Showing posts with label Oulipo. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Oulipo. Show all posts

Friday 27 October 2023

Fragment: Hoffmann’s Pictogram 1821

I suppose it’s not really so surprising to stumble upon a textual novelty such as Hoffmann’s, as early as 1821 previsioning Oulipian ‘constrained writing’, when Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy was published only sixty years earlier as our English precursor for tricks of ludic composition.


See also, Her Left Shoe: E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Terrible Projectile of Semiotics . . .
 
See also, Colour Blind:
 


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)
and Listen Close to Me (2011)
 

Friday 8 September 2023

Tyro Poets? Eton v Marlborough? (Finishing School for Versifiers, Pt.7.) Juvenilia

Breathes there a man with soul so dead
Who was not, in the Thirties, Red?
                                                               (G. Moor, New Statesmen, 1956.)
 
‘A lyric tongue and jaded Weltanschauung
  should be the glamour of young gentlemen.’ 
                                                           (Catherine Eisner, 2023.)
 
It struck me the other day, just as a sort of prosodic hypothesis, that two tyro poets with brilliant minds – near contemporaries and destined for notoriety in the British press – should surely have composed some specimens of juvenilia showing promise in their 1920s schooldays, since, in each case respectively, their mentors were poets – Edith Sitwell and poet-in-the-making Louis MacNeice.
 
The schoolboys? Brian Howard and Anthony Blunt.
Schools? Eton (BH), Marlborough (AB).
Schoolfriends? Harold Acton (BH), Louis MacNiece (AB).
Poetic milieu? Edith Sitwell (BH), John Betjeman (AB).
Universities? Oxford (BH), Cambridge (AB).

Anthony Blunt                 Brian Howard

In short, two aesthetes of their time – whose schooldays were devoted to the callow pursuit of attitudes – would later demonstrate there was substantially more to their avant-garde posturing than larking about as pasticheurs.

Of course, in all fairness, the early vocation of Blunt, a maths wizard, was never that of a poet yet the sensitivities of a poet were nurtured by his compeer, fellow Marlburian MacNeice, who encouraged him to make this rare attempt, never to be repeated . . .

Specimen extract. (By Blunt, age 17, Marlborough.)

The harsh green outline of the downs
Tight as a bow string
Strikes a discord in the sky.

This edge of the abyss
Is fixed immutable
Beyond the power of time
Or God . . .

By contrast, for young Brian Howard his acute self-awareness and self-deprecation granted powers of shrewd discrimination to a boy, who – at age 13 – could write to his mother that he feared he’d been cursed with a ‘fraudulent imagination’, an opinion at odds with his earliest mentor, Edith Sitwell, who was in awe of his precocity: ‘I see more remarkable talent and promise in your work than of any other poet under twenty . . .’  (with the exception of her brother Sacheverell, she adds, of course). Brian was discovered by Edith when he was sixteen, at which age he records he won the Junior Long Jump at Eton.

Specimen extracts. (By Howard, age 16, Eton.)

. . . the green ocean . . . the green ocean . . . like a towel-horse
painted in half . . . paperbags are significant
of the futility of the kosmos when they bob up and down . . .
yes, dripping, dripping and the sensations of sticking
plaster that won’t come off . . .
it’s Verdi (throttled with light lager) . . . like acrid little chopped
up canary wings, falling down in jerks and bursts and jangles out of
a blue-gilt sky . . . they trip along the long parallels of
dry, biscuity planking . . .

Immortal lines. ‘Four lips make a mouth.’

These imagistic aspirational pseudo-Sitwellian lines composed at Eton are from Brian’s Expression of Sea and Beach from the Pier Buffet and are precursors of his poem in the anthology, Oxford Poetry 1924 (co-edited by Harold Acton), which contains the not so inconsequential biscuity line:

(I wish I was back home in Philadelphia).
Why did the small queens run so hurriedly
just because I play Satie on my musical box
a little furtive music like the rubbing together of biscuits . . . 
 
And, of course, we are not alone in adoring the outré conversational chords of Satie so it is unsurprising that these 1924 poems (dismissed by Brian as ‘that bad derivative thing’) should appeal to Satie-lovers, and were considered ‘immortal lines’ by Betjeman, who cited them as ‘immortal’ for not only the biscuity acoustics of their vers libre music but also for Brian’s sensual phrase, ‘Four lips make a mouth . . .’
 
In my own view, there can be no doubt that Brian Howard, a schoolboy precociously drawn to the ‘Imagist’ vision, exhibited authentic synæsthesia . . . as of a (juvenile) alien Kosmonaut’s first encounter with the phenomena of our planet when assigned to a desperate search for sublime correlatives to match those of Worldlings.

Elementary utilitarianism denies adjectival fripperies.

A plutocratic pursuit by latent Leftists or Paper Marxists?

Of course, essentially, poetry in England at that time was a plutocratic pursuit since only the privately educated elect had the leisure of their privilege to garnish the utilitarian nouns of the People with the choicest of adjectival conceits packed in hampers sent from Fortnum’s. The Proles as poets – if there were such – perforce travelled light, sans adjectival fripperies, denied the luxury of excess baggage by the exigency of their voyaging in steerage.
 
Despite their dedicated posturing as champions of Ars Longa, the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War certainly could be said to have chivvied those two schoolboy pals, Blunt and MacNeice, briefly into becoming more than bystanders in a Rebellium Brevis, during which they both affected to be Communist-leaning sympathisers.
 
An affectation? When Blunt was asked by an interviewer whether he had gone to Spain in 1936 for political reasons, Blunt admitted, ‘I went to see the pictures, dear boy! The Prado is a Mecca for art historians . . . Oh, I was only a paper Marxist!’ Even his companion on that trip, Louis MacNeice, conceded: ‘In the long run a poet must choose between being politically ineffectual and poetically false.’ MacNeice later wrote that he never shared the idealistic impulse of many of his fellow writers and friends to be a Communist, ‘I joined them . . . in their hatred of the status quo.’ It’s true that, recalling Marlborough in their final year, Blunt also confessed his political naivety: ‘Politics was simply a subject never discussed at all, and what happened to be going on at that time in Europe was no concern of ours. Inflation in Germany merely meant that one could get an incredibly cheap holiday!’
 

The First Englishman to Foresee the Nazi Horror.

For Brian Howard, however, whose boyhood in high society was lived uneasily outside the unspoken English Jewish Pale (mid-20th Century, for instance, the ‘No Jews’ policy in many of London’s gentlemen’s clubs was well known), there had been an early introduction at Eton to not-so-subtle degrees of anti-Semitism from his schoolfellows. 

He was allowed no quarter in defence of his family name. ‘How is the Duke of Norfolk today?’ his classmates would taunt. He inveighed against his father – a fashionable art dealer — who, at birth, had presented him ‘. . . with an obviously false and pretentious name – not even adding the slight support of deed of poll.’ Shaped by such an upbringing, then, his precocious awareness of global political events fomenting the persecution of the Jews was matched only by his astonishingly mature assimilation of the most extreme avant-gardist cultural developments of the interwar years. 

And unsurprising, therefore, that the exotic Howard – tormented by doubt as to his Jewish identity – was, according to Erika Mann, ‘. . . probably the first Englishman to recognise the full immensity of the Nazi peril and to foresee, with shuddering horror, what was to come.’

(In 1939, Brian wrote in a poem published in June of Britain’s anguished apprehension under the shadow of the ‘Phoney War’: ‘. . . fingers crack like the prophecy of shooting.’ Indeed, a prophetic line.)

Two years earlier, when a shooting war broke out in Spain, with Nazi Germany taking sides against the Republican government, Brian Howard was to the fore in condemning espousers of the Fascist cause. Paradoxically, he found himself set against the Imagist hero whose ‘unsurpassable technique and poetic vision’ he had venerated in his schooldays. Ezra Pound wrote of the Civil War: ‘Spain is an emotional luxury to a gang of sap-headed dilettantes.’

Brian Howard wrote: ‘A people, nearly half of whom has been denied the opportunity to learn to read, is struggling for bread, liberty and life against the most unscrupulous and reactionary plutocracy left in existence . . . With all my anger and love, I am for the People of Republican Spain.’

Don’t call me comrade.

It is of course wholly simplistic to remind ourselves with 20/20 hindsight that, for the many fervent British anti-Fascists of the Thirties, it took the fatal aberration of a dewy-eyed idealism in the face of merciless dictatorships to finally convince them to ally themselves to Communism as the only acceptable countervailing champion of the People . . . a conversion to be regretted in disillusion soon enough. Moscow show trials and Stalin’s purges would irrevocably change their minds.

In this sense, it’s intriguingly significant that in 1936 W. H. Auden (who never joined the Communist Party despite complex social views apparent in his Thirties political writings) changed ‘Comrades’ to ‘Brothers’ in his poem of 1932, Comrades Who When the Sirens Roar.

Да здравствует сталинская конституция!
Long Live the Stalinist Constitution!

The trajectory of Blunt’s beliefs was to meet that same disillusion. Recruited by the NKVD just before the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, he was swept up in the groundswell of anti-Fascism that had driven his contemporaries to support the Republican cause. (One’s enemy’s enemies are one’s friends.) Yet, as a young Cambridge don of cold-eyed didacticism, it’s more likely the superior role of ideologue tempted him to a decisive step further to take sides beyond the boundaries of Western Europe and sign up to the Soviet utopian dream, enlisted, however, more as a talent-spotter of Cambridge leftists from among promising undergraduates disposed to be suborned . . . fledgling spies destined for the heart of the British Establishment. 

Blunt at that time (early 1937) played the canniest game of poker insofar as his Russian handlers never permitted him to be a card-carrying member of the Communist Party.

Red propaganda laid on a bit too thick?

(Plus ça change . . . today, UK academics turn a blind eye to the increasing ideological threats posed by Chinese influence implicit in our universities’ acceptance of the ‘soft power’ that defines faculty funding issuing from autocratic strategists in Beijing. Students in fields of research such as advanced materials or quantum mechanics, or artificial intelligence or biotech, are particularly vulnerable to approaches by agents of hostile states.)

And as for High Treason and the betrayal of Britain by pinning his colours to the cause of the Soviet Union, Blunt answered, ‘We did not think of ourselves as working for Russia. We were working for the Comintern.’ Or to put it another way, is this the lofty intellectual’s claim to being an internationalist, to be ranked with Einstein, say, as a citizen of the world?

Incurable nostalgists.

But I digress, so let us quickly return to my modest attempt to correlate the parallel paths taken by a Marlburian Cantabrigian (Blunt) and Etonian Oxonian (Howard) towards our arrival at a cultural sensibility that can satisfy a 21st Century notion of a moralistic poetising aesthete, if such there be. In other words, ‘How does a writer, precipitated into a moral fog, remain forensically honest?’ (The term, ‘forensically honest’ was applied to a contemporary poet in my hearing the other day.)

For the answer, perhaps we should seek our True Oracle and Champion Skewerer of Communism – George Orwell. A dedicated polemicist and, indeed, a collector of polemical pamphlets, Orwell was also an unwitting pasticheur . . .

See Rural Bard or Faltering Palimpsestic Balladeer? https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2019/05/

When Orwell wrote the concluding couplet of an unfinished poem, the refrain must have persisted like an earworm from his days residing in Southwold, Suffolk  . . .

        When good King Edward ruled the land
        And I was a chubby boy.

Imitative (unwittingly?) of a celebrated early nineteenth century Suffolk versifier, Orwell’s poem reveals the incurable nostalgist who hankers for the belle époque certainties of his youth. As his biographer spells out, ‘He was, indeed, a revolutionary in love with the Edwardian era.’  

Can the same be said, then, of  Blunt and Howard, two cultural rebels yet, in reality, both cleaving to dreams of a ‘Golden Country’ (cf. Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four) while seismic political convulsions would somehow leave them unscathed?

See Prescient Words of Godfather Who Foresaw Birth of Winston Smith.  

Did Blunt, who had endangered the lives of one hundred and seventy-five thousand Allied servicemen, by betraying the secret of the D-Day landings to his Soviet masters, truly believe that he would return to a liberated Paris, cultural capital of the world, where the cognoscenti who had survived the Occupation would prostrate themselves at his feet? Indeed, did Blunt believe too that Paris was the eternal pleasure-dome of the fevered imaginings of Germany’s occupying troops, a belief expressed by Ernst Jünger – writer and decorated Wehrmacht captain and uninvited boulevardier of pillaged Parisian streets – in his denigratory observation, ‘One realises that the city was founded on the altar of Venus.’ 

Yes. One suspects Blunt shared the view of the Wehrmacht ‘tourists in uniform’ and, for him, Paris would always remain, as for Jünger, the cerebral sensualist’s first destination for intellectual R & R.

In Search of the Fourth Man by Catherine Eisner was published
in the literary journal, Ambit, issue 193, Summer 2008.
Particular reference is made to the avant-gardist photomonteur,
Helmut Herzfeld, a committed Communist, whose 1938 photo-
montage memorialising the victims of Guernica outstrips 
in its
passion 
the abstruse figurations of fellow-Communist, Picasso.
 

Commie-Tsars . . . Self-Elective Illiterate Minion-Dominions.

But then Blunt had convinced himself that he was serving the Comintern and not the Kremlin, hadn’t he? Never mind that even before the Occupation of Paris in 1940, Stalin had set his mind to ‘arming the people’ of France, with draft instructions from the Comintern to the French Communist Party, dated 11 June, providing for the creation of a ‘popular militia’*. It was proposed that French Communists living in Moscow be sent back to France ‘in order to raise up the people against the bourgeois traitors.’    

Perhaps Blunt, the Francophile and distinguished francophone, truly did believe la France éternelle and her cultural treasures would somehow survive her defeat for cherishment by world citizens under the benign patronage of the Comintern. (A new interpretation, perhaps, of what the Nazis derided as Kulturbolschewismus?)

Is that what Blunt truly wanted? Or had he a liking to be ruled by the Commi-czars of a self-elective illiterate minion-dominion such as the Rumania of Ceaușescu? Orwellian motto: ‘Ignorance is Strength.’

Der neue Wilhelminismus. The Answer?

Englands und Deutschlands akute Nostalgie? The coronation of Charles III earlier this year brought to mind the writings of the conservative monarchist, Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen, an anglophile, whose Diary of a Man in Despair (Tagebuch eines Verzweifelten: Zeugnis einer inneren Emigration) describes the rise from a shabby  ‘Furnished Room’ of ‘The-Man-with-the-Forelock’ and the domination of the Masses by a cabal of Industrialists and suborned generals from the early 1930s to the diarist’s summary execution by pistol shot (Genickschuss) in Dachau in 1945.

He writes: ‘Nationalism: a state of mind in which you do not love your own country as much as you hate somebody else’s.’ 

Reck concluded that to reconcile his own ethos to some semblance of civic rectitude required a return to Wilhelminism (Wilhelminismus) as the guarantee of peace when confronted with revolution of any stripe (Communism or National Socialism). He refers, of course, to Kaiser Wilhelm II, the last German emperor and King of Prussia, forced to abdicate at the end of WWI.

What a pity, then, we have missed our own chance to live under Wilhelminism now Charles III has the throne. Maybe his heir, our Prince William, could remedy this omission as a salve to the troubled American Collective Unconscious. Prince William is, after all, named as America’s most popular public figure ahead of Trump and Zelensky. Perhaps William could assure world peace in the guise of the Count of Nassau, and by assuming this stirring title accorded one of his ancestors, King William III of England, he’ll return to rule the Amerikaanse Hollanders in New York and any other province or state eager to welcome him, as though the events of 1776 had all been a dreadful mistake.

For another patrician anglophile’s social remedy, compare  
the Di Lampedusa Principle  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Di_Lampedusa_strategy 

It’s clear to me that those conflicted nostalgists, Blunt and Howard, would have found this monarchical parlour trick an agreeable expedient, each of them absolved of an overburdened conscience . . . Brian Howard’s guilt that his modest oeuvre had not been truly iconoclastic enough and that he’d be remembered merely as an unfulfilled worldling . . . Anthony Blunt’s guilt that by the rigidity of his ideological posture he had denied the legacy of his nationhood, the gravest of too many broken taboos whose ultimate sanction was a sentence of ignominy. . . to be stripped of his knighthood and removed as an Honorary Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge.  

The icy cerebrality of Blunt’s nature from his earliest undergraduate days can be measured by the occasion when the elite Cambridge debating society, the Apostles, met to vote on the question ‘Must art come from the heart?’ Both Blunt and Wittgenstein voted. Both were Trinity men. Both were mathematicians. One was a philosopher. One would be a spy. Blunt voted ‘No;’ Wittgenstein ‘Yes’. Needless to spell it out. Humanities versus Maths. Thought versus feeling. Blunt’s was the bloodless ideologue’s answer.

Yet, in the end, both Blunt and Howard slipped back – more or less resignedly – into the formalisms of the English culture that had bred them. Ideological Nimbys. Yes, revolution is all very well, but Not In My Back Yard. And looking back, doubtless Brian questioned whether his trail-blazing had truly been so far ahead of the ancien régime.

Brian Howard, a self-confessed failure, would still hold fast to the haughty manner defined by his penchant for classical axiomatic epigrams he’d striven to polish in his undergraduate years. Characteristically, Brian, a cocaine addict and a tuft-hunting colossal snob who toadied up to peers of the realm attending Oxford, had the ironic motto, ‘Put your trust in the Lords’ blazoned on a banner strung across his undergraduate rooms. Where, then, is the spirit of the 1937 barricades and of his championing of the ‘People of the Republic’ in his jaded oft-quoted remark, ‘Anybody over the age of 30 seen in a bus has been a failure in life.’ Did his witticism refer to the thirty-somethings of all Spanish peasantry?

In such a stratified society, did the coteries of Blunt and Howard ever collide? When the Communist ‘recruiter’ of Blunt, his close friend Guy Burgess, escaped to the USSR, a newspaper manhunt was launched, and by the strangest of coincidences, which made world headlines, it was Brian Howard, while partying in Asolo in Italy, who was mistaken for the missing Cambridge spy. One posturing, flamboyant Englishman is much like any other, one supposes, in the eyes of our detractors on the Continent.

And for Blunt in retreat maybe there was escape too; escape into the gentlemanly preoccupations of the quondam don, where could be found the consolations of his last great fixation: the convoluted brilliant mind of mathematician Francesco Borromini, the 17th Century architect of Roman Baroque . . . a fixation directed with ‘maniacal concentration’, we learn.

We can only guess and wonder at the attraction held by those complex Borrominian geometries that are seen to blur sharply-demarcated boundaries through transformational interpenetrations, charged with the power to resolve, say, the intersection of two opposing planes into a miraculously invisible conjunction. 

Mmm . . . yes, we can only guess at why such geometric ambiguities held such an attraction for Blunt.

A compulsion to study a great architect who can neatly resolve two opposing planes at an imperceptible conjunction? 

How emblematic of a man who could with such ease switch ideological hobby horses mid-stream, as it were, and serve simultaneously as a spy for Communist Russia and as a loyal liegeman of HM The Queen. Arise Sir Anthony Blunt, KCVO, knight of the realm and Keeper of the Crown’s Pictures . . . a liegeman who throughout his service during WW2 in MI5 passed over a thousand classified secret documents to his Soviet handlers, arduously memorised or copied under intense pressure and the constant threat of exposure.

For Blunt it was a moral imperative for which he would be harshly judged. It is a dilemma that faces any moralist seeking the strait gate and the single narrow path: How does one remain ‘forensically honest’? (But there is no path though the woods.)

As the Germans say, Du kannst nicht auf zwei Hochzeiten gleichzeitig tanzen. You can’t dance at two weddings at the same time.

Post-modern or Post-ironic Bobos?

Did I almost forget? In my notional prosodic contest between a Marlburian Cantabrigian and Etonian Oxonian, I conclude that Oxford won – thumpingly – by a length at Chiswick Bridge.
 
Today, in our self-referential postmodern world, one wonders whether Anthony Blunt, the Francophile, would have welcomed a France ruled by the cultural Comintern he foresaw. Probably. That’s because postmodernism – for Blunt – would be seen to have achieved the desired bloodless cultural shift by a new army of ideological warriors; warriors led by the cynical propagandising voice of a siren-like La Desapasionada he too would have undoubtedly followed.
 
France has a name for them, as you no doubt know: ‘Bobos’ . . . bourgeois-bohemians who are reactionaries at heart. The postmodernist writer Laurent Binet seems to believe in their creed of Po-Mo Oulipian fatuities. His ineffable unquestioning smugness is astonishing:
‘It is obviously impossible that I—son of a Jewish mother and a Communist father, brought up on the republican values of the most progressive French petite bourgeoisie and immersed through my literary studies in the humanism of Montaigne and the philosophy of the Enlightenment, the Surrealist revolution and the Existentialist worldview—could ever be tempted to “sympathize” with anything to do with Nazism, in any shape or form.’
 HHhH by Laurent Binet, 2013.                   

No. An adherent of Nazism? No. Never. But the French would no more abandon their communistic societal underpinning than they would enter Le Grand Steeple-Chase de Paris without a horse. And how intriguing to les Alliés Binet’s despatch must be for those still among us who liberated the land of les cocos.

For more Po-Mo Bobo fatuities, see Michael Haneke’s Amour and reflections on the dilatoriness of Paris’s plumbers:  

 

Last word

Or to be fair, should, perhaps, the last word on these thorny questions be that of a KGB officer from the Third Department of the USSR’s Foreign Directorate whose terse verdict on the convolutions of our well-bred disingenuous Cambridge spies was to dismiss them as: ‘Ideological shit.’

So very Oulipian . . . so very self-referential . . . so very
Borrominian those geometries of the mind that are
seen to blur sharply-demarcated boundaries through
transformational interpenetrations, charged with the
power to resolve the intersection of two opposing lines
of thinking into a miraculously ambivalent conjunction.
Oh. Hang on! Orwell had a term for it.
Doublethink: the act of simultaneously accepting
two mutually contradictory meanings as correct.
Doublethink: ‘The Mutability of the Past.’


 
 
The sources for these Oxbridge character studies can found in definitive biographies researched by two remarkable women, with each writer sensitively intuitive and diligently scholarly in tracing every passage of the lives of these extraordinary subjects . . .

Brian Howard: Portrait of a failure (1968) by Marie-Jaqueline Lancaster.
Anthony Blunt: His Lives (2001) by Miranda Carter.

See also a glimpse of the proto-Bright-Young-Thing of the 1920s, here, 
From an Unswept Floor . . .
 
See also another intimate view of Anthony Blunt, here.
Slaves to Seconal: Droguée Antonia/Anthony and the Fourth Man . . . https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2013/10/slaves-to-seconal-droguee.html
 
*Afterthought: The success of ‘popular militias’ as an ideology was sustained long ago, of course, by the Gun Lobby of the USA, France’s hallowed friend of Liberty. There’s even a statue devoted to her. See Ellis Island 1902



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)
and Listen Close to Me (2011)
 

See also
Finishing School for Versifiers (part 1)
Finishing School for Versifiers (part 2)

Tuesday 1 November 2016

D-r Tchékhov: A Textbook Case . . . Prof. Yanychev’s Three-Cornered Duel

I have mentioned on a number of occasions the existence of the manuscript, A Textbook Case, putatively by Chekhov, which fell into the possession of my father at the end of WWII, and whose pages relate the misadventures of the morphine-dependent D-r Anton Tchékhov, aged 28 years, when investigating the mysterious duelling death of an aristocratic cadet in a remote snowbound northern garrison.  
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/d-r-tchekhov-detektiv-long-lost-novel.html       
        Evidently, my father believed the ms to be the long-lost novel to which Chekhov referred in a letter to Pleshcheev on 9 Feb. 1888; understood by scholars to be a fugitive work in progress but never found: ‘Ah, if you knew what a plot I have in my noddle! What marvellous women! What funerals . . . !’

        
        Well, a funeral there was, for this extract from the ms – An Unwreathed Burial – may be read here . . . 
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2014/02/khar-r-r-kai-khar-r-r-kai-khar-r-r-kai.html
        . . .  but, before a funeral there must be a death, and that passage from the ms has yet to be seen by a wider readership. So here it is, with an expanded exegesis on my father’s part to explain D-r Tchékhov’ allusion to The Three-Cornered Duel Problem posed by Professor Grigoriy Yevseyevich Yanychev (1804-1867), mathematician and leading 19th Century proponent of probability theory (his gifted young protégé was the distinguished algebraist, A. A. Markov the elder).
        Note: the idiosyncratic orthography throughout is my father’s.


A Textbook Case

In the dead of winter, for a Muscovite medico-anthropologist to stumble across a tableau mort frozen rigid in an attitude of heroic redundancy was to bow to an unwelcome knowledge that the catalogue of diseases inhabiting the General’s ill-favoured region was apparently not complete.
  “Make way!” shouted the komendant. “Field-surgeon forward!”
   Under the doctor’s generalship the party advanced.
   “A textbook case,” mused the General. “A perfect diagramma for a duel imprinted on the snow.”
  The undertaker crew halted a sazhen from the corpse.
   Again was uttered another dreadful dissyllable.  “Umer!” Anton heard an ensign exclaim. “Dead!” O! Nicolai Chudotvórets! Wonder Worker! Saint of God!”
  Anton thought of the morgue under the Moscow Medical Faculty building. 
  “Alas,” he reflected, “what is terrible is not the corpses, but the fact that I am no longer terrified of them.”
  “We must live by the quick and not with the dead.”  The General answered the unspoken thought.
  “First we’ll review the stricken field. A posthumous procès-verbal may well be required to satisfy our masters. That job falls to you,” the General ordained. 
  “HQ’s going to have me strung up for this, but,” and he gripped Anton’s shoulders compellingly, “while a noose is still running there’s still time to pray.”
  He broke away with a bitter laugh.
  “There’s the barriere.” He pointed to an odd shaped piece of wood stuck in the snow.
  “Take note. Cannoneer Kulikov’s shin-guard for a starting post.”
  In the moonlight the impressed footsteps were quite clear. The old frontier scout essayed a rapid reconstruction of the victim’s last moments, intent upon unriddling the monomachian rituals performed by insulter and insulted, by slayer and slain. 
  This was not the first time the General had smelled powder. 
  “Eight paces. Trod by the Offender. The Challenger proposes distance so, naturally, the Prince faces the butts – to be sure he gains the advantage of a co-ordinate. It assists the eye to draw a bead on a marker. Then it’s . . .  ‘Stations, Gentlemen, Attend!’ The Prince would have conceded to Pomidorchik. So Kulikov steps forward. ‘Aim! Fire!’  The Offender fires first.  The Aggressor has to make himself as small as possible – remember Mychetzky?* – by standing sideways, right hand on his chest, presenting the most difficult target. Dammit! Then what?  This problem is worse than Professor Yanychev’s Three-Cornered Duel!”
   There was a muffled report as the General blew his nose and resumed.
  “According to the Duello honour code, the rôles would then reverse, and the Prince would’ve returned fire whilst Kulikov stood his ground. Unless it was a lucky first shot I can’t believe Kulikov’s marksmanship could strike a mortal blow from that distance. He’d never handled a rod until today. Look! Five steps to the barriere, his pace is unbroken, he doesn’t pause to fire, just keeps walking in the return direction!  There’s the puzzle!” 
  Reluctantly, the General’s eyes swept the combat area until his gaze rested on the dark enigma that broke the surface of the field.
  Khvatit! Dovol'no! No more! Enough!” groaned the General. “Proceed, mon cher docteur, let our post-mortem begin.” 
        Anton braced himself, eyes half-shut, resisting full immersion in his drug-induced repose. He knew with certainty, as he struggled to withstand the narcotic’s serpentine embrace, that chance was beckoning him to draw near to witness one of the last and purest fountainheads of the empire’s accursed sentimental morbidity, frozen forever at its furthermost source ; that providence suffered him – and he alone – to be present in such close attendance at the pallida Mors of panslavonic Wertherism; to witness the fleurettes and gasconnades of an age of literary flâneurs wither in the Russian snows; to certify once and for all their extinction in all their tragic pathos.
       A doctor, as everyone should know, enjoys being at a duel. 


For the General’s recollections of duels between the cadet Mychetzky and his classmate Nezlobin, see Winter Rules and Le Diable Boiteux at :
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/03/winter-rules-and-le-diable-boiteux.html       


[ End of extract. ]  


Lèse-majesté – Yanychev’s Three-Cornered Duel.

Following the death of Aleksandr Pouschkin in a duel (January, 1837) fought with his wife Natalya’s admirer, Baron D’Anthès, the brilliant young mathematician, Grigoriy Yevseyevich Yanychev devised the satirical problem of the three-cornered duel, incorporating Aleksandr Pouschkin [A], the Baron [B] and, a second anonymous lover, the Count [C ]. This squib was considered by the Tsarist Court to have defamed the aristocracy and, in consequence, Yanychev was banished as a poselenets to Archangel (an exile-settler status for transgressors who did not fall into the harsher category of katorzhnik or convict).


Pistols for Three

“It is highly probable,” said Natalya to her lover, “that in a three-cornered duel only one of my three admirers will survive. Therefore, my dear Baron, so you alone may live, I beseech you to miss with your first shot.”
(1) Natalya began by assuming that the Baron was acquainted with the relative proficiency of his rivals.  This is how she calculated that B would be the sole surviver, and not A, her husband or C, her rejected lover : 
(a) If B kills A, it is C’s turn to fire.  There is a 3/4 chance that he will  kill B.  If he misses, the Baron has a second shot. There is a 2/3 chance that he will now kill the Count and secure the love of Natalya. 
(b) If B misses Aleksandr, C will fire at A next. (This is certain, because if C fires at B and kills him, he will next be killed in turn ; while if C fires at B and misses him, A will equally kill C next, as the more dangerous of his opponents.) 
     (i) If C misses A, Aleksandr will kill C.  Now the Baron, with his second shot, has a 2/3 chance of being the sole survivor.
     (ii) If C kills A.  B again has a 2/3 chance of being the sole survivor.
 Summarising these chances, the Baron’s chances of being sole survivor
 are :      ⅔   •  ¼   •   ⅔  (a)
     plus  ⅓   •  ¼   •   ⅔  (b)  (i)
     plus  ⅓   •  ¾   •   ⅔  (b)  (ii)
               i.e. are ⅓ in all. 
(2) Natalya, of course, also calculated the Baron’s chances of survival were he so foolish as to fire first at the Count.
     (a) If the Baron kills the Count, he is forthwith killed by Aleksandr.
     (b) If the Baron misses the Count, the Count fires (as before) at                         Aleksandr.  The Baron’s chances are now as in (i) (b) above :                         i.e. 2/9 in all.
(3) A secret smile then plays on Natalya lips as the logical conclusion finally dawns on her. Suppose the Baron makes sure of missing!  Now, since the Count will next (as before) fire at Alexandr first, the Baron’s chances of survival become 2/3.  Hence, Natalya’s message to Baron D’Anthès was to make sure of missing her husband with his first shot.

Precursor of The Three-Cornered Duel.

Incidentally, Yanychev claimed, in his defence to spare his banishment, that this puzzle was inspired not by Pouschkin but by a Three-Cornered Duel fought between a midshipmen, a boatswain and a purser's steward, described by an English seafarer. It is indeed a fact that such a duel was published in 1836, a year before Pouschkin’s death. [An extract follows.]

       “You have grossly insulted this gentleman,” said Mr Biggs, in continuation; and notwithstanding all your talk of equality, you are afraid to give him satisfaction—you shelter yourself under your quarter-deck.”
       Mr Biggs," replied our hero, who was now very wroth, I shall go on shore directly we arrive at Malta. Let you and this fellow put on plain clothes, and I will meet you both—and then I'll show you whether I am afraid to give satisfaction.”
       One at a time, said the boatswain. 
       “No, sir, not one at a time, but both at the same time — I will fight both, or none. If you are my superior officer, you must descend, replied Jack, with an ironical sneer, "to meet me, or I will not descend to meet that fellow, whom I believe to have been little better than a pickpocket.
       This accidental hit of Jack’s made the purser's steward turn pale as a sheet, and then equally red. He raved and foamed amazingly, although he could not meet Jack’s indignant look, who then turned round again.
       Now, Mr Biggs, is this to be understood, or do you shelter yourself under your forecastle?
       I'm no dodger, replied the boatswain, and we will settle the affair at Malta. . . . 
       . . . Mr Biggs having declared that he would fight, of course had to look out for a second, and he fixed upon Mr Tallboys, the gunner, and requested him to be his friend. Mr Tallboys, who had been latterly very much annoyed by Jack’s victories over him in the science of navigation, and therefore felt ill-will towards him, consented; but he was very much puzzled how to arrange that three were to fight at the same time, for he had no idea of there being two duels; so he went to his cabin and commenced reading. Jack, on the other hand, dared not say a word to Jolliffe on the subject; indeed there was no one in the ship to whom he could confide but Gascoigne: he therefore went to him, and although Gascoigne thought it was excessively ‘infra dig’ of Jack to meet even the boatswain, as the challenge had been given there was no retracting: he therefore consented, like all midshipmen, anticipating fun, and quite thoughtless of the consequences.


“Equal angles subtended by equal sides.”

The second day after they had been anchored in Valette Harbour, the boatswain and gunner, Jack and Gascoigne, obtained permission to go on shore. Mr Easthupp, the purser’s steward, dressed in his best blue coat, with brass buttons and velvet collar, the very one in which he had been taken up when he had been vowing and protesting that he was a gentleman, at the very time that his hand was abstracting a pocket-book, went up on the quarter-deck, and requested the same indulgence, but Mr Sawbridge refused, as he required him to return staves and hoops at the cooperage. Mesty also, much to his mortification, was not to be spared. This was awkward, but it was got over by proposing that the meeting should take place behind the cooperage at a certain hour, on which Mr Easthupp might slip out, and borrow a portion of the time appropriated to his duty, to heal the breach in his wounded honour. So the parties all went on shore, and put up at one of the small inns to make the necessary arrangements.
       Mr Tallboys then addressed Mr Gascoigne, taking him apart while the boatswain amused himself with a glass of grog, and our hero sat outside teasing a monkey.
       Mr Gascoigne,” said the gunner, I have been very much puzzled how this duel should be fought, but I have at last found it out. You see that there are three parties to fight; had there been two or four there would have been no difficulty, as the right line or square might guide us in that instance; but we must arrange it upon the triangle in this.”
       Gascoigne stared; he could not imagine what was coming.
       Are you aware, Mr Gascoigne, of the properties of an equilateral triangle?”
       Yes,” replied the midshipman, that it has three equal sides — but what the devil has that to do with the duel?”
       Everything, Mr Gascoigne,” replied the gunner; it has resolved the great difficulty: indeed, the duel between three can only be fought upon that principle. You observe," said the gunner, taking a piece of chalk out of his pocket, and making a triangle on the table, "in this figure we have three points, each equidistant from each other: and we have three combatants—so that, placing one at each point, it is all fair play for the three: Mr Easy, for instance, stands here, the boatswain here, and the purser’s steward at the third corner. Now, if the distance is fairly measured, it will be all right.”
       But then,” replied Gascoigne, delighted at the idea; how are they to fire?” 
       It certainly is not of much consequence,” replied the gunner, but still, as sailors, it appears to me that they should fire with the sun; that is, Mr Easy fires at Mr Biggs, Mr Biggs fires at Mr Easthupp, and Mr Easthupp fires at Mr Easy; so that you perceive that each party has his shot at one, and at the same time receives the fire of another.”
       Gascoigne was in ecstasies at the novelty of the proceeding, the more so as he perceived that Easy obtained every advantage by the arrangement.
       "Upon my word, Mr Tallboys, I give you great credit; you have a profound mathematical head, and I am delighted with your arrangement. Of course, in these affairs, the principals are bound to comply with the arrangements of the seconds, and I shall insist upon Mr Easy consenting to your excellent and scientific proposal.”
       Gascoigne went out, and pulling Jack away from the monkey, told him what the gunner had proposed, at which Jack laughed heartily.
       The gunner also explained it to the boatswain, who did not very well comprehend, but replied—
       I dare say it’s all right—shot for shot, and d—n all favours.” The parties then repaired to the spot with two pairs of ship’s pistols, which Mr Tallboys had smuggled on shore; and, as soon as they were on the ground, the gunner called Mr Easthupp out of the cooperage. In the meantime, Gascoigne had been measuring an equilateral triangle of twelve paces—and marked it out. Mr Tallboys, on his return with the purser’s steward, went over the ground, and finding that it was equal angles subtended by equal sides,” declared that it was all right. Easy took his station, the boatswain was put into his, and Mr Easthupp, who was quite in a mystery, was led by the gunner to the third position.
       But, Mr Tallboys,” said the purser's steward, I don’t understand this. Mr Easy will first fight Mr Biggs, will he not?”
       No," replied the gunner, this is a duel of three. You will fire at Mr Easy, Mr Easy will fire at Mr Biggs, and Mr Biggs will fire at you. It is all arranged, Mr Easthupp.”
       But,” said Mr Easthupp, I do not understand it. Why is Mr Biggs to fire at me? I have no quarrel with Mr Biggs.”
       Because Mr Easy fires at Mr Biggs, and Mr Biggs must have his shot as well.”
       If you have ever been in the company of gentlemen, Mr Easthupp," observed Gascoigne, you must know something about duelling.”
       Yes, yes, I've kept the best company, Mr Gascoigne, and I can give a gentleman satisfaction; but —
       Then, sir, if that is the case, you must know that your honour is in the hands of your second, and that no gentleman appeals.
       Yes, yes, I know that, Mr Gascoigne; but still I’ve no quarrel with Mr Biggs, and therefore, Mr Biggs, of course you will not aim at me.
       Why you don’t think that I am going to be fired at for nothing, replied the boatswain; “no, no, I'll have my shot anyhow.
       But at your friend, Mr Biggs?
       All the same, I shall fire at somebody; shot for shot, and hit the luckiest.

[Please forgive the lengthy extracts but I have followed the Oulipoian principle of the footnotes being of substantially greater depth than the cited text.)

============================================

For other excerpts from Tchékhov’s as-yet-unpublished crime novel, D-r Tchékhov, Detektiv, see:
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