Angel Carter’s Nights at the Circus explodes on the page in the form of six-foot-two, eyes of blue, fourteen stone Fevvers, a feminist icon, who has wings and really can fly. Or so it seems, she’s an aerialiste that needs no high wire. The high-flying star of Colonel Kearney’s circus—a fool and his money are easily parted; never give a mug a break—courted by Royalty, The Prince of Wales, painted by Toulouse Lautrec. She’s the toast of Paris, of Berlin, of Europe. Her tour will take her from smoke-filled London of 1899 to the beginning of a new century, and to dazzle St Petersburg and onto the cold wastes of Siberia.
Magical Realism hadn’t been invented. American reporter Jack Walser finds himself trapped in her London dressing room after another wildly successful show. He plans to include her in a series of stories about the great humbugs of Europe, but the questions he asks isn’t the questions she answers. Her constant companion, Lizzie, is also an unsettling presence. He’s befuddled and intoxicated in more ways than he knows.
‘Lor’ love you sir! Fevvers sang out in a voice that clanged like dustbin lids. ‘As to my place of birth, why I first saw light of day in smoky old London, didn’t I! Not billed “the Cockney Venus”, for nothing sir, though they could just as well ‘ave called me “Helen of the High Wire”, due to the unusual circumstances in which I came ashore—for I never docked via what you might call normal channels, sir, oh, dear me, no, just like Helen of Troy was hatched.
Hatched out of a bloody great egg, while Bow Bells rang, as ever is.’
Angela Carter’s short-story, Lizzie’s Tiger, begins in a quieter way. ‘When the circus came to town, and Lizzie saw the tiger, they were living on Ferry Street, in a very poor way’.
Nights at the Circus has tigers and Princess and a strongman rapist but ever stronger women, who tend to stick together. After all, Fevvers (a nickname derived from the feathers that sprouted on her back) was raised in a brothel and then adopted. Lizzie breastfed her, but she had a multitude of mothers who were well aware of what men were like in close quarters.
Lizzie had to step down from her harlotry and become a housekeeper because she asked too many awkward questions as Angela Carter does of her readers. ‘What is your name?’ ‘Have you a soul?’ ‘Can you love?’
With subcategories that tend to be didactic. Attitudes to ‘white slave trade?’; ‘rights and wrongs of women?; ‘universal suffrage?’; ‘the Irish question?’; ‘the Indian question?’; ‘republicanism?’; ‘syndicalism?’; ‘abolition of the House of Lords?’.
‘Nothing can come from nothing?’ And the question that Othello dare not ask adds a learned Shakespearian tone to what is in essence a love story as Walser goes incognito and joins the circus as a clown and travel to St Petersburg to find out the real story about Fevvers.
Essence is a theme. ‘Singularity,’ where gravity become strong enough to bend spacetime, where physics breaks down, but this is what Lizzie urges her not-so-little Fevvers to avoid, to keep her essence, to keep her singularity and not become the property of a man, any man, including the clown Walser. To keep her wings. To keep her singularity so that she can be who she is and fly and be herself.
An explosion of colour and depth, with an emphatic understanding of what it means to be poor. (The rich tend to be villains.) Well worth reading. I haven’t captured the essence. I’ll be reading more of Angela Carter’s works.
Alexander Starritt’s name can be added to the list of great Scottish writers. (He’s written another book I’ve not yet read, The Beast.) I, initially, thought We Germans was a translation like Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front and The Road Home. The format is simple. A grandfather writing to his Scottish grandson, Callum. And his grandson replying. Oberkanonier Meissner was in the Wehrmacht. Six-foot-two and broad shouldered, he was conscripted at nineteen. He was posted to the East. He weighed seven-and-a-half stone (48 kilos) when he was repatriated from the USSR, aged twenty-six.
Early in his written monologue, he promises his grandson,
‘I wasn’t a Nazi. No court would find me guilty of anything, even an omniscient one. What I want to tell you about isn’t about atrocities on genocide.’
What he wants to talk about is courage. War he describes as ‘a battle between hammers and anvils’.
The war in the East was the real war. ‘Out of every eight German soldiers killed. Seven were killed in the East.’
He describes the decision to invade the East like a decision to invade the sea. In the first year in the East, the Germans starved two-and-a-half million prisoners to death. In barbed-wire camps Russian’s ate their friends. Western loses in comparison were a blip, easily brushed off.
Meissner’s letter tells Callum he’s familiar with the idea of ‘collective guilt’—as a concept—but not as a feeling.
Shame, however, he claims holds ‘a more pitless truth’.
‘Shame is not like guilt. It’s not a matter of reparation. Shame cannot be atoned for, it is a debt that cannot be paid.’
In the introduction to Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, a Bulgarian historian on the Balkan’s Conflict observed, when we ask the question ‘WHY? Guilt becomes the focal point’. Twenty million soldiers killed in the First World War, roughly the number killed in USSR alone. Little wonder even Vladimir Putin calls it ‘The Great Patriotic War’.
Meissner admits to no guilt, but does admit to shame. He assures us we have become overfamiliar with the ‘pantomimes of valour’. Survival was enough.
When he and four other soldiers are sent foraging for food, the war was already lost. They were retreating home.
‘In that first, victorious summer, our invading tanks covered half the distance to St Petersburg in five days…The limiting factor wasn’t the Red Army, but the road surface: mud rather than tarmac.’
‘I became a pedestrian one day in spring 1943, in the Eastern part of Ukraine, more than a thousand miles from the German border.’
‘By 1944, those of us still alive were fleeing on foot, broken, bedraggled, our tanks blown up, our artillery abandoned, our good name blackened for generations, our friends and brothers-in-arms buried in hostile soil.’
Hunger eats away at a man, but when a man loses hope, he’s already dead. That autumn a rumour had spread that there was a food depot nearby. Stashed with French wine and Italian sardines and other loot from occupied countries the general staff were in such a hurry to retreat they’d left it to the Russians.
Meissner didn’t believe the rumour. He didn’t disbelieve it either. He’d been ordered, with four others in their rag-tag army, to find it. None of whom he knew particularly well. Luttke, he didn’t like because he parroted party propaganda and tried to take charge. But he was quickly put in his place. The only one he could bully was Jensen. It wasn’t worth trying to remember newly conscripted soldier’s names. But they’d a little horse, Ferdinand, which hadn’t yet been eaten, when they set off.
He finds the nostalgia for when Germany was for Germans a throwback to when villages were looted and their occupants crucified and hanged—and all to protect a civilian population that readily took part in pogroms.
Primo Levi asks an open question: If This Is a Man?
We Germans offers no ready answers. Alexander Starritt, now there’s a writer worth knowing.
At just over 650 pages this offers a comprehensive account of Grigory Efimovich Rasputin’s life and deaths. Deaths—plural. Most of us are familiar with the legend that Rasputin was poisoned, shot and finally drowned. His bound hands still clawing underneath the ice. Radzinsky takes the reader through different versions, but with the same outcome. Rasputin was murdered. The question of why he was murdered in much the same way that the tsar, tsarina and the Romanov children were murdered, he leaves to the last paragraph of his account.
Rasputin is the key to understanding both the soul and brutality of the Russia that came after him. He was a precursor of the millions of peasants who, with religious consciousness on their souls, would nevertheless tear down churches, and who, with a dream of the reign of Love and Justice, would murder, rape, and flood the country with blood, in the end destroying themselves.
There is an Afterword, in Putin’s Russia the name St Petersburg had been restored (formerly Petrograd and Leningrad) and the coffin of the tsars (like Rasputin’s body their bodies were burned to ash, so it would be an empty coffin) was returned from Ekaterinburg and laid to rest in the great cathedral. Putin said he wouldn’t attend, but did. Tsar Nicholas II and his wife Alexandra (Alix) and their children Olga, Tatyana, Maria, Anastasia and Alexi were feted as living saints by the Russian Orthodox Church.
In a black and white, cartoonish, world it was Rasputin that led them astray. While he lingers in infamy their goodness vindicated shines anew.
When you look for miracles, often you find them, especially if you are one of the last autocratic rulers on one of the biggest and richest, but technologically backward countries on earth. The 1905 war against Japan had ended in Russia’s humiliation. I’m no fan of Shakespeare but Richard II and the appeal for treason is perhaps a good place to start if you want to understand autocracy.
‘The unreal world of miracles and prophecies was increasingly becoming Alix’s real world. In Sarov they spent whole evenings by the spring and the rock where Serafim had lifted his voice in prayer. At night she and Nicky would bathe in the waters of the spring, putting their trust in the saint’s help and praying for an heir.’
The tsarina Alexi resented that Alexander II who was appointed by God to rule over the Russian people could no longer do so directly but by decree. He had to pay more than lip service to the Duma. And she feared her son Alexi would inherit the wind. His powers would be curbed and he would be little more than a token head of state like her grandmother, Queen Victoria. But the blood of the Romanov’s was tainted. Alexi was born with haemophilia. There was no cure, but Rasputin.
As a peasant he was a direct link to the Rus, the real Russian people that provided the bread that they all ate. He called the tsarina, ‘Mamma,’ and tsar, ‘Pappa,’ mother and father of all Russia. God’s anointed. And he prophesised that their paths and that of all Russia, were inextricably linked.
Radzinsky allows Rasputin to be both miraculous and diabolic. The spirit the peasant channels he suggests, however, is Alix’s. Semi-literate, he could read her easier than he could any book. Her wishes, where his wishes. ‘Pappa,’ needed to be sure that God was watching over him. Rasputin gave him evidence of this. Self-fulfilling prophecies are a useful tool.
Sex plays a big part in the legend of Rasputin. Radzinsky links it to secret sect of Christianity that didn’t come from the West of Europe and was purely Russian in origin, but were more universal in their ideas of chastising and subjugating the body for Christ’s glory. The Skoptsy (Castrators) cut off their penis. The Kylysty (Flagellants) was another heretic sect with a belief in the second coming of a Russian redeemer to liberate the oppressed and dating back to the seventeen century to the time of the first Romanovs. A mixture of paganism and Russian Orthodoxy. It taught that every man should become Christ and the Holy Ghost would descend upon him. Self-scourging, Christ-like flagellation and ascetic practices were one part of their belief. But during radenic (rejoicing) at communal gatherings, when the Holy Ghost descended an orgy took place. Svalnyi grekh (group sinning) promiscuous sex between men and women took place in order to conceive as many new ‘Christs’ and ‘Mothers of God’ as possible.
Rasputin when having sex with many women followers was healing them and himself of the sin of lechery by having sex. Tautological reasoning, but for Rasputin it was a living creed. He wore out many couches he kept in the houses in which he lodged and his sexual appetite was overwhelming. ‘Mama’ and ‘Papa,’ believe none of these government reports, believing him, Christ-like, to be unjustly accused and vilified.
With a direct link to the highest of the high, the tsar and tsarina, Rasputin pedalled public offices and millions of roubles passed through his hands. Much of it stolen by his ‘secretaries’.
The plot to kill Rasputin came from the aristocracy of Russian society, member of the Yacht club. The war with Germany was a debacle mirroring that of Japan. While condemning the tsar would be an act of treason, criticising his Germanic bride was not, and demonising her proxy Rasputin was aligned with a malignant hatred of a peasant interfering in matters of state. An act of righteousness would wipe out Rasputin. Peasants could be quietly flayed and beaten to death. But there was a note of caution. Rasputin’s supernatural powers, his guards, and ‘Mamma’ and ‘Papa’ watching over him, yet the plan to kill him was quite straightforward.
‘At Midnight A Friend Will Come To See Him.’ (16th / 17th December 1916)
The Friend is Prince Felix Yusopov, a bisexual, who dressed in girl’s clothes when he was a little boy and had adult sex with men and women. Radzinsky hints he may have been treated for his homosexuality by Rasputin, in what ways is not made clear. Yusopov had millions of roubles and thousands of hectares of land, he was friends and neighbours with the Romanovs. Yusopov’s wife, Irna, a society beauty was the—missing—bait in the trap. The hypocrisy of the widespread acceptance of Yusopov’s sexuality and the condemnation of Rasputin’s was based on class. Grand Duke Dmitry Pavlovich who was briefly engaged to one of Tsar’s daughters, before it was called after a behind-the-scenes scandal about his love affair with Felix. He was said to have fired the final shots at Rasputin and left him for dead (although water in his lung suggested to pathologists he’d finally drowned). Felix shot him too. And tried to poison him. Radzinsky explains these failures were not supernatural, but amateurish attempts to take his life.
The police officer’s account of hearing three or four shots and having seen Prince Yusopov and his butler crossing the courtyard of his palace was significant in that he was regarded as public servant, little more than a jumped-up peasant, the other a Prince. One’s testimony could be believed, the other ignored. Class matters. And it never mattered more in the cover-ups then and after the 1916 revolution. Rasputin was said to have prophesised his own death and the Bolshevik revolution in the name of natural justice that would end with the Romanov’s deaths mirroring Rasputin’s. He created his own hell and he paid the price of being an upstart peasant. The Romanov’s are in heaven looking down on us. Aye, right. Believe that and you’ll believe Trump won the 2020 election. Read on.
odonnellgrunting 