Sex Torment on the Baltic

...Although reportedly based on fact, the adventures of Erick, Sophie and Conrad might have happened on any front...

...At last, Erick's irresistible drive toward homosexuality wins out...

...Revieived by Helene Cantarella Former chief, Foreign Language Review Section, OWl Motion Picture Bureau "Tutto il mondo e paese " say the Italians when they want to emphasize the similarity of experiences common to the family of man...

...The ties that bind Sophie to Erick and Erick to Conrad give rise to one of those infinitely complex and tormented situations which the French handle with inimitable skill, conveying obliquely the essence and flavor of a whole society, the quiet desperation of an intolerable emotional climate and the tragic futility of the protagonists' efforts at achieving love, understanding and peace...

...Yourcenar situates her story in a sort of no-man's-land on a disputed sector of the German-Russian front, among people of such varied national and political backgrounds, at a period of such shifting allegiances, that the political question, while it does play a role, never becomes the dominant factor in the development and denouement of the love affair...

...What raises this story above the commonplace is the way it is told...

...Yourcenar's great talent and provides us with still another proof of the inexhaustible fascination which the German character exercises upon the French intelligentsia...

...Inevitably they fall in love and there ensues a strange, anguished intimacy which is characterized by a sort of desperate intellectual fencing that keeps them in a state of acute exasperation and unfulfilled passion...

...The beautiful, crystalline style, so Gallic in the measured economy of its means, and the ruthless stripping of action, background and characters to their bare non-national essentials so that nothing but the human factors remain, imbue the work with that true, timeless, universal value so dear to the French spirit...

...And this is especially true with love, that great common denominator, which produces the same pangs, the same delights, the same surrenders, the same remorses the world over...

...Both young men have in common their philosophy "of valuing nothing too high in order to remain free to disdain it while tasting it to the full...

...As if to give maximum cogency to her point (but without ever laboring it), Mme...

...This is no doubt the humble message that the brilliant French writer, Marguerite Yourcenar, means to convey in her second work—a brief, tender, almost crepuscular novel centered on a sad love affair between a girl and a young officer in the swirling tides of the First World War in the countries then known as the Baltic Provinces...

...In the last analysis, it is the clash of personalities and the impact of deeply felt emotional loyalties, of anguishing personal anxieties, that keep Erick and Sophie apart and precipitate the tragic and bitter climax...

...In his perpetually unsettled existence, Erick (a Prussian with French and Baltic blood) has only the poet Conrad (a Bait of Russian ancestry) as a fixed point...

...When the unsuspecting Sophie is faced with the bald facts, she flees in revulsion to the enemy and some months later is captured and, ironically enough, is put to death—in perhaps too pat a fashion—by Erick's troops...

...Here Erick meets Conrad's brave and disturbingly beautiful 16-year-old sister, Sophie, harrowed by the alternatingly traumatic and bleak experiences of the war...

...Of course, this is not a work of the same stature as the meditative Hadrian's Memoirs...

...In other words, it is with foes as it is with friends...

...In the midst of hostilities, they seek refuge and respite from the fighting in Conrad's war-torn ancestral feudal domain...

...But in its simple, unpretentions way it reveals a new facet of the versatile Mme...