The Last Nights of Ventôse
Oct. 18th, 2009 01:12 pm![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
elwen-rhiannon.livejournal.com posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
revolution_fr"Actually, they were almost the same age, with a difference of two years only, but never really realizing this fact. They both accepted Maxime as the older one with no doubt. Their mutual feelings were much stronger than normal friendship; it was simply love from both sides, in Camille's case with a huge amount of adoration. The condition for his own happiness was Maxime being close to him; an adult child tended to live in a constant exhausting rebelion against his own slave's dependence. Yet the feelings of the older one were probably even stronger, though they did not restrain his being. Maxime's love was 'at least strange', entirely protective, much more passionate than fraternal attachment, not even paternal, but typically maternal. A kind of love hard to bear, painful, monstrously deep, mindless to the point of absurd, full of nervous fear and insatiable tenderness - in the case of a man, of course, hidden extremly well. During the last months, he didn't have time - nor right - to ponder Camille, aching in his all body with a dumb pain he refused to even think about; for half a year Camille had been giving him one stroke after another, deliberately and knowingly hitting the weakest point each time. An incredibly strong attack of malaria, from which Maxime was pulling through with such a toil, was probably the result of this game. A love of this kind is ripped of any dignity so far that the more your darling one harasses you, the more loved he is."
Not mine, though I wouldn't mind it to be. This piece of fanfiction is almost a hundred years old, being a part of a novel by Stanisława Przybyszewska, Ostatnie noce ventôse'a / The Last Nights of Ventôse. Posted in this community because it's one of a very few places where the author's name is recognized, and I think she is worth it.
Translation by me.
Not mine, though I wouldn't mind it to be. This piece of fanfiction is almost a hundred years old, being a part of a novel by Stanisława Przybyszewska, Ostatnie noce ventôse'a / The Last Nights of Ventôse. Posted in this community because it's one of a very few places where the author's name is recognized, and I think she is worth it.
Translation by me.
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Date: 2009-10-20 10:43 pm (UTC)The action takes place during one night and a day after. To summarize, Robespierre wants to put Dantonists on trial, but hesitates because of Camille. Being seriously ill, he sends for him. Camille comes. They talk for a few hours. Camille promises to leave Danton, convinced that he was
used by him for personal reasons. In the morning, Robespierre waits for Camille's anti-Danton article, but nothing comes. Saint-Just presses: decide, you have to, either them or us all. Robespierre does. The end.
What will you NOT find in the book: sex of any kind, Camille/Lucile (he makes an interesting remark about her, realizing that if he would loose her, he would howl like a wolf for w couple of days, than remarry and forget), Saint-Just lusting after Robespierre (at least I don't see it)
What actually IS there: long talks, repressed and admitted feelings, one kiss, not badly written characters (even somewhat annoying Desmoulins), Robespierre aware of and accepting responsibility for all he did, is doing and will do, Saint-Just running without a thought to hold him and protect from falling on the floor which is exactly what Camille was afraid to do a few hours before
As for the historical-political inaccuracies, writing out fantasies and using history to express one's own ideas, I think it's a convention in historical fiction in general. Richard the Lionheart in Walter Scott's Ivanhoe, evil manipulator Richelieu and pure, innocent Anne d'Autriche in Dumas' Les trois mousquetaires, noble, tormented and perfect Marie Antoinette in Le Chevalier de Maison-Rouge etc. Not to mention literature on much lower level.
In my opinion, "little personal affairs", relevant to the plot or not, give literary characters human touch. But much depends on the writer. And if you think Przybyszewska is sexually obsessed, read her father's Requiem aeternam. First sentence - "At the beginning, there was lust" ("Na początku była chuć"; interesting topic of sexuality in modernistic literature, but that'd be another discussion). According to the analyst of her works, PhD Ewa Graczyk, despite the lack of personal contact until she was, as far as I remember, nineteen, she was fascinated with his works and influenced by them (though not entirely). She later married one of her father's followers, but I promised a few posts above to keep Freud out of that. And yes, in her letters she admits to live so deeply in the world of The Danton Case during writing that she saw the events from the play as if she was witnessing them. I don't want to speculate about her mental state (she was a drug addict, too, but it'd need a deeper research to clarify whether she was a such in that particular period of her life), but she was obviously deeply into what she was writing, especially when writing about Robespierre, with whom she was in love with. She writes, by the way, that the only character in The Danton Case she didn't like, was Camille Desmoulins. Which in my opinion gives her even more praise as an author, because no matter how many times I'd shake him myself, I think that he's a very well-written character and according to his biography that I read (the author, Stefan Meller, has rather a good opinion among Polish historians), not very far from historical Camille.
And having a good motivation is a base to learn a foreign language. I've learnt French to read Les Misérables...
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Date: 2009-10-21 11:02 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-21 12:48 pm (UTC)A question came to my mind: what exactly makes a good historical novel?
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Date: 2009-10-22 04:37 am (UTC)What I was speaking about especially in the other entry, but to some extend also here, is NOT AT ALL a differentiation between good and bad historical novel, but an idea of a honest approach to real people in any historical fiction, good or bad. I think writers of historical novels do have certain responsibility when writing historical fiction using real people (and, to some extend, real events).
I have already explained what I consider a more or less respectful approach in my answers in this thread: http://community.livejournal.com/revolution_fr/95311.html?thread=1136463#t1136463
In the cases that are apparently realistic (i.e. do not "warn" by their non-realistic form and, on the contrary, give signs of authenticity), but they use the real people as vehicles to express other kind of ideas that have nothing to do with those people and for that reason manipulate with ahistorical hints on, let's say, modern Poland, like Wajda does in his Danton, then I find it still legitimate and acceptable, as the literature has always been using the past like that, but I also see as totally legitimate to point to the ahistoricity and manipulation in the critique and especially if used in class or in a novel's introduction.
As for the writers who do believe that they are offering an interpretation "faithful in spirit" (though, of course, inventing dialogs and even some events and people), what a writer of "realistic" historical fiction should not do is what H.Mantel does: she ends up using her novel as a historical source when asked for her analysis/opinion on the real events and real people.
As for the historical novel just for fun, I think I have explained my opinion in sufficient detail in the debate below the entry mentioned above.
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Date: 2009-10-28 04:42 pm (UTC)I don't think Przybyszewska is sexually obsessed - she doesn't write pornography or anything close to it, and she always weaves those little romantic/erotic insinuations into the contexts of the plot (be it Desmoulins caught between Danton and Robespierre, Saint-Just smiling sadly to see Robespierre go to Desmoulins, or Billaud et al being jealous and afraid of Robespierre's power; all of these can be explained in completely 'unslashy' terms) - which, to me, makes it at once better and worse: the 'personal affairs' all run parallel to the political affairs, which makes the latter more vivid and graspable especially for readers/audiences who aren't well-versed in the historical details (this might be the human touch you speak of), but sometimes the emphasis is placed so that the personal side comes dangerously close to overshadowing the political one. That is where the problem begins or can begin, in my opinion, with the shift of emphasis: in presenting (to go, still, with the example at hand) the final split between Desmoulins and Robespierre in a scene so romantically/erotically charged, she supports - I don't think for a second that she meant to, nor that she even subconsciously believed that 'really the whole thing was all about love/sex', though, well, yes, there seems to be more of that in her interpretation than she acknowledges when discussing either the events or her plays in her letters - a take on the situation that reduces it to that, reduces the conflicts between the central figures to one located on that 'personal' plane. It's a matter of context (which was why I asked what the rest of the novel is like), as always; in the context of the entire play, the political components are (in my opinion) sufficiently (though no doubt questionably in their own right) represented. But there are, in my opinion, more 'personal' scenes/overtones than are a)historically sound and b)necessary for the human touch/vivid-making.
Tackling the play as a play I enjoy these and think they are applied in good measures at the right places in order to create, maintain, and (most effectively) not resolve a lot of tension that would otherwise not be there (except for those readers who are themselves passionately caught up in the history/politics). Tackling the play as a treatment of history, and therefore completely independent of its accomplishments in structuring, pacing, even characterisation (since her Robespierre, even if he is dismissed as a far-fetched interpretation by the historian, surely deserves some credit as a fascinating creation from the non-historically inclined reader - the same goes for a thousand figures immortalised in historically dubious shape by some play or other), I think the representation is potentially damaging at least to the uninitiated reader. I must add, though, that as an uneducated afficionada I cannot claim the faintest expertise in either field, nor back up my impression with any proper theories. I apologise if I am being overly fatuous!
The reason I pointed this out the way I did (and contrasted it with fanfiction, or with the Mantels, Lees, and many, many film makers of this world, who seem to have no concrete historical/political objective at all, but merely a taste for the 'playground' of the era and the 'characters' involved; the entire debate, I guess, boils down to whether or not one thinks that real life should be used for 'playing with' in a piece of fiction if there is nothing more to it than that) is that it seems to clash so with her self-proclaimed ambition to write, so to speak, the definite dramatisation of the events, one that isn't coloured by personal interest or taste (in this she also meant to counteract Büchner) - whereas what she wrote definitely is, both in her interpretation of, especially, Robespierre as a political thinker (his visionary monologue at the end of "Thermidor") and in the way she styles his aura, so to speak. (TBC)
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Date: 2009-10-28 04:50 pm (UTC)"Les Misérables" is a good example of this (though a bad one in other points; Hugo includes quite a few 'pages of history' for which, in providing them as a contextualisation of his action, he implicitly claims accuracy, even though in writing a novel he is not sworn to any such thing): Hugo could have called his Enjolras Charles Jeanne and placed his barricade at Saint-Merri, but he doesn't, he takes a very real insurrection and in its context realistically sets up a fictional barricade, where the personal tragedies of his characters can play out against a background of greater affairs, with a fictional leader, whom he can depict as as many ideals incarnate as he likes - imagine he had given the whole radiantly beautiful charming/terrible angelically chaste firy/icy marble Spartan treatment to Jeanne! (Perhaps most notable in this context is that he doesn't give it to Saint-Just in his "93".) In my eyes, that would have done damage to the historical personnage, and unnecessarily so, since the adventures can be told, the same great points made through fictional characters. And that in turn applies a thousand times to fiction that doesn't want to make Great Points in the first place.
It's different again (as Sibylla said) in cases where the author makes it absolutely clear that they are primarily playing around - for instance, I would not even be tempted to take Naomi Novik's word on the Napoleonic Wars and thereby come to believe that Admiral Nelson survived Trafalgar, because it's clear that she's playing merry hell with history (and aware of it) from the fact that There Are Dragons! I could (in keeping with what I said above - I've probably contradicted myself five times over by now ;D) demand that she stay away from all real persons, but I do think it's different, since she actually creates a whole 'nother history that every reader can easily distinguish from the real one, as opposed to taking said real one and making changes so small/realistic there remains a temptation to believe it - or believe the author believes it.
There is a 'biographical study with selected letters' of S. P. in English that I have read by Daniel Gerould, who also edited the translation of the two plays, and Jadwiga Kosicka (the biography is short, but understandably so, but I wish there were more letters); going by that, she was a morphine addict from circa 1921 onwards until the end of her life, so all she produced while understanding herself as 'exclusively a writer' would have been created under the influence of the drug. Taking the longevity of her habit into account, I wouldn't 'blame' it for any oddities in her writing (that is to say, not to the extent of claiming that she would have turned out something altogether less idiosyncratic without it), nor for her mental state - the three forces (morphine addiction and destitution, mental imbalance, writing) all seem to have enabled one another.
I've not read any of her father's writings (another thing I always mean to do) so I can't compare them in style, but he seems to have been one of the most decisive influences in her life, artistically and otherwise; she spent some of her later years trying to 'improve' the flaws in his writing. As for leaving Freud out of it, her second Revolution-related play (after the first completed draft of "Thermidor"), "93", apparently (as I understand it, nothing has survived of this even in Polish?) centered around a young aristocrat who denounces her father in order to see his reaction ... yeah.
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Date: 2009-10-29 08:58 pm (UTC)Historical fiction would be unreadable without 'the human touch' (if there could even be 'fiction' without it - if a book contains only hard facts or argument-based theories, it's non-fiction, isn't it?), but I think that from the point on where there is more romance, more psychology, or more decidedly out-of-time-and-place politics/philosophy (e.g. Marxism in the eighteenth century) than accurate history, it should step away from involving real people as characters. Not from choosing real events as the setting, necessarily, unless it distorts them absolutely ... in which case (as both Sibylla and I have said a few times now), why pick them in the first place (unless you have absolutely no other way of getting your word out)?
(... all right, maybe it didn't add anything. Ah well!)
no subject
Date: 2009-11-01 09:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-11-01 09:58 pm (UTC)Saint-Just in 93 is given one sentence, in which he is described as "sad". As much as I love Les Misérables, I think 93 is his best book.
It matters a lot whether she was taking morphine in 1921 or was addicted to it in this year. I'd be careful here: I'm the last person to run from using the author's biography to interpretate literary (or any other) work, but we cannot exagerate.
Daniel Gerould, as the one who wrote the history of guillotine?
And how many of Przybyszewska's letters are available in English? More or less; I'd like to compare it with what was edited in POlish.
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Date: 2009-11-02 09:08 pm (UTC)At the same time, it's easier (relatively speaking) to faithfully recreate fictional persons, since there is one definite source text that contains all that must be considered true about them, whereas with historical figures there are a thousand sources (or hardly any), all of which are already somebody's inevitably simplified black-on-white take on three-dimensional persons and complex events.
Speculation is more likely to go wrong then (gaps in the lives and personalities of fictional characters that are filled by fanfictioneers may not be what the author had in mind, if they had anything in mind for the things they did not write, but the possibilities can't be denied unless by the author, whereas in real people's lives there definitely are no gaps, there is a truth; it may already be impossible to retrieve, but there remains a challenge to at least try to come close to it - 'careful modifications', as you say - or even accept the gap, rather than fill it with whatever pleases), but it is also more necessary if there's to be a coherent story. One can identify an author's depiction of a real person as 'wrong' if it contradicts known facts, but it's hardly ever possible to call it 'right' if it doesn't, since we can never fully know the persons in question.
RE: one sentence - exactly! Taking into account how obviously phrases used to describe Enjolras (by the author, by other characters) match the phrases commonly associated with Saint-Just, it wouldn't have been absurd to expect that, apparently being so fond of describing that type, he'd give Saint-Just a scene to re-use some of that - not least since he does give Robespierre, Danton, and Marat a long scene (which I think is very well-handled), thus is clearly not averse to featuring historical figures as acting characters if it fits the context. But he doesn't. He has no need for Saint-Just to take the stage in order to tell his story, or to teach the reader anything. That is what I find so noteworthy - of course E. is not Saint-Just, but he has so much of him that, concluding (perhaps mistakenly - in which case this entire point is nil) that Hugo found him intriguing, I expected an extensive portrait (more as in 'painting' than as in 'characterisation/analysis', but a bit of both, surely) of Saint-Just in "93" and was initially disappointed when none was there - but seeing how it wouldn't have added anything to the novel if there had been one, I'm glad he resisted the temptation (perhaps I am wrong, and there was no temptation in the first place) to throw him in just to babble a bit about his hair and/or the incompletion of the absolute.
(As concerns the 'sad', by the way, it disappeared from the final version, but in an earlier draft, Enjolras, not yet the chief, had two lines for his initial description, too, describing him as 'froid, fanatique, et triste'-- which is not relevant to the characterisation of historical figures, just to further stress the connection between those two).
no subject
Date: 2009-11-03 08:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-11-02 09:18 pm (UTC)There are about ninety letters in the collection, the first from 1914, the last from November 1934. If you like I'll type up a list of precisely which they are - it would be interesting to see if the translators deliberately focused on letters on any topic in particular or omitted anything glaring. (There are also [...]s all over the letters, even the short ones.) Most are to her aunt (almost all that discuss the contents of her work in concrete terms - as opposed to chances of staging, progress or lack thereof - are), Helena Barlińska, a few interesting ones to Julia Borowa, some to Iwi Bennet, a few to Wacław Dziabaszewski, a few to writers (Bernanos, Cocteau, Mann). But the long diary-esque outpourings addressed at the aunt definitely make up the largest part. It says the selection is 'based on' a two-volume collection of her letters edited by Tomasz Lewandowski in 1978 and 1983.
no subject
Date: 2009-11-02 11:02 pm (UTC)Most of her writings remains in manuscripts - alas, almost nothing in Gdańsk (= my home town), otherwise I'd have seen it long time ago. When I have time at work, I'll check local biographical lexicon, the part about Przybyszewska includes a list of her unedited works. I happen to know the person who worked on it, I'm curious whether he chcecked the texts himself or just worked basing on a list. I promise to ask.
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Date: 2009-11-03 07:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-11-04 08:49 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-11-03 05:58 pm (UTC)