A Human Adultery Tale: Waves / Wellen by Eduard von Keyserling

Eduard von Keyserling is the latest German writer who publishers seem to have decided needs a revival. This is explained partly by his dates – he was born in 1855, and died in 1919 – which means there has been a flurry of attention upon him anyway thanks to the centenary of his death. My own edition of his late novels, which Waves / Wellen is included among, is a lovingly crafted hardback, filled with notes and the impressions of his contemporaries. The only problem is that it’s written in German. There are also new English translations of his works coming out all the time, Wikipedia suggests, including one of Waves itself which was released in 2019 and translated by Gary Miller.

Keyserling is interesting not only because he happened to die a hundred-ish years ago, though. He’s also the most well-known Baltic German writer. The Baltic Germans were the ethnically German ruling class who once inhabited Latvia and Estonia, a people who have now vanished for a variety of reasons. Keyserling is therefore interesting for representing a now vanished people, a now vanished way of life. But since every writer does that in some sense, we should perhaps look for reasons to read him elsewhere.

Waves, the short novel I finished yesterday, is a tender exploration of the life of a woman who has left her husband. It’s interesting to compare the life of Doralice, the heroine, with the heroines of the 19th century “adultery classics” – Anna Karenina, Emma Bovary, and Effi Briest. While those novels showed adultery ending in unpleasant deaths, here Keyserling tries to ask what life is like instead.

A Woman’s Story

Theodor Fontane, my favourite German novelist of the 19th century, once remarked that women were far more interesting to write about than men. At least at that time, he was on to something. The realist tradition often takes as its spiritual core the battle between the individual and his or her society, and since women in that period saw their lives and freedoms more constrained by society than men did, their lives generally provided a more interesting canvas for writing on than did those of men. It’s just a shame that our occasionally well-intentioned 19th century male authors did not realise that the “interesting lives” of women did not necessarily have to be about adultery or marriage. I forgive them, sometimes, this.

Waves, or Wellen in the original, was published in 1911. Taking place on the Baltic coastline, it centres around two groups of people. The first is Doralice and her partner, Hans Grill. Doralice, who only a year before the story begins had been living as the Countess of Köhne-Jasky in a big castle, abandoned her much older husband to be with Hans, who she met while he was painting her portrait. The second group centres around the aristocratic and respectable Buttlär family – father, mother, the mother’s mother, and various children – most importantly, Lolo, whose fiancé Hilmar joins them a little into the story. These two groups, forced together by the small size of the beach setting, are what leads to the novel’s central conflict.

Eduard von Keyserling is often called an Expressionist. So is Edvard Munch, whose paintings match the slightly expressive mood of Waves.

Doralice, or Countess of Köhne-Jasky?

Doralice, or the Countess of Köhne-Jasky, is our main character. By the time the story begins she has already left her husband for Hans Grill, who is a humble painter. Together they are relaxing in on the coast, making use of her money. But Waves begins not with Doralice, but with Mrs General von Palikow and her daughter, Baroness Buttlär. We are introduced to Doralice through the rumours about her and the fear that she inspires in other characters. Baroness Buttlär is so terrified of the influence this free woman could have upon her children that she forces them to go to bed early so that they might not hear about her past. The adults of the family are “like two fortresses, keeping out all those who do not belong to their kind”. (all translations are mine)

Of course such attempts do not work, and the children are fascinated by the beautiful countess. Waves is a novel about misperceptions, as much as anything else, and for the children their misperception is that this woman is a Romantic heroine. Doralice is far less passionate and far more human than they make her out to be. Even her love for Hans is startlingly normal, which is the problem. At times we are left asking whether she left her husband because of how awful he was, or because of how nice Hans was. Doralice herself sits and dreams of her old life, with its luxury and respectability. In meeting the Buttlärs she is confronted with what she has lost forever.

A Woman’s Identity

What is sad is that all around Doralice are people who, if not bad, are still unwilling to let her develop in her own way. From the words she remembers from her parents – “”when you will be married”” – to her old husband’s habit of saying “we” when he really means “you”, and even to Hans Grill himself (though in a less oppressive form), Doralice’s identity is always being determined by those around her. When she finally has her “freedom”, it is unpleasant. Locked out of society, but still by birth an aristocrat, her days at the beach are marked by idleness and English novels.

This is in stark contrast to the fishermen of the village, who are always hard at work, and to Hans himself. Although it seems unfair, Hans is right when he says: “Work and action – this is what we need in our lives”. For idleness is fallow ground for the imagination, and imagination (especially when English novels are involved) can lead to tragedy.

An Adulteress

When Hilmar, the dashing Lieutenant who is Lola’s husband-to-be, turns up, things take a turn for the dangerous. Where the aristocrats think Doralice is someone to be feared, and the children admire her, Hilmar sees her as someone to seduce. And within the world he lives in, his view is logical. Here, an adulteress is a woman who has shown herself to be a loose woman with loose morals. Within German society at the time there was very little opportunity to say that actually, one can make a mistake in marriage, and that the second love may be more successful than the first. And so, even though he breaks his fiancée’s heart, Hilmar sets about seducing Doralice. He takes her out sailing, he finds her alone while she’s reading… you know, the usual.  

Their meeting while she is reading in the forest is one of the saddest moments in the story. For Doralice is lonely, desperately lonely in her new life. And yet Hilmar, a new face, can only see her as an object.

““I was once told by a young Attaché that he thought it was impolite for him to spend more than a moment alone with a young lady without declaring his love for her””.

Doralice’s words made me laugh, but they also contain a deep sense of the emptiness of even what first appears to be passionate feeling. She inhabits a world – all of the characters inhabit a world – where behaviour is almost completely conditioned by society, and true feelings are repressed so deeply that they may never come out again. Hilmar of course denies that he is here to declare his love. But Doralice knows better – she doesn’t want to play his game. “”All of my ties with the world have been cut. You can either talk about the weather with me, or you can declare your love for me instead.”” Everything is socially determined, and Doralice’s deep loneliness is the result.

More Munch. Both artists, Keyserling and Munch, have an excellent sense for the intensity of loneliness.

Conclusion: Waves, Loves, and Other Things

One of the aspects of Waves that I haven’t been able to talk about yet is the style. Although much of it is written in the same realist style of Fontane or Turgenev, when dealing with passionate emotions Keyserling is not afraid to go into long, intense and very expressive paragraphs. Waves as a title calls to mind Woolf’s The Waves, and the beach setting and style occasionally reminded me of To the Lighthouse. Like Woolf, Keyserling can write a beautiful, thoughtful description when he wants to. In this he is a transitional figure between the realisms of his youth and the modernisms that took over in his late middle age.

And I think that this is an important part of why this story is interesting in the first place, and why it’s worth reading if you can find a translation (or read German). Keyserling really gives Doralice a soul – he lets her feel. She is not as cunning as Emma Bovary, or as passionate as Anna Karenina. Instead, she is a human being who was forced into a marriage and life that were wrong, and who made the brave decision to walk away from it. Her story is the working out of a difficult relationship with the man she left her husband for, rather than one of passion and punishment. And after so many adultery tales, it’s nice to read one that sees the adulteress for what she really is – a human like the rest of us, instead of a lamb to be sacrificed to make a point about society.

That’s why Waves is worth your time. And did I mention it’s under two hundred pages?

“Asya” by Ivan Turgenev

I’ve never liked Turgenev. What I mean is that I’ve never been particularly impressed by him. Among the major Russian writers of the 19th century he bears the fewest marks of the land of his birth. This is fair enough, for a man who corresponded with Theodor Storm and Gustave Flaubert, and spent much of his life in Europe rather than Russia. But it doesn’t change the fact that I’ve always found Turgenev boring. Unlike Dostoevsky, ideas don’t seem to interest him, and though he tries to write passionate characters he can’t actually write characters who ideas seem to interest them either. In On the Eve, we have a classic Turgenev tale of a revolutionary who forgets about his convictions when love appears. Fathers and Sons is not much better.

If I were feeling charitable, I’d say Turgenev’s stories are mostly about the failures of an ideological way of living. His characters are shown, time and again, to fail to achieve their goals because of their own hesitations and inaction. They think they believe something, but it always turns out that they don’t quite know themselves. It’s either love spoiling the young revolutionary, or his own weakness of will. Either way, hesitancy leading to quiet failure is the common thread in Turgenev’s work. No character really feels strongly enough to actually do anything, so opportunities are always being missed and everyone ends up sad. In “Asya”, the novella which I finished this week, the formula is little changed.

“Asya”: an Introduction to the Plot

“Asya” was completed in 1858 and shows Turgenev’s Europeanness rather plainly by being set in Europe. Our narrator and the two other principal characters are Russians, but the action takes place somewhere along the Rhine in the German lands. N. N. is our narrator, and “Asya” is ostensibly a recollection by an older and wiser N. N. of a time in his youth – “First Love”, another Turgenev novella, has a similar structure. Our hero is about twenty five at the time of his story, carefree and travelling “without any goal or plan”. He enjoys observing others, and he has recently attempted a tryst with a widow only to get rebuffed. But we shouldn’t worry for the sake of N. N.’s soul – he says himself that the wound she left “wasn’t very deep”.

In any case, he winds up in the town of Z., on one bank of the Rhine. On the other is another town, L., which can be reached by ferry. Neither of them is on the track usually beaten by Russians holidaying in Europe. Having nothing else to do, one day N. N. heads over there, and to his surprise comes across two other Russian tourists, a seventeen-year-old girl by the name of Asya, and her brother, who goes by Gagin. Gagin is a bad artist but a friendly fellow, and the two men strike up an acquaintance. Asya, however, is a wild thing – and Turgenev is constantly comparing her to a wild animal, or a child – and the narrator isn’t quite sure what to make of her. At one moment she’s enthusiastic and buoyant, at another she dresses demurely and shuns contact. One thing N. N. is certain of, however – she’s not Gagin’s real brother.

Well, he’s right. He overhears her making a confession of love to her “brother”, but it turns out she’s not actually his secret lover – as we might suppose – but actually his half-sister. She was born to one of the servants employed by Gagin’s father shortly after his wife died. Gagin for a long time never knew his sister’s identity, and her mother kept her out of the big house where the aristocrats lived. However, once her mother dies Gagin’s father took Asya into his own house, and on his deathbed he admits to Gagin that she’s actually his sister. So anyway, that’s how the two of them got to know each other.

Gagin and his sister go to Petersburg soon after, and he puts her into a boarding school – after all, he can’t keep her with him. Then, he decides he’s sick of work and wants to travel, so the two of them head to Europe for a wander, as you do.

Social Monster or Victim – Who or What is Asya?

The Russian name “Asya” is a shortened version of quite a lot of names. I know an Anastasia who uses that name, and an Arsenia. Turgenev’s Asya is, however, an Anna – which is quite unusual. It is a simple example of her rather confused, mixed identity. She is half aristocrat, half peasant – not just by parentage, but also by the amount of time she has spent in each milieu. If she stayed in Russia she would immediately be identified as not belonging, but in Europe there’s a little more leeway for her, a chance to determine her own identity. Turgenev plays up her unnaturalness by comparing her to a “little beast” and a “boy” on various occasions. N. N. notices in Asya something unnatural, though he’s unable to put his finger on what until Gagin tells him.

Asya is playing a role – she is trying to be the aristocrat she isn’t, and the effort is draining. Just like Maslova in Tolstoy’s Resurrection, because Asya is the product of two social groups she struggles to sit easily in either of them, causing great spiritual strain – like Maslova, she also struggles with having had an absent mother in her life. N. N. once comes across her reading a French novel and complains of her taste, not realising what her reading means to her: “She wanted to be no worse than other ladies, and so she gave herself to books”. Later, she desperately asks him “Tell me what I should read! Tell me what I should do!”

Youth, Love, and a Complete Inability to Do Anything

Unsurprisingly, after a few days together both Asya and N. N. fall hopelessly in love with each other. Asya, a girl who “doesn’t experience emotions by halves”, arranges a rendez-vous between them. They meet, but N. N. has already spoken with Gagin about it, and he comes prepared to play a role himself. She wants him to marry her, and he refuses. He doesn’t even say what he feels for her. Shortly afterwards, she and Gagin disappear, never to be seen again.

The narrator’s reluctance to marry her stems from his class prejudices, from the need for respectability. It also stems from his word of honour, given to Gagin, that he wouldn’t let his emotions get the better of him. But once Asya has gone he realises his love for her and feels that it is stronger than anything else. However, he had missed his opportunity, and he will never have another such chance again. He grows old, feeling sad and regretting what he lost.

Honour, class, are apparently left worthless when love has escaped our grasp. But Turgenev’s novella tells us all this with enough irony to keep us guessing. First of all, we might think of the structure – why is N. N. telling this story? He says at the end “that I didn’t feel sad about her for too long”, that probably she’d have been a bad wife. At the beginning of his story he talks of youth as like a “biscuit that we think is hearty bread”, and says that like flowers we should never bloom too long. But I think his words are ultimately a kind of self-deception. The man is alone, living on his memories, and perhaps worth feeling sorry for. As he says, “happiness has no tomorrow”, and he missed his “today”.

Location and Literature

“Asya” doesn’t strike me as a particularly complex story, but there are a few things going on behind the scenes that are interesting enough to mention. I quite like the idea of the two towns, separated by the river. The crossing from one end to another is a nice visual metaphor for what happens to N. N. as he enters Asya’s world. I also like the way Turgenev uses literary references in “Asya”. We have Gretchen (Goethe’s Faust), Tatyana (Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin), and the Lorelei myth, which has featured in lots of poems by various Germans including Goethe and Heine. The Tatyana one is quite interesting. Asya says “I would have liked to be Tatyana” – a woman who loved a man who didn’t love her back, and then rejected him once he did. The comparison with Pushkin’s heroine ties Asya to her homeland (something N. N. remarks on elsewhere, saying she’s the most Russian creature he’s ever seen), but it also makes her a little immature for wanting to be a tragic heroine. Although N. N. is mostly to blame for the failure of the relationship, Asya herself is not without fault for her decision to appoint mysterious rendez-vous and make overly harsh demands of N. N. – her final note said if he’d said he’d loved her she would have stayed. So much for second chances or taking things slowly!

This tragic nature makes us think the story will end with a melodramatic death scene. Indeed, there’s a frightening moment when N. N. goes searching around the town for her, and it seems certain she’s about to take her own life (as Lorelei did, by jumping into the river). It turns out that she didn’t, and just went home instead. While Turgenev can’t escape traditional descriptions of women or boring men he is at least wise enough to know that not every story involving a girl needs to end with suicide.

Conclusion

There’s no doubt Turgenev was a sensitive soul. He wrote some beautiful nature passages which I had to force myself to analyse in my first year at university, but in some sense that’s about it. His characters are limp and forgettable. I don’t actually remember Fathers and Sons, though I’ve read it twice. I only remember Bazarov because he’s significant in Russian literary history, not because he actually shines in his own story. “Asya” was very okay. While it’s true I was surprised by it in a few places, at the end of the day it’s just another story about two young people who fall in love and end up unhappier for their trouble. There are a few interesting ideas in here, but not really enough to make this story particularly exciting. In the end, “Asya” is as limp as its narrator. And that’s just doesn’t make for an awesome reading experience.

Still, it’s a nice story to have in my mental repertoire. There are some worthwhile comparisons to be made between Asya and Lelenka in Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaya’s “Boarding School Girl” – both are almost the same age, and both of them are faced with the challenges of forming their own identity against the identity that society wants to force upon them. But Turgenev is not particularly interested in the Woman Question, and anyway I can’t write about him on that topic in my exam because he’s not a woman to begin with.

If you’re out here looking for some Turgenev to read that’s not Fathers and Sons, I’d recommend Rudin over “Asya”. It’s not too long but it’s much more interesting. But if you have nothing else to read except “Asya”, then be my guest. After all, if you’re dying of thirst then even the lukewarm bottle of water you left out on the table overnight will do for a drink.

Two Years of Mostly About Stories

Mostly About Stories has been going for about two years now. I was tempted to give a little summary or whatever at the end of the year, but on balance doing it now makes sense. At the end of any year, and especially one such as that which has just passed, there’s so much to go over that the development of a little blog really has no claim to anyone’s attention.

But what is exciting is that this blog is no longer just a little blog at all.

I shouldn’t get ahead of myself. The blog has grown, massively, in relation to itself. As far as its relation to other book blogs goes, I have not the faintest idea of whether I’m doing well or badly here. Well, actually, I have the most recent version of the same survey that I mentioned when I posted one year ago. According to this, in some respects I’m doing quite well indeed.

One year ago, last January, I had 1078 views on the blog for that month, which worked out as 35 views a day. This month, still unfinished, sees me already at 2738 and with an average of 111 per day. This would put me in the top quartile by pageviews according to the survey. Last year, with the exception of a dip in February, every month was larger than the last. Things just built up, slowly but surely. As they should.

I shouldn’t worry about views, but I do enjoy thinking that people read my blog. Last year I had one follower – a friend. This year I have almost twenty, and almost all of them are unknown to me. The same is true of comments. I now have a few. Not a huge amount, but enough to be excited about. Engagement is what I’m after, really, with this blog. I want a place where people read and want to have their say.

Identity

But it is difficult, because the identity problems I mentioned last year are still present. What exactly is Mostly About Stories? I have long analyses, such as my pieces on Benjamin’s “The Storyteller” (still the most popular piece by far), short poems such as this one by Baratynsky, pieces focusing on a particular aspect of a novel like my thoughts on character in Nostromo, and more general pieces, like this one on Misotheism. It is perfectly reasonable for a blog to be varied in its contents. Just as Borges declared that Kafka created his own precursors, so too do I create my own readers. But that tension between a blog that’s a mess and a blog that’s held together by a unity – some stance, or perhaps my own character – is one that I’ve not resolved.

Even so, this year has been good for the blog’s “intellectual” development. I wrote some long pieces I had wanted to for a while, such as my thing on late Tolstoy, and some shorter more conversational pieces, like my thoughts on how many books to read. I wrote on books that I enjoyed, and on books that I studied, as usual. I do still struggle with knowing what to write. With a book that I’m studying, there’s always an element of teaching involved. I want my readers to learn something, and since the books can be obscure or not available in English, they perhaps do. But when it’s a book that everyone is familiar with, or a book that is long, I’m left flummoxed. Last year I read both War and Peace and Wuthering Heights and I had absolutely no idea what to say about them. Everything’s been said already.

This possibly reflects bad reading habits on my part. I’m not sure I quite “got” Wuthering Heights, though I did have stuff to say about it. But I think it also reflects an unwillingness to write shorter pieces. One thing that I’ve been somewhat adamant about in the past is that Mostly About Stories is for longer pieces, of around 1500 words or more. Yet sometimes I don’t have that much to say, or I want to focus on something small. I wanted to write about education in Wuthering Heights but didn’t know how to make it into a good enough size.

This is an idiotic stance to have. People’s attention drops off rapidly at about 1500 words anyway. Why force people to read more? Perhaps in the future I should aim for something like 1000-1500, but ensure the content is good and tight. Or perhaps I should just let each piece take its own length. All of these ideas have merit.

Reading

Last year, which I spent mostly in Russia with a little time in Cambridge at the end, was a good year for reading. John Williams’ Augustus and Butcher’s Crossing, Marilynne Robison’s Gilead, Joseph Roth’s Radetzky March and Job, Richard Holmes’ Footsteps – all of these are books that have left their mark on me, by authors who were mostly new to me. Then there was Sally Rooney, who is exciting even as I’m somewhat ambivalent towards her work.

This year promises more discoveries. My degree at Cambridge finishes in the summer, leaving me for the first time in a very long time completely free to read whatever I want. It is a great opportunity, as well as a great burden. I am confident I will find something to read. I already have a lot of things I want to. Much more befogged lies my future beyond this blog. Do I get a job, do I do a master’s degree, do I run away into the mountains and become a full-time writer? All of these are possible, as are some less pleasant variants. Only time will tell which fate has decided for me.

Anyway, thanks for reading. Come again.

Here’s a dreadful poem for your time:

I’d Rather (by Konstantin Balmont)

I wouldn't want to be a storm, 
There's too much thunder brewing there. 
I'd rather be the dew at dawn, 
Whose quiet peace knows no compare. 

I'd rather be a little flower, 
The kind whose bloom you barely see, 
The kind that spurns the thunder's power
To have its happiness, to be.