Violence as Answer – Yukio Mishima’s The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea

The really frightening thing about violence is how close it is to magic. If it were not, perhaps nobody would ever think of committing its acts. Violence is taboo and unacceptable to the orderly and their world, but their rejection gives it mystique. It becomes in this light a kind of portal from one world to another – from the boring, polite, controlled world, into something more raw and seemingly more real. This is what we might say to ourselves as we prepare our fists for the first blow. As a group action, violence also binds us together in complicity – guilt, even if we openly reject it, shimmers behind our thoughts and connects us to others it shadows. By a single act we have placed ourselves outside the world, while binding ourselves together in a secret confraternity. That is the power of violence, its magic, its temptation and its horror.

The Japanese writer Yukio Mishima’s short novel, The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea, (literally Afternoon tow, but John Nathan’s title is so beautiful I’m sure even Mishima would not have objected to it), has violence at its heart and violence as its source of meaning. Just as Mishima himself, trained in iron discipline by his father and connected by blood to the pre-Meiji Emperors through his grandmother, seemed to have violence at his own heart. In 1970, sick of the loss of values in post-war Japanese society as it succumbed to cultural Westernisation, he attempted a military coup with a few followers, then committed seppuku, disembowelling himself before having a loyal friend decapitate him. Before this, he wrote books. To judge from The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea, angry, violent books. And utterly brilliant ones.

I knew a little of Mishima and his writing before I started. Themes involving bodies, beauty, and shame were on my mind. What I was not prepared for was the sheer intensity of his work, the absolute authorial stamp on the prose regardless of what it narrates. From the first chapter alone, I knew I had entered an entirely new world. Noboru, a boy of thirteen, discovers a peephole between his bedroom and his mother Fusako’s. He observes her as she undresses alone, his father having died five years earlier, with intense curiosity. But it is not until they have a sailor round for the evening, and his mother takes him to bed, that Noboru is rewarded with a secret initiation into the world of adults.

Everything here is intensity, extremity, and taboo. Also light and shadow. It’s interesting to see Tanizaki’s comments on light from In Praise of Shadows given body here, with the extraordinary attention Mishima pays to the light in his scenes, in particular, the effect of moonlight enchanting a scene. Noboru’s unerotic excitement of the voyeurism of observing his mother is mixed with humiliation at the thought of her having been observed by the occupying American soldiers once there in the house. Pleasure and pain are joined in a single action – pressing one’s eye to the peephole. That is one world. When Noboru instead looks at the room through the door as normal, he finds it “drab and familiar”. This is the other one. Enchantment and taboo intensity, or emptiness. Noboru, at thirteen, knows exactly which one he wants.

Noboru loves the sea, its intensity and mystery, and he is attracted to the sailor, Ryuji, as its representative. The ocean also gives the boy the central images he uses to imagine his place in the world: “a large iron anchor withstanding the corrosion of the sea and scornful of the barnacles and oysters that harass the hulls of ships, sinking polished and indifferent through heaps of broken glass, toothless combs, bottle caps, and prophylactics into the mud at harbour bottom – that was how he liked to imagine his heart.” Yet though he tries to steel his heart, Noboru is a boy. He idolises Ryuji, who even looks like he’s stepped out of the waves, from the first meeting. And when he sees Ryuji and his mother coupling, it’s like he has witnessed the moment of the earth’s transfiguration. He determines to protect the illusion at all costs.

The sea is everywhere in this work. Its constant presence is marked most obviously by the horns of ships as they go past Tokyo, and it is visible through Fusako’s window too. Another motif is that of daydreaming and illusion. In the first two chapters following them Ryuji and Fusako both daydream. While going about their days Ryuji remembers his visit to a brothel in Hong Kong, and Fusako thinks back to her first meeting with him from the perspective of a few days afterwards. Violence, shame, and sex are also everywhere, and often linked, as in the half-naked bodies of the stevedores that Fusako watches as they labour, subjecting themselves to the danger of their dockside work. Even more subtly though, through the way that even tree roots can look like “tumid black blood vessels”, Mishima never lets readers relax from their immersion in his vision.

What we actually have is a story of lost illusions, and the terrible attempt to recover them. Fusako, Noboru’s mother, is lonely and gladly falls in love with the sailor Ryuji. Noboru’s idolisation of the man from the sea changes to horror and disgust when Ryuji demonstrates his kind-heartedness and joviality by falling in love in return, rather than representing the boy’s frosty ideal. All this might leave us without tragedy were Noboru not part of a secret group of boys, led by “the chief”, who have their own philosophy and a willingness to put it into practice.

This philosophy is one of “absolute dispassion”, which really means a refusal of all good-will and a “matchless inhumanity”. The children believe that through adopting a posture of cynicism towards the world they might become its masters. They complete the freezing of their hearts through the joint murder of a kitten – a scene so gruesome I don’t think I would ever willingly read it again, even though, in another sense, it’s just a child’s version of the murder that binds the revolutionaries of Dostoevsky’s Demons and every bit as stupid as it.

The idea is not the world. Noboru struggles to force his heart into hardness, convincing himself that he will gain “power over existence” through this bondage of violence. Uneasily, however, he retains his boyish love for ships and the sea. He teeters, perhaps, between the boyish excitement of adventure, and the equally boyish idea that cruelty equates to manliness. When Ryuji lets him down by becoming soft, the balance is lost, and in the end, it’s almost his own self that Noboru wishes to punish.

Ryuji himself is closer to Noboru than the latter realises. With his aloofness and belief in the “Grand Cause” and glory, Ryuji too is in love with illusory ideas. Yet after several years at sea, he has already begun to lose his belief that in his life upon the waves there lies real magic. He’s glad of his love for Fusako, and the chance to enjoy the much sweeter illusion of love, which after all may not be an illusion at all. In other words, Ryuji seems a symbol of that inevitable disillusionment and mellowing that comes with a little age.

The children cannot tolerate this. All they lack is Ryuji’s experience, which would tell them that they cannot maintain their vision of the world forever. Instead, shaken by his betrayal of the authentic, dispassionate, sailor’s life, they decide on punishment – “the deed essential to filling the emptiness of the world.” Some novels show their protagonists lose their illusions willingly, typically replacing cold ideas of the world with the warmth of emotions, as Bazarov does in Fathers and Sons. What makes The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea so powerful is that Mishima does not let the children lose their illusions. He offers them a way out – one brutal, horrible, but in its way even magical. There is no moral here – no sense that violence is not, in fact, the answer.

It’s a problem I have thought about a lot. Often, when depression strikes, it’s for me as if the world has been emptied of its meaning, just as it is for Noboru after Ryuji’s unwitting “betrayal”. One of the ways that I have thought about that void I enter is that while I cannot pull myself out of it I may yet be able to save others from it. The meaning of meaninglessness becomes preventing others from falling into it, whatever the cost. Taken this way, the only thing that matters is the preservation of illusion. Some time ago I wrote a story about an occupying army, cut off from the rest of its people, which is forced into increasingly violent acts in order to maintain to its own soldiers the illusion that it is there on foreign soil with good purpose. It was an exploration of this idea, which is obviously poisonous – there is a point where the actions taken to maintain an illusion are so extreme that it is better to allow for illusions to die.

In The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea we have such an action. Except that we do not have a sense that it goes too far. Because every character in the novel is absorbed in their own illusions, it’s hard to blame the children for trying to maintain their own. More pertinently, in the novel’s closing moments, as Ryuji reflects on his time at sea after giving it up for domestic life with Noboru and Fusako, he actually begins to miss it once again. In other words, at the precise moment when the children are ready to sacrifice him for the preservation of illusion he himself has retreated from reality back into that same illusion of seafaring greatness, as if to say that the children were right all along that there was nothing worthwhile in his coming ashore.

We could probably pick through the novel finding hints of Mishima’s fascism, but perhaps a better way of thinking about it is that the story presents a scenario where violence, illusion, shame and beauty come together to offer a vision of a world where the horror of the novel’s contents is justified and correct. Like any great work of literature it presents a worldview in a way that is compelling. More than that, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea concerns that classic literary deity – dignity. But not mere dignity for individuals. Instead, the novel concerns the dignity of ideas we might today dismiss out of hand. It is here, in this moonlit world of cruelty and shifting dreams, that we see a way of life that once was so tantalising for so many, and may yet become so again. A cult of beauty, death, and glory.

It’s really quite cool stuff to read, so long as we keep our heads screwed on. We need the knowledge of this world to better combat it in our own, but it is a testament to Mishima’s dark strength that he makes the ideas so tempting too.

A few weeks after posting this I find myself feeling I might have argued a little too sympathetically for violence, which is not my view at all. I think what’s interesting with The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea is that it creates this illusion that violence really can be right and meaningful, when it isn’t if you actually think about it. The sailor might believe that he was wrong to return to land, but as soon as the boys start murdering him he’ll cry out in great pain and want more than anything to be returned to safety – he won’t be thinking about the significance of their actions.

Likewise I feel like I read somewhere that Mishima botched his suicide and was in agony throughout it – even he, I imagined, realised ideas were far less mystical or meaningful when they caused you physical pain. And so many of those whose attempts at taking their own life fail talk of the regret they felt, for example, while falling. Violence makes magic until the last moment, but I can’t help but feel that this last moment is really the only one that counts. It’s certainly the only one, when we cry out for the pain to end, whose plea I can wholeheartedly get behind.

Conrad’s Defeat – Victory

Back in the days when critics still puzzled over such questions, there was some debate over whether Victory was Joseph Conrad’s first bad novel or his last great novel. To me the matter is clear: Victory is a failure. Some of the problems with it are simple, but the more interesting issues with it lie within its overall thematic approach and are worth elaborating to understand how to avoid them. Since Victory is still a work by a talented writer, it’s hard to cut off those pieces of the novel that make it not work because they are all interconnected. The themes are embedded in the characters and embedded further in the structure and in the prose itself. Still, broadly speaking, my problems with it concern the narration, the characters peopling the story, and the treatment of the ideas within it.

The Story, approximately

Victory takes place in Southeast Asia, a region that the Joseph Conrad knew well from his time serving on ships there, and sits alongside his other works set in the region, in particular Lord Jim, which even shares with Victory the character of the hotel keeper Schomberg. Today’s novel primarily concerns a gentleman Swede, Axel Heyst, who is a drifter out of personal philosophical convictions handed down from his father, a professional philosopher. Specifically, Heyst drifts as his “defence against life.” Scorning attachment, he wanders inoffensively around the islands of Southeast Asia, before helping an down-and-out acquaintance with some money to get him out of a tight spot and causing thereby the bother that sets the novel going.

To repay the kindness, the friend sets Heyst up to manage a coal mining operation on a small island. The friend then dies away in England and the operation fails to generate the required returns, with the result that Heyst is left alone with great stores of food and a single Chinese servant. It would seem he never has to return to society except occasionally to pick up some hard currency, but he does at one point end up at a dodgy hotel owned by one Schomberg, coincidentally at a time when there are some female musicians visiting. Heyst finds out that a young English girl is among them and on seeing her tormented, rescues her and takes her to his island. Schomberg, who has also fallen in love with the girl, named alternately Alma or Lena, later has two rather sinister guests, Ricardo and Mr Jones, whom he convinces to pay Heyst a visit and rob him, telling them tall tales of Heyst’s vast riches. The criminals arrive, and eventually there is a confrontation and a tragedy.

In terms of theme, really there are two points of interest. The first is the treatment of illusions and deception, and the second is the nature of Heyst himself. While he may not have given his work its title, as did Nostromo or Lord Jim in their works, Victory is very much about Heyst’s psychology. So it is perhaps here that it makes sense to begin.

Heyst and the treatment of mystery in character

Conrad is known for his formal experimentation, where chronology is jumbled and narrators are there beside us framing events. This is an approach that is brilliantly suited to character studies because layering perspectives and confusing chronologies force readers to think their own way through biases to any facts they can find underneath. The former in particular also adds a brilliant reality to Conrad’s work. Heart of Darkness or Lord Jim are literally Marlow telling a story, with us a listener on the boat or at the club, and with his uncertainties and discoveries mirroring our own. Kurtz in the former work is mysterious not only because he only skulks onto the scene for a few pages, but because we hear him first through people Marlow meets on his way up the Congo river, then through Marlow himself. Like Marlow, we need to work out what meaning lurks behind appearances.

Of Heart of Darkness we could state simply that Kurtz is a colonial administrator who went mad and lost his “civilization” from being too long in Central Africa, but this is brutal. It leaves the reader uninvolved, because the story comes straight to her, and because there is no mystery left after it is spelled out thus. Even to enter Kurtz’s consciousness for an extended period would destroy the work. What little we hear from him, (“exterminate all the brutes”), gains its power by its isolation, like flashes in the dark. Too much light and we would not care.

Even without actually considering Heyst’s personality, Victory ruins the mystery. What’s upsetting is the novel has a strong beginning section, adopting a similar approach to many of Conrad’s other works. We have a narrator, living in the area the novel describes, who hears of Heyst through other people, such as the sailor Davidson and Schomberg. “I met a man once… to whom Heyst exclaimed” is a common construction in his telling and a thing of joy to me as a lover of Conrad. We build up Heyst from without, not within. Each thing he says, each thing that is said about him, deepens the mystery, because there is contradiction piled upon contradiction, yet without there ever being the suggestion that Heyst is not a real person underneath the crust of others’ comments. As with Kurtz, we try to find Heyst, deduce him from limited evidence, scraps of phrases. It’s exciting.

But as soon as we finish the first part of the novel, the narrator changes. We have omniscience, inhabiting the consciousness of the various characters, Heyst included. Mysteries disappear or at least fade when we see the ambiguities of character from within as conflict, rather than from without as evidence of complexity. If Heyst’s mysterious personality is the sustaining question of the book, this shift in narrative destroys things.

There are arguments against this. We might say that there are scenes that cannot be witnessed but must be reported, but this is a weak argument. Literature has always found tolerable workarounds, such as the obsession with timely eavesdropping in the early 19th century. Lord Jim, for another example, has quite a significant narrative shift once Jim settles on dry land upriver and Marlow no longer witnesses everything first hand, and while I preferred the first part of the book, Conrad lets Marlow retain a privileged narrative position as the person all information passes through before reaching the reader, even if he no longer sees as much with his own eyes.

Another argument is that such reporting does not sustain a long book – the listeners would have fallen asleep before Marlow got out of the jungle in Heart of Darkness, to say nothing of Lord Jim’s length. My answer here is that Victory is far too long to begin with. It would have worked much better as the short story it began its life as, where mysteries remained rather than being bleached by overexposure to the light of the page. But this is also because I did not find the ideas worth 300+ pages either.

Sad Ideas – Pessimism

That Conrad himself was a pessimist I know from his letters and the accumulation of impressions from his other works, but you’d be hard pressed to miss this fact in Victory either. Heyst comments that “the world is a bad dog”, considers “the illusion of human fellowship on earth”, and contemplates how he is “hurt by the sight of his own life.” A few pages later he notes that “if you begin to think you will be unhappy.” A little after that he notes that “Man on this earth is an unforeseen accident which does not stand close investigation”. I will not give further quotes, but there are plenty. Some of them are quite memorable, but the important thing is that Heyst is Schopenhauer’s representative on earth.

Never has the fatality of Conrad’s work been so obvious; never has it also been so unearned. Heyst’s father was a moody philosopher, so Heyst is a moody person. That’s it. The book, except for its ending, provides no arguments for its pessimism within itself, which turns Heyst’s pronouncements into mere preaching. The pessimism is delivered in phrases rather than in the brute facts of narrative, facts which are always more philosophically convincing than the words of prominent characters. There is a moment when Heyst literally reads his own father’s philosophical works and all I could think as a reader was how unbearably self-indulgent this was. And I say this as someone inclined to pessimistic utterances and self-indulgent writings myself.

So what if one person is pessimistic, or indeed the narrative overall, we might say. Well, when Heyst’s only company for most of the book is an ill-educated girl, there can be no reasonable argument articulated against his views. His voice dominates. This both destroys the mystery (see the section above) but also destroys the curiosity of his ideas, which are never challenged or refined by the work because ultimately Conrad more or less agrees with them.

Bad Ideas – Delusions and Scepticism

Related to the problem of pessimism is that of scepticism and illusion. As with the treatment of pessimism, this is altogether too direct. Every single character is laughably deluded. Lena lives in romantic delusions. Ricardo and Mr Jones think there is silver on the island when there is nothing. Schomberg refuses to realise that he has lost Lena and is in the depths of middle age rather than a strapping young man. Heyst believes he can live without a connection with the world – “he who forms a tie is lost”. Around Heyst there are many rumours, which would have made him more interesting if it were not too obvious, because of the narration, what was true and what false about them. When Ricardo and Mr Jones arrive at the island, Ricardo has to mislead Mr Jones about the presence of Lena, because the other man is terrified of women. And so on. Nobody has a clue about anything whatsoever.

We can say that illusions lead to the novel’s tragedy, which is true. But the problem is that the illusions are relentless, like the pessimism. Conrad seems to say that everyone is a fool, and there’s no hope for any of us. To say all are deluded is also not a thematically rich idea. Nobody really progresses into knowledge, which means that this sense of mistakenness is constant throughout the work, and the work seems ultimately flat. Again, this is not suitable for such a long work. If all illusions lead to tragedy, there’s no weighing up, for example, of different kind of illusions, of the sort which might be more interesting. Is Heyst’s illusion that he should live alone any more harmful that Lena’s illusion that life is a romance novel? Conrad really doesn’t have an answer, only a shrug.

In this way, the two central ideas of the novel – that things are bad, and everyone is deluded, are all too simple and quickly grow stale. There’s neither challenge nor depth to them, and that won’t do.

Other Characters, Other Problems

Of course, the novel does more than this, but not as much more as I think we would wish. Ricardo and Mr Jones are described in Conrad’s typical way for hellish apparitions, with words like “phosphorescent” linking them to that Other Place, and they function as a kind of example of fate. We could conceivably get some paragraphs out of comparing Mr Jones, an exiled gentleman wandering the world and committing crimes, with Heyst, another wanderer but for different reasons. But Jones barely speaks, and because he is not central, any mystery we might build with him along the lines we do with Kurtz is lost from this lack of focus. He remains too fuzzy. Ricardo, on the other hand, speaks too much. He immediately admits to the vaguely respectable hotel owner Schomberg that he and Jones are criminals and gives a long speech about their motivations – something I found hard to believe and all too convenient from a plot perspective.

Wang, the Chinese servant, speaks broken English and his only personality is to be able to “materialize” in various places. Ricardo and Jones also have a servant, Pedro, who is a feral beast because he’s from South America. Both these characterisations I also did not like – not only because they are racist, but because there’s no depth to them, nor any coherence or complexity, especially in Pedro’s case. Pedro joined Ricardo and Jones because… they murdered his brother? Come on.

Conclusions

The problem is that Victory has all the ingredients for a great work. If it were a third of the length and followed a similar formal approach to Heart of Darkness throughout, it would lose nothing in depth, and gain infinitely in effectiveness. Instead, Conrad’s musings on philosophy are boring without action to body them, action which this novel has precious little of. His villains stretch credulity and the overwhelming sense that everyone is deluded is too simple and too dreary to hold our attention for long. It’s a shame, but at least I can say I’m glad I read Victory because I can now better see the achievements in characterisation and form that Conrad achieved elsewhere.

Ideas of Emancipation in Lou Andreas-Salomé’s Fenitschka

Lou Andreas-Salomé is someone I had long imagined I would only encounter through the words and biographies of others. Perhaps the most important woman Nietzsche knew, and certainly the only one to whom he ever proposed – as many as three times, without success – and a lover and confidante to Rilke who taught him Russian and introduced him to Tolstoy, before finally becoming a significant figure in psychoanalysis, where she worked alongside Sigmund Freud, Andreas-Salomé found herself at the centres of German-language culture practically from the moment she was born in 1861 to her death in 1937.

A Russian, born in St Petersburg of mixed Huguenot and German ancestry, Andreas-Salomé had everything she needed to succeed as a woman in her age. Her father maintained an intellectual atmosphere at home, including letting his daughter attend her brothers’ classes. Then, when he died young, he left his daughter enough money for a certain amount of choice in how to live. The most important thing for her, however, came from within – the will to choose her own destiny, everything else be damned. She eventually married for affection rather than desire, spending her entire life in what today we might call an open relationship, passing from one rapturous affair to the next, never settling for too long or surrendering her independence to the men she adored. Deeply intellectual, deeply passionate, and finally heroic in her own choice of life, she seems a person it would be great to get to know.

What a relief it is, then, to learn she wrote some books. They aren’t easy to come by, either in the original German (Andreas-Salomé spent most of her adult life in Germany) or in any other language (though, in one of the quirks of translation, Goodreads seems to suggest she has become quite popular in Turkish). Still, I wanted to hear her words. I bought a slim and tiny Reclam edition of Fenitschka, one of her best-known novellas. I thought it would be as good a place as any to start with.

As a work of literature, Fenitschka excels in the subversion of our expectations. This stretches from the novella’s title, to its genre and characters. It appears at first glance to be a traditional bildungsroman, a story of education. We follow Max Werner, an Austrian flaneur on the streets of Paris who encounters the mysterious Russian woman, Fenia or Fenitschka, while at a bar. His destiny, from the moment he lays eyes on her, seems to be to unite himself in marriage with her. Marriage, after all, is the key moment in traditional works of the genre, as it provides a synthesis of all the education that has gone on before. And Max, who thinks of himself as something of a psychologist, appears to have undertaken all the other “education” needed – all that remains is the marriage.

Yet just as the novella places Max as the hero, ready for marriage, it undermines Max’s education. Max’s “psychology”, is really just an excuse for him to stare at women. When on an evening walk with Fenitschka, who has taken herself through a degree in Zurich, she talks about the importance of education for female emancipation, Max shows very little enthusiasm or understanding for what she’s talking about. By this point he has decided to seduce her. He abuses his right as a man to ensure a lady is taken home safely to her hotel by taking her back to his hotel, then actually locks her in his room to make sure he gets what he wants. It appears he knows the theory of seduction, but as for the reality…

Fenia tells him to get lost and leaves. Not only that, but she calls him “the first indecent man” she has ever met. Rather than happily enjoying the fruits of his manliness, Max is not just denied what he thinks is his by right, but he also finds his own sense of self and knowledge challenged by this stranger. It’s a remarkable scene insofar as the supposed hero is acting the villain, while the readers watch in increasing discomfort. The education Max has received is not proved through marriage, but undermined by showing that he is an asshole.

We wait a year for the action to continue. Max is in Russia for his sister’s marriage when he encounters Fenia again. She refers to their “love affair” (Liebesroman) with a certain mockery, born of her increased confidence from being a little older (she has finished her studies) and from being in her own country. For that is what the first section of Fenitschka is – a love story that has the wrong ending. The remaining sections of the novella are only more different to what we expect.

Max follows Fenia to St Petersburg to meet her family, as a friend, that is. (He reveals to her at the wedding that he is himself engaged, but readers smile knowing an engagement can always be broken off). We might expect that having failed at the “affair” part, Max might have a go at the “love” part of his “love affair”. For a reader, Max is still the person we follow, and we always have in mind the novella’s title – Fenitschka is the central figure, and we expect such figures to get married. Regular references to love, such as through quotes from the Russian poet Lermontov’s long poem The Demon, and a sense that Max is finding Fenitschka ever more physically attractive, make us think that he and she will soon end up together. But this is not what happens. Instead, Max discovers that Fenitschka is herself conducting a secret affair, and assumes the (traditionally female) role of confidant.

While Max has his moments when it seems he realises his worldview is limited, he is still very much that voice of tradition which lurks behind apparent liberal outlooks. When Fenitschka’s lover insists they get married, he encourages her to go ahead with it. But this is precisely what she does not want, as it would constrain her. The novella ends with her rejecting the lover, but with gratitude for their time together – a very modern moment.

We think that this is Max’s story. He is referred to always as “Max Werner”, as if to highlight his solidity and manly importance in contrast with the fragile female Fenitschka. The novella’s title, Fenitschka, is itself a diminutive, turning the independent woman into a cutesy figure. Her real name is Fenia, and the narrative shifts between the two to emphasise that she has two identities – one imposed from outside, and the other that she is crafting for herself. We see a similar situation in Nadezhda Kvoshchinskaya’s The Boarding School Girl, where “Lelenka” becomes “Elena” once she has achieved independence.

The comparison with Kvoshchinskaya’s work is worth exploring. One key similarity is in their narrative structures. In both works we have stories that are seemingly about men – the exiled revolutionary Veretitsyn and the flaneur Max Werner – who we expect to marry the titular female figures, but who are soon revealed to be far less impressive than their female counterparts, who instead move beyond them. Veretitsyn is supposedly a progressively-minded revolutionary, but is shocked when Lelenka becomes an artist and lives independently in St Petersburg. Werner claims to be up to date in psychology and has long discussions with Fenia about women’s rights, only to try to persuade her to marry her lover after all. Like Lelenka, Fenia instead prefers to be alone – in her case as a professor.

Where these works differ is in their treatment of the obstacles facing women in the 19th century. The Boarding School Girl paints a miserable picture of Lelenka’s home life, where she is essentially sold into a marriage she does not want. The enemies are mainly her family – father and mother – and the way out is self-education. Fenitschka instead focuses on the shortcomings of male figures who are not even aware of what they do. While certainly the novella makes the typical stabs at the empty “faultless mechanism of coming and speaking and moving on” of society evenings, and Fenia has an uncle who is something of a toady, freedom through education is still available to Fenia to ignore all of that. Instead, the real enemy is Max, precisely because he has no idea that he is one, believing himself liberal and sensible. Whether trying to seduce her or marry her, he continues to “demonise or idealise” her, rather than viewing her as a human being, and force her into traditional roles.

Of course, we smile at the thought that the so-called psychologist is unable to view his subject properly. But in Fenitschka we see the more subtle pressures placed upon women, compared to parents telling them what to do. Calling the incident in Paris a “love affair” gives it a recognisable narrative shape, and thus pressures both of their existences to follow this same shape. When they encounter the Lermontov (“All on this earth I give to you. / Just love me, you have to love me!”), Fenia notes that the quotes are hanging in near-enough every house in the city, ready for impressionable girls and boys to learn their roles: the one to love, the other to submit to its force. In this way, the novella shows that our traditional understandings of narrative, shaped by culture, are also a subtle barrier to emancipation.

In both Khvoshchinskaya’s novella and Andreas-Salomé’s, the women choose independence, but in both works there remains a certain ambiguity – the loneliness that comes with the rejection of ties. Max hears Fenia reject her lover, but never sees her again, just as Veretitsyn ends his story descending from Lelenka’s apartment, not sure what to do with himself. Yet in the almost fifty years between the novellas, (The Boarding School Girl is from 1861, while Fenitschka was published in 1898) there is a sense that the victories of the women are quite different. Lelenka has fought off the suitor her parents provided and is now an independent artist, but it has come at a cost – she is now rational and cold, as if she has had to adopt qualities from the men who aimed to control her in order to control her own freedom. Fenia, however, retains both her emotional side and her intellectual side when she achieves her freedom: “I thank you! I thank you!” These are emotional words, but they are also the words of someone choosing to be a professor – an eminently rational pursuit. To put it another way, Fenia appears to be achieving a more complete existence as a free person compared to Lelenka.

When we see this synthesis, we realise that Fenitschka was indeed a kind of bildungsroman after all. It was not Max who needed to grow, develop, and get married. He only learned, and probably not well enough, of his own mistakes and limitations. But Fenia grew, finally demonstrated her independence, and achieved a kind of synthesis in her own life – one that required no marriage at all. Here we have a model for growth without shortcuts. There may be challenges ahead for the Russian, but she is now well-set to face them. Of all the many heroes and heroines we know who end their books married instead, of how many can we really say their marriage will last?

As literature, Fenitschka has certain issues – it’s a little weak in terms of language, and I find the idea that a young woman would forgive so readily the man who locked her in his room to try to seduce her a little unbelievable – but it’s quite an exciting look at the challenges and opportunities for self-discovery available to women (or anyone) in the late 19th century. And with its emphasis on the idea that marriage and conformity are less important than being true to yourself and your ideals, it’s a work with a message that is as fresh now as it was then. It’s especially worth seeking out if you want to experience for yourself the voice of the “free spirit” Nietzsche once truly loved, and see how she imagined emancipation for herself.