The War Poetry of Viktoria Amelina, and her language

Viktoria Amelina was a Ukrainian writer and war crimes investigator who died following a Russian missile attack upon the city of Kramatorsk in June 2023. More than once, I have read of Ukrainians referring to her as the person who could have written their great novel of national survival and resistance. (Her first novel was about the Maidan Revolution in 2014.) Even without such talk of future greatness, her life was cut off while she was very young – only thirty-seven. She ought to have had so much time, for whatever becoming was to be. Twelve other individuals died from that same attack, including four children. Who knows what futures they might have found or made for themselves also, if only the missiles had missed.

I found the small collection of Amelina’s poetry, Svidchennya / Testimonies, in a strange little bookstore in Amsterdam that specialises in Eastern European literature. Amelina only wrote a few poems before her death, and the collection is padded out with art and a lengthy chronology of her travels and prizes and a thoughtful afterward by the writer Sofia Chelyak. Really, I cannot complain about the size, for the daintiness of the book made it something I could carry around with me at work, snatching a few lines here and there. It also meant it was not intimidating, like a novel, for someone approaching it in the original Ukrainian.

“I don’t write poetry
I am a prose writer
It’s just that the reality of war
eats up punctuation
the coherence of a subject
the coherence
eats up
as if into our language
there fell a shell”

Amelina’s poems range from such broken, fragmented verse, to more structured poems where the line lengths are fuller, the punctuation orderly, and there is even a hint of a rhyme. All of them are responses to the invasion of her country. We can imagine something like the verse I quoted above being scribbled in a notebook as she sits in a jeep under fire, heading towards a frontline city to try to protect her people. Then there are the more reflective verses, where I picture her sitting in some sad anonymous hotel room (in New York, say, waiting for a prize or the chance to speak), thinking of all the people who are not there anymore, or who have lost so much:

“When Mira left her home, she took with her a bead from her curtains
When Tim left his city, he took a small stone from the street
When Yarka lost her garden, she took an apricot’s stone
When Vira left her home she took nothing
“I’ll be back soon,” she said,
And took not a thing at all”

The poem names these people, and goes on to list still more of these little things, these talismans and protectors against a sense of greater loss, that people take with them.

“And then your home will be in your pocket,
And there it will sleep

You should take your home from your pocket
In a safe place
When you are ready”

These lines are beautiful because they are humble. Often, narratives of war and trauma are about overcoming. Here, Amelina states clearly that it’s not for the poet to decide how the narrative looks – it’s for the person to decide for themselves. “When you are ready.” Take your time to mourn, to grieve, and only then start again.

The poem ends still more strikingly, for someone like me (or, I presume, you), reading this far distant from the direct horror of the war. The second-to-last verse runs like this: “And what would you take with you?” Literally, this is Amelina asking herself (the word “take” is in the feminine singular past), and she answers her question (these stories). But it’s just as much, by hanging there in a separate line, a question to ourselves as readers. Reading something like Amelina’s poetry requires us to put in these imaginative leaps. It’s a kind of moral obligation. Reading it and remaining detached would be like pressing your face against the barbed wire fence at the edge of a camp, viewing what’s inside as a spectacle instead an outrage to your fellow-feeling.

The importance of naming and individualisation is also highlighted in the poem “The Losses of the Ukrainian Army”. It begins by noting that these numbers are secret, but then goes on, as if straining against the injunction to keep silent, to start numbering them:

“There will be the neighbour, a rather eccentric one,
Who planted red flowers.
The friend who never told off anyone.
The translator, whom we loved so much.
That girl who annoyed everyone.
The artist whom everyone liked,
But, it seems, loved that girl.”

A comparison with this kind of writing which comes to my mind is the work of Anna Akhmatova, in her Requiem, written with her son imprisoned during the Great Terror but not published until long after: “and I pray not for myself alone, / but for all of them, who stood out there with me.” Such a concern for others is no different to Amelina’s involvement of ordinary people by telling their stories in her own poems. Likewise, when Akhmatova says “I would like to call everyone by name, / But the list is taken, and there’s nowhere else to help me find out” she shows the same concern for naming and victims as individuals.

Yet while Akhmatova’s poetry is inevitably far more accomplished as poetry, thanks to her huge experience and focused talent in that medium, Amelina’s poems, at least to me, are just as powerful – indeed, possibly even more so. The majority of the poems in Testimonies are short, but as we read them we have an awful sense that they are alive. The number of people who have had to leave their homes since Amelina’s passing has only increased with new incursions into Sumi and Kharkiv regions. The defence of southern Donetsk has collapsed, leaving only the north unoccupied. This year civilian casualties have increased significantly as the air attack has ramped up in scale. And of course, whenever Amelina lists those who have died, we have to add the line with her own name ourselves. It is impossible not to.

These days, too, the mood is worse than when Amelina was writing. Her poems come from a time when hope of a complete victory was higher. She has a poem from April 2022 that seems almost overly optimistic to me now: “The future – it’s what we ask ourselves about during a quiet moment: / Do you see it? / Can you see it?” Of course, the answer eventually is a kind of yes, a kind of affirmation. The Russians had already left Kyiv region in a “gesture of goodwill”, and by the end of the year they would have been driven back to the Dnepr in Kherson Oblast and lost most of the lands they occupied in Kharkiv Oblast. Yet with the exception of the Kursk incursion, which did not restore control over any Ukrainian land, subsequent Ukrainian offensives have been failures. Russia still has the upper hand on the front, the current US administration is not particularly friendly to Ukraine and fatigue is rising, both domestically and internationally.

The future, yes, I see it. But I do not look forward to it.

The poems are full of striking images, striking less because they are unexpected than because their truth is impossible to deny. Amelina was there from the beginning, volunteering, documenting what her own eyes witnessed and others passed on with words. There’s so much grief and loss, and so many childless women wandering homeless – it’s a mood like that conjured by Beckett at times, but retaining a more direct connection to real events in a way that heightens (for me) their impact. What I like about them is that they prove Adorno’s comment that “there can be no poetry after Auschwitz” except that which deals with it. A new barbarity has created a new (for Amelina) way of expression, and driven her from finely-tuned prose into this direct and damaged poetry.

Perhaps the main German-language poet of the Holocaust was Paul Celan, a writer whose highly-allusive, pared down, language makes him a real challenge for me to read and understand. (Incidentally, his birthplace is in today’s Ukraine.) Both he and Amelina reacted to the horrors they faced in a similar way – the destruction of punctuation, the shattering of extended lines. But one thing that differentiates them is this sense of hope: Amelina’s poetry occasionally retains narrative and therefore a sense that the chaos of life at war can still be brought into order somehow in a way that Celan’s, in my experience of him, does not.

All this is to say that these poems are not just recollections of war, but poetry in and of themselves, poetry that stands comparison with other writers, just as much as it brings sad pleasure on its own.

I read Amelina in the original Ukrainian, which is my first time reading an extended work in that language. I have no formal learning in it, aside from reading a few chapters of a “Colloquial Ukrainian” textbook to note the key grammar endings where they differ from Russian; all I do is speak that other language fluently. I had no particular intention of learning Ukrainian either. When the full-scale invasion began I subscribed to various Ukrainian news channels on Telegram so I could keep up with their perspective, and after a few months a number of them gradually switched language from Russian to Ukrainian. I was annoyed (as were many of their readers), but kept reading. Somehow, gradually, I stopped merely reading and began understanding too. The written languages are very similar in practice, so it was not hard. A comparison would be reading Dutch if you speak German and English. Even without knowing Dutch, you can understand much of what is written. As if by magic. Listening, however, is another story.

As a result of this, however, there’s something uncomfortable about my Ukrainian. A little bit like how the war effected Amelina’s poetry, it’s shaped my understanding of her country’s language. To give an example, I knew the word for “rape” in Ukrainian when I saw it here, but had to google the word for “flower”. I probably know, at this point, more ways of saying “to die” in Ukrainian, than I do in German, the language of the country where I actually live. I’ve come to recognise that Ukrainian is a beautiful language, but all the words I know in it are words of violence and horror.

But there’s another source of discomfort, too: the sheer ease of the language is disturbing. Coming from the “language of the occupier”, it’s like I’m not even learning Ukrainian as itself, but myself colonising it. Every time I come across a “new” word and it’s immediately guessable because it’s a word I know in Russian with a different prefix or using an “і” instead of an “и”, I feel like I’m cheating. Though I do try to view it the other way – that every Ukrainian word that I have to look up is the language proudly asserting its difference – it doesn’t quite wash away the distaste entirely, perhaps because the number of shared words seems so high.

Taras Schevchenko, Ukraine’s national poet (though he also wrote a large number of prose works in Russian, and a few poems), while imprisoned in what is today Kazakhstan, had a similar kind of problem. He found that his Ukrainian was beginning to collapse from being so long away from a Ukrainian-language community. He was making mistakes, for example by using Russian prefixes on his verbs instead of Ukrainian ones. All languages stand in continuity with every other, but Ukrainian and Russian are so close that the former is in practice forced to constantly be on watch for the words of the latter seeping in where they are not supposed to be. While reading Testimonies I sometimes found myself searching for words which in the end I could only find in Russian dictionaries.

All this is to say that, reading Amelina as a Russian speaker, you also have the shock of a language asserting itself:

“And this is also not poetry
Just the truth
Written in a column
Without punctuation
In Ukrainian
(That’s important)
To gather money for the AFU
And for my sister”

I am glad I read these poems, that I heard Amelina’s voice and was able to translate a few snippets of it here. (Out of copyright considerations I did not do more, but I’ve written to the rightsholder to ask if I can do the rest of the poems mentioned and will make a separate post if they agree). Many Ukrainian cultural figures like to tell us to stop reading Russians and start reading Ukrainians, but the fact remains that Ukrainian has few translators, even for authors as canonical in their tradition as Schevchenko, Ivan Franko, or Lesya Ukrainka. While I have my misgivings with a considerable amount of what these contemporary cultural figures say on this and other topics, the idea that we should all hear about Ukraine from its own people is something that there can be no reasonable argument against.

That is why I’m grateful to have the opportunity to share Amelina’s voice with the readers of this blog, as a small contribution to that end.

The original poems and others can be read on these pages:

“Жінко, він ще до тебе повернеться, твій Азов”: добірка поезій Вікторії Амеліної

“Наче у мову влучив снаряд”: добірка віршів Вікторії Амеліної про війну

Here you can read three of her poems, professionally translated:

Three poems | London Ukrainian Review


	


	





	

		
		
Widowhood and Its Narratives – Colm Tóibín’s Nora Webster
	


	
	
	

		

Widowhood is a word with its own well-known narratives. The shock of grief sets us up for a story of overcoming that grief. The loss of, in traditional societies and marriages, the guidance and expertise of the husband – who may, for example, have been entirely responsible for his wife’s finances – prepares us for a tale of growth into now-vacant spaces. Should the husband have been bad or later become recognised as such, we can have a story less about overcoming grief and more about becoming the person that the late partner never allowed one to be. Perhaps there might even be a new man – or woman – as confirmation of one’s new life instead of a grief-stricken stasis.





I mention these narratives not to say how the Irish writer Colm Tóibín subverts or ignores them in his novel of 2014 Nora Webster, for he largely does not. After the early death of her husband Maurice in late-sixties Ireland, Nora is visited daily by townsfolk who want to tell her how sorry they are. She grieves, and by the end of the book has largely overcome that grief. She grows a little, and not just into financial responsibility. Maurice does not turn out to be a bastard, but the life that Nora ends up leading does differ from the one they had and might have come to have had in several ways. Tóibín’s prose is every bit as considered and thoughtful as the gentle movements of his story. Conventional, predictable, a critic might say.





I am not sure, setting out on this post, how far I am one of those. Asking a book to be other than it is, is normally just a reflection of one’s own prejudices. What is true is that Nora Webster lives and dies by its details, which is unsurprising given Tóibín’s love of Henry James. It is the more nuanced growth that a reader can chart from such details that really makes the book much more interesting compared to the headline story of a woman getting over the death of her husband. How does she grow, whether this growth is entirely positive or not, and so on.





Maurice Webster took his time dying. During that time his wife nursed him, leaving their four children – Fiona and Aine, Donal and Conor – with relatives or studying elsewhere. For the prioritisation of her husband there’s the faintest suggestion of a reproach from the aunt who had taken in the two boys – “they stayed here. And it was silent. And they thought you might come and you never did.” Nora did not return calls, nor did she visit, and at the start of the book she gives herself another cause for guilt – she rashly sells the family’s holiday home to the first enquirer, even though it held wonderful memories for her children. Soon one more guilt is added – the reminder of a cruelty to a colleague some twenty-five years ago. Nora is not perfect by any means.





Besides guilt, another emotion Nora contends with is shame. One of her children has a stammer (and indeed, it stems from her abandonment during the period she nursed her husband) that she never gets round to organising a speech therapist for. Then there’s the matter of money, or rather her lack of it, which only partly explains why she sells the holiday house and does not organise the speech therapist. She has to accept an offer of employment with a local business she once worked for when still a teenager, for example, and discovers that many people she knows have done better for themselves than she has. “Nora had never heard her sister say the word “fabulously” before.” Her other sister also gets engaged without ever introducing her fiancé to Nora. Other challenges include the memory of a difficult mother, who never encouraged her to develop her musical talents.





Over the course of the book Nora does manage to address some of these emotions, but in many cases her success is limited. Her relationship to her children remains poor and distant throughout. It is his aunt who builds a darkroom for budding photographer Donal, not his mother, to whom he barely even shows his pictures. While relatives encourage (and fund) Donal to study at boarding school or Aine to go for a university in Dublin, Nora does the opposite, trying to cling on to these people without any result except furthering their mutual misunderstandings. It’s a curious marker of the novel’s structure that at the novel’s end she’s left alone with her youngest son, so that even though she has reached a kind of triumph in moving on from Maurice’s death, she has ended up in a situation is approaching desolate.





Still, in any case she has gained independence. Through music, through clothes, through haircuts and hair dyes, Nora finds a new way of representing herself. If early on in the novel her independence consisted of consciously choosing not to help with the dishes while being a guest at her sister’s home, thus going against how she had been taught to behave, later on she shows her personality through buying a record player, learning to sing, and buying some dresses. From a kind of negative freedom – a refusal – she moves to a private, affirmative one, even if it is one that is dependent upon her material conditions improving. (One of the ways time is marked in Nora Webster is the occasional comment that a recent budget has improved the allowance granted by the state to widows like herself.)





Finally, Nora even eventually turns that independence into an assertiveness. When one of her sons is moved down in class, unfairly in her view, she writes to each of the teachers declaring she will picket the school until the change is reversed. It certainly is independence, but whether it is maturity is another matter. This harms her daughter’s prospects of getting a teaching job and reveals a real thoughtless selfishness about her. When one of the teachers asks her to consider the other parents and children she simply says “I have no interest in the other parents”. She also never truly tries to understand why her son was moved down to begin with.





Maturity is important because one of the threads I most enjoyed in Nora Webster was the treatment of politics in the novel and its relationship to Nora’s changing perspective. Within the novel Nora grows up politically. Her husband was a significant figure within local politics with the Fianna Fáil party, but Nora herself lived in his shadow – I had the impression she hardly would have allowed herself to utter a thought contradicting his, even though the novel makes clear that on church matters she was more progressive than he, for example.





Politics, for a woman at home in a happy enough marriage, can sometimes arrive dulled. For a widow forced to take up work, it’s harder to avoid. Nora’s interest in her widow’s pension makes her aware of the finance minister responsible for her. Her work brings her into contact with the Haves, in the form of the Gibney family, and the Have-Nots, in the form of their workers. By working in the office of the Gibney daughter, Elizabeth, and through an acquaintance with her mother (who married into the family from a background closer to Nora’s), Nora’s position seems to be one aligned with an unassuming, unaware privilege.





Instead, however, Nora comes to shift towards the workers instead. Politics in Nora Webster is “elsewhere” but still available for those with eyes to see. In plain language: it’s on the telly. Just as in Marilynne Robinson’s Home, where the Civil Rights period comes to small town Iowa through a new television, in Nora Webster the early stages of The Troubles come to her through her own. But who notices besides her? At work it is only a lorry driver who responds to the violence of the British in Northern Ireland in an appropriate manner – “The baton charge on Saturday was serious. They were marching for civil rights. They were on their own streets. I am telling you now that is a disgrace”. Nobody else even seems to notice it.





Ultimately, Nora even joins the workers of the Gibneys’ business as they have a meeting to unionise. For Nora, this is an important milestone in her growing independence – “it was the idea that she had made a decision for herself, the idea that she had asked no one’s advice.” But what is interesting is that the narrative reflects a growing unease on Nora’s part. She’s shocked by how negatively the workers speak about the owners, and how positively about a colleague that Nora had not got on well with. Though Nora does end up joining the union, this long central chapter does not end there, but shows the reaction of the Gibneys when they find their employees have suddenly decided to unionise. While Elizabeth reports humorously that one of the brothers is busy complaining about the “Bolsheviks”, the narrative focus briefly lingers upon the head of the family, who “doesn’t want to see the place ever again. He has known some of the staff for forty years and some of them have been with the company even longer. They all stabbed him in the back.”





Industrial action is plenty more complicated than Tóibín can depict it here, but what’s important is Nora’s perspective. She sees the blindness of both the workers and of the owners, which gives her a kind of privileged position of maturity from which she could defuse any tension. I think this sense of clarity could have been explored much more in the book, for it is an area where Tóibín could really have emphasised Nora’s growth without simply falling back into these traditional narratives of overcoming grief or choosing an independent life outside of the memory of one’s husband. Sadly, this local politics is not pursued much further, and as for the country-level topics, Nora’s last word – where she declares that she would get a gun in her house if any of her children were shot at a march – rather suggests that the moral maturity I’ve spoken of is ultimately an illusion.





I think this is the most significant problem with the novel. Nora Webster is the story of a normal woman, quiet, self-effacing, in a time of relative unfreedom. Her opportunities are limited and perhaps we are supposed to praise her for whatever she does choose to do. But this crushing normality – her failures with her family, her mistakes – means that there is little in particular to like or be interested in about her. The opportunities for narratives that are more complex than just overcoming grief – through religion, through organised labour and a new perspective – are hinted at but ultimately never explored. Nora’s difficulties with her family are never resolved. She grows, in the sense of making friends and doing things, but not in the sense of moral growth or resolving deeper problems. We should be happy for her, but that doesn’t mean we should be happy to be with her.





In a certain sense, this novel is too long for what is ultimately just that standard narrative I named at the blog post’s start. It has that Chekhovian atmosphere of quiet failure about it, emphasised by that final image of Nora alone with her youngest son, in an emptied nest that is as much her own responsibility as that of her husband’s cancer. Too long in such a world is painful, rather than edifying. There were some very good moments – the final chapter is haunting (literally) and superb – but all this is not enough to unflatten for me what is ultimately a rather smooth book. I’m pained to write this since the whole reason I read Nora Webster was because, during a period of poor utilization at work, I watched quite a lot of Tóibín’s interviews and thought he was a lovely and very interesting fellow. I’m sure he is.





Temperamentally, however, I just didn’t like his book. Alas.

	


	





	

		
		
The Devil, Perhaps – James Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner
	


	
	
	

		

When I was a young teen, I attempted to make an agreement with God, which has given me a low hum of anxiety ever since. This is for the simple reason that I broke it, first in spirit and then eventually in practice. Now, I have no evidence that God did indeed agree to any deal, nor that He would exact the punishment I determined for myself for the breach. (Nor even that He exists to begin with.) Regardless, one consequence of the above is that since then my own innate sense of guilt has been bolstered by the feeling that I am well and truly metaphysically screwed, and that there may be no way out of the trap I both laid myself, and myself fell into, like an overconfident Mephistopheles. Bother though these feelings be, from them I do at least have an enhanced appreciation for tales involving the Faust myth and the idea of a soul eternally sold for earthly powers.





It is a long time since I’ve read such an interesting take on the whole topic as James Hogg’s 1824 novel The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. The “justified sinner” of the title is a young man who is convinced that he is one of God’s elect, and thus removed from all moral rules – a position known as antinomianism. It’s in line with some interpretations of Calvinism / the Reformed Church, the faith popular in Scotland at the time. With such convictions, the central character begins a string of unreasonable murders while yet believing himself every bit God’s chosen son.





Based on this description, we might be tempted to dismiss the work as a bit of fun and nothing more. Arguing against a position few of us hold from an unpopular faith, its relevance to us today can only be so great. Even if we extend the central idea concerning morality to bring into play other contexts where we might declare ourselves above its rules, often without being aware of it, such as in the case of radical politics, it still does not seem something meriting a whole novel.





Why then does Hogg succeed? He succeeds because his work is much more complicated than this simple description suggests. A Justified Sinner has a fascinating split structure, with the same tale told twice from different perspectives, a blurring of fact and fiction, and a curious interplay of brazen obviousness and paralysing ambiguity. More than just an argument against extremism, it emerges as a work soaked in the anxieties of an age where the promised clarity of the Enlightenment was being challenged by the ambiguities of experience as people actually lived it.





The Story





The story goes something like this. The Laird of Dalcastle, George Colwan, inherits the family seat in Scotland in 1687. He marries a young woman of strong Calvinist convictions, who spends a single night with him before being so disgusted that she sets herself up in a different part of the estate, with only her friend, the priest Robert Wringham, for company. She gives birth to two sons, one certainly George’s and who takes his name, and one of more uncertain parentage, who is banished alongside her to live with Wringham, and takes the name Robert after him. Once older, the boys come into contact with one another, and in mysterious circumstances, George is murdered. His father dies of heartbreak, and Robert, born in wedlock and hence legitimate, takes over. Some time later, one of the elder George’s former lovers discovers young Robert and an accomplice to have been responsible for the murders and ties the new Laird up, only for him to flee just as the law is making its way to Dalcastle.





Anti-Antinomianism, then and now





The view of Christianity advanced by John Calvin, in Scotland and elsewhere, also known as Reformed Christianity, is easy for outsiders to criticise. It considers humans inherently sinful and that ascension to heaven is available to only a certain few, the “elect”. Importantly, however, election itself has nothing to do with moral merit or good works. It’s a choice God made at the beginning of time, so to speak, and you can’t convince Him otherwise. That means that if you are outside of the elect, or feel you are, you are basically trapped in despair. This idea is illustrated with terrible power by Jack Boughton, in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead novels, who is convinced of his depravity and powerlessness to stop sinning. The result is that he continues to sin and loath himself, even though, as a human being, Robinson shows him to be as deserving of love as anyone. Perhaps Calvinism’s best popular defender these days is Robinson herself – her non-fiction explores Calvin’s legacy with greater depth and seriousness than I could. (Or indeed, than does Hogg here.)





For Hogg in his novel, the interest in Calvinism is in this idea of the elect and their relation to other obligations. If one is elected, then under certain interpretations of Calvinism, one can really do whatever one wants – because God chose you for election anyway, knowing this. The practical tension that the younger Robert faces is that he has “doubts, that, chosen as he knew he was from all eternity, still it might be possible for him to commit acts that would exclude him from the limits of the covenant.” Unfortunately, he has an accomplice or double or devil for a guide – a being calling itself Gil-Martin. As we learn in the second section of A Justified Sinner, this man is ready and waiting to convince Robert to kill whenever he starts with his worries again. If one is serving God, and one must be as one of the elect, then one can do anything one deems necessary because one can be sure it will be in God’s own service. Including, of course, murder.





It is tempting to laugh at such ideas, which are not the standard view in Calvinism, but we encounter people setting themselves outside of consistent moral rules almost every day. Religions are full of hypocrites, but so too are the irreligious, whose behaviour is conditioned by considerations of purity, something we see all too often in our decaying political discourse, especially on the internet. As soon as we learn someone is outside of our political group, we excuse ourselves of the responsibility of treating them as fully human and with the kindness and consideration we would someone of our own group. We dismiss them, denigrate them. Heaven forbid we should encounter them online, for we will then go through their entire post history to find something that gives them away as an enemy. In A Justified Sinner, there is a direct parallel in young Robert asking the older Robert about the spiritual qualities of a man he plans to murder to find the “gotcha” that proves it’s right to end his life.





The Novel’s Criticism of Antinomianism 





If the criticism of antinomianism were only the dead that dot the novel’s pages, A Justified Sinner would be preaching to the converted, as I imagine the majority of its readers have never seriously contemplated murdering anyone. Yet the novel does much more than that in arguments against extremism, which does much to extend its interest today. The first way it does this is its emphasis on human fallibility through the courts and the priests, because for all young Robert’s interest in heavenly justice, the novel he inhabits is much more concerned with justice of an earthly sort. Among other situations, young Robert and George end up in court after a fight, there’s an investigation into George’s murder, and the elder George’s lover must disclaim knowledge of some stolen goods to save another woman’s life.





Each of these situations puts a crack in our idea of justice as a kind of idol. In the first, “the sheriff was a Whig,” and we hear that though it is “well known how differently the people of the present day, in Scotland, view the cases of their own party-men, and those of opposite political principles”, the situation at the time of the narrative was still worse. In the second case, the wrong man, a friend of George’s, is convicted of his murder, with contrary evidence being discounted, while in the third case, the pursuit of legal truth has to be neglected for the pursuit of moral truth and the discovery of Robert’s true purposes.





In a similar way, the treatment of religious discourse is such that we come to doubt the reliability of those who represent it. The priest Robert is a nasty man, more ready to “doom all that were aliens from God to destruction” than to wish them well, for example. And whenever the younger Robert doubts his obligation to murder, Gil-Martin always has a counterargument using scripture to get him back on track. Jesus himself came “with a sword”, so why shouldn’t young Robert? Alas, the Bible, being a big book, provides plenty of opportunities for crafting a more violent set of obligations upon Christians than we prefer to see these days.





One final point that is as obvious to me as it is impossible to consider for the younger Robert – how on earth does someone know they are one of the elect? In the younger Robert’s case, the only evidence is that his own probable father declares he is. But how can the priest be sure? We need not doubt the idea of election or the religious truth of Calvinism to doubt that it is practically possible to establish who is elected, and who is not. If we can’t trust authorities we have to trust our own consciences. This seems to be what A Justified Sinner is getting at, morally. Even young Robert, led astray by the devil, has one of those.





Narration and the Search for Truth





A Justified Sinner thus makes an argument against extremism first through its murders, then through its demonstration of the fallibility of scriptural interpretation and court justice. But where the book is most fascinating is at a still more fundamental level – the level of narration and structure themselves. This is because the entire book’s structure is itself an argument about the elusiveness of truth and hence an argument for moderation and carefulness.





A Justified Sinner is broken up into two main parts, with a final section tying them together. The first version of the story is “the editor’s narrative”, and details the version of the story that they could find from “history” and “tradition”. As a narrative, it covers the Story section earlier in this post. The narrator is largely a background presence, but his judgement against “the rage of fanaticism” of the events comes forth above all in his language. This is hard to miss – A Justified Sinner is at times anything but a subtle book. Young Robert is like a “demon”, a “devilish-looking youth” with a “malignant eye”. The narrator never says outright that either Robert or his familiar are devils, but they may as well do.





It’s not an ambiguous book, might be our conclusion from the first part of the work. But then the second section, the “Confessions”, begins, and things become a lot stranger. For here, the narrator is young Robert himself. He is convinced that he is guilty of no evil at all, and that what he did he did “in the faith of the promises, and justification by grace.” Through his condemnation of his brother (“ungodly and reprobate”) and father, and his black and white thinking, Robert’s narration provides a mirroring of the editor’s while relating many of the same events. Both, in their biases, cannot be true reflections of the world. By making the biases so obvious, it seems in fact that the text wants to make clear that neither is a true reflection.





The book does more than place two unambiguous texts against one another, for in Robert’s telling there’s also the problem of Gil-Martin. This creature, who has the ability to shapeshift, meets young Robert on the very morning when the priest has declared him one of the elect. The text allows a certain amount of uncertainty about who Gil-Martin really is, indeed whether he really exists at all beyond Robert’s mind: “I was a being incomprehensible to myself. Either I had a second self, who transacted business in my likeness, or else my body was at times possessed by a spirit over which it had no control, and of whose actions my own soul was wholly unconscious”.  





The overall result is that the narration is both real and unreal, both obvious and totally obfuscated at different moments. Robert is the subjectivity that becomes increasingly deranged, while the narrator is the attempt at objectivity that never quite works in spite of its best efforts. A Justified Sinner even contains a real letter from Hogg himself and features him as a minor character. It seems real, but it is so far from containing a simple truth that the only argument we can get from the text is that things will never be as certain as we want them to be. This, in turn, becomes an argument for moderation.





A Romantic Reaction





This line of method and argumentation also places A Justified Sinner within the context of other Romantic works. While the bulk of the novel is set in the early years of the 18th century and deals, indirectly, with a climate of significant religious tensions in Scotland at the time, its real thematic interests are Romantic. Specifically, they are anti-Enlightenment.





A Justified Sinner shares with writers like the German E.T.A. Hoffmann an engagement with the strangeness of perception. In Hoffmann’s Sandmann, a work full of looking-glasses and different perspectives – in this case, an epistolary section and a more impersonal narrative section – there is also a man who goes mad and acts violently out of a personal conviction. The anxiety as a whole likely leads back to a mixture of Kant and the Terror in France, where, in the latter case, the idea that all could be made rational led only to the guillotine. In A Justified Sinner, we have the sensible young George, who tries to reason with his brother and make peace with him, pitted against the thoroughly irrational Robert.





There are dark forces in the subconscious, and in the world itself. This was one key Romantic idea, as was the idea of the sublimity of subjective vision of the sort that Robert’s attitude embodies. In A Justified Sinner, the forces of unreason are stronger – first because Robert kills George, and then because he is driven mad himself. (More mad than mere murder). “Unreason”, though, has perhaps more negativity than what we really see here. What the novel suggests is just that there are forces beyond reason at play in the world, for good and for ill. The former is not too obvious unless we consider the work as a whole. In the final section, we return to the editor’s narrative to hear how he came across Robert’s Confessions. These were, we learn, miraculously preserved alongside his body in the grave of his eventual suicide.





In other words, God has intervened to bring us the anti-extremist message of this work. There’s a further irony, a further mystery. If God did do this, then perhaps the younger Robert was right all along – his life was serving God in an indirect way, because through A Justified Sinner we receive a text that reminds us of our obligations to follow His commandments. Whether this is the right interpretation, we shall never know – as with the rest of the book, it’s shrouded in the fog of mystery.





Conclusion





It’s by no means a perfect work, is Hogg’s. The language and characterisation, in particular, is at times so poor that I myself could have written it. (I learned since that Hogg had a thing against editing his works owing to a belief that he was a genius – I have taken this to heart as a warning). But the ideas here, the innovations of structure and narrative, make this a fine work to study, all the same. Plus, as a Scot myself who has barely read a thing by his fellow countrymen, it was a good place to start. Any other recommendations beyond Burns are welcome in the comments.