When I rewatched Portrait of a Lady on Fire recently, it occurred to me that the main protagonist, the woman artist, could well be a fictional representation of the 18th century Neo-Classical painting sensation Angelika Kauffmann. Her father was a painter too and taught her his craft: I always considered her Austrian (having spent my childhood in Vienna), and it turns out her father was Austrian but she was born in Switzerland and lived a peripatetic lifestyle as a child prodigy. In later life she had great success in England and Italy, although she was denigrated (or ‘trolled’) as well as praised throughout her lifetime and beyond.
Self-portrait: the Artist hesitating between the Arts of Music and Painting. Angelika was equally gifted as a singer but in the end opted for painting, although it was a career that would be harder to break into for her as a woman.
The Judgement of Paris: For example, she was not allowed to study male nudes as a woman artist, so she has often been disregarded as a painter of ‘rather effeminate male figures’.
Cupid and Psyche. The historical, allegorical or mythical subject matters were considered far more prestigious than portraits, and were usually the preserve of men. Although in an earlier period Artemisia Gentileschi painted classical subjects, by the 18th century this had changed and women were relegated to more domestic subject matter. Mme Vigee Le Brun, for example, painted predominantly portraits and landscapes.
Portrait of a Lady, probably Elizabeth Montagu. In England, Kauffmann was particularly popular as the portrait painter of the aristocracy.
Lady Georgiana Spencer, Henrietta Spencer and George, Viscount Althorp. During her time in England, Kauffmann was one of only two women to become a founding member of the Royal Academy (against some opposition and calls of favouritism because of an alleged affair with Sir Joshua Reynolds).
Cornelia pointing to her children as treasures. A visitor shows off her jewels to the Roman matriarch Cornelia, who then says in a (possibly unbearably smug tone) that her only treasures are her sons Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus, who both became Roman politicians and tribunes later in life. Mind you, I have some sympathy for single mum Cornelia, daughter of Scipio, who did her best to ensure her sons got the best possible education, but then was destined to outlive her sons, who were both assassinated.
Apologies, the pictures below are not fun or escapist by any stretch of the imagination, but I felt compelled to include them as a reminder of how far we have come and that one of the key missions of the EU was to prevent future wars in Europe (which it has not always succeeded in). This week Ireland and Denmark are celebrating 50 years since joining the EC (now EU). The UK also acceded to the EC on the same date, but, of course, has nothing to celebrate anymore.
Allied soldiers queuing for food at the Brandenburg Gate, Berlin. From Imperial War Museum.
Milan in 1945, from Wikipedia.
Library in London during the Blitz, from All That’s Interesting.
The Romanian Atheneum Concert Hall, Bucharest, from Historia.ro
I was going to write just one blog post about this, but it is turning out to be far too long, so I am dividing it up into two parts: Part 1 is about the author and the period the book is set in, as well as giving an overview of the three volumes. Part 2 will discuss the characters, gender and class, as well as literary style.
Under the Influence
It is almost impossible to overstate how much of an influence the Medeleni trilogy had on our childhood in 1980s Romania, although it was a book published in the early 1920s, depicting a period just before and just after the First World War (without actually talking much about that war at all). Maybe we were starved of nostalgic, escapist types of literature and depictions of children who could be lively, naughty, rebellious. Maybe we were just at that blushingly adolescent stage of writing bad poetry and falling in love with the wrong people. For me, as for many others of my age, it must have been the casual acceptance of travelling, living and studying abroad presented in the book, and the openness to foreign languages, literature and music, at a time when we were forcibly cut off from the rest of the world.
Suffice it to say that we used ‘which character are you?’ test just like the children of today might use the Hogwarts houses quiz to determine compatibility and alliances (I was obviously an Olguţa, so my account of the characters might be slightly biased). We played Potemkin and Kamimura battles in the schoolyard, although we knew nothing about the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05. Many of us had relatives in the countryside and spent our summers there, so the fact that this was a privileged family with a summer estate did not strike us as too strange. We all craved such close and understanding friendships… the only other series of books whose popularity rivalled Medeleni’s was the Cireșarii series, written in the 1950s-60s, a sort of socialist Famous Fivers (we loved them for their travel adventures and friendship).
However, it turns out we were not the first generation to succumb to the charms of Ionel Teodoreanu. He was born in 1897 in a reasonably well-to-do Moldovan family in Iasi. His father was a lawyer, his mother a piano teacher at the Conservatoire, his brother was also a writer and journalist. Ionel was a brilliant student and lawyer himself, married early (his wife was also a writer), had twins, and published pretty much a book per year during his creative period (mid-1920s to just after the war). La Medeleni was his first major work, published in serialised form, when the author was in his mid to late twenties, and it became an instant hit. Literary critics were not always kind to him (see the Style section), but he was an undeniable bestseller. La Medeleni has never been out of print, and has had many covers and different editions over the decades. His later novels never quite recaptured that early success, but he remained popular, especially among the ladies (he was good-looking and romantic, what more could you want?) He stopped writing after the Communists came to power in 1948 (both he and his wife were actively anti-Communist) and died in 1954.
In an interview dating from 1932, Teodoreanu describes how he spends most of the summer in a friend’s garden, writing from morning to evening, because the rest of the year he has to work (both as a lawyer and as director of the National Theatre in Iasi), and how being married is ideal for a writer, because it ‘simplifies’ his life. (His twin boys were eleven years old at the time, so I am guessing they were spending their summers mostly with their mother or grandparents and not allowed to complicate their father’s life.)
The author explicitly set out to describe an idyllic rural way of life that he feared was already disappearing. In the first volume, in particular, there is a similarity to the almost dream-like, yearning atmosphere of Le Grand Meaulnes. There are many references in the book to the differences between fast-paced, sharp-tongued, quite urban province of Muntenia (with its capital, Bucharest) and the softer, slower way of talking and moving in Moldova, with its predominantly rural landscapes. Iasi was a town proud of its cultural heritage, particularly its literary past, but in the newly unified Greater Romania after 1918, the author fears it will become a second-rate provincial town (he himself moved to Bucharest in 1938).
Plot, period and location
No fear of spoilers, since you will have read this book already if you are Romanian, and there is not a chance in the world that it will be translated. So I can give you the whole plot, prepare your tissues now! [Addendum: I discovered after writing Part 2 that Histria Books in the US does have a translation of At Medeleni coming out, so if you intend to read it and do NOT want spoilers, please skip the rest of this post.]
A signed first edition of the second volume of the book, dating from 1926.
The first volume (‘The Uncertain Border’) is set in 1907 on the country estate of Medeleni in the Romanian province of Moldova, not that far from Iasi, where the Deleanu family are spending their summer. Mr Deleanu is a lawyer, his wife is the actual owner of the estate, as a descendant of a family of Moldovan bojars – landed gentry. They have two children, dreamy mother’s favourite Dănuț (11) and sarcastic, hyperactive ten-year-old Olguţa, who is the apple of her father’s eye. As the story opens, they are welcoming ten-year-old Monica, shy and well-behaved, into their home, whom they will foster after the death of her last surviving relative, her grandmother. Not much happens in the book, or rather, only the typical mischief of children on holiday, and Monica harbouring a secret passion for Dănuț, but by the end of the book the uncle from Germany (nicknamed Herr Direktor) offers to take the boy with him to study in Bucharest, while Olguţa’s beloved family coachman/groom, the grandfatherly Moș Gheorghe, dies.
Teodoreanu has as good an ear for children’s dialogue and sibling rivalry as Elizabeth Jane Howard, as well as a knack for the well-placed detail of daily life. In fact, it was the detailed descriptions of daily life in the country home before the war in the Cazalet Chronicles which made me pick up the Medeleni trilogy again. Here too we are in the home of a fairly wealthy family, with servants, a vanished world that most of us are unfamiliar with, and yet there are so many little scenes that will sound familiar to those of us who spent any part of our childhood somewhat unsupervised and unscheduled, whether in the Romanian countryside or not – there is a sort of timelessness and classlessness to these memories. We find here descriptions of thin white sheets soaked in cold water and pinned to the windows to cool down the rooms enough to allow for some sleep. The children eat juicy watermelons and get told off by their mother for bad table manners. The children invent all sorts of excuses for wearing a new piece of clothing. They want to play at being grown-up and do what grown-ups do:
Mum dearest, please make me a coffee.
Beg your pardon?
Please, Mum!
Coffee isn’t suitable for children.
Why not?
It makes you nervous.
So why do you drink it then?
… It helps me with the digestion.
Don’t I have a digestion too?
You’ve got one without any coffee.
And you have nerves without any coffee, dear mother, Olguta whispered suavely.
The uncle comes to visit, bringing presents and gossip about the old days, they all dress up, run in and out of the kitchens and annoy the servants. Dănuț plays horsies in the garden with Monica, using her long blonde plaits as reins. Later, in a fit of spite against his sister, who he thinks put Monica’s doll in his bed to tease him, he cuts off the doll’s hair and never finds the forlorn little love note that Monica had put in its pocket.
A prettier edition of the trilogy
In the second volume (‘Paths’) we skip forward seven years and move to Bucharest for a while. Dănuț is about to start his final year of secondary school, living in his own independent little annexe next to his uncle’s house. He is very much in love with Adina, a coquettish married older woman, much to the dismay of his good friend Mircea, who is of a timid and anxious disposition. Dănuț persists in seeing Adina as an innocent, darling little girl (helped no doubt by her acting skills and diminutive proportions) and writes endless bad poetry to her – mostly in French, like the poets he so much admires. He has neglected writing to his mother and the patient Monica, who has become his friend and confidante, although he seems blind to the fact that she is in love with him. Olguța storms off to Bucharest to bring her brother to his senses, although she is much subtler about it than we might expect, and wins all of her brother’s classmates over with her frank, impulsive style.
Later in this volume, all of the actors, including their new schoolfriends, gather for the summer at Medeleni again. Mircea joins them, falls in love with Olguța, who also has another admirer in the shape of young cousin Puiu, who is, however, both attracted and repelled by superficial and highly-sexed classmate of the girls, Rodica. Rodica pines after Dănuț, who initially pines after Adina, but then falls under the spell of a neighbour of theirs, Ioana Palla, whose brother-in-law is a famous painter who ends up with Adina in Venice, in something of a Dangerous Liaisons type move. This is perhaps the weakest part of the trilogy, mostly because it tries to be a Bildungsroman as well as an insight into the artistic psyche of … let’s face it, a rather green and callow youth, with many pages given over to his prose-poems (all fashionable in France at the time, but rather derivative and pointless in this context), or to descriptions of womanly flesh and eyes and pouts. Despite its flaws, it’s a very funny volume as well, with lots of skewering of the pretentiousness and budding sexual feelings of adolescence. Ahough Dan might be the author’s alter ego, he has no qualms in presenting him warts and all to the reader: the universal teenage boy – self-absorbed, easily seduced, vain, a wannabe artist or writer, derivative, imitative, unable to quite believe in or control his talents.
But this is the summer of 1914 and of course the threat of war is on the horizon. Although Romania remained neutral until 1916, we know that the young boys we have gently mocked and grown to love will be conscripted very soon. As a side note, Teodoreanu’s younger brother died in the war, which is perhaps the reason why he chose not to show the war and its effect directly in this book, nor kill off any of the young men.
The third volume (‘Windswept’ or ‘Between the Winds’) is set in 1922 and suddenly a lot of the playfulness has gone. The girls have been to study in Paris: Monica has completed a Ph.D. on the poetry of Villon, while Olguța has trained as a concert pianist, and they are on their way back to Romania on board a ship, unhurriedly making their way from Marseille to Constanța. Dan is following in his father’s footsteps as a lawyer, but struggles with his conscience and idealism, and would much rather spend all of his time writing (this time in Romanian, rather than French). Mircea has become a teacher, a journalist and is starting to get involved in politics. Puiu too is a lawyer, of the more materialistic and earthy kind.
Unbeknownst to the rest of the family, Olguța (still known by her diminutive, although her brother prefers to be called Dan now) has fallen in love with Vania, a distant relative on her mother’s side, with family and property in Basarabia (the part of Moldova which until 1918 belonged to the Russians). He disappeared during the war, feared dead, but in a rather far-fetched plot twist, Olguța finds him on board the ship. He is wanted by the Russians as a possible deserter and political agitator, he has been travelling the world like a vagabond, and he needs to sort out his inheritance and land, which now is within Romanian borders, plus he is twenty years older than Olguța, but she is adamant she wants to be with him no matter where he might go. She briefly joins him for a few days in the very depressing, run-down town of Bălți (now in the Republic of Moldova), which Teodoreanu describes in very unflattering terms – but which is transformed of course by their love and happiness. They promise each other to elope to America together on a ship from Constanța on the 14th of September.
Most of the action then takes place in the Deleanu house, as they prepare to receive their beloved daughters back home. Once again we have various memorable set-piece scenes: a furious and funny present-giving ceremony, in which the servants aren’t forgotten either; or the hunting scene by the lake. However, everything is tinged with melancholy, not just because Olguța is secretly planning to leave them, but also because back in Paris, she had an operation to remove a lump from her breast and was told that if it reappeared, she might be in trouble. It does reappear, and she remembers that her grandmother too died of breast cancer, but not before she was taken to all sorts of clinics abroad, having various chunks of her flesh chopped off, and suffering more and more pain. She cannot bear to see herself or her family go through this ritual of false hope, so on the 12th of December, in Moș Gheorghe’s old house where she enjoyed so many carefree moments in her childhood, she writes her farewell letters and commits suicide. She asks Monica to go to the port in her place to explain to Vania what happened and ask for the engagement ring he was going to bring to that meeting, the only piece of jewellery with which she wants to be buried. But Vania does not show up at their meeting place. Instead, he wrote a letter, which arrived after Olguța’s death, to explain that he could not tear her away from her family and allow her to give everything up for an old footloose vagrant like himself.
One of the worst series of book covers that I’ve ever seen for La Medeleni.
But the novel does not end on this dramatic note. The epilogue takes place a couple of years later. The family, needless to say, has been devastated by the loss of their daughter, although at least they have the consolation of seeing Monica and Dan get married. Dan hasn’t been able to write at all since his sister’s death, and tries to work harder than ever as a lawyer, to allow his poor broken father some time to rest. Monica is teaching at a girls’ school. Mircea has married and settled for mediocrity. He finds the solemn vow that he wrote in his youth, when he first fell in love with Olguța, that if he ever were to become ‘like everyone else’, he would commit suicide – or else accept that his real soul is broken and his wings have been cut off… and quietly burns it to cinders. Saddest of all, the family has decided to sell Medeleni. The parents can no longer bear to go there, the memories are too painful, while Dan realises that he cannot afford to maintain the vast property, even if he were to work non-stop. The buyers are none other than vulgar Rodica and her rich banker husband, an act of revenge for being rather summarily dismissed from Medeleni in her youth (after trying to seduce Dan). In the Cazalet Chronicles, there was one last gathering at Home Place before it went on sale, but in this book, it’s just Dan and Monica spending one last day going through the empty house, haunted but also strengthened by their memories.
The days of the landed gentry are over, Teodoreanu seems to be saying. The hard-working professional classes can no longer afford to own such properties – and it’s the wild capitalists, the financiers, the industrialists and nouveau riche who are taking over. Banffy’s Transylvanian trilogy offers a similar sense of nostalgia in describing a vanished world, albeit one with far more politics and protagonists facing higher stakes overall.
I have recently acquired a new mattress – after my back started telling me in no uncertain terms that the old one was knackered. I am somewhat sceptical still about the benefits of the much-lauded (and expensive) ‘mattress in a box’ Emma, but just think how much more expensive it might be to have one of the bedrooms below!
The Lincoln Bedroom in the White House – I really think the White House decor would not be to my taste, it is too opulent and faux-historical. From Galerie Magazine.
If you want a real historical bedroom, what about Hever Castle? From their website.
Hmmm, Josephine’s bedroom at Malmaison resembles a campaign tent – so that Napoleon would feel right at home? From Palaces-of-Europe.com
Bedroom in Faringdon House, described by Nancy Mitford in one of her novels. From House and Garden.
Edith Wharton’s bedroom at The Mount is very feminine – apparently, she wrote most of her work while lying in bed, although she had a perfectly stunning library/study downstairs. From Lit Hub.
I rather like the style of Syrie Maugham, interior designer to the stars (and yes, wife of Somerset Maugham). From Decorpad.
I have a weakness for Art Deco, so I couldn’t resist including this, although it’s a film set rather than a real bedroom: Gatsby’s bedrooom in the latest film incarnation by Baz Lurhmann.
Britain is far less open to revolutionary modern architecture when it comes to residential property. A severe case of nostalgia or the result of far too many inadequate poky modern developments? Yet, undeniably, there is a charm to old buildings, especially if they have been sympathetically restored.
This window must have been the former barn door, in this gorgeous renovation from Archer Buchanan.
A conservatory with a difference from Town and Country Living.
Gresgarth Hall with its idyllic waterside setting.
Even better if your historical house has a library, of course, as is the case of Skibo Castle in Scotland, from Vogue Magazine.
A clever new addition that blends in with the old, from DIY Architecture.
Alexei Berg is a promising young pianist whose parents are imprisoned by the Soviets in 1941, on the eve of his debut concert. He runs away to find family in the west of the Soviet Union, assumes the identity of a dead soldier, becomes the driver and protégé of a Russian general and is taught how to play piano by the general’s daughter once he returns to Russia. He never reveals his real identity or his musical abilities until one day…. And yes, I did find the end of the book too rushed and the love story not entirely convincing. But this is not an epic story, nor a work of suspense. Nor is the story told in quite such a simple manner. Instead, it is told as a story within a story. Our unnamed narrator is trapped by a snowstorm in a remote railway station somewhere in Siberia when he comes across Alexei, now an old man, who tells him the story of his life. And perhaps forever changes his own.
This is not only a beautifully written elegy to a wasted talent, but also a far too familiar account of life, death, survival of human emotions and beauty under the twin evils of dictatorship and war. But it is about more than that: it is about art as the triumph of human spirit, and its suppression robbing us a little of our humanity. It is about music as life and life as music. Or the concert of a lifetime. Or how we only have a limited time on life’s stage. Or how the concert we have planned to play won’t necessarily be the music we end up playing, but there is music there nevertheless if we know how to listen. Or, or, or…
You can see how this short book, gives rise to all sorts of philosophical musings. Let me come back down to earth for an instant. [It’s that Russian soul of profound melancholy speaking to me.] Makine is Russian born and bred, but fled to France at the age of 30. He started writing novels in French, living the poverty-stricken life of ‘La Bohème’ for real, even had to pretend they were translated from Russian in an effort find any publisher. He achieved recognition with Le Testament Français, which won the two highest French literature prizes in 1995. He is one of the most respected writers in France today, has been translated into many languages, but is not all that popular back in Russia. Not surprising, given his frank, sometimes distressing portrayal of Soviet times in many of his novels. And, although he claims in interviews to have no nostalgia for ‘Motherland Russia’, Makine is forever trying to bridge the gap between Eastern and Western Europe.
Russia does permeate his works: the sensibility and descriptions are so reminiscent of Russian masterpieces. The door of the waiting-room blasting open and letting the chill air and snow in at the railway station where the characters are waiting for their delayed train. Alexei’s search amongst corpses, both Russian and German, for a plausible fake identity. It is the individual experience and these single moments of sharp insight that Makine tries to convey, rather than a sweeping panorama of society or a historical period. In a period when we rush to label nations and cultures (he takes exception to the term ‘Homo sovieticus’), the author gives us the example of a single person, not a particularly likeable or heroic person, perhaps not even a musical genius. And somehow this story becomes exemplary, reverberating in the Siberia of your soul long after you finish reading.
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