believe, will never die. To possess ‘raven’s knowledge’ is to be truly wise.

    Following this passage, on the next page, Tchékhov notes the ability of his caged raven to imitate human calls and even, the barking of a dog.  ‘The raven, after he was caught, I saw had been clearly separated from a distraught mate who distantly mimicked her captive partner’s idiosyncratic alarm calls with astonishing exactitude to prompt a response and locate her beloved.
     ‘The complete transliteration of a Russian raven’s speech is a task which I regard with the greatest gravity. I trust I will be granted time on earth to complete my research and to publish the prophetic utterances I have brought to light which I dare not breathe to a soul until I have exhausted every effort to establish contact with these supranatural beings, and succeed in knowing their ways with the same facility as Vańuška.’

                               Transliterated Sound      Resembles (Russian)      
                                                                     Awk!      oko (eye)
                                                               Awk-up!      okop (trench)
                                              Ggaagga-ggaagga!     Garotting
                                                                    Kaah!      See “Kar-kat!”
                                                         Kakoy krah!      kakoi (what, which, how)
                                                                 Kak-to!      kak-to (one day, somehow)
                                                                Kar-kat!      karkat (to hawk up phlegm)
                                                                      Kaw!      khor (chorus)
                                                                Kee-aw!      kur'er (messenger)
                                                                Ko-pick!      kopeyka (kopeck = penny)
                                                                      Kow!      -
                                                                     Krah!      krak (financial crash ; bankruptcy ; failure)
                                                                   Kraap!      krap (specks or marks made by    
                                                                                      card-sharper on deck of cards)
                                                                      Krrk!      krik (cry, shout)
                                                                   Kuork!      korka (crust of bread, poverty)
                                                                    Kuort!      kort (court) kurit' (smoke)
                                                                   Kurort!      kurort (spa)
                                                           Ku-uk-kuk!      kukovat (to “cuckoo” ; to drag out 
                                                                                       a lonely existence)
                                                             Kvvar-kat!      kvakat (to croak, to prophecy ill)
                                                          Kwulkulkul!      –
                                                                          Ky!      kii (cue)
                                                          Nakh-rrnm!      Nigynam (Tcheremis = ‘Nevermore’)
                                                                     Nuhk!      Nyukh (scent)
                                                                     O-ort!      Vo't (There! Now! There is!)
                                                                Prurrhk!      prok (use, benefit)
                                                                   Rhaap!      rab (slave)
                                                                    Rührr!      –
                          Spror-spree-spruck-spor-per-
                                                rhick-rhür-rhuck!      –
                                                       Tuktu-tavani!      –
                                                     Whoo-oo-woo!      –

For a further extract from the manuscripts of D-r Tchékhov, Detektiv, see also Dead Wife, New Hat at 
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/dead-wife-new-hat-femme-morte-chapeau.html 
and D-r Tchékhov, Detektiv. A long lost novel . . .
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/d-r-tchekhov-detektiv-long-lost-novel.html 
and Inductive Detection . . .
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/inductive-detection.html 
and Winter Rules . . .
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/03/winter-rules-and-le-diable-boiteux.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 (2014)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/a-bad-case-and-other-adventures-of.html