A Norwegian writer travels in a circle from Norway to Finland, Russia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Germany, Denmark and then back to Norway. He also visits Sweden. It is a sort of tour of the Baltic kulturgemeinschaft. Eystein writes in the introduction that he wants to transcend national borders, and ends up with something of a Nordic version of the magisterial “Danube” by Claudio Magris. I read it in the original Norwegian, all 500+ pages. There is also an English translation, heavily redacted (half the book was cut out). It was given a new title too: “Baltic” – which is very poor. Granted, “Til” is also a shitty name, but at least somewhat mysterious.
Given its length and meandering style, I had to read this in 50 page spurts. I had to skip and skim a bit. It was fun to read in Norwegian, I like expanding my vocabulary and learning new words. Eystein goes all in on musing about Nordic history, literature, architecture, art and more. He isn’t afraid to throw in a movie reference or two, with mostly 80s and 90s art films, which kind of dates the text for a contemporary reader. The dated feeling is partly because of what movies he references (the Danish film Babette’s Feast (1987) is mentioned, I believe) and partly also the simple fact that they are movie references at all. But that was the world back then. Eystein was born in 1968.
He intersperses his text with memories of earlier visits. He mentions the places he stays at,which are often writer’s retreats and cultural centers. He complains about the coffee or retells some small talk he makes. Not that interesting. Some of the observations seem quaint and naive to me, and I don’t know if it is because times have changed since 2002 (when this trip was undertaken) or because Eystein actually was/is a bit quaint? Like his discussion of österbotten and västerbotten or the fact that he is fascinated that medieval churches made candles out of beeswax.
Don’t get me wrong – I love the idea that someone undertook a projcet like this, in the part of the world that I call home. I once made a similar (but shorter) coastal trip from Oslo to Stockholm, traveling the entire coast of Sweden between those points. But I didn’t write about it. I’d really like to make a similar trip to the one Eystein made for this book, but I don’t have access to the kind of grants Eystein got. While reading, I feel like he could have come up with stronger material than this, but then I remember that he didn’t grow up with the Internet. And he grew up in a small town called Bodø.
He reflects upon why he always chooses the canonized literature to connect with a country…and he has a convoluted argument about why certain countries develop poetry and some countries write epics. For some reason does he find the island of Gotland similar to Rome. He mentions latitudes and the fact that our geography doesn’t have to be so closed as it is by borders. Stockholm is on the same latitudinal coordinates as Oslo, which is on basically the same as Helsinki, as is Saint Petersburg. He asks: does the snow on the Norwegian side of the border become Finnish snow when it crosses the border?
As he circles the Ostsee he also encounters non-Nordic lands. Like the little strip of Russia, the former Soviet states south of Finland (which in Scandinavian languages is what we think of when the word baltic comes up) – as well as Poland and Germany. He discusses the Hanseatic league… the trade of amber (bernstein). The Vikings. Kind of good to read this from a Norwegian, cause a Swedes would probably have been too blind to a lot of things.
He writes about his own doubts about this “project” and revisits those thoughts maybe too many times. “I sit at the coffee shop and think about the point of this journey” is a sentence that is recurrent, in various forms. He also thinks back on his youth and his tendency to be non-participating and taking the role of observer.
He returns to how all literature is based in space and time – a thought that must have seemed more novel in 2002 than today. The idea of situating literary studies in historical and spatial context is part of the standard nowadays. Franco Morretti’s literary geographies come to mind.
Norway is not part of the Baltic countries. But he is the one who does this trip. Maybe it took a Norwegian to write a literary travelogue of the “Eastern sea”, as this body of water is called in the Scandinavian languages. Or maybe it took a Norwegian grant committee? I suspect this is what he means when he writes that Norway is the best country to be a writer in.
Revisiting this 20 years after the trip was undertaken begs the question of what has changed in the two decades that have passed? References to the USSR feel quaint. And references to world war 2 seem ancient nowadays. What would a “Til 2.0” be like?
Month: June 2022
Fathers and Sons (Ivan Turgenev, 1862)
Turgenev is lesser-known compared to the stalwarts Dostoevsky and Tolstoy in (the Western version of) the Russian literary canon. What also sets him apart from his more famous counterparts is that he spent a lot of his life in Europe, in exile from Russian society. His writing is of a very realist bent, and he is often occupied with describing unfulfilled love and feelings of longing. Fathers and Sons is his most read work, and contains the famous character Bazarov, a young man at odds with society, coming to the fore with the generation of his parents, and society at large.
The story opens as student Arkady brings Bazarov home with him over a leave rom university. Bazarov shocks and surprises Arkadys father and uncle with his radical views on morality and tradition. The two later visit another estate and become friends with some women. Later they go on to Bazarovs family home.
I like the description of Russian society and how the ideas of nihilism (nigilizm) were embraced in Russian society. A lot of the book is dialogue between Bazarov and various characters. A notable passage is the discussion of nihilism between Bazarov and Arkady’s father and uncle. I liked the parts where Bazarov ridiculed the father and the Father tried to be up with the times, which is a phenomenon we see to this day. The whole notion of generational shifts interests me, and how those dynamics have changed over time. Someone from my generation (born in the late 1980s) will associate a lot of radical ideas with the 1960s but this book is a good reminder that these tendencies didn’t start there.
Another favorite part was the description of the folk beliefs of the peasant woman in the second half of the book (chapter 20):
Arina Vlasyevna was a genuine Russian gentlewoman of the olden times; she ought to have lived two centuries before, in the old Moscow days. She was very devout and emotional; she believed in fortune-telling, charms, dreams, and omens of every possible kind; she believed in the prophecies of crazy people, in house-spirits, in wood-spirits, in unlucky meetings, in the evil eye, in popular remedies, she ate specially prepared salt on Holy Thursday, and believed that the end of the world was at hand; she believed that if on Easter Sunday the lights did not go out at vespers, then there would be a good crop of buckwheat, and that a mushroom will not grow after it has been looked on by the eye of man; she believed that the devil likes to be where there is water, and that every Jew has a blood-stained patch on his breast; she was afraid of mice, of snakes, of frogs, of sparrows, of leeches, of thunder, of cold water, of draughts, of horses, of goats, of red-haired people, and black cats, and she regarded crickets and dogs as unclean beasts; she never ate veal, doves, crayfishes, cheese, asparagus, artichokes, hares, nor water-melons, because a cut water-melon suggested the head of John the Baptist, and of oysters she could not speak without a shudder; she was fond of eating—and fasted rigidly; she slept ten hours out of the twenty-four—and never went to bed at all if Vassily Ivanovitch had so much as a headache; she had never read a single book except Alexis or the Cottage in the Forest; she wrote one, or at the most two letters in a year, but was great in housewifery, preserving, and jam-making, though with her own hands she never touched a thing, and was generally disinclined to move from her place.
Another notable passage was the one where Bazarov discusses love with the woman at the estate, Mme Odintsov. It presents the problem of how to be, and picks apart some presuppositions of both rationalism and romanticism.
The estates are described as being in a state of the desuetude, with laborers who don’t respect the owner. It is a period in time which somehow mirrors our own. Emancipation of the serfs had happened in 1861, when presumably this was written, but I think it is set earlier. Bazarov thinks differently about the serfs: they should be free and able but not necessarily regarded particularly positively. Those views are at odds with both the traditional nationalist view and the supposed progressive view.
I can’t comment on the translation much, but the word “ejaculated” to describe dialogue comes across as somewhat uncomfortable. I guess the 2010 Michael Pursglove translation trumps this one by Richard Hare (1907-1966).
Kinship of all Species 