Mostly About Stories

A Russian Woman’s Lot – Karolina Pavlova’s A Double Life

Ask any Russian who their great 19th century women writers were and you’ll get little except confused looks. After discussing it with several Russian friends we decided to discount Nadezhda Teffi and Zinaida Gippius, both of whom really flourished in the early 20^th century, leaving us with nobody at all. Russia had no George Sand, no Jane Austen, no Annette von Droste-Hülshoff. However, with the republication of Barbara Heldt’s translation of Karolina Pavlova’s A Double Life, alongside a new afterward by Daniel Green, the scene is set for Columbia University Press’s Russian Library to finally tell the Russians once and for all what they were unable to work out for themselves – that they had a great writer after all, and her name was Karolina Pavlova. A Double Life, her novel of 1848, is apparently her masterpiece.

When it appeared on my reading list, I was sceptical, to say the least. A Double Life is mentioned nowhere; there is no Russian edition published later than the days of the Soviet Union; it is impossible to buy it within Russia. But now that I’ve read it, I’m coming round. Pavlova is not a great writer of fiction, however much we might nobly wish that she were. (I’ve not read her poetry so can’t judge it). But nor is she talentless, shoehorned into my upcoming exams solely on the basis of her sex. A Double Life is an interesting book, it is an hilarious and tragic book, and most importantly it’s a valuable, eye-opening book. It may not stack up to Tolstoy, or Dostoevsky, or Gogol, but we shouldn’t hold that against Pavlova. Few of us, whatever our background or sex, can do that.

A painting of Karolina Pavlova, author of A Double Life. — Karolina Pavlova, author of poetry and the novel A Double Life, as painted by V. F. Binemann

What follows is a summary of the plot of A Double Life, an overview of its main themes, and finally a brief look at Pavlova’s life.

A Double Life – Plot Summary

Our heroine is Cecily von Lindenborn, an 18-year-old girl who has only just entered society. Her life’s goal, as it was for most young women in those days, is to get herself a good husband. The man she’s settled on is the alluring and rich Prince Viktor. Cecily has been trained her whole life long to live and succeed within high society’s bounds, with the result that she cannot commit or conceive even a single “peccadillo”. She’s about as interesting as we all were at that age, which is to say that she scarcely has a personality at all. This may perhaps be jointly blamed on her upbringing and on her environment. Her closest friend, Olga, is even more dull than she is.

Although Cecily thinks she’s in charge of her fate, she is much mistaken. She is unwittingly a pawn in a much greater game, played between the adults of A Double Life – the men and the mothers – to ensure suitable matches are made. And Olga’s own mother, Madame Valitskaya, has her own plans in mind involving the prince. Soon enough, Cecily will learn just how little control she really has.

A Double Life is by the standards of the 19^th century Russian novel, awfully short. There are ten chapters, in all, and their structure is the same throughout – a daytime, waking scene, focusing on the banalities of aristocratic life, is then followed by an introspective bedroom scene where our heroine is alone, and then finally a few pages of poetry as she falls asleep. This contrast between day and night as two different “lives” is suggested both by the title and by the epigraph from Byron at the beginning of A Double Life.

Conversation and Propriety

A Double Life is built on conversation. So much is obvious from the novel’s very first words, “But are they rich?” But this is not the speech of Dostoevsky or Tolstoy, that tortured desperate working out of questions like “what must I do?” and “how must I live?” In A Double Life there is not one moment where the dialogue serves to answer great questions. It’s purpose is the opposite – to suppress questioning, to control the tone, and to pass the time. People are incessantly talking, and Pavlova skilfully weaves her narration through different groups, giving us snatches at a time, which further lessen any chance of meaningful development of spoken ideas. What I noticed straight away was just how much blank space there was on the page. Pavlova’s characters are always uttering a few remarks, without expansion. They are simply filling the air.

“But are they rich?” Money, of course, is the most important thing for a young man or woman and the thing at the forefront of their minds. But not just money. People are obsessed with their appearance too. When mourning a dead woman, all Prince Viktor has to say is “She was not at all bad looking.” A Double Life’s world is a world in which people have forgotten how to express true feelings. Or rather, one where society forbids them too. When trying to assess Cecily as a match, one man says “I’ve never discussed anything with her except the weather and dances”. Later on, the narrator writes “How and by what means may one in an aristocratic drawing room distinguish the vulgar man from the brilliantly intelligent one? Surely only by the fact that the former usually seems more clever”. There is no way even to judge successfully.

The Language of A Double Life

Even if we cannot rely on people’s conversation as a source of truth, that doesn’t mean the spoken language of A Double Life is pointless. After all, it does show character. In addition to the vapidity of mourning, above, I was shocked and amused (a common feeling, reading this book), by the words of Dmitri, Prince Viktor’s competitor, when he tries to enlist the help of Olga’s mother: “I love Cecily Alexandrovna. I fell in love with her long ago”. This is a lie – he has “loved” her all of five pages. Vera Vladimirovna loses her daughter’s hand in an extremely distressing sequence in which Prince Viktor’s mother talks of a wonderful suitor, all without mentioning once that she is representing Dmitri and not Viktor himself. But Vera Vladimirovna cannot ask for clarification, because that would be beyond what is proper. Language is much more a straightjacket than a liberation here.

Outside of the dialogue, Pavlova’s language serves its purpose well – demonstrating the sheer soullessness of the world her characters inhabit. The word “nice”, is a common giveaway. For example, concerning Cecily’s talents she writes: “She sang very nicely and sketched very nicely as well”. Another word is “luxurious”, showing the materialism of the characters. This wonderful description of a summer residence demonstrates unequivocally how the aristocrats wish to be seen: “surrounding the luxurious cottage was a luxurious garden, its greenery always an excellent, a choice, or one might say an aristocratic greenery”. I also liked the comment that “nature made herself unnatural” – just as the characters must lose their nature to survive in society, so too must the landscape itself. Finally, Pavlova is quite like Austen in that she draws a distinction between native and foreign words. Frenchisms like “Comme il faut” all indicate society’s unnaturalness.

Boredom and Loneliness

If you are an aristocratic girl of 18 at the height of the Russian Empire, your options for enjoyment are rather limited. Unlike your male acquaintances you are unable to murder pawnbrokers, philosophise, or even go on a spree. The result is that everyone, knowingly or unknowingly, is awfully bored. As in Austen’s Emma, characters scheme and gossip away to pass the time. Even the talents they have, like Cecily’s singing, are limited in that they are only means to an end – securing an attractive husband. We are also made keenly aware of the lack of movement options for the women of A Double Life. Spatially, they are restricted to the drawing room and the bedroom. When Cecily finds a moment’s freedom on a horse, she is immediately stopped for going too fast – even the outdoors is no escape.

Cecily’s boredom is compounded by those around her. Olga, ostensibly her best friend, is amusingly banal. After a poetry reading Cecily turns to her:

“How fine that was,” said Cecily into Olga’s ear.
“Very good,” Olga replied, looking intently at someone through her lorgnette.

This is not the only example of a time where Olga immediately lowers the tone, preventing Cecily from expressing higher thoughts by depriving her of an interlocutor. At other times, Olga is simply a mouthpiece for her mother, manipulating Cecily so that she can secure the Prince for herself. And then class gets in the way of any other options. When Cecily is alone in her room with her old nanny, we are told that it means “in other words, completely alone”. With nobody to talk to it is no surprise that she is ultimately an undeveloped, boring, person.

Another representation of Pavlova. The next time you read a Russian novel in the 19th century, pay attention to the women. Male novelists rarely give them much character at all, leaving them either pure and spotless or irredeemable. Pavlova’s women may not be better, but they do provide a counterbalance to the women we might in the men’s works.

Freedom’s Enemies – Mothers…

We may blame “society” for the restrictions on Cecily’s freedom, and certainly there are many unspoken rules that bind her. But there are also people who are to blame – mothers, and men. A Double Life sees Cecily’s problems not only as stemming from her environment, but also very much from her upbringing. At the heart of the novel is the question of why mothers, whose experience of the world cannot have been any better than that of their daughters, continue to bring them up just as they themselves were brought up.

“All these educators have been young once, and had been brought up in the same way! Were they really so satisfied with their own lives and with themselves that they are happy to renew the experience with their children?”

Cecily’s mother leaves her with “her mind in a corset”. Vera Vladimirovna fears “any development of imagination and inspiration, those eternal enemies of propriety”, so much that even Cecily’s dreams are controlled by her: “instead of dreaming of the Marquis Poza, of Egmont, of Lara and the like, [Cecily] could only dream of a splendid ball, a new gown, and the outdoor fete on the first of May.” At no point do mother and daughter seriously talk. Cecily has no emotional support anywhere. I thought this line, from the first chapter, was particularly telling: “A child needs an English nurse more than a mother”. That is to say, that propriety and outward appearance is considered more important than actually nurturing the child. Instead, Vera Vladimirovna sees her role as guiding Cecily to the right husband, with lines like this: “a virtuous wife can completely reform a flighty husband”. Hardly emotional support.

…And Men

Next to the mothers, the men are not nearly so bad. However, I don’t wish to absolve us of guilt. The two main male characters are Dmitri and Prince Viktor, and both of them are equally faulty. Dmitri is a gambler, a self-centred lout. He only comes to “love” Cecily when he hears she might get a big inheritance. When he imagines her after that he thinks she is someone “who could make a husband very happy”. He does not once think of her own happiness. Dmitri is also a master of using society’s rules to his benefit. After Cecily’s brief burst of freedom galloping on horseback everyone wants to keep a watchful eye on her. Dmitri comes up and says “let me ride beside you. The last time you frightened me”. A horrible, stomach churning moment, precisely because she cannot say no.

Prince Viktor is not so bad. He breaks the rules more often, but Vera Vladimirovna is willing to make an exception for him because he’s rich. Around him Olga’s mother schemes so that he will marry Olga, however at the end of A Double Life he declares that he is going to go to Paris. It is a significant point. However talented the machinations of the mothers may be, the men of the novel still have the ultimate freedom because it is they who make the proposals. If Prince Viktor is disappointed that he’s missed out on Cecily, then he can go to Paris if he wants. As a man, nobody controls him.

The Poet and The Double Life

But there is one man in A Double Life who is controlled by others, just as the women are. In the third chapter there is a poetry recital by a young poet, who performs his rendition of Schiller’s “The Bell”. Immediately he comes under attack by one of the audience members. “We demand action,” he says. “Poetry should be useful; it should hold vice up to shame or set a crown on virtue”. The poet, surrounded by important aristocrats, is unable to defend himself. Like the women, his environment determines his identity even as his heart wishes to rebel in the name of higher feelings. Cecily is not a poet, but during A Double Life she begins moving down a path towards becoming one. Though she has been made to understand that being a woman poet is “the most pitiable, abnormal condition”, every night she hears poetry in her dreams.

This is the voice of her muse, at least I take it to be so. It comes as a warning, trying to warn Cecily before it’s too late both that society is not all there is to life, and that her “love”, when it comes, is not all it seems to be. The poems are translated without rhyme, focusing on the images. They were quite repetitive, filled with the usual chains and repressive bits and pieces. The speaker in them is a “he”, which adds a nice sense of reflection. In her poetic night-time double life Dmitri has another rival, but Cecily is not able to see that man’s worth until it is too late. The tone becomes one of resignation. “You will understand earthly reality / With a maturing soul: / You will buy a dear blessing / At a dear price.” Cecily will suffer, but she will learn.

At the end of A Double Life Cecily speaks for the first time a snippet from one of her poems. Olga calls it nonsense, and Cecily for her part refuses to claim it, saying she simply heard it somewhere. But that night there’s a change in the poems, and for the first time the voice is in the first person. Speaking of her poetry, it says: “Long had it lived mid worldly noise, / Free and bright within me”. Even as Cecily’s external world has suddenly grown constricted her internal world has reached a new level of freedom. For the narrator, who seems like an older, wiser woman, A Double Life’s plot is marked with a melancholy inevitability. “What maidenly soul does not understand the charm of these slight transgressions?” The narrator asks of Cecily’s first deluded moments in love.

For Cecily is only one of many women who were trapped within their society, and near the end of A Double Life she realises this in a moment of revelation.“And she felt and knew that everything going on now had definitely already happened to her once, that this moment was a repetition of something in her past and that she had already lived through it once before”. Cecily is in that moment all women, and it is here that A Double Life stakes its claim on universality. Just as Pavlova wrote a book to give knowledge of aristocratic women’s plight to the world, so too, do we feel, one day will Cecily. But before that time much suffering awaits. A Double Life marks the end of one of Cecily’s lives, but it also marks the birth of another. But that life is for another story, and Pavlova never wrote it – she lived it.

Karolina Pavlova and Her Critics

Reading about Karolina Pavlova’s life is not fun. The Introduction and Afterward give ample evidence to support the view that Pavlova was treated horrendously by the men of the world she inhabited. And, indeed, by the women too. In spite of her impeccable literary credentials – she rubbed shoulders with all of the major Russian writers of the period, including Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, and others – she found herself insulted by many of the critics of the day, and constantly demeaned. As a man, much of this makes for uncomfortable reading. An anonymous critic writes of his experience reading: “I suddenly had my doubts and looked again at the book’s title page to make certain – “did I not make a mistake? – was it really written by a woman? I had somehow thought that only men could be so sharp”. Reading this I wanted both to laugh and cry.

An old photograph of Adam Mickiewicz, Polish national poet — Adam Mickiewicz, perhaps the most important Polish poet, was one of the many influential literary figures who got to know Pavlova well. But somehow, she never rose to be as successful as they. Who, or what, is to blame for this?

But for Pavlova, there were only tears. Born Jaenisch in Yaroslavl in 1807 to a German professor, she was forced, a few years after the publication of A Double Life, to flee Russia to Dresden, where she lived for four decades in poverty, cut off from her home. At every turn she made enemies, such as when she initiated (perfectly justified) criminal proceedings against her husband for wasting all of her inheritance on gambling. Her dedication to her poetry made her an outsider – as a woman she was supposed to be raising children. Only Aleksei Tolstoy, himself a minor poet, was of any real literary support in her later years. When she died in 1893 she was already forgotten, waiting for the Silver Age poets to rediscover her poetry, and then critics like Barbara Heldt to rediscover her prose.

Conclusion

To say that Pavlova lived in a hostile environment would be a horrible understatement. Everyone, everything, men and women alike, conspired to insult and humiliate her and denigrate her poetic calling. Though she attempted to be stoical, no amount of character will let you withstand such hostility forever. I cannot fault her character, and I was truly shocked at her treatment. But heroism in life alone does not make for a good book.

A Double Life is not a great novel, Russian or otherwise. It has a number of faults that are simply impossible to look past. Its characters are poorly drawn, both the men and the women; the heroine is boring; the poetry’s repetitive; and the arguments are rarely subtle. In spite of this, you should definitely read it. It’s short, and it’s fascinating to see the world of ballrooms from a different perspective, even if Pavlova has an axe to grind. Pavlova is no Jane Austen – she lacks the subtlety of her characterisation and irony. But she is by no means talentless. A Double Life is at its best when it’s comic and satirical, rather than when it attempts loftiness. I really did laugh out loud at several moments.

Many diamonds in the rough can slip through literary history unnoticed, but rarely do truly polished ones. Ultimately, A Double Life is just the former, not the latter. So read it, but keep your expectations tempered, and you’ll no doubt enjoy it a lot.

A Catholic novel: Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory – a Review

I am nominally a Catholic. Once a month as a boy my mother dragged me to a town hall a few villages away, and to a gathering of perhaps ten people a priest would do the honours. It was neither the glamorous service nor glittering golden church that most people associate with Catholicism. In the back room there was a table for table football, but as I was the only child there, I never had a chance to play. I remember little about the services themselves. All that I do remember was a feeling of unease when it came time to make my confession to the man behind the window who apparently had become God. I do not think I’ve made one since.

I remember being surprised at boarding school when I was told I was a Catholic. I’d had no idea. This meant that I had to go to Mass, rather than the normal Sunday services. And dutifully I went, at least at first. Later, I found someone to sign the attendance sheet for me and stayed in bed. I realise now that however nominal that upbringing seems to be, it’s not something I should take for granted. Once, almost everyone knew the major stories of the bible and bits and pieces from the gospels. This is certainly no longer the case – that common reference network is fading rapidly from collective memory.

A photograph of Graham Greene, author of The Power and the Glory — Graham Greene, our author. Famous for spy novels like Our Man in Havana, and more overtly Catholic novels like Brighton Rock.

The Power and the Glory is a novel by Graham Greene, a writer who was Catholic himself. It’s the second of his that I’ve read after Brighton Rock, which I read back at school. Greene didn’t like the appellation “Catholic Novelist”, but The Power and the Glory centres on a Catholic priest in Mexico and it’s easy to see where people might have got the idea from.

Introduction to the Plot

The Power and the Glory centres on an unnamed “Whisky Priest”, Greene’s own coinage for a priest who is rather poor at following the rules of his profession. He neglects his fish on Fridays, has a penchant for brandy, and has fathered a child. In the unnamed state of Mexico where the story is set, the governor has introduced a policy of extreme religious repression and priests are either forced to marry and surrender their profession or else face the firing line. We first meet the priest waiting for a boat that will take him away, but he is forced to abandon the plan when a child comes, informing him that their mother is dying. The priest grumblingly decides to go to help, even though he knows he will miss the boat. “I am meant to miss it”, he says to an Englishman he meets at the port.

Without the boat, the priest’s options are limited. He travels around the small state, trying both to perform his duty and to escape. He’s vacillates between the two options. Especially once the antagonist of The Power and the Glory, the lieutenant, introduces a system where hostages are taken from each village, who are then shot whenever it turns out that they did not give the priest up when he passed through, it becomes hard to justify his decision to put others at risk. But the priest, for all his failings of character, knows that it is his duty to stay. He thinks:

“When he was gone it would be as if God in all this space between the sea and the mountains ceased to exist. Wasn’t it his duty to stay, even if they despised him, even if they were murdered for his sake? Even if they were corrupted by his example?”

Suspense and Action

He stays, but with each day the challenge for him grows. At first villages welcome him, but by the time he reaches his old parish people have already turned cold. They receive him out of their own sense of duty, much more than from love. True to his talents elsewhere as a novelist of spies and action, Greene in The Power and Glory is able to write a story that has an excellent feeling of suspense and action throughout. I never knew what was going to happen next, but at the same time I constantly had the feeling that a net was closing in around our hero. Compared to many classics, The Power and the Glory is an exciting read as well as an interesting one.

A few times stand out, such as when the priest and a mestizo go together towards the priest’s home. The priest is certain the mestizo is only travelling with him to turn him in for sizeable monetary reward. But Greene keeps us guessing and unable to decide whether to believe the mestizo’s avowed Catholic faith or the priest’s own senses. Another time was when the police reached the priest’s parish just after he’d finished mass, leaving no time to flee. All of the townsfolk were lined up and asked to give away the priest, but their resolve holds and a hostage is taken instead.

A photo showing some Mexicans — The Power and the Glory is based on historical religious persecution in Mexico

The Lieutenant – an Enemy of the Faith

One thing I enjoyed about The Power and the Glory was the way Greene presents the lieutenant, the priest’s antagonist. Although he does introduce the hostage system, in other ways he and the priest are not so different. Both are driven by faith. But the lieutenant wants to destroy religious belief, so that people concentrate on the here and now. He wants to give people “the right to be happy in any way they chose”, but his methods ultimately end up restricting people.

All the same, he is himself a noble, virtuous man. He thinks it would be a triumph if he “could show [him]self superior on any point – whether of courage, truthfulness, justice”. He turns his hatred into a motivation for building up his character. Judging on that basis alone, the lieutenant is the better man. After a stint in prison the lieutenant even gives the (unrecognised) priest some money, forcing the latter to admit with astonishment “You’re a good man”. Unfortunately the ends the lieutenant aims for are undermined by the means he uses to try to reach them.

The Religious Mode – what makes The Power and the Glory a Catholic novel?

Every chapter in The Power and the Glory has a vulture somewhere in it. The great birds, hovering and waiting for us to die, are an obvious analogy for God, watching and waiting too. In The Power and the Glory we are presented with a world where God may well exist, and without bearing that in mind it is difficult to understand the priest’s actions. People die because of him – good people. He himself is no moral exemplar, so how can this be correct? Because he is a priest, and his duty is to help people to salvation of their souls, not their bodies. As the priest says, it doesn’t matter if he’s a coward – “I can put God into a man’s mouth just the same – and I can give him God’s pardon.” If we believe in the salvation of souls, we can accept the avoidable early deaths of bodies.

It is God who, the priest understands, is responsible for his continued survival and lucky escapes. “There was only one reason, surely, which would make Him refuse His peace – if there was any peace – that he could still be of us in saving a soul, his own or another’s”. In The Power and the Glory we are constantly faced with souls, hovering on the edge of damnation, including the priest’s own. However many people may die, so long as a few souls are saved, the sacrifice is worth it. It is a challenging idea for the unreligious, but without it it’s hard to see the priest as anyone other than a fool. I like that Greene focuses on the good of his characters. Images of faces and feet are all traditionally Christian and run through the whole book. They remind us that we’re all made in the image of Christ.

A Few Words on Style and Form

I’m not sure how much I’m a fan of Greene’s writing style. It’s very sparse, careful. The fact that he had a very methodical approach to writing is something you can feel. It gets the job done, no doubt, but I think it sometimes left emotions not as hard hitting as they ought to have been. And unlike Under the Volcano, another book I read recently which was set in Mexico, I didn’t really have much of a feel for the landscape of The Power and the Glory. There are moments of good imagery, though. For example, from the first chapter: “The vulture moved a little, like the black hand of a clock”.

Greene does make up for this with a good command of form – again, the evidence of careful planning and meticulousness. I liked the way that we are often seeing the priest from other eyes, showing how he changes externally as well as internally as the book progresses. I also liked the number of characters Greene includes. They were not all living and breathing, but they were all relatively fleshed out. The use of symbols and their development also made sense. What more can I say? Everything works as it needed to – the base that bears the story is sturdy enough.

Conclusion

The Power and the Glory is the first book by Graham Greene that I’ve read since I left school. It will not be my last. Although I’m not quite sure what I believe, it’s always important to see a different view of the world, and this is exactly what Greene provides in his novel. Whether the salvation of a single soul is worth more than the deaths of many, I’m not sure, but I’m glad someone is making a case for it. Too often it’s easy to forget the power and glory of the ideas that underpin religions. In The Power and the Glory Greene shows the dignity of faith, but beyond that he also reminds us of the dignity of everyone, whether atheist or faithful, child or adult. And whatever you believe, there’s always value in remembering that.

For more things on God, take a look at my post on rebellion against Him.

Musil’s Three Women – Grigia, The Lady from Portugal, and Tonka

There are some books which, when I take my notes from page to screen, seem more interesting and more enjoyable than they had been as I was reading them. Robert Musil’s Three Women is such a book. Three Women is interesting – I got awfully excited by the thought of all the essays I’ll be able to write next year on it – but it’s not exactly fun to read. Musil takes three different relationships and uses them to weave an intricate network of ideas and associations which provide an intellectual feast for anyone who hungers for one, built on workable plots.

This is, of course, progress for Musil, whose two stories Unions were also in my edition. These were written earlier, and as Frank Kermode writes of Three Women in the preface to my edition, “the difference from the earlier work could be expressed as a new willingness to find a place in his stories for straight narrative”, which is about as open as any serious literary critic could be about the fact that those two stories make no bloody sense whatsoever, however interesting they might be for someone who has got lost on the way to the philosophy section of the library.

Anyway, as I said at the top, now that I’ve extracted my notes, I can start to “appreciate” the stories. What follows is a teasing out of some of the various meanings I found.

A photo of Robert Musil — Robert Musil, author of *Three Women.* His most famous work is the unfinished *Man without Qualities*. However, it’s rather long and I’m not sure I like his writing enough to attempt it just yet.

Three Women and Robert Musil

There are three stories in Three Women, each of them centring on a different woman – “Grigia”, “The Lady from Portugal”, and “Tonka”. The last of these, “Tonka”, as about twice as long as the others, and is also broken up into chapters to make it easier to read. Robert Musil, their author, was an Austrian-German who had seem the Austro-Hungarian Empire collapse, but as Kermode makes clear, this is not the only collapse he witnessed. There is also the sense of “metaphysical collapse”, a sense that modern man (and everyone else) is losing his spiritual anchoring without replacing it with anything. In all of these stories the notion of “will” is of great importance, as is the feeling that looking at the world from only one angle, whether scientific or martial, can lead to our doom. Pretty typical Modernist stuff, to be fair, but Musil does it well.

Grigia

“Grigia” is the first story in Three Women and it takes its name from a peasant woman from Venetia. Homo, the main character, is left home alone by his wife and ailing son as they seek out treatment, so he decides to take up an offer from an old friend to go and attempt to reopen some gold mines in Venetia. Mines are a particularly German setting, taking us back at once to the Romantics. Novalis had studied mining, and Ludwig Tieck’s “The Rune Mountain” and E. T. A. Hofmann’s story “The Mines at Falun” both present classic renditions of the dangers of what lies buried beneath the ground. Of these three, I found “The Mines at Falun” to be the most relevant while I thought about “Grigia”.

In Musil’s story Homo, in an alien mountainous world, begins going “native”. As usual, we have to ask whether that nature has always been there. Homo has an “impression that behind the outward appearance of this district… there was hidden something that he yearningly awaited”; meanwhile, crystals from the mountain are compared to flowers. “Yearningly” and the connection with flowers (also present in Hofmann’s tale) speak to a kind of sexual desire that is hidden, not-fully-acknowledged, within Homo. When the gold starts to flow, Homo finds the attraction of power and wealth too, blotting out memories of his old life. Stars become like “thalers”, and in the villages “they poured out money among the people and held sway like gods”. Homo and his companions, the other mining directors, stop talking as time passes, instead adopting “an animal language”. Power takes away their civility and leaves them beasts.

The first page of Musil's Grigia, the first story in Three Women — The first edition of “Grigia”, the first story in *Three Women*. I quite liked “Grigia” but I wish Musil had focused more on straight narrative.

This power is a temporary state, of course, contingent upon the gold’s flow. “Grigia”, as do all the stories of Three Women, has at its core questions about identity. This is where Musil’s use of sex and eroticism comes in. The peasant women’s husbands all go to America in search of fortune there, and one day Homo hears a story about one who comes back. He goes to one woman, spends time with her until he runs out of money, and then he leaves to the next one. He has been in America and knows the husbands, letting him imitate them. The women do not object, perhaps do not even notice. They are simply glad of his return. Eventually the trickster is caught, but the story speaks to the idea that one can change one’s role at will. For Homo, far from home, the idea is an attractive one.

It is attractive because it absolves him of responsibility. For one going “native” the only possible danger, so long as one stays where one is, is the possibility of guilt. Thinking about everything as acting is much easier. When Homo starts having sex with the peasant women, the language reflects his feeling that everything is in a way unreal, even though in fact it’s a further indication of his moral decline. Of one, he thinks “her passion was so brilliantly and passionately acted”, with a “theatrical quality of it”. And from this a kind of solipsism emerges, the necessary continuation of his growing sense of power. He thinks the women are there for him, and comes to find everything on the mountains as an “enchanted world ordained for him alone”. When he gets close to the peasant woman Grigia, he thinks it will bring him spiritually closer to his wife.

Perhaps it does, but reality intervenes. A vengeful husband traps Homo and Grigia in a cave, but only Grigia has the willpower to escape. Homo, already having had his pleasure, stays where he is. At that moment the mining stops, a failure. To me the story ultimately suggests the dangers of delusions, the need to have a firm grip on things. The need for a kind of spiritual centre. And since Homo’s name isn’t a far cry from Homo Sapiens, perhaps Musil’s message may be meant for us all.

The Lady from Portugal

The second story of Three Women is “The Lady from Portugal”. Unlike the other two stories in Three Women this one is set in the past, in the Alps on the border with Italy during the time of the earlier Holy Roman Empire. Its central characters are the Herr von Ketten (Man of the Chains), a nobleman, and his wife, a Portuguese lady. As with the other stories, the focus here is on identity. The Herr von Ketten is part of a long lineage of warriors, and his entire identity is based on war. For one year of their lives his people court their wives in faraway lands, and for the rest they fight. The Herr von Ketten’s sworn enemies are the forces of the Bishop of Trent. However, the real tension here is between von Ketten and his wife. Can they ever know each other or get close?

The Lady from Portugal imagines, when she reaches the castle, that the Alpine landscape reflects her husband’s character. She hears a story about how no-one has ever seen beyond the mountains, because every time someone sees past one row of peaks, another lies in wait. It is the same with identity – we may think that we know a person, but there is always another layer to be discovered. The castle itself is not to her taste – she finds it hideous, rotting, but she decides to try to make it her own. Meanwhile, her husband has already abandoned her to go to war. Thus begins their period of separation.

They meet, of course, but rarely. When he returns, he leaves “more hastily than was necessary”, and they both end up laughing awkwardly. She tends to his wounds, performing her duty as wife, but for both of them it becomes a comic action. For von Ketten, she is something outside of war, and thus alien. He has no power over her – she is as if from “some other realm.” War, by contrast, is much easier. Instead of the woman’s complexity, “To command is a thing of clarity”. “The thrust of a spear under an iron collar that has slipped is as simple as pointing one’s finger at something and being able to say: This is. This.” The spear and his finger are connected – for von Ketten there’s scarcely a difference.

He enjoys war because it doesn’t require “that other thing” – women. In fighting, his entire life can be focused on one thing. And indeed, it almost seemed to me that the war von Ketten fights is a war against multiplicity, against women. It is key that the Bishop of Trent is described as wearing “womanish robes” – if von Ketten can destroy him, it’s like he can destroy the presence of women in his life. For the Lady there are also challenges. Her children, which have not seen the sea, do not seem like her children to her. When the two meet she’s almost thankful for the brevity of these meetings – “If he had remained longer, he would have had to be truly as he was.” Things are easier because they are acted, rather than felt.

Von Ketten cannot hide from his wife forever. When the Bishop of Trent dies naturally both sides make peace, leaving von Ketten without the cornerstone of his identity. On the way home he is stung by a fly and almost dies. He suffers fevers and a surgeon. This latter is already a challenge to his old world view – “How strange it was to let pain be inflicted on one and not defend oneself”, he thinks. He drifts between death and life but eventually decides to live, but he doesn’t fully recover. His head has shrunk and his cap no longer fits. He has literally lost a part of himself without war.

At home the Lady from Portugal has a guest – a friend from her homeland. For von Ketten what is unbearable is seeing what real closeness can actually look like. “Their souls seemed to be in harmony with each other”, and when he spies them in the garden “among the leaves the shadows all blurred into one”. He starts to second-guess the past, finding evidence for betrayal everywhere. But he is sick, and a soothsayer tells him he will be cured only when he’s “accomplish[ed] a task” – what task, she doesn’t say. Now, just as once she couldn’t understand him, he cannot understand her. “When he gazed into his wife’s eyes, they were like new-cut glass, and although what the surface showed him was his own reflection, he could not penetrate further” – once again, an image of layers.

One day a kitten appears. At first beloved by all, it later gets ill. All three nobles try to take care of it. Ultimately, they fail and send it away, but it comes back well. When it falls ill again they have it killed. Ketten now decides it is time to get rid of the Portuguese guest. But “he could not make the final decision that he had all his life found it so easy to make”. Something has changed, and killing is no longer in his nature. All the same, one night he climbs onto the castle’s rocks to try to catch his wife and guest together. As he does so, his strength returns. But the man has already vanished. His wife explains: “If God could become man, then He can also become a kitten”.

Through this experience of jealousy and care von Ketten moves on from war to a kind of love.

Tonka

“Tonka” is the last story of Three Women, and the longest. It tells the story of a relationship between a young man from the middle classes and a peasant girl, Tonka. As ever, we are made to think about notions of identity. Tonka is a girl who is like “a snowflake falling all alone in the midst of a summer’s day” – she is always out of place. Moreover, she is hard to pin down, always associated with liminality. For instance, her full name is the German “Antonie” but the shortened form comes from the Czech “Toninka”; in addition, her family is made of an aunt “who was actually her much older cousin” and a grandmother who is actually the grandmother’s sister.

The young man brings her into his household as a nurse for his own ailing grandmother. Tonka is not intelligent – she mostly just says “yes” or “no”. Her mind has an “opacity” to it because she cannot express herself. By contrast, the young man’s relatives are all talkers. They know that speech is “not a medium of thought, but a sort of capital, something they wore like jewellery to impress others”, even if their speech is empty. When the grandmother dies, Tonka doesn’t cry – she doesn’t understand the need to fake emotions. His mother berates the young man for being “out of place” when he tries to help Tonka – his relationship doesn’t conform to the strictures of his class. But at the same time, the young man is part of his class – he gets annoyed when something reminds him of Tonka’s earlier life, when she worked in a shop.

Eventually, Tonka and the young man go to Berlin. They were unable to stay with the family. The young man doesn’t want to become like his mother, forced to carry on a relationship in secret. He and Tonka are now in love, though it is a strange love: “He loved Tonka because he did not love her, because she did not stir his soul, but rinsed it clean and smooth, like fresh water. He loved her more than he himself believed.” Tonka is simple, but she is not stupid. Even to the young man she reveals hidden depths, such as when she tells him about chemistry she has remembered, “like pretty stones whose names one does not know, kept in a box!” For a time, all is well. After some difficulty, “suspended between emotion and theory”, they have sex. And then she gets pregnant.

A painting of a seated woman — Egon Schiele, “Edith Schiele in gestreiftem Kleid sitzend”. In “Tonka” there is a great tension between who Tonka says she is and what reason dictates she must be. For the rational, scientific young man who is her partner, the gulf between the two is too great to overcome.

Tonka gets pregnant while the young man is away on a journey. There are two possibilities – either an immaculate conception, or infidelity. The young man is a man of science, but Tonka, “impervious to his reasoning”, is a force of her own. She is from “a world that does not know the concept “truth””. She grows ill, her skin peels away, “letting the peasant skeleton peer through the skin.” By contrast, the young man’s “well-bred face” better survives hardship. Illness seems to reveal who they really are. Money grows tight, and the young man’s forced to turn to his mother. But he has broken the unwritten codes – the family alludes to “amorous acts” that Tonka uses to control him. There are none. They simply cannot understand Tonka’s simplicity.

The young man becomes superstitious just as he becomes suspicious, but at the same time his personality splits. Part of him, the superstitious and suspicious part, is Tonka’s lover – the other is a scientist. And as the relationship worsens, the science improves. He stops shaving because he thinks it helps the relationship, only wears a certain ring. When he tries to confront Tonka with the scientific and medical irrefutability of her infidelity, “all she could do was to vouch for the truth of her words with the truth of her whole being.” There is more than one type of truth in the world. But for the scientist it is a torment to have no certainty. Even though he’s sure she’s betrayed him, this feeling is like a “dream” – they are real only while we experience them. Later we see their flimsy construction.

He starts dreaming. His dreams come as warnings that his work is not his true life. He has a repeated memory of disbelieving in religion as a boy and trying to button up his coat during a frost only to find the cold has numbed his fingers. Tonka ends up in the hospital. The young man is unable to tell her “I believe you” – he cannot face the consequences of those words for his worldview. Eventually she dies, without hearing those words. Only then does the young man appreciate that deep inside her “there is a part of her that remains untouched by all this” – where infidelity is irrelevant because it is not a part of her truth. But it is too late. Unlike Herr von Ketten, the young man is unable to save his love. His need for rational certainty has cost him everything.

Conclusion

I have written too much. All the same, I hope this piece gives an idea of why Musil is an interesting writer and Three Women is an interesting collection. At least when you’re looking to write an essay. Musil’s Modernist concerns in Three Women – the shifting nature of identity and the dangers of a worldview that is too focused on one thing – remain pertinent in our own time, as does the importance he sets upon having an appreciation for the possibility of spirituality and irrationality as an antidote to looking at the world in only one way. Unfortunately, I’m still not sure I actually enjoyed reading Three Women. Even though I found parts of it touching, especially the descriptions of an unusual love in “Tonka”, most of Three Women was just too intellectual for my tastes, like Musil’s Posthumous Papers of a Living Author, which I looked at here.

But still, it’s probably worth checking out Three Women. These stories are much shorter than The Man Without Qualities and may help you decide whether that book’s for you. If you enjoyed the piece or have read Three Women and think I seriously have misinterpreted the stories (I probably did), do leave a comment.