The Black Monk, Saving Orchards from Frost, and Lensky's (or Kovrin's) Aria

Dear Anton Chekhov,

I was fascinated by a couple of things while reading your short story, The Black Monk. The first is a criticism. The other, I'm not sure. The first is something about horticulture. It is about living in an orchard.

Early in my married life I lived in orchard country, more specifically, in the middle of orchards of apples and peaches. Have you ever eaten a ripe peach, picked warm from a tree, ripened wholly on the branches? Oh, how divine the taste, the sweetness. I have never eaten a "store-bought" peach that even closely compares. I don't even buy peaches. My palette has been ruined.

But, back to the subject, the farmer who worked that land, who like Tania's father works from love and attachment to land and plants, is full of knowledge and solutions. The solution you described in the opening pages of The Black Monk is one that was used at the time of your writing, and is used yet today. However, the weakness in your portrayal of Kovrin, upon returning to his adopted home one frosty spring night, is that he was surprised and full of questions at the process of burning debris to save the budding trees of the orchards. Frankly Anton, he would have known. He could not have grown up near an orchard ignorant of such fires and the stoking of such smoke. April, says Eliot, is the cruelist month. At least it is for the farmer. He or she just begins to breathe deeply the sun stroked gusts of blossom-scented air when it freezes in his/her nostrils.

So Yegor Pesotsky and Tania and Andrei Kovrin too, all would have known from hard experience the drill of long nights tending fires on the evenings of spring that had played them false. I, too, have known the phantom clouds, not appearing as a whirlwinding Black Monk but wafting from piles of burning trash and used tires with the rubber emitting acridity as well as makeshift cumulus forms.

The second element I noticed was the song from Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin that Kovrin chose to hum to Tania when first he noticed her, not as a child, but as a woman.

Interestingly, one of my favorites of late, Vladimir Nabokov, translated a version of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin in which I found this passage:

Or when a falling star along the dark sky flew and dissipated, then Tanya would hasten in confusion while the star still was rolling her heart's desire to whisper to it. When anywhere she happened a black monk to encounter, or 'mongst the fields a rapid hare would run across her path, so scared she knew not what to undertake, with sorrowful forebodings filled, directly she expected some mishap.

So is this where you found inspiration for your eerie Black Monk? I notice that here Pushkin pictures Tanya as being frightened by a falling star. You used that image, too, in your story about an artist. You must have liked Pushkin's novel/poem very much, so I can imagine that you were among the first, at the opening nights of Tchaikovsky's operatic version of Onegin to listen and love the music. From Pushkin you secreted away the name of the leading lady for your tale. From Tchaikovsky's Onegin you took a little musical reference. But that is where I tripped, for though you had your Onegin-like hero hum a tune from the opera, the reference doesn't quite work. That tune was not one that Onegin sings to Tanya. Instead, Tchaikovsky's Lensky sang it of Olga. "Olga how I loved you." In the example below though, I'll let you hear Fritz Wunderlich sing it, for he was one of the great Lenskys!


Apart from such particularities and snobbery of detail, I liked your story very much and it carries with it great pathos.

Affectionately,

Betsy

Invitation to a Beheading

Dear Vladimir Nabokov,

I have had some trouble finding your classic novel. Finally, the University of Kentucky library systems provided a lovely pencil-annotated version of Invitation to a Beheading, copyright 1959, (Presented, a book nameplate explains, by J. Wesley Littlefield of the Class of 1933).

I haven't finished the book yet. As I read, my right index finger strokes the pages that remain, relieved to find, still, a good two-thirds of the whole waiting.

This is my first letter to you, and I feel a little shy. I feel, perhaps, like Cincinnatus, a lone dark obstacle (pg. 24) who will be unable to maintain control of cunningly established illusion. Perhaps you will wrinkle your eyes—you might remove your spectacles and with a tissue from a rectangular cardboard box, huff and swipe at a singular fingerprint, replace them—and confirm my opacity. Your Cincinnatus could at such moments take hold and remove himself to a psychologically safe place. I think that I did not learn, early enough, the trick of such mental transportation.

Self is such an odd containment. We hover about the stark cell that is the heart of ourselves. It is a tiny habitat, really, with just a few rules, a nearly unreachable glint of sunlight, and, if we are fortunate, a writing desk.

I wonder whether all of us, early or late, come to recognize the imprisonment we enjoy. And, if we are fortunate enough . . . believe me, I do not for a minute disrespect the miraculous in this . . . if we are fortunate enough to be loved by some—mother? father? sister? brother? friend? dog?—we will without doubt be the victim of some—mother? father? son? aunt? butcher? baker? Someone complains about "our basic illegality" and we are undone.

Such is life and it is, often, to the pain if not to the guillotine. So we begin to look to the end with an odd fixation, either in fear and trembling or with mild obsessions, or with resolute faith in something higher, better, bigger, other than our little cell selves.

"The compensation for a death sentence is knowledge of the exact hour when one is to die," believes Cincinnatus? But how senseless a belief is that, for we have all heard the whispered sentence, "Prisoner, in this solemn hour. . . " with soft breath tickling our ears.

"So we are nearing the end. The right hand, still untasted part of the novel, which, during our delectable reading, we would lightly feel, mechanically testing whether there were still plenty left (and our fingers were always gladdened by the placid, faithful thickness) has suddenly, for no reason at all, become quite meager."

I am anxious to discover what else your have to say in your book before my index digit plucks and turns the final leaf.

Betsy

P.S. I found this butterfly you drew for Vera. How nice.

Eugene Onegin and Ennui

Dear A. Pushkin,

I read your poetic novel recently. It was, sigh, ok. I have heard the operatic version a number of times and saw it on the Met broadcast. It's, yawn, nice. So I figured it was time I read the book.

In your poem, "Onegin's Journey," (was that an addendum to the main poem?) I noticed that concise couplet, which, to me expressed the point precisely.

Oh God, I'm young, I'm fresh, I'm strong
And I've got boredom, all day long.

Onegin is not really a bad man, is he? But he is a bored one. And boredom disallows the kind of caring that engenders good, doesn't it. The want of good can degenerate to bad very quickly. In Onegin, it degenerates to a thoughtless flirtation and the killing of a friend. For that, Onegin pays with a life of more ennui and guilt. You don't really develop the guilt in your work, Alexander, but for 'Evgeny' ennui is punishment enough. Ennui, that is, and unrequited love.

Here is why I think Onegin is a generally good man.

1. He doesn't take advantage of Tatyana.
2. He writes in the margins of books.
3. His servants like him.

The first is obvious. In most pre-20th century literature, I think, protagonists get "good" points for respecting the life and sexual innocence of other human beings. This is probably no longer the case as far as I can guess, but when you were writing, it was true.

I might be questioned on my line of reasoning for my third point. But I think goodness used to be defined by how well servants and slaves liked their masters. To me this is strange, but reflects an interesting human trait. The very person who is in some ways the closest oppressor is deified for the kindliness of their oppression. Certainly Onegin is just a poor example of this, but literature runneth over with examples, from Harriet Stowe to Jane Austin, good is established not by active high virtue, but by the absence of high evil with the trimmings of petty virtue. (Perhaps I need to think more about this later but I think I've a headache now.)

Onegin wins my heart though, if perhaps he loses that of Tatyana, because he writes in the margins of his books.

Tatyana sees with trepidation
what kind of thought, what observation,
had drawn Eugene's especial heed
and where he'd silently agreed.
Her eyes along the margin flitting
pursue his pencil.
Everywhere his soul encountered there declares
itself in ways unwitting--
terse words or crosses in the book,
or else a query's wondering hook.

There is nothing I like better than an annotated book with margins full of reaction. How much we can learn about the reader from a simple exclamation point or underline. (I especially favor the double underline.) I have to tell you, this stanza was my very favorite of the entire book. There, as I droned along through the interminable passages of this overwritten book, my spirit was captured by your obvious appreciation of the marginal comment.

Lee Smith in her novel Saving Grace says you can get away with anything if you are nice about it. Of course neither her Florida Grace nor Onegin, whose delicate charm won many hearts, get away with anything in the end, for loved or not loved, they must live with themselves.

At this point I need to comment about Childe Harold, for it seems that this is the character that you drew upon for your skeleton of Onegin ("A Muscovite in Harold's Dress"). Lord Byron, whose portrait hung in Onegin's country library, said this of his Harold.

It had been easy to varnish over his faults, to make him do more and express less, but he never was intended as an example, further than to show that early perversion of mind and morals leads to satiety of past pleasures and disappointment in new ones, and that even the beauties of nature, and the stimulus of travel (except ambition, the most powerful of all excitements) are lost on a soul so constituted, or rather misdirected.

(Does anyone have a stick of gum?)

"Childe," as you know, means a youth destined for Knighthood. But neither Harold nor Onegin have the heart for nobility (whatever that is). Byron's description of Harold,

But long ere scarce a third of his pass'd by,
Worse than adversity the Childe befreel
He felt the fulness of satiety:
Then loath'd he in his native land to dwell,
Which seem'd to him more lone than Eremite's sad cell.

Whoa is this boring yet? So back to the point, poor Onegin, he is not a bad guy, but lost. He reminds me of the obese children suing McDonald's. Is there anything more pathetic than Harold, Onegin, and they, satieted and looking for something to eat.

Here's the thing, (I really need to take a shower) . . . I think U.S. Culture 2007 has been struck by a bad case of Oneginitis. You've had a century or so to think about this. Got a cure? Let me know, I've gotta go and take my Prozac.

Betsy