Fantasies Conjured from War
RUSSELL, JAMES R.
SUMMER BOOKS Fantasies Conjured from War By James R. Russell Even in fantasy books that present exotic forms of future society or idealized images of the feudal past, political simplicity can...
...He called his noble Lion and Christ-figure Asian (Turkish for "lion...
...the Finnish Kalevala, with its dueling wizards and romantic youths...
...One of them served with the Lancashire Fusiliers, who were decimated landing at Gallipoli on April 25,1915, one day after the Ottoman Empire began the Armenian genocide...
...Indeed, Thomas More's Utopia proved disquieting because those who were supposed to benefit from his vision found themselves the class enemies and torture victims of Ingsoc in George Orwell's 1984...
...Biographies, starting with Humphrey Carpenter's Tolkien: The Authorized Biography (1977), faithfully record the details of a humdrum life yet fail uniformly to realize how humdrum the fiction is...
...Eliot, D.H...
...He has nothing to say about the Modernists or novelists like Franz Kafka, Mikhail Bulgakov and Vladimir Nabokov, though they used fantastic material richly...
...Afterward he dreams of eating a delicious cutlet, then realizes it has been cut from the thigh of his beloved acolyte at the monastery...
...Beowulf, with its evil monsters...
...Tolkien himself famously claimed he constructed his lore after cooking up his private tongues and calligraphic scripts, not the other way around...
...Russian writers could not afford the complacency of Oxonian dons...
...The horror of war propelled Tolkien and Lewis into escapist fantasies that have in common reductive, Manichean struggles between stereotyped forces of good and evil...
...The Chamber's fictional leader, Tsar Asyka, is part man, part monkey—a composite cousin of the various races in Middle Earth...
...It is a realm of backward names, reversed sexualities, and explicit fairy-tale and boy's-own-story episodes, described by the enigmatic Professor Kinbote...
...Remizov, more than Tolkien, was attuned to the elusiveness of good and evil, truth and illusion...
...Like the befuddled Zemblan, Tolkien was a prisoner locked within his own fantasy...
...In later years, Tolkien, Lewis and their friends at Oxford attempted to recover the clubby comfort of their schooldays with a new talking club, the Inklings...
...But he did not react in the manner of a Modernist confronting the derangement of the senses and of sense...
...When he received queries from readers about Middle Earth, he answered with the promise to do some research into the matter...
...The adventures Tolkien set in Middle Earth are simplified derivatives of the literature he studied and taught: the German Nibelungenlied, with its Ring motif...
...In recent years some critics have maintained that works like The Lord of the Rings should be enjoyed, but subjected to scholarly examination as well...
...Escapism can assuage such horrors, and the last century made readers hungrier than ever for fantasy's favorite theme—the triumph of good over evil...
...The novels and stories of J.R.R...
...others, like Remizov in Paris, were scattered across Europe in its aftermath...
...Tom Shippey's J.R.R...
...The examples he offers are fatally limited to English and American authors: William Golding, Orwell, Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut, Ursula Le Guin...
...Its purpose, in the words of one member, I.A...
...Remizov's daring and complex tales share Tolkien's linguistic antiquarianism, but the Russian's literary style is avant garde, evoking Velimir Khlebnikov's phonetic zaum ("transrational") games...
...women are safely limited to the kindly but uncanny elves...
...Like the Symbolists of his time, he frequently relies on dreams as a theme and as an actual source...
...The British government produced a propaganda newsreel about it, failing to foresee how the carnage on the screen would produce revulsion in audiences...
...in 1956—has recently been rivaled by a rising tide of critical reverence...
...Signs of the trauma and loss of World War I betray themselves in both Tolkien's elementary plots and his intricate linguistic games...
...Remizov created 400-odd charters, orders and notebooks (one of them entitled "Sirin") for the Chamber, endowing it with its own rich mythology...
...Instead, the history of Middle Earth begins long before The Hobbit, with an extended series of tales...
...It is possible to ply the fantasy genre without playing Peter Pan...
...Lewis' Narnia cycle, set in 1940, the year of the Blitz, ends with the untimely death of all the characters...
...Garth puts that work in context...
...Elvish is not dead, it never lived...
...Victory led to the shrunken Britain of the 1920s and disillusionment with compromised liberal ideals...
...the composer Sergei Prokofiev...
...Shippey fails to make this essential judgment...
...The quartet invented languages, played rugby, put on Greek plays, and talked about how important they were to the future of the world...
...Garth notes that the name Kor was taken from H. Rider Haggard's 1887 novel She, but the description of the lost city owes much to Poe's poem "The City in the Sea...
...the writers Maxim Gorky, Zamyatin and Mikhail Kuzmin, author of Wings (1906), the first overtly gay novel ever published...
...Neither Tolkien's Christianity nor his prejudices are as overt in his books as in Lewis', but they are there...
...The different circumstances of Tolkien's and Remizov's youth, at opposite ends of Europe, anticipated the contrast in their talents...
...Tolkien alone survived...
...Beowulf is epic, the Tolkien oeuvre is the pastime of a student of epic...
...John Garth's Tolkien and the Great War (2003) recounts Tolkien's prewar years at a cloistered English boarding school, where he and three friends founded the close-knit Tea Club and Barrovian Society (TCBS...
...From there the elfin first men set out toward the grim and mortal East...
...the poets Sergei Esenin, Aleksandr Blok and Anna Akhmatova...
...A generation earlier, in 1924, the Russian writer Yevgeny Zamyatin published We, the first work of this genre by an author living through the dystopian nightmare of real totalitarianism...
...SUMMER BOOKS Fantasies Conjured from War By James R. Russell Even in fantasy books that present exotic forms of future society or idealized images of the feudal past, political simplicity can be dangerous...
...the leader of the democratic Russian republic after the February Revolution, Aleksandr Kerensky...
...He was at the Battle of the Somme in 1916, another massacre on an enormous scale...
...In Kiev he goes to church, beholds what appears to be a funeral, and is regretful that he advised propriety over happiness...
...Kinbote's account of his flight from Zembla, where he was king until a recent coup, is attached as a commentary to a poem by John Shade, his recently slain American neighbor...
...Sherry explains how the horrors of the War called forth innovation in some and strategies of evasion in others, including Tolkien...
...Lewis, in his Chronicles of Narnia, also lifted frequently from the Sultan's tongue...
...He argues that fantasy literature dominated the 20th century, but does not provide convincing proof...
...In The Great War and the Language of Modernism (2003) Vincent Sherry suggests the opposite...
...Both authors accept that there can be no return to the idyllic, prewar life...
...The soldiers sought the kind and the familiar...
...Sumerian is dead, but Gilgamesh is part of our culture...
...Though he denied his epic was allegorical, the rumblings of World War I, in which Tolkien served, echo throughout his work...
...His career begins with a nightmare of pursuit by the Bronze Horseman—the statue of Peter the Great in the capital, detached from its pedestal to give chase...
...Had he not been a budding Oxford don, his retrograde escapism might have ended with a few pseudo-Nordic poems and stories...
...He named Sauron's Furylike ring-wraiths Nazgul...
...For the former, creative work was little more than "play up, play up, and play the game" on a cricket pitch...
...the word is Persian-in-Turkish for the delicate, lyrical "coquettish rose...
...Their club was Obezvelvolpal, the Great and Free Chamber of Monkeys...
...The work of writers who were on the front lines, such as Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen and Graves, was thoroughly conventional in style, while the truly innovative Modernists reacting to the War—William Butler Yeats, Virginia Woolf, Ezra Pound, T.S...
...There they founded the Union of Free Alcoholics—the TCBS to Obezvelvolpal's Inklings, as it were—and Remizov learned the value of being a revolutionary in all things, resolving "to preserve the truth of being oneself on earth...
...Tolkien's doughty hobbits are essentially English schoolboys from the Home Counties ("the Shire...
...His most recent books are An Armenian Epic: The Heroes of Kasht and The Book of Flowers...
...This was used previously by Aleksandr Pushkin and Nikolai Gogol to represent oppression of the individual by ruthlessly arbitrary state power...
...This recalls Kinbote drawing Shade a color diagram of his lost royal palace...
...Refusing the inner voice of his intuition and following a sign given by a holy icon, the priest counsels the latter...
...the former an inchoate, nostalgic England of beer and skittles...
...The TCBS members were schoolboys, the Free Alcoholics a Decembrist cell...
...Nabokov, for instance, a lover of the linguistic treasures of his heritage no less than Tolkien, stretched the boundaries of the novel in ways the Englishman could not have imagined...
...His close friend, Oxford colleague and fellow fantasist CS...
...it never advanced beyond the amateur...
...Pale Fire is in part an academic parody...
...It did not take news from Turkey for Tolkien to realize he was living through a transition into a new and terrifying era...
...Since every member of Obezvelvolpal was a nobleman, it was a mirror image of Tsarist Russia, with its social stratification and bleak inequality...
...the writers at home, enjoying the luxury of distance, pondered both the meaningless slaughter at the front and the cant of official propaganda at home...
...When the War began, they enlisted and shared nostalgic, sentimental correspondence...
...Here Lewis follows Medieval Christians who accused Muslims of idolatry—the one sin they could not possibly be guilty of—claiming they worshiped little golden statues called "mawmets," after the Prophet Mohammed...
...Tolkien have achieved a level of popularity that, despite scorn from the likes of Edmund Wilson—who boomed "Ooh, those awful ores...
...Lawrence, and James Joyce—did not witness the horrors of battle...
...In the story "Divine Judgment," a young man returning to his parents' home in Kiev asks Father Hilarion, a priest traveling on the same train, whether he should abandon a happy, unconsecrated marriage in Petersburg and wed the woman his family has chosen, whom he does not love...
...The latter is a disturbing amalgam of mechanistic Germany, Soviet Russia and the Islamic world...
...The poem and end notes seem to have nothing to do with each other, but the desperate Kinbote insists on a concealed connection of Shade's verse to his own bizarre story...
...The society formed before the Bolsheviks took power...
...The Lord of the Rings pits divine beings and various human types (elves, dwarves, hobbits) against Sauron, the tyrant of Mordor...
...The list of the club's princes and cavaliers included the future Soviet cultural theoretician and official A. Lunacharsky...
...Tolkien's denouement reflects that atmosphere, and his reactionary vision of a restored kingdom rings hollow...
...They have no visible form of government, nor any important female associates...
...Both constructed elaborate mythologies and within them explored cosmic and human problems, but the fates of their native countries resulted in fantasies that have radically different political implications...
...At the other end of Europe, the Great War led to revolution and civil war...
...Ilyin, was to inculcate "creative imagination in opposition to "normal modes of thought' and to enable it to break free...
...Sherry shows that readers of the press on the home front saw through the pseudoliberal rhetoric employed by the Establishment, too, as it tried to justify mass killing...
...His undertaking paralleled Tolkien's in both magnitude and theme...
...Compared to Nabokov, Tolkien seems a kind of real life Kinbote...
...They reacted to it directly and, often, cruelly...
...His invented country is the looking-glass land of Zembla in Pale Fire...
...But they never wanted that kind of life anyway...
...The outcome of the hobbits' battles for Middle Earth, ostensibly a struggle for freedom against tyranny, is the restoration of an ancient, quasi-Arthurian monarchy...
...Its citizens worship the hideous idol Tash (Turkish for "stone...
...He further asserts that various writers who experienced the new horrors of total war and genocide sought to describe their feelings in the terms of fantasy, while practitioners of the "drawing room" genres (a term Shippey attributes to Robert Graves) ignored the public and historical reality surrounding them...
...The new monkeyking spurs the nobles of his court to create a playful society based on mythological imagination and creativity...
...The Russians were engaged in revolutionary innovation in arts and letters, sex, and political rebellion...
...Along the way the world begins to seem more quotidian and the great music is heard ever more faintly...
...The truth is contradictory and maddening: Hilarion abandons the Church and wanders off as ayurodivy (a Russian Orthodox holy fool) into the endlessness of Russia...
...As it happened, they were of no significance to the world, nor was the future anything like what they had hoped it might be...
...Russian liberals and radicals found no place, though, in Soviet society...
...The name is a Russian acronym that mocks the polysyllabic abbreviations of the Soviet bureaucracy (à la Orwell's darker Ingsoc...
...Remizov turns the device on its heel, making Asyka the victor—an incarnation of human free will and a crusader against the dreary regimentation of everyday life...
...Putting natural and artificial languages on an equal footing is sterile scholarship...
...Better to have lived and loved, to be an Asyka or a Sirin in Zembla, than to spend a colorless senescence in Middle Earth...
...In these foundational myths, the Creator-god forms the world by singing a primordial tune, and the first city, Kor, arises in the far West...
...Tolkien's cosmogony also draws on Nordic myth, Romanticism, Genesis, the Decadents, and the popular culture of the late Victorian era...
...But this triumph is offset by a grim episode, "The Scouring of the Shire," when the hobbits find their land infested by evil and must root it out at a cost of many lives...
...and the theater director Vsevolod Meyerhold...
...He also admitted that those secret inventions were guilty pleasures...
...For that reason Shippey's labor seems onanistic...
...Some of this material was published posthumously by the author's devoted son, Christopher, in a revised and condensed version called The Silmarillion (1973), and in the two volumes of The Book of Lost Tales (1986), which collect Tolkien's earliest writings...
...He wrote lyric poems about an idyllic rural past, stilted in style and remote in subject from the events around him...
...But Namia's enemy is the Oriental despotism of Calormen, whose currency, the crescent, is the symbol of Islam...
...The appendices to The Lord of the Rings summarize the relevant details...
...Nabokov's fictional framework allows us to understand Zembla both as an actual place and as one man's elaborately narcissistic delusion...
...Some members joined the Revolution...
...Like Sassoon and Owen, Tolkien was conventional in his outlook, a point obscured by classifying him as a fantasist...
...Similarly, the Revolution in St...
...In his landmark essay, "The Monsters and the Critics," he argued that the Anglo-Saxon poem is best appreciated for its own sake as a strange, sustained journey of imagination, not merely as a text to be dissected by linguists...
...A few members of Obezvelvolpal had met Remizov in the provincial town of Vologda, where he was exiled in the 1890s— when he was in his early 20s—by the Tsarist regime for radicalism...
...Tolkien may have had the Ottomans in mind when he invented Mordorian, an agglutinative parody of Turkish meant to sound alien and nasty...
...Tolkien, Author of the Century (2001) illustrates the perils and the possibilities of such a project...
...Petersburg that attended the Great War marked the fiction of the Russian writer Aleksey Remizov...
...James R. Russell is Mashtonts Professor of Armenian Studies at Harvard University...
...A specialist in English and German philology, he devotes many pages to an investigation of the Germanic and Finnish inspiration of Tolkien's invented languages...
...Having caught trench fever, Tolkien spent the last two years of the War in England, in military hospitals and at home with his wife...
...Nabokov's cousin, the composer Nicholas Nabokov, belonged to a society of writers and artists founded by Remizov...
...Nabokov conceived of himself a conjuror (in Russian volshebnik, a partial anagram of his name) and wrote at first under the nom de plume Sirin, the name of a mythical bird...
Vol. 87 • May 2004 • No. 3
