43.Prva ljubezen Ivana Turgenjeva in grskega pisatelja Ioannisa Kondilakisa
(The first love by Ivan
Turgenev and John Condilakis), translated from English by Vera Troha, in Primerjalna Knjizevnost, (Comparative Literature), volume
28, Nr 1, Liubljana, June 2005, ó. 91-97.
There is a Greek saying that a man never
forgets his first love, and a woman her latest. As a
demonstration I will refer to two short stories of the same title, “The first
love”, written by the Russian writer Ivan Turgenev and by the Greek writer John
Condilakis.
As we read in
the introductions to the two works used in this study1, they are
autobiographical to a great extent. They were, however, written in different
periods of the writers’s lives. Condilakis’s work was written a little before
his death. this can be inferred by the fact that it
was published in 1919, a year before his death. It was also written in
“dimotiki”, the spoken language, in contrast to his other works, which were
written in “catharevousa”, a sort of written language much preferred by
scholars and writers alike, a language with grammatical and syntactical forms
of the ancient Greek, from which it borrowed most of its vocabulary. Turgenev,
on the other hand, started his work in 1860, when he was only 42 years old, and
finished it in the middle of March of the same year, as we are informed in the
introduction.
In spite of
the common theme, both works have some differences as regards the plot.
However, there are two major similarities: the plot is unusual, and the heroines
came to a tragic end. Condilakis’s heroine commits suicide and Turgenev’s
heroine dies young, in childbirth. Both die before reaching the age of
thirty.
Their first
love had a great impact on the lives of both writers, as they confess: “The sorrow
gathered in my soul and stayed there all my life” (p. 92), Condilakis writes.
“Then I felt that, no matter how long I would live, I would never be able to
forget this movement, this glance, this smile of Zenaid. Her figure, this new
figure which unexpectedly appeared before me, would stay for ever in my memory”
(p. 81), Turgenev writes. A little earlier the hero says to his beloved: “I
will be in love with you until I die” (p. 77). I wonder if this is the reason
why neither writer got married. Perhaps they both had the feeling that all the
women that they met in their lives were lacking in comparison to their first,
idealized loves. Turgenev writes in the same short story: “Oh, tender feelings,
sweet sounds, goodness and calmness of a moved soul, lost joy of the first
excitement of love, where are you? Where are you?” (p. 35-36) And a few pages
later: “The feeling of happiness that I had at that time never appeared again
in my life” (p. 53). That time was when Zenaid, thinking that he was
unconscious, kissed him all over his face. “Her breast breathed over mine, her
hands tenderly held my head, and suddenly – what happened to me then! Her
tender, cool lips began covering my whole face with kisses… bit my lips”
(pp.52-53).
The experience
of the first kisses was for Condilakis’s hero also tremendous: “But when…
Vangelio embraced me and kissed me, I had the feeling that now she was kissing
me in a different way. Her kisses were fewer but lasted longer, and all of them
on the mouth. I had the feeling that they were burning and
that my cheeks were on fire” (p. 19).
Condilakis’s
first love, Vangelio, was a distant relative. “Slim and
brunette, apparently older than eighteen, maybe older than twenty” (p. 12),
while the writer was only five years old. The others would tease him for
his feelings. Vangelio is engaged, but her fiancé abandons her, and she
doesn’t manage to form another relationship. So, as the hero gets older, never
ceasing to love her, Vangelio directs her frustrated feelings towards him. His
mother doesn’t fail to notice, and is not at all
pleased.
Our hero is
now fourteen years old. He lives in the city where he attends high school. On
coming home for the vacations, he finds Vangelio ill with tuberculosis. His
mother isn’t on good terms with her, being anxious about the relations she has
developed with her son. He, however, despite his mother’s worried protests that
he may become infected, visits her twice. Vangelio, in despair, says to her
mother: “I have a love which doesn’t suit me. This love is my great and only
joy, but also the great and incurable pain of my life. People should feel sorry
for me. I haven’t asked for their sympathy. But though they criticize me, I am
neither afraid nor ashamed. God who thinks differently will
judge me and find my heart pure” (p. 88). In the end, in despair, she
climbs a high cliff and throws herself down, killing herself. Her young beloved
then falls into great despair.
Turgenev’s
narrator is sixteen when he makes the acquaintance of Zenaid, an impoverished
princess who lives with her mother in a nearby house in the country. Like
Kondylakis’s first love, she is “tall and slim” (p.16). He falls in love with
her. He suffers from jealousy seeing her surrounded by a multitude of admirers,
just like Kondylakis’s narrator, who is jealous of Vangelio’s fiancé.
Later his distress becomes greater, as he realizes that she is having a love
affair with someone. He gives us some evidence, which at that time had passed
unnoticed by him, as to who the man in her life might be. Finally he finds out
that this man is his own father, as he is witness to a farewell scene. So our
hero turns out to be an inverted Hippolyte, Euripides’s hero. He loves his
father’s wife, and not vice-versa. And the one who is going to die is his father,
and not he. His separation with his mistress seems to become intolerable to
him, provoking thus an apoplexy, which sends him to death. Just before he dies,
he begins writing a letter to his son. “My son – he wrote to me – beware women’s love, this happiness, this poison” (p. 83).
While these
short stories apparently focus on the love despair that these two young heroes
experience, in fact, what moves the reader more is the tragic condition of the
two heroines. By far the most moving of them is Condilakis’s heroine, whose
frustrated love is eminent throughout, finally leading her to suicide. As
regards Turgenev’s heroine, she gets married, but four years afterwards she
dies in childbirth. Turgenev’s hero didn’t have the chance to meet with her
during all these years.
According to
Aristotle who says “…when the tragic incident occurs between those who are near
or dear to one another… these are the situations to be looked for by the poet”2,
Turgenev’s love-story should be more tragic, since there is the son’s jealousy
of the father. Moreover there is no conflict, since Zenaid, in contrast to
Vangelio, doesn’t take this young boy’s love for her seriously, which might
have caused his father’s rage. And the young son doesn’t feel anger against his
father when he discovers who his rival is. And, most of all, the heroine’s
death doesn’t happen “according to the law of probability or necessity”3,
but quite accidentally.
On the
contrary, Condilakis’s love-story has an air of ancient tragedy. The tragic
heroine suffers because of amartia, that is “some error or frailty”4,
and her tragic end is not an ordinary death, but suicide. She is, moreover,
constantly in the foreground. The father in Turgenev’s story, though he also
dies because of “some error or frailty”, appears very rarely on the stage. His
error is the adultery, and his punishment a death caused by grief. So the
reader feels more compassion, a sentiment prevalent in Greek tragedies
according to Aristotle, for Vangelio than for any of Turgenev’s heroes.
There is a
general similarity in Turgenev’s and Condilakis’s works. In the electronic
encyclopedia Britanica cd, we read about “…the elegance of the love
story and the psychological acuity of the portraiture” in Turgenev’s works, and
that “The promise of happiness is offered, but the ending of the relation is
invariably calamitous”. In Condilakis’s works the end is always calamitous as
well, without however any promise of happiness. This is more evident in another
of Kondylakis’s work entitled “When I was a schoolmaster”. The reader has no
doubt that neither the love of the teacher nor the love of the narrator for the
same young beautiful girl is going to be reciprocated. But while the narrator
overcomes his grief when the young girl gets married the good-looking young
man, the teacher, falling into deep depression, like Vangelio, commits suicide.
In his “First
love” Condilakis proves very modern in his depiction of a passionate love and
its frustration not in a normal love relationship but rather in an unusual love
relationship. “Madam Butterfly” by Henry David Hwang is one of the most
representative examples of the portrayal of an unusual, but nonetheless deep
erotic passion. His hero commits suicide, as the woman he is in love with
proves to be a man and, moreover, a spy. Not because of the betrayal, but
because the ideal female form with which he was in love proved to be
non-existent. “
Turgenev, in
opposition to Condilakis, tends to focus more, like a painter, on the outer
appearance of his heroes. Zenaid is depicted in many episodes. These
depictions, emphasizing her beauty, function as a means to make the narrator’s
love both justified and inevitable. Zenaid is portrayed from his point of view,
the point of view not of an objective spectator but of a teenager totally in
love: “I glanced at Zenaid – and at that moment she seemed to me much taller
than anyone of us. Her pale brow, her motionless eyebrows, reflected such a brilliance
of spirit and commanding force, that I thought: You
are this queen” (p.63).
In their first
encounter the young narrator is attracted by “her huge gray eyes” (p. 16).
Condilakis’s narrator also remarks that “her black eyes, which seemed greater
than usual, had the agony of an injured bird” (p.35). The huge gray eyes of
Zenaid express eroticism, since, as biologists contend, a woman’s eyes, when
sexually aroused, dilate, and, announcing thus her erotic readiness, she seems
more beautiful, attracting in this way the males. In contrast Vangelios’ black
eyes, which seemed larger than usual, made evident her great distress like
windows to her soul.
Condilakis, in
contrast to Turgenev, depicts the outer appearance of his heroine very briefly,
showing her gradual withering as the symbolic equivalent of a deeper spiritual
withering, caused by the attacks of the narrator’s mother and by the
realization of the inevitable frustration of her erotic feelings. Turgenev
portrays his heroine’s beauty while Condilakis portrays the turbulent inner
world of his.
Turgenev makes
brief but accurate portrayals of the suitors who surround his queen:
“-Maidanov, the princess addressed a tall young man with a thin face and the
small eyes of a blind man, and a very long black
hair…” e.t.c. (p. 31). A motif in Turgenev’s works is the examination of the
impact of a newcomer to the rest of the company and their reaction when they
see him developing a relation with the heroine, which, as we have already said,
is doomed to fail. So in Turgenev’s short story there are a lot of characters,
while in Condilakis’s short story there are very few, all of them having a
decisive role in the development of the plot.
Every
narrative work is to a certain extent ethographic, either by design or
unavoidably, since the milieu of the characters has to be described somehow,
otherwise they would seem to be moving in a vacuum. When a story is placed in
the distant past its readers capture more intensely its ethographic character,
because of the difference in the customs and morals between the present and the
past. The soviet citizens and contemporary Russians as well must observe with
curiosity the morals of the aristocracy of that time and the ways they
entertained themselves. The game of Jack which Turgenev describes may well be
unknown to contemporary Russians.
In his short
story Condilakis exposes medical practices of the past, with an ethographic
intention and a satirical aim as well. The mentally ill was thought to be
possessed by demons. The demons would then be exorcised by the priest, and if
they didn’t leave the possessed man, he was heavily thrashed. “The poor crazy
man was beaten and they thought that they were beating the devil” (p.58). In
those times there was also a very strange way to fight fever. “My mother used
to call for a man of letters to ‘write the shivers’, that is to write an
incantation on a piece of paper, and this paper would then be strung around my
neck, as a talisman. They also used to dissolve this paper
and give me the solution to drink” (p. 80).
And a page
later:
“…The majority
of these doctors of traditional medicine were fortune-tellers, that is magicians and doctors at the same time. Instead of
diagnosing the illness according to the symptoms of the patient, these doctors
diagnosed on the basis of fortune-cards, which were believed to be a mixture of
magic and cure.
My mother
called such a doctor to examine me. He came holding a thick book, handwritten,
wrinkled and worn in the corners after so many years of browsing. He hardly
cast a look at me. He neither examined my pulse nor looked at my tongue. My
mother told him that I felt very feverish, I sweated
at night and was delirious. But all this was irrelevant information for his art
of healing. He only asked what month and what day I had been born. Then he
opened his book. And as he turned over page after page, there appeared stars of
David, magic circles and other similar magic forms. After reading aloud for a
while he stopped and told me to put my finger randomly on any point. Then he
started reading again, not aloud this time, his lips hardly moving. After a few
minutes he made his diagnosis. I had a heavy “vistara”, that is an attack of
the evil spirits, but perhaps initiated and in collaboration with a human
being. His piece of paper was rather vague on this point” (p.81).5
Condilakis’
language also shows the transition of the Cretan vernacular (Condilakis comes
from
Both stories
are excellent. I think that Condilakis’s short story is the better. Although it
was not my intention to demonstrate it in my analysis, I think it becomes
evident through it. Turgenev is a widely known writer. Condilakis, a very
talented writer, had the misfortune to write in an idiom spoken in a small
country. But the fate of great literary works written in minor languages like
Slovenian and Greek is too large an issue to be discussed here.
Notes
[1] Ioannis Condilakis, I proti agapi kai alla
diigimata, (First love and other stories),
2 Aristotle, Poetics, tr.
By S.H.Butcher, etext #1974, Gutenberg Project, XIV.
3 Ibid, IX.
4 Ibid,
XIII.
5 Incidentally, Ba Jin, a famous Chinese writer,
satirizes similar traditional medical Chinese practices and the rejection of the
western medicine in his work Chun (Spring). We
have read it in a simplified edition, as a reader, in Sinolingua editions,
Beijing, 1987, p.42.
Works cited
Ioannis Condilakis, xx:, I
proti agapi kai alla diigimata, (First love and other stories),
I.S. Turgenev, 1988: Pervaya lubov (First love),
Aristotle, Poetics, tr. By
S.H.Butcher, etext #1974, Gutenberg Project, XIV.
Ba Jin, 1987: Chun (Spring),