Stories set in the future are really about concerns of the present. That’s one reason why there’s no relation between the quality of a work and whether the predictions made in it come true. The proof of this is that people still enjoy classics of the genre that got things wrong, because their true virtues lie elsewhere.

2001: A Space Odyssey, which came out in 1968, got a lot of predictions wrong. Kubrick and Clarke assumed that both Pan Am Airlines and the Soviet Union would still be around in that year. We weren’t flying to Jupiter and “beyond the infinite” in 2001, either. We weren’t even shuttling to the moon on a regular basis, as the characters in the film do. It goes without saying that they got the clothes and hairstyles wrong, because fashion cycles appear to be unpredictable. As time passed, and the real year 2001 came and went, the movie’s future history was transformed into alternate history, along the lines of Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle or Catherine Lacey’s Biography of X. But for the appreciation of this film, these mistakes don’t matter. In the last Sight & Sound critics’ poll of the greatest films of all time (insofar as that serves as a useful measurement of opinion), it placed sixth.

Meanwhile, a creepy milestone was reached this summer. Ray Bradbury’s 1950 story of a deserted house collapsing in the aftermath of a nuclear war, “There Will Come Soft Rains,” is set on August 4-5, 2026. writes a detailed and timely appreciation of the story here. It didn’t matter that Bradbury made an incorrect prediction. His story was expressing the fears of the newly arrived Nuclear Age, which is still with us, just as Kubrick and Clarke were expressing the dreams, hopes and fears of the Space Age. (And yes, in the age of AI, HAL the rogue computer has become more relevant than ever.)

There is a particular reason why this topic is on my mind: it’s related to my current literary project. Yes, I’m working on my third novel. The state of play is as follows. The first draft is almost complete – only several thousand words left to go – and then comes the real fun, i.e. editing, revision, rewriting. The writing process is similar to the one I used for Social Distancing: instead of discrete chapters, I’m writing it in big sections composed of numerous subsections. I like this approach because I find it preserves the flow of narrative better than short chapters do. It’s also fun for my beta readers, who get a big chunk of text that they can critique every few months, and thus, we watch the book slowly coming together as it’s being written.

“So,” I can hear you say, “what’s it about, and how does it relate to all that stuff you just wrote about futuristic storytelling?” I’m coming to that. One of the first book reviews I posted here was of the novel Insatiability by wacko Polish avant-garde genius Witkacy. As I say in the review, although this book was published about 100 years ago, it is startlingly prescient. As I also say, it’s very diffuse and complicated and difficult to read, and I suspect very few people in the Anglo world have succeeded in reading the whole thing. Which is a shame, because at least in part due to that prophetic quality, it’s very worth reading.

I was contemplating this situation a few years ago, about the time I was sending out Social Distancing to publishers, and I got a bright idea: why not do a modern retelling of Insatiability, for an English-reading 21^st-century audience? This struck me as a very worthwhile thing to do, with kind of a twist, because I’m mining material that is obscure to my potential readers. After all, it’s not uncommon for authors to do retellings or reworkings of some established classic. Percival Everett redid Huckleberry Finn with his novel James a few years back; Barbara Kingsolver recently rewrote David Copperfield as Demon Copperhead. But the reworking doesn’t have to be of an established classic. There has, for instance, been a trend – which I was unaware of till recently – of Anglophone writers directly imitating Thomas Bernhard, of all people. One novel in particular is a close rewriting of that cranky, misanthropic scribbler’s book Woodcutters. Doing a modern riff on Insatiability struck me as a self-evidently good idea; probably the only reason nobody did it before me is because the book is little-known outside of Poland.

Naturally, once I actually got down to writing, it took on a life of its own. Although I’m following Witkacy’s template, I’m doing it loosely. It could turn out that when I finally finish the book, it will be about as close to its model as Ulysses is to The Odyssey. I think there are good reasons to keep this kind of distance.

First of all, the world Witkacy describes is very different from the world I have to deal with. Many of the characters in Insatiability are decadent aristocrats. We don’t have aristocrats in America; instead, we have billionaires and their hangers-on. So I’m making some relevant adjustments.

Here’s an example of what I mean. The hero of Insatiability graduates from a military academy and becomes an aide to the country’s leader, a sort of military dictator. I’m making use of a more contemporary idea. Around 2011, I started to see a trend of people posting on the Internet, complaining that modern higher education was a colossal waste of time, and if billionaires set up their own academies that taught practical skills and provided graduates with guaranteed jobs, they’d be flooded with applicants. I picked up that idea and ran with it. And it’s something that could happen in real life. We don’t yet have Elon Musk Leadership Academy, but we could!

Another aspect of Insatiability that looks grossly unrealistic from a contemporary standpoint is the idea of a Chinese military conquest of North America. This type of “Red Dawn” scenario simply wouldn’t work nowadays. First of all, it doesn’t work geographically, thanks to the Pacific Ocean. Furthermore, it would be pointless. We live in a globalized world of international capital. Money, products, assets all move across borders; the great tycoons of our time maintain interests in multiple continents. This means I’ve had to make other adjustments to bring the story in line with our present and near-future political and economic realities.

The story is set sometime in the not-too-distant future. I’m keeping it intentionally vague, but I think the decade of the 2040s is most likely. Readers will encounter such futuristic delights as human sacrifice, human cloning, ubiquitous automation, social and political breakdown, extreme and bizarre cults, and of course, drugs that take your worries away. As for influences beyond the original model, there’s a bit of Houellebecq, a dash of Ballard, a dose of Slavic satirical science fiction, and a plot driven by some Dickensian twists and surprises. That’s how the first draft is turning out, anyway.

There’s another aspect of this book that only became clear after I started writing it. My first novel, Abandon All Hope, was published in 2021 but is set in 1998. My second novel, Social Distancing, was written in 2022-23 and published in 2024. It’s set more or less in the present, although I didn’t specify the year. This third book (title still to be decided) is set a couple of decades in the future. This means that when I finish, I’ll have a “Past-Present-Future” trilogy. I didn’t plan it that way, but that’s how it’s working out. Maybe I should bundle them all together and sell them as a set?

Since I didn’t plan it in advance and only realized it was a potential trilogy once I’d started working on Book 3, the installments don’t share any characters or events. In that regard each book is totally self-contained. They do, however, share some themes and ideas. This is natural because I’m just a guy working out ideas that interest me on the page, and those ideas are going to keep coming back. If there’s an overarching concept that binds these three books together, it’s probably this: the question of how to live a meaningful and worthwhile life in a collapsing, unstable reality.

Now, as I said above, comes the fun part: revising, rewriting, reworking, doing all the “re-” stuff writers have to do before they send manuscripts out. And then, the really nerve-wracking and soul-destroying part, trying to get it published. Maybe I’ll have an update for you in a year or two. Maybe it will take longer. But having come this far – about 90% of the way through the first draft – I’m determined to finish this thing and get it out into the world. Even if it’s a collapsing and unstable world, like the one my characters have to deal with.

This is a personal account from the inside of how a profession withers and wanes to the point where it becomes no longer viable as a full-time job. I’m deliberately avoiding the emotive verb die because it’s not quite accurate. There are still people working as professional translators and interpreters. Although I stopped being a member of the American Translators Association at the end of 2024 after I got a new job, I still get their emails. I see that this year’s annual convention is still going ahead as planned. I won’t be there, though.

What I did was not literary translation, but mostly legal and business. When you’re dealing with legal documents, annual reports, financial statements, and the like, the goal should be accuracy above all. Elegant phrasing is nice but you can’t compromise the meaning of the text. In the business world, correctness takes precedence and style is secondary, unless you’re writing something like a press release or advertisement. Doing legal, medical, or technical translation is about as creative as doing surgery. There’s little or no room for creativity, because if you make mistakes, somebody could get hurt.

I first got into this type of translation in Moscow at the end of 2007, when I was hired by a Major International Law Firm (let’s call it MILF). At first, I edited other people’s writings. Later, after I learned the legal jargon, I became one of the official on-staff translators. Once you learn how legal jargon works, you realize how transferable it is among certain languages. I started out doing Russian -> English, but occasionally ventured into German -> English, where the process of picking up the specific vocabulary and phrasing went faster because I’d already done it once.

By the time I went freelance in 2012, I was working pretty much full-time, with both German and Russian as my “official” languages – i.e., those I listed on my resume or on professional translation sites. Every once in a while, I was called on to translate something from a language I knew to some extent, but not well enough to do it regularly or at a very high level (Polish, Czech, Spanish, French – and one unique case where I had to translate somebody’s diploma from Latin). But if agencies sent me work, it was only translating out of my two professional languages.

Work really picked up in 2014, when I signed on with one of the world’s biggest translation agencies. I was also still working remotely for MILF whenever they needed me, and for a couple of other agencies, as well as the occasional private client. Until COVID hit in 2020, my situation was almost ideal in the sense that I could count on a steady stream of offers every week and didn’t have to take every job that came my way.

A lot of the jobs were admittedly drudgework. Try as you might, it’s hard to make real estate contracts or clinical trial paperwork fun. There was subject matter I deliberately avoided, such as patents. That’s because patent language is its own strange jargon, above and beyond the usual legal jargon. I had to struggle with certain things. For instance, German legal language is not uniform. Austria uses certain terms that Germany doesn’t. In Switzerland, there are even differences in legal language depending on canton. Liechtenstein, which is sort of the Delaware of Europe (a place where companies exist on paper but not physically), has its own quirks. Things like this require you to develop a kind of sixth sense.

Here’s what I mean by that. Once I was translating a contract from German. The contract made repeated references to somebody called the “Rup” or “RUP.” For example: “Der Rup ist Herr Dr. X: der Rup wird diesen Vertrag verwalten [the Rup is Dr. X: the Rup will manage this contract].” This was not a word used in any German-speaking country I was aware of. Then I realized that this contract originated from South Tyrol, the German-speaking area of northern Italy. A few inquiries revealed that this wasn’t a German word at all, it was an Italian acronym: Responsabile unico del procedimento, the “person responsible for the proceedings.” This is a position specific to Italian law, so knowing German legal language won’t help you here.

If you don’t constantly exercise your linguistic abilities you’ll find yourself out of shape. This kind of translation would be difficult for me to do now, because my sixth sense has diminished since that time. Using a language is a lot like playing a musical instrument. If you spend a long time away from it, your abilities atrophy, and when you come back to it, the awkwardness can be distressing. The upside is that you usually get your skills back fairly quickly if you’re willing to put in the work. I used to know how to say such obscure things as “reverse piercing of the corporate veil” in German. Now I don’t.

In any case I was happily busy and steadily employed for several years, with no expectation that things were going to get worse. The rot began to set in, slowly but steadily, in 2018. That was the year when “machine translation post-editing” (MTPE) started to predominate in jobs originating from the major translation agencies. This had a couple of insidious effects. Most obviously, it turned most translation jobs into editing jobs. Instead of a continuous text with its own internal flow and logic, you got a text that had been scrambled and smashed to bits by a machine. Let me illustrate what I mean.

Let’s take the very first sentence of Madame Bovary. Here it is in the original French: Nous étions à l’Étude, quand le Proviseur entra, suivi d’un nouveau habillé en bourgeois et d’un garçon de classe qui portait un grand pupitre.

Here’s the opening of the novel in Francis Steegmuller’s English version: “We were in study-hall when the headmaster entered, followed by a new boy not yet in school uniform and by the handyman carrying a large desk.” Running the original through Google, we wind up with the following: “We were under study, when the headmaster entered, followed by a new dressed in bourgeois and a class boy who wore a large desk.”

This is a different picture entirely. First, the handyman has been transformed into a mere “class boy,” losing his significance in this vignette. More comically, the boy, instead of carrying the desk, is wearing it. This is due to the fact that the same verb is used in French for both actions. In “a new dressed in bourgeois,” the subject disappears: a new boy? a new girl? a new donkey? The French adjective nouveau contains a clue: it’s masculine, so we know the new entity is not a girl. But English lacks gendered adjectives, so you can’t tell the gender of the noun from the adjective.

To make things worse, it is clear that the computer lacks understanding of the cultural context of this passage. It doesn’t know that “study hall” is the correct translation, rather than “under study,” a phrase that suggests they are being observed or monitored. And it doesn’t know how to interpret the word “bourgeois,” which in this case refers not to a social class or even to a person, but to a style of dress (that’s why he’s “not yet in school uniform” in the standard translation).

So the picture we have is approximately as follows. A boy pathetically staggers around a research clinic with a desk strapped to his back, accompanied by a ghostly, indeterminate entity dressed for some reason like a member of the 19th-century European upper middle class. We, the lab rats on which a new medicine is being tested, can only hope that the headmaster will offer us an explanation.

Google Translate has obviously never spent a day of its life in school; has never had to wonder what to wear today; and has no experience dealing with people. And that’s just one sentence. Would you trust it to translate the whole book for you?

That’s what I had to work with. Part of thinking is feeling, and MT can’t feel. It lacks the lifetime of impressions, sentiments, and experiences that give us our knowledge of the world and our skill in managing it. And it lacks style. It can’t pick up on the social cues and hints of the many environments we traverse in our lifetimes.

It may seem odd to cite David Hume, who died in 1776, in an essay on computer technology. But Hume had a great deal to say about intelligence and the workings of the human mind, and in A Treatise of Human Nature, he laid down some principles that apply directly to the matter of MT:

Those perceptions, which enter with most force and violence, we may name impressions; and under this name I comprehend all our sensations, passions and emotions, as they make their first appearance in the soul. By ideas I mean the faint images of these in thinking and reasoning; such as, for instance, are all the perceptions excited by the present discourse, excepting only, those which arise from the sight and touch, and excepting the immediate pleasure or uneasiness it may occasion.

Put simply, since it hasn’t lived, MT lacks the ability to turn impressions into ideas. Also, its inability to sense a larger context means that computer translation is also inadequate for specialized fields. Many fields use their own jargon. They also break down further into various subfields, each with its own peculiar terminology.

One way MT responds to this type of complexity is by bundling terms together. Once I was dealing with a German contract that had been machine-translated into English. It included this string of words: “Installation/installation and commissioning of the complete installation at the site.” That’s three different iterations of “installation,” each one translating a different word in the original (respectively Aufstellung, Einrichtung, and Anlage). Yes, any of these can be “installation,” but they can also be “facility,” “setup,” “plant” or a number of other things. It all depends on context. Conversely, MT doesn’t just bundle, it fragments. The same program couldn’t decide if Auftraggeber was “client,” “contracting authority,” or “customer” – it used all three, seemingly at random.

MT knocks up against the real world with all the obliviousness of Chauncey Gardiner in Being There. The personal name Timo Kloster is rendered as “Timo Monastery” because the computer can’t distinguish a person from a building. BAG-Rechtsprechung – the case law of the German Federal Labor Court – becomes “bag case-law,” or jurisprudence relating to bags. Idiomatic expressions are rendered literally: es liegt auf der Hand (“it’s obvious”) becomes “it lies on the hand,” while keine Zukunftsmusik (meaning something that is already a reality) is “no future music.”

Some of my experiences with MT highlighted another one of its peculiarities: its tendency to create a parallel world of its own from the text it is processing. The following is an especially vivid example.

The Republic of Tatarstan has a simple but inspiring slogan: “we can!” I was doing a Russian to English translation dealing with the inauguration of Tatarstan’s newest president. In the Tatar language, “we can” is “без булдырабыз,” and this phrase rang out that day in the Kazan Kremlin. Tatar is a Turkic language, not genetically related to Russian, the language in which my text was overwhelmingly composed. The MT program interpreted this Tatar slogan as a Russian phrase, and rendered it in English as: “without bullholes!”

What is a bullhole? Is that even a word? The only reference I could find was to a swimming hole located in North Carolina. This is another case of MT stumbling over something it can’t handle, and making up words based on hazily understood similarities.

Consider, for instance, the way it mangled the name of Tatarstan’s outgoing president, Mintimer Sharipovich Shaimiyev. Picking up on the Russian-looking elements shar (sphere, ball) and shai (similar to shaiba, “hockey puck”), it transformed the president’s name into “Mintier Ballpovich Puck.” Since the text says that Kazan “is rightfully considered Russia’s sports capital,” this weird rendering actually made a bit of sense.

The scene got more surreal when somebody quoted a brief verse by the Tatar poet Gabdulla Tuqay. In its original language, the poem is an unobjectionable statement about the importance of loving life and one’s country, but what the MT heard was this: “Watch the Horn, hide hulk, hide the hulk of the roof.” Inspiring rhetoric? You be the judge.

Spectators at the real event in the Kazan Kremlin saw an orderly transfer of power, replete with the congratulations, good wishes and other predictable phenomena that are characteristic of such a ceremony. But reading the MT version, one was treated to a spectacle marked by odd surrealistic flourishes, such as outlandish poetry and meaningless slogans, comical names, and provocative comments like “the presidential contradiction is in good hands” (it should be “the presidential banner”), as well as awarding the outgoing president not a “new order” for his services to the republic, but a “new orifice.”

Thus did MT take potshots at reality. There’s the real world of boring ceremonies with speeches and awards, and then there’s the world where Mr. Puck goes off to enjoy his new orifice, in a land without bullholes.

The other insidious effect was that MT exacerbated the economic decline. In 2012 – the year I went freelance – I could reasonably expect to get 11 or 12 cents per word for translation. Starting around 2015, for reasons that were not clear to me, agencies began to push rates down. That was not too big a hit: 10 cents was still a decent amount. Also, I was still working part-time for MILF and the occasional private client, and they were usually willing to pay me more.

With the creeping takeover of translation by MTPE, the wage situation became seriously degraded. The agencies were now offering 5-6 cents per post-edited word. They claimed that any reduction in pay would be compensated by savings in time. After all, if the machine had already translated the text, the hard part was done, right?

The problem was that this wasn’t true. Yes, the machine had “translated” the text. But the result was an English version that had been scrambled, smashed and then haphazardly put back together, without any regard to style, flow, consistency, or internal logic.

And now, here’s the economic significance of this: often enough, it took as long to post-edit the translation as it would have taken to do the translation from scratch. The alleged time savings were minimal to non-existent. Yet they were paying, in effect, about 50-70% of what I was making for straight translation back in 2012-18. To make matters worse, when I did get a straight translation with no use of machines, wages were now typically down to around 8 cents. This in the inflationary environment of the early 2020s.

At this time, of course, COVID entered the scene, crushing demand and making things still worse. I had been translating a lot of material for European court proceedings. Suddenly, the courts were closed. Business trips were not being made. Contracts were not being signed. Due to geopolitical events beyond my control, MILF closed its Moscow office. Work dried up. Later, after lockdowns were lifted and things started to return to normal, the amount of translation work increased. But the recovery was weak. The volume of work was less than in the 2010s, and most of these jobs were the dreaded MTPE low-wage assignments. For a while, I had to supplement translation with a variety of writing and editing jobs. It was clear that the good old days of 2015 weren’t coming back.

I can’t make any firm conclusion from all this, but my vague impression is that few jobs are really going to be secure going forward. Students were once told to study computer science because it was seen as providing a guaranteed job. Outsourcing and automation destroyed that illusion. All kinds of fields – law, medicine, journalism – are feeling the pressure. The skilled trades still require human beings, but what happens when robots become good enough to do their work? How many truckers will we need when trucks can drive themselves?

During the good days, one conclusion I reached was that the most important characteristic necessary for translators was to be a good writer in your own, native language. After all, a translation isn’t supposed to look like a translation. This characteristic falls by the wayside in a world where clients decide that a machine or AI translation, even if somewhat faulty, is good enough for their purposes, falling at an acceptable point on the quality-price axis. There will still be clients in specialized fields who aren’t willing or able to compromise on quality; there will still be cases where human translators are needed for reasons of security and confidentiality. For these reasons, there will be jobs for translators. But we’re looking at a situation where too many people will be chasing too few jobs, and I don’t think the good days are ever coming back.

It’s June 16 again, which means it’s time for a Ulysses-related post.

Dr John Alexander Dowie restorer of the church in Zion is coming – Ulysses, Chapter 8

Sometimes you don’t know what’s in your own backyard. A few years ago I wrote about my alcohol-fueled romp through Ulysses, which I republished on this site, here. Back in 2019 I wrote about the local literary history of my own small town/suburb, Lake Bluff (pop. around 6000 at last count). If you read the second post, you’ll see a surprising link between this town and the publishing history of Joyce’s masterpiece. It turns out Joyce has at least one other link to our local history.

In writing Ulysses, Joyce was notoriously compendious, cramming the book with references famous and obscure, including many mentions of what was happening in the world of 1904, when the book is set. One name I came across repeatedly was that of John Alexander Dowie. Joyce deemed Dowie important enough to mention him several times without giving any real explanation of who he was.

Dowie actually puts in a couple of appearances as a minor character. At the end of Chapter 14, he pops up to spew forth the following:

“Christicle, who’s this excrement yellow gospeller on the Merrion hall? Elijah is coming! Washed in the blood of the Lamb. Come on you winefizzling, ginsizzling, booseguzzling existences! Come on, you dog-gone, bullnecked, beetlebrowed, hogjowled, peanutbrained, weaseleyed fourflushers, false alarms and excess baggage! Come on, you triple extract of infamy! Alexander J Christ Dowie, that’s my name, that’s yanked to glory most half this planet from Frisco beach to Vladivostok. The Deity aint no nickel dime bumshow. I put it to you that He’s on the square and a corking fine business proposition.”

In the extended dream play that constitutes Chapter 15, Dowie shows up to denounce Leopold Bloom thusly:

“ALEXANDER J DOWIE: (Violently.) Fellowchristians and antiBloomites, the man called Bloom is from the roots of hell, a disgrace to christian men. A fiendish libertine from his earliest years [etc.] …”

So, who was John Alexander Dowie and what does he have to do with where I live now? He was an evangelist and faith healer, born in Scotland, who immigrated to Australia and then to the United States. He wound up in Chicago in time to take advantage of the 1893 World’s Fair, where his faith-healing business boomed. Dowie decided to put down roots in the Chicago area, and he did so in an impressive way. He founded the village of Zion. This town, which is about 20 minutes’ driving distance straight north of where I am now, was deliberately designed to be a religious utopia. In addition, it was effectively a company town, with Dowie owning all the land and most of the businesses. Dowie also called himself “the spirit of Elijah” or “Elijah II,” which accounts for the different middle name in the image above.1

Currently, Zion is a fairly depressed town which not long ago hosted a now-shuttered nuclear power plant; driving through the town today does not make one think of utopias, religious or otherwise. Most of the signs of Dowie’s presence, and that of his sect, have vanished. The massive church he built, the Shiloh Tabernacle, burned down in 1937. Dowie, who was rumored to be an embezzler on a massive scale, was deposed by a rival in 1905. One notable eccentricity that survived the Dowie era was that the city officially adhered to the Flat Earth doctrine and taught it in its schools until the 1940s. Zion retains at least one notable relic of its history as a religious settlement, namely the Shiloh House mansion, built using Dowie’s plentiful funds in 1901.

I have to admit I knew nothing of this until I came across Dowie’s name in Ulysses and became curious about him. In the Internet age, it was easy to satisfy that curiosity.

The Zion Historical Society contains plenty of information on Dowie and his role in the town. Oddly, Zion’s official website makes no mention of the founder by name, though it does tell you when and where the town’s first water well was established and where the Zion Cookie Factory used to be located. James Joyce, the obsessive chronicler of urban reality, would probably have appreciated this level of detail.

I wonder now if X had always been a thousand years older than anyone, that everyone she ever loved was always a child to her, always something to be molded, to control. Or perhaps it’s all much simpler than that: we cannot see the full and terrible truth of anyone with whom we closely live. Everything blurs when held too near.

I’ve read a lot of books on the basis of positive reviews, but strangely enough, it was a negative review that caused me to read this one. Let me explain. Biography of X is a novel that’s been praised extravagantly in most of the reviews I’ve read. Here’s what Kirkus has to say. On Substack, that most uncommon of readers states as follows: “There is no other novel that I know of written in the last few years in English that is so full of research and imagination, written on so large a scale.” You’ll find no shortage of rave reviews of this book and its highly original approach to the exploration of character.

What grabbed my attention was an opposing view: this article by (hereinafter LitGaz), published in The Republic of Letters. The piece deals with Biography of X as part of an overall assessment of Lacey’s handling of character in her novels (the “non-self” as he calls it). LitGaz judges Lacey’s project as a failure in both aesthetic and psychological terms. My initial reaction was “I’m glad he read Lacey because now I don’t have to.” But something about the article intrigued me – probably because it was so different from the other reviews I’d read – and even though it was negative, it spurred me to check out this, Lacey’s most famous novel thus far.

Short version: I’m glad I read it. I don’t agree with LitGaz; my view is closer to Henry Oliver’s. Biography of X has its flaws, but I found it fascinating. Let’s zoom in.

The book plays with the notion of fluidity or fragmentation on two levels. The first is of the human personality. The narrator is a woman called C.M. Lucca, a journalist who was married for several years to a woman known as X.1 This mysterious individual was supposedly a great and controversial artist in several fields (literature, music, film, and visual art). X went under various names and aliases during her life, and getting reliable biographical information about her is difficult. When an error-ridden biography of the now deceased X is published, Lucca goes on a quest to set the record straight.

The second level of fluidity is that of history. It’s not enough to have a main character who is fluid and shape-shifting; the country she lives in has to display the same qualities. In 1945, the United States somehow broke up into three vast independent countries known simply as the Southern Territory, the Northern Territory, and the Western Territory. These lands coexisted in a state of cold war for several decades before being reunited.

Thus, from the outset, readers have to swallow two grand implausibilities:

• That an investigative journalist can live in a close, intimate relationship for years with someone and not know basic facts about her;

• That the United States in 1945, at about the most unified time of its history, would break up into three states that don’t even have proper country names.

And you know what? I swallowed them, and you can too. This book demonstrates something about the psychology of storytelling that, to my mind at least, isn’t stressed enough in writers’ groups, creative writing classes, and the like. Namely: if the story is sufficiently compelling, engaging, or original that it makes you want to accept certain highly implausible events, you will accept them.

Either one of these would have been a bold move on Lacey’s part; but she does both of them, and it pays off. One reason it works is because her treatment is so over the top. The Southern Territory, for example, is not just socially conservative and religious, as one might expect. It’s more like a Christian fundamentalist version of North Korea, walled off from the outside world and willing to suffer to maintain its theocracy. At first I thought Lacey, a native of Mississippi, was taking some cheap satirical shots at her native turf. But her presentation of the place is too weird and radical for that. The weirdness doesn’t just apply to the South. This is an America where in a presidential election Bernie Sanders defeats Jesse Jackson, the candidate of the neo-fascist Growth Party, and where Ronald Reagan represents the Green Party. It’s a place where the Painters’ Massacre of 1943 takes out 14 artists, including such famous figures as Duchamp and Kandinsky. Some readers have rolled their eyes at these flourishes. I found them entertaining, in a funhouse-mirror kind of way.

Weird and radical also apply to her presentation of X. She is a complete mystery, but also a giant in the world of art who collaborates with some of the most famous people in the world. She is provocative, manipulative, egotistical, and even violent, yet inspires devotion from people close to her.2 One of the hardest things to do in a story is convincingly portray a fictional character who’s a genius, and while Lacey doesn’t quite pull off the trick consistently, there are enough glimpses of X’s boldly innovative approach to her work that I was willing to take her genius on faith. For his part, LitGaz is totally unconvinced (“the impression is one of sarcastic collage”). I thought it was more like kaleidoscopic mystery. I kept reading because I wanted to find out more about this strange, fascinating person living in this shattered country, and see how Lacey would reconcile all these fragments and rough edges.

This brings me to what I find to be the central flaw in the book, which I’ll summarize with the phrase “there’s no Rosebud.” I am of course referring to Citizen Kane and its famous plot device, the meaning of which is only discovered at the end, and then only by the viewers, not by any of the characters. Biography of X has no Rosebud – it lacks a convenient symbol, object, or hidden fact to give the plot some direction and organization. As a result (and here I agree to some extent with LitGaz),3 the story gradually loses its propulsive force after about the halfway mark. We continue circling around X, not getting much closer to the truth about her, as the anecdotes become more fragmentary and repetitive.

The biggest irony, or even joke, about Biography of X is that it’s not really what the title says it is. Lucca admits to this early on: “The title of this book – as titles so often are – is a lie.” There are no firm referents to which we can tie X’s life. As noted, certain recurring characteristics of X do emerge out of the confusing swirl of events. But we learn a lot more about the people who knew X in the various phases of her life. Taken together, they are a varied and rather poignant lot, many of them coming to bad ends. I’m thinking about Connie Converse, the suicidal Michigander, with her ambitions as a folk musician and writer. Oleg Hall, the wealthy, directionless playboy. Dave Moser, a “middle-class courthouse clerk with something of a gambling problem” who befriended X when she worked at a deer-processing plant in Montana. Fred Holton, the retired intel agent who prevented a war in Vietnam. Lacey creates a whole gallery of these memorable characters, and it’s one of the best things about the book.

Finally, a note on one of the more curious aspects of this book full of curiosities. Some reviews I’ve read refer to the “fake endnotes” that come after the main text. But as far as I can tell, these endnotes (unlike the footnotes in the main text) are real. They may be the most real thing in the whole book – and I suspect they were put there, not as some kind of Nabokov-style trick or game, but for legal reasons. To take one example: late in the book, X is quoted as saying “I believe very strongly in fascism.” This causes a public outcry, and David Bowie, with whom she has collaborated, calls her “a disgrace.” But in real life, it was Bowie who made the pro-fascist statements – in the 1970s, in the persona of one of his invented characters. Lacey is actually inverting reality here. There are numerous examples of this kind of displacement or inversion throughout Biography of X, and if you don’t want to get sued, it’s a good idea to clarify what’s real and what’s fake.

Karel Čapek, in his epistemological or “noetic” trilogy, explored the unknowable nature of the human personality in three volumes. Catherine Lacey does it in one. I’m not saying it’s better necessarily, but still, it’s quite an achievement.

Herzog on Herzog, edited by Paul Cronin

I used to be seriously interested in film as an art form. Technically, this would make me a cinephile: a word I haven’t heard in ages. But this word, as well as terminology like “art house cinema” and even disparaging expressions like “film snob,” evoke a world that I haven’t visited in a long time. I’m not even sure that world still exists, at least in the form it once did. There was a time (peaking somewhere in the 1960s-80s) when people joined clubs to discuss the latest masterpieces, crammed into sparsely furnished cinemas to watch blobby prints of foreign and indie films, and subscribed to journals like Film Comment and Sight & Sound. These magazines still exist, but the fire that fed these trends seems to be burning low nowadays.

It is in a spirit of distanced reflection that I’m starting a new series, discussing six famous directors through their writings or statements. Werner Herzog is the only one of these six who is still living, which is perhaps a clue as to how well “art house cinema” is doing nowadays. I first read Herzog on Herzog (part of Faber & Faber’s estimable “X on X” cinematic series – my term for it) in the early 2000s when it came out, and even reviewed it for a now defunct publication. It would be fun to revisit the book and see what I think now.

In retrospect we can see that the book, which takes the form of conversations with the critic Paul Cronin, came out at about the midpoint of Herzog’s career. His filmography was already large, but now it is enormous, and dominated by documentaries. Classics like Aguirre, the Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo now look like early-stage work.

Thus, an important part of this book is situating Herzog in the context of New German Cinema, as well as clearing up the myths that had already accrued around his outsized personality. Herzog started his career in the 1960s, in a West Germany that was coming to terms with the Nazi era, a process known as Vergangenheitsbewältigung (overcoming, or coping with, the past). As part of this, West German society was largely remade along Anglo-American lines, with associated cultural repercussions. Herzog’s contemporary Wim Wenders, with his devotion to road movies and rock music, is an example of this. Herzog himself wound up in California – the final destination for a range of iconic German-speaking figures, from Arnold Schoenberg to Arnold Schwarzenegger. Meanwhile, Germany left Romantic dreams in the past and embraced liberal democracy and the whole panoply of consumer culture.

Against this background, we can see Herzog, West Coast resident though he is, as a re-animator of deep, old currents of German culture via the young art of film. In contrast to R.W. Fassbinder’s corrosive social commentaries and Wenders’ rock-influenced Americophilia, Herzog has been the most traditionally German in his concerns, even while requiring six continents to make his films. All the while he has been building his own legend as an outsized, daredevil personality-a superman of cinema.

Or has he? “Most of what you’ve heard about Werner Herzog is untrue,” states Paul Cronin on the first page of Herzog on Herzog. “More than any other director, the number of false rumors and downright lies disseminated about the man and his films is truly astonishing.” According to Cronin, Herzog is just a modest, pleasant and humorous fellow with a remarkable artistic gift. This book is both an editor’s attempt to set the record straight and a director’s commentary on his own life and work.

It turns out, however, that many of those crazy stories about Herzog are true, or at least partly so. Yes, he did threaten to shoot Klaus Kinski on the set of Aguirre, the Wrath of God. Yes, he did eat his own shoe as a result of losing a bet to Errol Morris (this tasty event is recorded in Les Blank’s short documentary Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe). Yes, he did grow up in a remote mountain village and made his first phone call at the age of 17. Yes, he did hypnotize the cast of Heart of Glass. Cronin asserts that “he didn’t put anyone’s life at risk while making Fitzcarraldo,” but if Herzog’s account of the shoot is accurate, the crew sustained a veritable emergency room’s worth of life-threatening injuries. And yes, he did throw himself onto a cactus after the making of Even Dwarfs Started Small – his way of apologizing to his Lilliputian cast for the pain he had put them through.

Another of Cronin’s debatable assertions is that “his work is not in the tradition of the German romanticists.” Herzog himself drops a hint in this direction, though only while complaining about the simplistic ways in which foreigners categorize his work. The evidence suggests otherwise. Some of his best-known films – The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, Woyzeck, Nosferatu – clearly draw on German Romantic images and themes. Nosferatu, his remake of the F. W. Murnau vampire classic, boasts landscapes out of Caspar David Friedrich and music by Wagner. And his characterization of The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser could have come straight from Rousseau: “Kaspar’s story is about what civilization does to us all, how it deforms and destroys us by bringing us into societal line: this stultifying and staid bourgeois existence.”

Less obviously, his Latin American epics (Aguirre, the Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo) revive Romanticism by displacing it geographically. The Spanish megalomaniac chasing after El Dorado and the Irish adventurer dragging a ship over a mountain, are consumed by their obsessions in a way that would have resonated with Goethe or Wagner. Romantic themes that would once have found expression in the Alps are played out in the Andes instead, by Europeans of other nationalities.

Fortunately, once the actual interviews start, Cronin asks intelligent, sensible questions, lets his subject talk and stays mostly out of the way. The book proceeds chronologically, which for the most part makes it easy to follow. Cronin’s hands-off approach isn’t always fruitful. When he says to Herzog, “Many critics seem to have found themes running throughout your work over the years,” it would be nice to know the identity of some of those critics and the nature of some of those themes, but he doesn’t tell us.

But this is a minor objection, because a book in which Werner Herzog does 90 percent of the talking is not going to be dull. Two main themes emerge from his rambles: the importance of craftsmanship (as opposed to some vague notion of “art”) and filmmaking as a physical, even athletic discipline.

For a director who hails from the world of the “art film,” Herzog’s approach is remarkably non-intellectual. At one point he calls himself an “illiterate” and says that his “ideology is simply the films themselves and my ability to make them.” He insists on the necessity of being open to chance and the inspirations that brings. The extreme conditions under which Fitzcarraldo was shot “would inevitably create situations that nobody had foreseen and so would bring life to the film.” Finally, he claims that he is not an artist. “Rather, I am a craftsman and feel very close to the medieval artisans.” (Not mentioned is the fact that the Romantics also honored and idealized the traditional craftsman.)

Why does he feel so close to them? Because they “had a true feeling for the physical materials they were working with.” Not only does filmmaking require that kind of physical instinct, it makes demands that would tire a decathlete. Herzog goes through the catalogue of injuries and hardships sustained by himself and his assistants like a soldier proudly enumerating his war wounds. Strewn through the text are broken bones, arrow wounds, even a frozen mustache (sustained on the terrifying Argentinian peak of Cerro Torre). Furthermore, Herzog insists on the superiority of walking over other forms of travel: “The volume and depth and intensity of the world is something that only those on foot will ever experience.”

Herzog’s detractors bring a variety of charges against him. The most common are probably egomania and eccentricity. “Werner Herzog is so busy making his myth that he no longer bothers to make movies,” said the critic Dave Kehr. Others consider his films’ intellectual underpinnings too flimsy a support for their grandiose images. He’s been accused of estheticizing violence and taking a superficial approach to social and historical contexts. But this is just what we might expect from a director who avoids intellectualism and elevates craftsmanship above all.

Whatever your views, Herzog on Herzog is an engrossing record of the glories and tribulations involved in making movies. It’s also an account of how cinema – an art form without deep roots in the past, which experienced an efflorescence in Germany during the liberal Weimar period – gave German artists an opportunity to start over, and a way to inspire the world once again.

This is another old blog post which I dredged up and reworked in response to something I read last week.

Recently, posted about a concept he called the “secondary narrator” in a work of fiction. In the course of it, he brought up the contentious question of “standpoint epistemology” – “the idea that only a person from a certain community or possessing certain identity traits can write about certain people or experiences.”

Leaving aside the larger issues raised by this idea, the post put me in mind of some of the problems creative writers face when writing about foreign countries. Even in this age of cheap flights, instant Internet communication, and all-expenses-paid package tours, it is still true that understanding a country that’s not your own remains difficult if not impossible. This is especially the case if you haven’t lived there, don’t know the language, and lack knowledge of the local history and culture.

For creative writers, one way this difficulty manifests itself is in the invention of names. I don’t mean a new name for your baby, but a foreign name for a character you’re creating. You can stay on safe ground by sticking with the obvious – Juan Garcia, Erika Schmidt, Sergei Petrov. Or you can try to give your characters more distinctive names. That’s where the trouble starts.

With some of these names, you can see the wheels of the writer’s mind turning. In his novel His Master’s Voice, which is about the attempt of scientists to communicate with an extraterrestrial intelligence, Stanisław Lem set most of the action in the hermetic environment of a fictitious American scientific institution. While most of his made-up American names wouldn’t raise an eyebrow, he gives a peculiar name to one of the book’s most memorable characters: the linguist Yvor Baloyne. I am fairly certain that Lem got his first name from a relatively obscure figure, the poet and critic Yvor Winters (Lem shows a knowledge of English-language poetry in his work). Besides the poet, I have never encountered anyone with this name in real life.

The fake America invented by Lem has its counterpart in the fake Canada imagined by those other legends of Eastern European science fiction, the Strugatsky Brothers, in their novel Roadside Picnic. This is another space of the mind, having little to do with any actually existing country. (Shakespeare, who gave Italian names to Danes and a seacoast to Bohemia, might have sympathized.) This novel is probably most famous outside of Russia for serving as the basis for Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker. The use of the term “stalker,” not translated but borrowed directly from English, is the only surviving link to the fictitious Canada of the novel.

The characters in the film lack proper names, but the Strugatskys gave their stalker the name Redrick Schuhart. As far as I can tell, almost nobody in North America actually has the name Redrick, and I have no idea how they stumbled across it. His wife bears the non-English, non-French name Guta, so she’s just as unconvincing as a Canadian.

Yet the nomenclature of plausibility can be an issue even when authors are dealing with more familiar countries. A much better-known example than Yvor Baloyne – namely Stephen Maturin, the Irish/Catalan ship’s doctor from Patrick O’Brian’s popular “Aubrey/Maturin” series of novels – also shows the author plumbing the depths of obscurity. The name is obviously taken from the Gothic novelist Charles Maturin, author of Melmoth the Wanderer. What makes it unusual is that it’s not an Irish or even an English name. It’s French, because Charles Maturin, though a Dubliner, came from a family of French Huguenot origin. O’Brian also gave a Lithuanian nobleman the last name of Jagiełło. This isn’t really a usual surname – it’s the Polish version of Jogaila, the name of the Lithuanian prince who united Poland and Lithuania and founded a dynasty named after him. It appears that fewer than 300 people in Poland have this surname. On this side of the ocean, the only one I can find is the polka musician Walter “Li’l Wally” Jagiello, a member of the World Concertina Congress Hall of Fame.

Doing some background checks is always a good idea, as it helps prevent absurdities. Consider the Antichrist figure from the Left Behind series of apocalyptic novels – a Romanian named Nicolae Carpathia. The authors apparently decided to combine the first name of the Romanian Communist leader Nicolae Ceaușescu with the Carpathian mountain range, which runs through Romania. It’s like calling a fictional American president “George Appalachia.” (An online search for this surname in the Bucharest phone book yielded niciun rezultat – zero results).

Sometimes the author’s personal experiences are a factor. August Strindberg gave the family in his play Easter the surname Heyst, because he had been staying at a Belgian resort town of that name1 (typically for him, he hated the place). It is not a Swedish name at all, yet Joseph Conrad – quite obviously, after reading Strindberg – gave it to his own Swedish character, Axel Heyst, in the novel Victory.

Some choices are rather mystifying. For their film Inside Llewyn Davis, the Coen Brothers gave their hero an obscure first name supposedly of Welsh origin. Llewyn resembles the common Welsh name Llewellyn, but the film contains no explanation of why the character got this peculiar name, or if it is some kind of alteration or abbreviation. We’re left in the dark – although a plausible theory holds that this may be an indirect reference to Bob Dylan, who adopted a Welsh poet’s first name as his stage name.

Going back to Romania, another curious case is Bogdan Wolynetz, the carwash owner in Breaking Bad. He is supposedly Romanian, but his name looks Ukrainian to me (it literally means “Theodore from Volhynia,” a region of Western Ukraine). Given the ethnic complexities of that part of the world, it’s not impossible that a Romanian might have a Ukrainian name. I doubt, however, that the show’s creators were intending to highlight Romania’s Ukrainian minority, which makes up about 0.3% of the population. It’s more likely they just grabbed a name from somewhere and ran with it.

Most of these names don’t pass what I used to call the “phone book test,” or what we might call the “Google test” nowadays, meaning: can you look up these names in the relevant phone books and find them? In the old days, most of us didn’t have easy access to the phone books of remote countries or cities. In the Internet age, there’s no excuse, so we can look forward to a golden age of plausible character names (perhaps).

Today’s post consists of two posts from my old blog, welded together and edited. I expect it will find more readers here than it did in its original form.

One of the things that writers in English have to grapple with is the way “high style” and “low style,” or ornate vs. plain, are expressed by different registers that, if taken to an extreme, are practically different languages. George Orwell once analyzed a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Felix Randal,” pointing out the extent to which it was a “Saxon” poem. Orwell mentions that “English is a mixture of several languages, but mainly Saxon and Norman French, and to this day [the 1940s], in the country districts, there is a class distinction between the two. Many agricultural labourers speak almost pure Saxon.” Hopkins’ own language is very Saxon, which is appropriate, because he is trying to evoke a dying way of life, “the old Saxon village community,” fading away due to industrialization.

Many years ago, I heard Anthony Burgess on a radio broadcast pointing out that due to the hybrid nature of English, one could express the same proverb in two different forms of the language. “A nod is as good as a wink to a blind horse” is pure Anglo-Saxon; but one could also say, in something close to pure Latin, “a minimal inclination of the cranium is as adequate as a spasmodic motion of one optic to an equine quadruped devoid of visionary capacity.”

This might make you wonder what English would look like if the Norman Conquest had never happened. The creators of the site The Anglish Moot have put a lot of thought into precisely that question, creating a contemporary Anglo-Saxon from which words of Latin, Greek and other non-Germanic origin have been banished.

Instead of philosophy, chemistry and literature, your school program would consist of wisdomlove, blendlore and bookcraft. You could read about famous people like Shakespeare (who wrote “plays of mirthplay, eretide and sorrowplay”) and Gandhi (who was “one of the bremest folk inheld in the shrithing for the selfdom of Inland,” as well as being “a wrathless shrither”). Relax with some gleecraft (music) or enjoy a screening of Star Wyes (the first of “a stream of witship-playtruth films by George Lucas”). Or you can play some football, described as “a game played on a long and wide pitch with a ball.” (Hey, no strange words in that last one.)

What does our modern political world look like? Well, in Europe, “the Europish Band nowadays has growing might over the rikes within it. Many Europish lands are in the Schengen rikesband, which lets folk go from land to land freely.” In Japan, “the lawmoot has nearly always been held by the Freebeing-Folkmightish Mootband.” Across the water, the Folk’s Ledewealth of China “is steered by an Elderdom following the Mao Zedong lief-thought.” Here at home, “the leader of America is Foresitter Donald Trump of the Folkrike Mootband.” To the north, separatism among French Canadians “is still something that is pithy in Quebec mootmanship.”

Being a language created by individual contributors working from computers (“freely making new words after one’s own inblowing”), Anglish isn’t totally consistent. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics is, depending on who you talk to, the Band of Workermootly Kithish Commonwealths, the Workermootly Kithish Gathering, the Band of Workermootly Kithish Folkrikes, or the Band of Soviet Fellowship Ledewealths (and how di­d that Slavic word get into the last one?). The purism can also get out of hand: Australia is confusingly called New Holland, presumably because 1) they had to get rid of that Latin name, and 2) Dutchman Abel Tasman was the first European to explore the Antipodes.

The language of science is so much more dependent on words of Latin and Greek origin that science in Anglish sounds like some form of esoteric folk wisdom. Try this sentence: “In 1687, Newton outlayed a book called the Mean Liefstalls of Reckoning in which he unheals his thoughtlay of allspanning weightpull and three laws of shrithing.”

The philosopher of aesthetics T. E. Hulme wrote of “hearing the phrase ‘fed up,’ and realising that all our analogies spiritual and intellectual are derived from purely physical acts.” The process of word formation in Anglish brings this idea home in its own way. A word like “inblowing” conveys a much more physical impression than its Latin-derived equivalent “inspiration,” as does “­­weightpull” for “gravity.”

It is interesting, however – and taking my cue from Orwell’s comments above – to consider the way in which “Anglish” actually lived on in a sense, in the form of “plain speech.”

The type of plain speech employed by Hopkins was in some sense an invention, that of a 19th-century poet imitating older poetry. Reviving old language is something modern writers like to do. Sometimes it was done for ideological reasons: consider Hugh MacDiarmid’s “synthetic Scots,” part of a nationalistic project to revive Scottish literature, by drawing on the old literary language of Scotland, which predominated before the Act of Union (1707) dethroned it in favor of English. Sometimes the reasons are aesthetic. Burgess’ own novel Nothing Like the Sun is a good example of this – a reconstruction of the life of Shakespeare written in the author’s own re-creation of Shakespearean English. It’s a virtuoso performance, even if Shakespeare probably wouldn’t have recognized it as his own kind of speech.1

In this regard, “new old” language resembles the neoclassicism of 20th-century composers like Stravinsky and Hindemith. You can revive the old structures and echo the old sounds, but there is no point trying to recreate them exactly, since it’s impossible to get the sound of later music out of your ears. In both literature and music, imitating the past is a means to an end; it’s not a goal in and of itself.

Since I mentioned music, one thing that preserves the old language in a modern setting is folk music. The modern folk revivals, especially in Britain and Ireland, brought this old language to a new audience. Because they’re meant to be sung, you can treat the old texts in a variety of ways, effectively bringing them up to date without altering the language at all.

Let’s look at the fate of one song, attested from the 17th century, but undoubtedly centuries older than that: “A Lyke-Wake Dirge.” This song tells of the passage of a soul after death; it dates from the Christian period, but according to people who know about these things, incorporates some pre-Christian elements. As far as I can tell, the dirge contains hardly any non-Germanic words – it’s “Saxon” in the same sense as Hopkins’ poem, but it’s the real thing, not a recreation. The text is not entirely settled either: should we say “fire and fleet” or “fire and sleet”?

And here we come back to Igor Stravinsky. He set this song as part of his Cantata on old English texts but did something unusual with it: he broke it up, interpolating other songs between the verses. The dirge thus serves as a kind of framing device for the whole piece. Stravinsky’s setting dates from 1952 and reflects his growing interest in early music. It is also written in a modernist mid-20th century style, making partial use of serial procedures. It looks backward and forward at the same time.

It’s the same text, but nothing could sound more different from Stravinsky’s cool modernism than The Young Tradition. Two guys and a girl, with no instruments, singing in a style that sounds like it comes straight from Chaucer’s time: what could be more authentic than this? You can practically smell the hay and horse dung in this one.

The Young Tradition’s version dates from 1965, a time when the folk music revival on both sides of the Atlantic was in full bloom. This take by Pentangle, from their album Basket of Light, was recorded in 1969, when folk was turning into folk rock. This is a polished version, redolent of old churches lit by candles and cemeteries at twilight.

And that’s just scratching the surface: I merely chose the versions I happened to have lying around the house.2

This is the final installment of my journey around the Baltic, undertaken in September and October 2004. I hope you’ve enjoyed it!

Gotland is both a beginning and an end. It was the end of my journey, but in its heyday, it was one of the springboards for the Hanseatic colonization of the Baltic. The capital, Visby, was one of the League’s mother cities. Strategically placed in the middle of the sea, it controlled a large chunk of trade and sent its settlers and merchants out to distant parts. The Gotlanders held a commanding position in Baltic commerce in the early days. They were jealous of their dominance and looked askance at the idea of sharing it with the upstart cities of the new league, such as Lübeck. You see signs in the town with the words Hansestad Visby, but the signs don’t tell you that due to a series of conflicts, it was eventually kicked out of the league in 1470.

After its expulsion (and the sacking of the town by an army from Lübeck in 1525), Visby stagnated. Unlike the other major Hansa towns, it lost its economic standing and simply stopped growing. The ensuing centuries of peace and neglect resulted in one of the best-preserved medieval towns in the entire Baltic region. With a population of about twenty thousand, it is probably not much bigger than it was in the Hansa days. There has been some depressingly box-like residential and commercial development on its fringes; but this does not extend too far and hardly touches the old town at all. In short, Visby is probably the best example of a Hansa city we have today, despite the above historical caveat.

Approached from the sea, Visby clusters modestly on a gentle incline, its roofs of white, gray and red reminiscent of fellow Hansestadt Tallinn, though on a smaller scale. In one of the world’s most secular countries, this island province is crammed with churches. Visby is a cathedral city, befitting its importance in the Middle Ages, and the cathedral is the tallest structure on the low cityscape.

I took a room in a small hotel right by the sea, just to the south of the town itself. After checking in, I decided to relax a bit in the hotel bar. It was rather bleak: apart from Erik the bartender, I was the only person there. My beer cost more than it would be decent to say here, and I consumed it as slowly as I could, making every sip count.

Erik, who looked to be in his thirties, also had money on his mind. “I like it here,” he said, “but the taxes are too high.” I asked how high. The figure was fairly stiff, but the total tax load didn’t seem much heavier than in some of the more expensive American states. “But we don’t get as much for our money as the rest of the country,” he continued, while polishing some beer glasses. “Our standard of living is a little lower. Also, I don’t like what they’re doing to the island.”

“In what way?”

“The buildings. The houses. Too many people from the mainland – they want a house here, and most of what they build, it’s not in the style of the place.” He put down the last glass and tossed the rag into a corner. “It’s beautiful now, but I don’t know how long it will last.”

Being situated right in the middle of the sea, Gotland is the natural home for a complex of centers that bring together artists from all the countries around the Baltic. There is a composers’ center, a studio for visual artists, and a center for writers and translators. While puttering around the studio, right next to the sea, I met Nina, who was working there.

“Gotland used to be as far east as we ever thought of going,” she said. During the time when Europe was divided and Cold War tensions sometimes resonated even within their own officially neutral country, many Swedes regarded the eastern part of the Baltic as a vaguely threatening terra incognita. Nina’s father used to phone her up, worrying about her being out on Gotland – it was a bit too far out to sea and too close to Russia for comfort. But the unease seems to be waning now, and Gotland is benefiting from renewed and frequent contacts with the lands to the east.

Gotland has also played a small but distinguished role in the art of cinema. “Does Ingmar Bergman still live here?” I asked.

“Yes,” said Nina, but she pointed out that he actually lives on Fårö, the tiny neighboring island to the north. “But you won’t see him out in public – he’s very old and keeps to himself.”

Bergman, like his idol Strindberg, has found a steady source of inspiration in Sweden’s Baltic islands. He decided to plant himself in the region for good after a visit in the spring of 1960. At the time he was scouting locations for the film Through a Glass Darkly, and was so taken with the place that he eventually moved both himself and his studio there. “Originally it was a romantic idea,” he told interviewers in 1970, “the sense of being on an island, of the sea. One of these stupid notions one gets if one has never lived by the sea…But over the years Fårö has come to be indispensable for me. Out there everything assumes its proper proportions. One lives in spontaneous natural contact with an element – the sea.”

Perhaps it was coincidence, or just the normal evolutionary course any artist follows over the years, but the “Baltic films” that began to emerge in the 1960s mark a definite shift in Bergman’s oeuvre towards the cryptic, the ambiguous, the mysterious. The films that established his reputation outside Sweden, such as The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries, are marked by clear conflicts, sharp characterization, and straightforward symbolism. The frequent bursts of surrealism can be easily pegged to the graphs of plot or character psychology. When Dr. Isak Borg sees his double in a coffin in the first dream of Wild Strawberries, and the double tries to drag him down into the box, the old man’s fear of death is blatant. But the later films – Persona, The Silence, Hour of the Wolf – explore more subjective realms of the mind, and explanations are often left tantalizingly out of reach. The opening sequence of Persona, with its random shots of faces and hands, a spider, walls and fences, a spike driven into a hand, and so on, is frightful in its lack of meaning, and realistic in the way so many of our chaotic, noisy dreams actually are.

One of Bergman’s Fårö movies is The Shame (1967). This film depicts the collapse of an ordered, civilized world under the onslaught of war. A pair of musicians, played by Max von Sydow and Liv Ullmann, try to maintain their way of life in the midst of a never-explained conflict that eventually engulfs them. At the film’s end they join a boatload of refugees fleeing to what they hope will be safety. Their boat grinds through the dim gray water, bumping corpses along the way. Ullmann recounts a mysterious dream. The film ends.

It gave off an echo almost two decades later, when Gotland became the scene for an eerily similar film – one in which cultivated people on the idyllic island are suddenly subjected to mortal threats. Andrei Tarkovsky, the director Bergman admired above all others, had just left Russia, never to return. He set up in Gotland to make the film that would be his last, The Sacrifice.

Tarkovsky had worked in the Baltic before. His last film before heading west for good, Stalker (1979), was filmed in Estonia. It is a Kafkaesque fantasy about a deserted, dangerous zone created as the result of a visit by extraterrestrials. Wild rumors circulate about the Zone; one of them concerns a room at its center that has the power to fulfill wishes. A special guide (the “Stalker” of the title) leads pilgrims through one of the grungiest, most haunted landscapes ever captured on film to reach this goal. In real life, the Zone was an area in the vicinity of a disused power station not far from Tallinn. The soft, misty blue and green territory, with its heavy foliage, is riddled and crisscrossed with lurching telephone poles, twisted rails, burned-out army vehicles, and all kinds of industrial junk, from syringes to pistols to coins. Among all this wreckage, the deserted calm of the North creates a feeling of latent danger, of something malignant, hiding and ready to spring out at an opportune moment.

In fact, the land itself was the danger. Over the course of the next several years, Tarkovsky, his three leading actors, and crew members who were on site in the Zone got sick with cancer and died. The poisoned territory infected everyone who came in contact with it. Later, after the Chernobyl disaster in 1986, the film started to be seen as prophetic. To this day, Chernobyl is surrounded by a toxic no-man’s-land known locally as the Zone. Its eerie dilapidation mirrors the Zone of Stalker like an unconscious rhyme.

Tarkovsky was already sick with the cancer that would kill him when he set up on Gotland to make his last film, The Sacrifice. At the same latitude as Stalker’s Zone, the island looks much more peaceful, with a Chekhovian country dacha serving as the main stage. The director had simply transferred his Russian homeland to this isolated part of Sweden, something that may not be obvious behind the masks of dialogue in Swedish and the use of several of Bergman’s frequent collaborators before and behind the camera. The stakes are even higher in this film. This time, rather than the local conflict in The Shame, the whole world is threatened by nuclear war – something hinted at in the script but not explicitly spelled out. The protagonist is not a musician, but a brooding actor and writer. For most of the film (which unfolds very gradually, much of it in real time) the long pale twilight of the Scandinavian summer night bathes the whole scene in a blanket of confusion and mystery. The island dozes, in the typical way of the Baltic white nights, tossing up illusions in the hero’s mind that might actually be real.

One of my early impressions of Gotland was: “This is the sort of place where one could take refuge if a world war broke out.” Bergman and Tarkovsky, poking and prodding at the world in their role as artists, suggested that even this cool green Eden may not be so safe after all.

As mentioned, I am vast, unlimited in the range and delicacy of my voice, unrestrained in love, rapid in apprehension, skillful in motion, capable, equally, of traversing, within a few seconds’ time, a mile or ten thousand miles.

I was moved to review this short novel by several things. First, the rather polarized reviews it’s received intrigued me. You can find a highly positive take by in The Metropolitan Review, a more mixed reaction by here, and a somewhat negative one by in The Los Angeles Review of Books. Second, I expressed my own mixed reaction to Saunders more generally in my last Capsule Review installment, here. Finally, Saunders’ book is about the death of a billionaire and the wreckage his activity has left behind on this earth. This interests me because I’m dealing with a similar character in my current work-in-progress, about which I hope to share more later this year.

The Greek word doula is enjoying a vogue. Originally it meant a person who provides comfort and support during the ordeal of childbirth. Since then, the term has spread to other fields: I’ve even encountered a “query doula” who provides guidance to writers who want help with their query letters. The ghostly narrator of Vigil can best be described as a death doula: her job is to comfort people who are about to cross that last border. She’s done it 343 times, so she’s probably due for an award, though I don’t know if that sort of thing exists in the afterlife.

This particular death doula is called Jill “Doll” Blaine.1 (That’s her speaking in the block quote at the top.) She was accidentally murdered (car blown up by someone who was actually targeting her husband) at age 24. The object of her comfort (her “charge,” to use the term of art) is one K.J. Boone, an 87-year-old oil tycoon who is dying of cancer.

Jill isn’t alone. There are a bunch of other doulas in this book. Saunders presumably intended them to provide comic relief, and perhaps moral instruction. Sometimes they do, but just as often, they are irritating. Humor is subjective, so you may disagree, but that was my response. One of them is identified only as “the Frenchman,” although this monicker doesn’t tell you anything you can’t figure out yourself, since he peppers his speech with quelle horreur and Mon Dieu and similar expressions. The Frenchman claims he “invented the engine” and then goes on to lament the deleterious effects his engine has had on the world; the historical burden he carries resembles that of Boone.2

This brings us to the most obvious and lazy part of the story: the moralizing. K.J. Boone has a lot to repent of: specifically, his role in causing the world to heat up, leading to unprecedented climatic disasters. This part of the book looks as if “ripped from today’s headlines,” as folks say, and that’s the problem. It’s too blatant to be artistic. The true art of moralistic storytelling is to do it without explicit moralizing, and Saunders fails on this score. I agree with Isaac Kolding that “This is not, at its core, a book about climate change.” Rather, it looks like Saunders grabbed the easiest and most topical subject he could think of. If this book had been written in the 1980s, chances are the focus of anxiety would have been nuclear weapons or nuclear power, because those were the biggest worries of the time.

But there’s a complication, because this moralizing runs up against another, far more interesting aspect of the story: Jill’s fatalistic convictions about human nature. One reason why comfort is so important is because you can’t count on people to change at the end of their lives. Here’s Jill, speaking some hard words to Boone:

Who else could you have been but exactly who you are? I said. Did you in the womb construct yourself? All your life, you believed yourself to be making choices, but what looked like choices were so severely delimited in advance by the mind, body, and disposition thrust upon you that the whole game amounted to a sort of lavish jailing.

Meanwhile, there’s a double, a shadow character, who haunts the story. That’s Paul Bowman, the man who accidentally blew up Jill. Like Boone, he lives to a ripe old age, forgiving himself for his sins, getting on with his life; but because he is vastly less powerful than Boone, his evildoing is much more limited. Yet it’s made clear that they are, at heart, very similar people. Saunders even constructs for Bowman an almost identical paragraph to the one quoted above, ending with the words: “Bowman, trapped inside Bowman, had believed he was making choices, but what looked to him like choices had been so severely delimited in advance by the mind, body, and disposition thrust upon him that the whole game amounted to a sort of lavish jailing.”

I find it hard to believe that Saunders, by this parallelism, isn’t trying to get at a larger truth about human nature. People can’t escape who they are, the world gets ruined due to their actions, and life somehow drags on. Hope is something that mainly gets deferred to a heavenly sphere, where liberated spirits go in search of elevation (which is the last word in the book). In short, there isn’t a lot of comfort in this book, not for this earthly life anyway.

One thing on which I agree with Robinson: Vigil would work better as a long short story than as a stand-alone novella. It’s 174 pages with 31 lines per page and a profusion of one-sentence paragraphs – i.e. most likely somewhere around 40,000 words in total – but even at this short length, parts of it feel extraneous. For instance, Saunders sets up a counterpoint to Boone’s demise by having Jill repeatedly visit a lavish wedding taking place next door. Okay, I get it, we’ve got the juxtaposition of life and death right here, but the wedding scenes are dull compared to the death scenes. As noted above, I have a similar problem with the numerous other doulas and their wearying antics.

My overall take is an ambivalent one. The explicit moralizing, and the extraneous elements that to my mind don’t quite work, undermine this book. Yet I can’t deny that the story develops a certain poignancy and provokes thought. On the whole, Vigil affirms my mixed, though leaning positive, view of Saunders’ work.

When I came up on deck, it was morning, the sun was shining, and visibility was excellent. We were about two hours from Stockholm. The approach to the city by sea is one of the best things about it. As our ferry neared the Swedish mainland, islands began to appear in quick succession. Most of them were tiny and dense with trees and other vegetation; sometimes I saw a house or two. The procession of islands continued like a big parade – it was as if Nature had laid on an extensive welcome for us under the morning sun. The islands were marked with increasing signs of human habitation as we sailed west. The houses multiplied and formed what looked like little villages, and the archipelago itself became denser and more crowded; at times it looked like a deep green forest floating on the water, broken up by broad rivers and ponds. We passed an uncountable number of islands during the last hour or so of the trip, and most of them were inhabited.

These islands formed the setting for August Strindberg’s novel By the Open Sea. Strindberg himself liked to flee the city for the peace and isolation of the Stockholm Archipelago, and it served him repeatedly as a source of inspiration. In his novel, a sensitive urban intellectual working as an inspector of fisheries confronts a primitive, inbred island society and is destroyed by it. “Science could not prevail against a sinking soul which had lost all interest in life,” writes Strindberg of his progressive, rationalist hero, Axel Borg. “His brain had struggled until it was weary, and his imagination worked out of control… The whole of life disgusted him, and he now laughed at his former exertions.”

When he wrote the book, in 1890, the islands were among the poorest regions of a country that was then losing masses of people to North American emigration. Today, judging from my shipboard view, these islands looked as prosperous as anywhere else in this rich, seemingly contented country. The houses were big and modern, and luxury cars lined the modest streets. The overall impression was of little broken-off pieces of suburb scattered through the sea by the hand of God or nature.

We docked, and I walked right into Sweden, no customs or passport officials anywhere in sight. In short order I was walking around, taking things in. Stockholm is an unusually fine city – almost too fine for its own good. It is just a bit too clean, too quiet, too harmonious in appearance, and I got the impression that it was too satisfied with itself, though in this last case I was succumbing to a certain traveler’s fallacy – the assumption that you can understand a place from first impressions. I did, however, discover that the city is too expensive for an impecunious traveler, which provides another reason not to linger there too long.

It took a long time for Stockholm to become a real city. In the sixteenth century, when places like Lübeck and Danzig had reached fifteen or twenty thousand in population, Stockholm still straggled behind with only about six or seven thousand. In fact, in the whole Swedish realm – all of present-day Sweden and Finland – there were probably not more than a million people at the time, scattered across what are, geographically, among the largest countries in Europe.

Stockholm’s old town, Gamla Stan, reflects the city’s small historical size and slow growth. Gamla Stan sits unobtrusively on – you guessed it – a fig-shaped island. It is, however, one of the smaller islands in the city, centrally located but easy to miss if you’re looking at a comprehensive city map. It is now a fashionable place, with lots of cafes and shops amidst the dark narrow streets, and is home to the Royal Palace, a huge monochrome brown block of stone decorated with sculptures of dignitaries, similar in its unattractive grandeur to Amalienborg in Copenhagen. The streets are lined with the usual rows of Hansa houses, built to last forever, in colors more subdued than I had seen elsewhere. But before the last century, Gamla Stan was largely regarded as a poor, even slummy district. The city’s richer, newer neighborhoods are on the larger islands that stretch north and south of the old town. To the east is Djurgarden, a former royal hunting ground that maintains the feeling of an extended patch of countryside within the city. It is a pleasant place for a wander, and home to Skansen, the world-famous outdoor museum.

At the same time, Stockholm is one of the more extreme examples of architectural and urban schizophrenia that I have encountered. Gamla Stan and the younger areas that surround and enfold it are tasteful, attractive, and harmonious. They really do have the much-vaunted “Old World charm.” Stray outside these zones and the difference is stark. The city’s postwar growth, stretching through its expansive suburban districts, is drab and sometimes rises to the level of surreal ugliness. Bad architecture even affects parts of the center. Sergels Torg, a large commercial square located in the business heart of the city, is a glaring example of this Stockholm syndrome. It boasts (if that’s the right word) a glass obelisk that resembles blocks of ice piled atop each other in totem-pole fashion. The circular space it stands on is hemmed in by traffic, and surrounded by massive glass-and-steel buildings of depressing anonymity. In a city as rich as this one, there is no excuse for such a lapse of taste as Sergels Torg. It is a Second World style somehow transplanted and polished to a high First World gloss. While gazing upon Sergels Torg, only a modest effort of the imagination is needed to mentally transport yourself to a bleak provincial town in some Communist country, circa 1980. You just have to picture the gleaming square buildings in a rundown state, while the meaningless glass obelisk that they surround would be dedicated to the Revolution or some Bolshevik luminary. Wheezing cars would circle the cracked pavements, blackening the air with their exhaust. And when this dream dissolves and you find yourself back in Stockholm, you may wonder why they had to disfigure the city in this way.

Stockholm grew in size and importance with the “Swedish Age of Greatness,” which lasted for most of the seventeenth century. A succession of enterprising monarchs – Gustavus Adolphus, Christina, and Charles XII – made Sweden into a great military power, and also tried to bring it in line with Europe’s main cultural currents. Sometimes they did this simultaneously. Gustavus Adolphus defeated Catholic forces during the Thirty Years’ War, and conquered Estonia and Latvia for Sweden; he also founded the university in Tartu (Dorpat in German) that eventually became so important for Estonian nationalists and intellectuals. Queen Christina attempted to Latinize her capital, inviting Rene Descartes and other French litterateurs to Stockholm. Most of them couldn’t stand the climate and eventually went home; Descartes himself, with all his best work past him, died there of pneumonia.

Sweden has been so pacifistic for so long that it is hard to believe that it once had its own empire, which at one point extended as far as Delaware, and that the Swedes were feared as soldiers all over Europe. They not only took over Livonia (that is, modern Estonia and Latvia) and won some major victories during the Thirty Years’ War, they also clashed with Poland repeatedly. Apparently, there was an enlightened side to all this expansionism. In addition to promoting education and administrative reform in Livonia, Swedish rulers took measures to improve the condition of the “people of the land,” lightening their workload and restricting the punishments their landlords could give them. Among the native Estonians and Latvians, the seventeenth century eventually acquired the nickname of “the good old Swedish time.”

The Swedish monarchs eventually did what empire-builders tend to do: they over-reached. The key year was 1709. Deep inside the Russian Empire, near the Ukrainian town of Poltava, the army of Peter the Great crushed the Swedish forces of Charles XII. Sweden had gotten about as far as a lightly populated country running on administrative efficiency could go; it simply couldn’t stand up to Russia’s much greater manpower and resources any further. The Great Northern War officially dragged on until 1721, but after Poltava there was no mystery as to how it would turn out. The Swedes lost their Baltic possessions to Russia, with Livonia going first, to be followed by Finland at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Since that time, Sweden has turned inward, concentrating on diplomacy, commerce, gloomy films and plays, and social democracy.1 These are quieter and less dramatic things than empire-building, but more valuable and lasting in their effects.

It’s time again for me, the small-press author, to support the team. Let’s take a look at what the small presses have been putting out in this century!

The End of the Book by Porter Shreve

In this novel published by Louisiana State University Press (specifically, its defunct “Yellow Shoe Fiction” line – don’t ask me what that name means), we have a two-track story. One track, set in the present, is about a writer in Chicago who is struggling to balance the demands of art and commerce. The other track, set in the past, is about a writer in Chicago who is struggling to balance the demands of art and commerce. The most novel aspect of this novel is that the second writer is George Willard, the hero of Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio – a book I’ve mentioned before. At the end of Anderson’s book, George leaves his native town. Shreve’s book recounts his life in the big city:

When he left Winesburg in spring 1896, George had planned to find a newspaper job, and after that to become a writer. But he’d arrived in the fastest-growing city the world had ever known only to find that this place of a thousand tongues had one universal language: commerce.

A frequent drawback of two-track novels is that one track turns out to be much more interesting than the other. Shreve does pretty well here. Both tracks are interesting enough to keep me absorbed in them without wishing to switch to the other track. But if I had to choose, I would say the Willard track has a slight edge because of its historical interest. Shreve does a great job bringing boomtown Chicago to life, with its vile slaughterhouses, ambitious entrepreneurs, and budding literary scene.

The present-day track deals with a frustrated writer and ex-academic named Adam Clary, who works for a company that’s engaged in a massive project to digitize the world’s books (hence the title). Family drama plays a large part in this section, such drama mainly being furnished by Adam’s dad, a retired scholar of American literature whose life is falling apart. The father, who managed to write one volume of a projected two-volume biography of Sherwood Anderson, also provides the most direct link to the other track of the story.

The End of the Book serves as an imaginative extension of a 20^th-century classic, as well as a thoughtful dramatization of the eternal struggle between artistic aspirations and real-world commitments. As is typical in cases like this, I don’t think your reading experience will suffer if you haven’t read Winesburg, Ohio; Shreve fills you in on what you need to know.

Stumbling in the Public Square by James L. Merriner

Full disclosure, I supplied a blurb for this historical novel when it was published by Auctus Publishers in 2023. It was a bit of a surprise how much I enjoyed it, since its subject matter – political corruption – is something I usually find depressing and frustrating to read about. In this case, it helps that the story is set in the 1920s; since the past can’t be fixed, I don’t feel that I’m being ripped off.

One reason the book works is the author’s background. Merriner was a longtime writer and editor for the Chicago Sun-Times, and in that capacity, he wrote several books about corruption in Chicago, in Illinois in general, and in Washington DC. I probably don’t need to tell you that if you’re looking for stories about corruption, these places are hunting grounds that will provide you with an endless supply of game. It’s possible nobody knows more about this sordid topic than Merriner.

Another reason the book works is – somewhat counterintuitively – its central character. That personage is no less than Warren G. Harding, one of America’s least respected presidents, regarded by many historians as the nation’s all-time champion in the corruption sweepstakes. Harding presented a rather bland façade to the world while all kinds of shenanigans were going on behind the scenes. Against the odds, Merriner manages to make Harding somewhat sympathetic. He is portrayed as a man possessing well-meaning instincts, but too weak and compromised to resist and control the vipers that infest his administration. These vipers provide most of the book’s entertainment value. While poor Harding is “stumbling in the public square” (Isaiah 59:14), trying to figure out which way is up, various rogues and scammers (almost all of them real historical figures) are using his administration as a casino to enrich themselves.

The story is told with appropriate attention to period detail. While the novel does indeed feel heavily researched like so many literary novels nowadays, I never got the sense that the author was showing off or dumping information without a clear purpose. I’m tempted to say the book would make a great Netflix miniseries, and why not? Their recent production centered on another obscure president (James Garfield) was highly successful.

In a historical note at the end, Merriner says: “Even after a century of constant political scandals, the corruption of the Harding administration still strains credulity.” Unlike explicitly reformist writers like Upton Sinclair, Merriner doesn’t suggest that there’s a magic bullet for this. Human nature is the ultimate reality here, and it’s something that can only be managed, not cured.

The Ways We Get By by Joe Dornich

This book, a collection of thematically similar short stories published by Black Lawrence Press, made me moderately angry. It’s not the fault of the book, which is mostly excellent. There are other reasons, which I’ll discuss below.

With regard to subject matter, Dornich appears to owe something to George Saunders. Both authors write about sad-sack characters who, usually due to circumstances beyond their control (economic, medical, or other), are forced into absurd situations that make it almost impossible to live in a dignified manner. The cartoon-like worlds they find themselves in are generators of malign and despairing humor, like a circus of crying clowns, which only makes things worse by covering the tragedy with a patina of laughter. Here’s the opening of Dornich’s story “Cry on Command”:

Somber, graceful mourning, with maybe the occasional tear or two, that’s one hundred. We call it a Dry. Hysterical crying, with the wailing and the moaning and the classic rhetorical questions screamed to the heavens – the How could you’s, the Why now’s – that’s going to cost you two-fifty. We call those, and really any tear-related mourning, a Wet.

It’s told from the point of view of a professional mourner at the funerals of strangers; she’s had to master different levels of crying to do the job properly. She used to run a restaurant, but for reasons outside her control, she had to close it down and take any job she could find. Now, she gets paid to mourn for other people – to put on a performance. Gogol spoke of “laughter through tears,” and that’s a good summary of the effect Dornich achieves, in this story as well as others. It’s hilarious, but it hurts.

So why did I say this book made me angry? Let’s go back to that Saunders comparison. I’ve only read one book by Saunders – Pastoralia, widely considered one of his best – and I mostly enjoyed it. But doing a book-to-book comparison, I find that I prefer Dornich. His characters are more relatable, his situations more precisely and plausibly rendered, and he’s funnier. Yet Saunders is only about a million times more famous than Dornich. Saunders publishes with Penguin Random House and gets his stories in The New Yorker and comparable venues, and he’s won a load of prizes. Joe Dornich has published one book, and that was with a small press; its current Amazon sales rank is way down in the millions. It doesn’t seem fair.

It would be nice to believe that the best-quality stuff eventually rises to the top, and maybe it does, but I don’t have space here to open that particular can of worms. You may raise the objection that what we like and dislike is a subjective thing. I’m glad when I can find a hidden gem, and I encourage interested readers to take the Dornich vs. Saunders test and see who wins in your own mind.

The capital of Finland is tidy, clean, and eclectic. It provides the greatest possible contrast to sprawling, messy, schematic St. Petersburg, and it is a bit surprising to learn that Helsinki served as a substitute for the Russian city in numerous films. There is the dignified, Russian-built Parliament Square, which has the right look; but it is so small that you would have to cast your film with dwarves in order to get the properly grand imperial effect. Right by the harbor is an Orthodox cathedral, supposedly the largest outside of Russia. It is attractive enough, but hardly special in its features. The strongest influences on the city historically have been Nordic rather than Russian. Finland was a de facto province of Sweden for about eight hundred years, and was ruled by Russia for only about one hundred, so it’s hardly a surprise that the Swedish influence is very strong. To this day, Swedish is an official language in this country, even though the percentage of people who use it as their first language has been in decline for decades – Swedo-Finns now number less than ten percent of the population.

This highlights another historical trend: the use of Germanic languages with deep roots around the Baltic has been in decline since some time in the late nineteenth century. Swedish used to be the elite language in Finland, just as German was in Estonia and Latvia. At some point Swedish lost its socially dominant position in Finland, while German, for a variety of reasons, disappeared almost completely from the lands formerly ruled by the Teutonic Knights. Nowadays the Germanic language you’re mostly likely to hear in the region is English, not the speech of any native communities.

Personally, I am grateful that Swedish still has official status here. It means that anyone who knows a Germanic language can figure out at least the basic meanings of signs and instructions, whereas Finnish is hopeless unless you have a grounding in Finno-Ugric. Out of curiosity, I studied Finnish for a short time, with the help of a Linguaphone tape course. The only thing that still sticks in my mind is the sentence olemme jälleen nojatuolissa (“we are again in a sitting-room”); I have never had an opportunity to use it. Shortly thereafter I gave up. You need a strong incentive to learn a language with fourteen cases, a vocabulary that’s almost completely unfamiliar to an Indo-European, and only about five million speakers – and Finnish ranks as one of the most populous languages of its group, behind only Hungarian with fourteen million speakers. Finnish is also the westernmost of the Finnic subgroup of languages. Its relatives stretch to the east, deep into northern and sub-arctic Russia.

The harsh, cold, infertile territory of the far north ensures that the Finno-Ugric languages cover an enormous territory but are spoken by comparatively few people. The biggest languages number a few hundred thousand speakers, and those speakers are spread over regions even larger and emptier than many of America’s Western states. It is something of a triumph over historical and geographical circumstances that one can still find reindeer herders, farmers and villagers speaking Komi, Mari, Udmurt, and the two distinct dialects of Mordvin. The pressure of Russian has been steady and relentless for centuries; many young people grow up speaking only that language. The modern forms of Finno-Ugric, in fact, are remnants. Much of the population of northern Russia has distant roots in Finno-Ugric tribes who, like the Prussians and Wends, vanished generation by generation over a long period of assimilation and Christianization, commencing in the Middle Ages. The greatest monument of this obscure process is the translation of excerpts from the Bible into Komi, made by St. Stefan of Perm in the fourteenth century. This Orthodox monk created the first Biblical texts in any Finnic language, long before many of the languages of Europe were granted a similar service.

These peoples have never had an independent state. When the October Revolution occurred, some activists tried to take advantage of the ensuing chaos to create their own joint Tatar-Bashkir and Finno-Ugric republic in the Volga heartland. Finns and Estonians were breaking away at the same time; why should their cousins in the interior not do likewise? But Idel-Ural, with its thinly spread, varied population, large number of Russians, and lack of an ethnic center of gravity among several distinct Turkic and Finnic peoples, never had a chance. It was quickly absorbed back into Russia, and the idea was never seriously contemplated again, even during the breakup of the Soviet Union.

Today in the Russian heartland, extinct Finnic peoples are memorialized in place names. You can still find (barely) living languages as far away as Siberia, where two forest peoples numbering only a few thousand each – the Khanty and the Mansi – are the closest linguistic relatives of the Hungarians, from whom they split thousands of years ago. It is strange to consider that today’s thoroughly European Hungarians are part of the same family as the shamanists of the Ob-Irtysh forests; but no stranger than to realize that Londoners and Parisians every day speak the same root words – day, night, sun; mother, father; one, two, three – as members of isolated hill tribes in the Indian subcontinent.

One of the people I met in Helsinki was an America with a background in comparative linguistics, who had immigrated to Finland as far back as the 1960s. Since he had lived there so long, I asked him how the country had changed in recent decades. “When I first moved here, it was actually kind of grim,” he said. Though super-rich now (and a world leader in the mobile-phone business), Finland had lagged behind its Nordic neighbors in living standards for a long time; it had a reputation as a rather isolated, lonely country, requiring a hefty dose of the quality known as sisu (persistence, toughness) to survive. Now, it was a much livelier place. My contact said that it had attracted substantial numbers of immigrants, who were beginning to make a mark. One of his own students, a native of Belarus, had become active in local politics. Helsinki itself, with its increasingly complex cultural and nocturnal life, felt more like a capital than before, a junior version of Stockholm or Copenhagen.

A Russian traveler (from the Finnic-speaking Komi Republic) was not very impressed with the city. “You can see it in a couple of hours,” he told me. “At the harbor, there’s the cathedral, there’s Parliament Square. Walk down the boulevard for a while. Turn, there’s the concert hall, there’s the Sibelius monument. That’s all! You can go home now.”

This is too dismissive. While the look of the city is mostly a kind of standard-issue Scandinavian, quirky things pop up here and there to proclaim its distinctiveness. The severe, white-on-white creations of architects like Aalto and Saarinen – buildings so clean in appearance you want to eat off them – provides much local flavor. The Sibelius monument looks like a pipe organ in an advanced state of meltdown, or a crop of silver stalactites. It punctuates the park near Finlandia Hall, the concert hall designed by Alvar Aalto, a pale square exercise in frugal modernist minimalism. Yet more striking is the Church in the Rock, a design from the late 1960s that fuses the city with nature in an especially suggestive way. Hidden away in the center of town under a green dome of copper, it is carved directly out of the rock. From the inside, with its piled-rock walls and muted light, it suggests a cave or the hideaway of a giant hermit.

Somebody gave the city the nickname “Daughter of the Baltic,” and the presence of the sea is stronger here than it is in most Baltic cities. Founded in the sixteenth century as a rival to Tallinn across the gulf, it was never a Hanseatic city. Thus, it is not built on a fig-shaped island located slightly inland. It stands right on the coast, open to the sea; in a few minutes, you can walk directly off a ship and find yourself strolling along the central tree-lined boulevard. An open market spreads along the waterfront, in the shade of the Russian cathedral. Out in the harbor, small islands stretch into the distance; this island range thins out, then becomes spectacularly dense as it approaches Stockholm.

One of the city’s biggest attractions, Suomenlinna, lies on a few of these islands, a short ferry-ride away. The name means “Finnish fortress,” and it was built by the Swedes to defend against Russian encroachments. In the long run, it didn’t work – the Russians took Finland anyway in 1809 – but it survives as a rambling yet impressive example of military architecture. The walls, ramparts, and barracks are still in good shape, though in places you can see nature getting the upper hand through erosion. On this sunny, cool day, the place looked cheerful, but I can imagine how remote and grim it must feel in the winter, or during the Baltic storms, when the sea foams white and the wind howls without mercy.

After a couple of days in Helsinki, it was time for me to depart to Stockholm. The ferries that crisscross the Baltic are like floating hotels, with casinos, floor shows and eateries. This one had about seven decks, and it took me a while to find my berth, as it was about as far down as I could go. Coming back to the top deck, I watched the city slowly slip away under the afternoon sun; its handful of towers shrunk towards the earth as the tiny islands of the archipelago emerged into view, like slow sea turtles accompanying our ship. Most were simply small, unadorned patches of land, but a few of them boasted a shack or two. Islands would follow us the whole way. From here we would cruise slightly to the northwest, passing through the Aland Islands; from there we would turn again slightly south, and pass through Stockholm’s vast and extensive archipelago on our way to the city.

Night fell on a calm, placid sea. I was grateful: when a ship pitches and rolls, my stomach always moves in sympathy with it. I got a beer and strolled around the top deck. In one room, two Finnish comedians were entertaining their compatriots; next door, passengers took turns at pan-Baltic karaoke. Finnish and Swedish pop songs, crooned against a shifting backdrop of idyllic nature scenes, alternated with hits by Elton John and the Beatles, belted out in choppy English. An odd air of subdued festivity reigned over the proceedings – the resigned enthusiasm of a captive, but contented, audience.

I couldn’t get to Finland from the Finland Station. I could go in the general direction of that country, but no train would take me across the border. The “real” Finland Station is a new construction called Ladoga Station (Ladozhsky Vokzal), named after the large lake to the northeast of St. Petersburg. Memorialized as the “Road of Life,” the lake’s iced-over surface bore the convoys of trucks that enabled the city to survive during the siege.

The lake has now been honored with one of Russia’s nicest, cleanest and most efficient train stations, a shining exception to the general grunginess of stations in this part of the world. Passengers glide along ramps past dignified glass and metal surfaces, much of the latter in a comforting chocolate brown. There are no puddles, recumbent drunkards, or slumbering canines in sight. The whole atmosphere suggests an airport in some European provincial city, rather than a train station in an outlying region of a huge Russian metropolis. It appears, however, that construction went not entirely smoothly. From one of the nearby apartment buildings hung a white sheet with the words: “We’re tired of living at the station. Resettlement was promised and forgotten.”

The passengers on the Helsinki train appeared to be about evenly split between Finns and Russians, with a sprinkling of other nationalities. We left the huge city behind and entered the Karelian Isthmus to the north. This territory is populated by a mixture of Russians and Finnic peoples, the largest being the Karelians who give the area its name. Occasionally the forests and lakes would give way to little wooden villages, some of them with Finnic names, spelled out in Cyrillic on train platforms. The villages were notable for their absence of Soviet-style concrete buildings, and here and there were signs of commerce, with storefronts, open lots selling auto parts, and the like. Then it was back to the unspoiled landscape of trees and lakes. For the first time I saw snow, in occasional modest patches on the grass.

Karelia, which is split between Russia and Finland and stretches far to the north, is the homeland of the Kalevala. In these lands to the east of the Finnish mainland, Elias Lönnrot – like his Estonian counterpart Kreutzwald, a country doctor – tramped through little villages taking down the runic and strophic songs from the mouths of peasant singers, who had learned them from a previous generation of peasant singers, and so on, back to a world that pre-dated Christianity. Vast amounts of pagan lore were handed down over the centuries, preserved in the metrical amber of archaic trochaic tetrameter. The dainas of Latvia and Lithuania use a very similar meter, and the fact that the Finns are unique among Finno-Ugric peoples in using this meter for their epic poetry suggests an ancient period of cultural mixing between Finns and Balts. The roots of the Kalevala may well go back thousands of years, to the earliest times of Finno-Ugric settlement in this land.

As noted earlier, Lönnrot was much less creative than his friend Kreutzwald in compiling his material, but forming the epic into a coherent whole required a great deal of editing and revision. The first version was published in 1835, but Lönnrot continued to revise and expand the Kalevala after that. Thanks to his efforts, the world came to know about the shaman Väinämöinen, one of the creators of the world; about the mysterious magic object known as the Sampo, and its heroic forger, the smith Ilmarinen (who has his analogue in Germanic legends); about epic heroes with resounding names like Lemminkäinen and Kullervo; and about the land of the dead, Tuonela, presided over by a mournful swan, whose voice Jean Sibelius heard as an English horn. These figures stand in the midst of a whole world of peasant wisdom, ritual, and superstition. There are episodes devoted to such things as extensive advice to a young bride on how to conduct herself in her new home, and a “bear ritual” with deep Finno-Ugric roots (in Hungary early in the twentieth century, Bela Bartók noted down the bear dances of the Finns’ very distant relatives).

After working its influence on Longfellow, Sibelius, the painter Akseli Gallen-Kallela, and the whole Finnish cultural revival, the Kalevala surfaced again, in the writings of J.R.R. Tolkien. He had read the epic, and one can easily detect thematic parallels with The Lord of the Rings. Being a linguist, he found Finnish too rich a resource to ignore. Discovering the language was like finding “a complete wine-cellar filled with bottles of an amazing wine of a kind and flavour never tasted before.” The Elvish dialects he devised for his own epic are based on Finnish; the “amazing wine” that had intoxicated him manifests itself in such phrases as Elen sil lumenn’ ometeilvo – an Elvish greeting that translates literally as “a star shines on the hour of our meeting.”

Moving up through the isthmus, we passed an important milestone: we crossed the 60^th parallel. North of sixty, the look and feel of things changes in ways that are subtle and barely detectable, but you get a definite sense of having entered a different zone of the planet.

Sixty degrees is about as far north as large numbers of people can live comfortably together. Helsinki, with about half a million inhabitants, represents the largest manifestation of this sort of thing. There are some substantial towns north of it in the Nordic countries – Tampere, Reykjavik, Trondheim – but they are much smaller; some American suburbs surpass them in size. Russia’s Arctic port of Murmansk deserves a mention, although it’s doubtful if it can be considered comfortable, up there on the cold and bare Kola Peninsula.

The main characteristic of the far north is the rule of nature. The towns are small; the distances between them are large. The summer days never end, the winter days can barely get started. Clothing, which in hotter parts of the globe is sometimes treated as optional, requires the complicated protocol of dressing in layers, since the seasons can change in a day. You might look out the window just before leaving home, and find the day bright and sunny; you open the door, and the rain hits you in the face. Even in the heart of the summer, the glassy blue sky frequently turns dark with clouds. The nights may be white, but the mornings and afternoons are slate gray.

Nature, not having to contend so much with man, is cleaner here. You taste it in the air, which should be bottled and sold as a luxury in more crowded lands. You see it in the vast stretches of untouched forest and the purity of the mirror-like lakes. The Russian philosopher and mystic Vladimir Solovyov, in his poem “Winter on Saimaa,” described a Finnish lake lying “in tranquil, hushed sleep” in the luminous air, and “the transparent, white silence” all around. Beautiful as it is, it has its hard, even deadly side. This is the land where peasants had to mix tree bark into their flour to produce bread; where the normal diet in the north of Finland consisted of sour milk, preserved fish, and rock-hard barley loaves; where a village was often an extended family living together in a sort of longhouse. One reason why oral poetry flourished in Finnish villages was because the poverty was so harsh, and the resources so meager, that the material basis for other art forms simply didn’t exist.

The psychologist Julian Jaynes (in his eccentric treatise The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind) defined civilization as the art of living in urban settlements so large that everyone doesn’t know everyone else. By that definition, civilization didn’t really conquer the Nordic regions for good until the nineteenth century. At that point, “Northernness” exploded onto the world scene. The North ceased being an afterthought in the minds of the rest of Europe when figures like Ibsen, Sibelius, Munch, and Strindberg began to make their mark internationally.

Art elsewhere in Europe was built on a strong, richly layered social base. The cities were crowded with every type of person from the richest and strongest to the poorest and weakest. Paris, London, and Vienna displayed the range of human conditions in their most extreme form, as did the great cities of Russia. Dickens, Balzac and Dostoyevsky could draw on these endlessly deep urban worlds, as well as the more modest stages provided by towns and estates, which had built up, over the centuries, a heritage worth exploiting. Place your moody hero in one of these settings, let him bump into other people, customs, and places, and your plot takes shape from that.

Nordic art, by contrast, is notably inward and individualistic. Henrik Ibsen’s Norway was a country of only a couple of million people, sitting on a long thread of land with only a few modest bulges for the main cities. Ibsen himself remarked that Norway’s lonely geography drove people into themselves, making every second person “a philosopher.” Rainer Maria Rilke, writing in the persona of his fictional Danish narrator in The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, created a remarkable meditation on Ibsen’s ability to make use of his external Nordic world as a reflection of internal, psychological events, as the playwright “sought, among what was visible, the equivalents for what he had seen inside”1:

A rabbit was there, an attic, a room with someone walking back and forth; there was a clatter of glass in the next room, a fire outside the windows; there was the sun. There was a church, and a rocky valley that resembled a church. But that didn’t go far enough: finally towers had to come in and whole mountain ranges; and the avalanches that bury landscapes spilled onto stages overloaded with what was tangible, for the sake of the ungraspable.

Or consider the opening of Pan, a novel by Ibsen’s compatriot Knut Hamsun: “These last few days I have thought and thought of the Nordland summer’s endless day.” Up there, beyond the Arctic Circle, he didn’t have much else to do. Even the inward, organic development of Sibelius’ later works – the patient, gradual expansion of a few motifs – seems to have its roots in this monodic loneliness. A few tones, linked together like a party of explorers entering the forest, soldier on into the darkness, where changes sneak up on you in a gradual accumulation of small details. In fact, when Sibelius’ stripped-down, austere Fourth Symphony was first performed in 1911, it quickly acquired the nickname “Bark-bread Symphony,” in tribute to that desperate peasant custom. The Scottish poet Hugh MacDiarmid went further in his poem “Good-bye Twilight,” calling it “Sibelius’s gaunt El-Greco-emaciated ecstatic Fourth!” Sibelius saw his own work in less alarming terms: whereas other composers created works that were like multicolored cocktails, the great Finn gave his listeners “pure, cold water.” The sort of water that runs through an unspoiled, unpeopled countryside.

Look, also, at the most famous of all Scandinavian paintings. A sky like strips of fire and a landscape of viciously swirling green and blue curves dwarf the tiny boats in the distance, and the two grime-dark pedestrians on the bridge. The solitary figure in the foreground, clutching its ghoulish light-bulb head, howls at the viewer. Could anyone hear Munch’s screamer, or was the distance to the next person simply too great?

My mother said this to me the other night. “Why are you calling this book Crapalachia? That’s not a good title. It’s a horrible title.” I told her, “No it’s not. It’s a good title. Shit makes the flowers grow.”

One of the highlights of “Substack Summer” (a term coined to describe the explosion of literary activity on this platform in 2025) was a debate on the topic of autofiction. The Republic of Letters has run a number of pieces on this controversial and much-derided genre. I found ’s defense of the genre compelling, but I must add a caveat: not only am I not entirely sure what autofiction is, I’m not sure it’s a real genre at all.

I’ve read definitions of autofiction, and I’ve read a number of books that could be classified as such. Most of these books don’t seem to be regarded as autofiction. Is Saul Bellow’s Ravelstein autofiction? He called it a novel, but it records the real-life friendship between the title character, who is so closely based on the political philosopher Allan Bloom that it can probably be considered an accurate portrait, and a writer identified only as Chick, who is clearly based on Bellow. This much can be confirmed by some basic biographical research, as can many of the events depicted in the story. Yet I have never seen Ravelstein described as autofiction, possibly because it was published back in 2000, long before the term came into vogue.

Bellow stays close to reality, but other authors have gone much further. In The Map and the Territory, Michel Houellebecq inserts himself as a character, under his own name. This is not a new trick, but Houellebecq takes things to an extreme level by making himself the victim of a gruesome murder. Does merely putting himself in his own book make it autofiction? And does murdering himself in the same book invalidate the autofictionality? Alasdair Gray also shows up as the author (under a different name) in one part of his great novel Lanark, while his protagonist Duncan Thaw (who is based on Gray) winds up committing suicide. How autofictional is that?

This brings us to Crapalachia, which was first published by the small press Two Dollar Radio in 2013 and recently reissued in its “New Classics” series. I admit it: I got interested in Crapalachia because of the title. That’s good marketing right there. It did make me wonder if this was going to be a case where some urban sophisticate takes a crap on the rubes he left behind, but the book is more complicated and nuanced than that. There is plenty of crap in Crapalachia, but it’s part of a broader, more affectionate context.

The book’s subtitle is “A Biography of a Place,” but the book is mainly about the people living in the place. It’s mostly about the narrator, who is apparently the same person as the author, and about his experiences growing up in West Virginia. The other main characters are the people Scott McClanahan winds up living with: Grandma Ruby and Uncle Nathan, and later on, his friend Bill.

The problems these people have are not specific to Appalachia. Uncle Nathan has cerebral palsy and is unable to talk; he has to resort to creative, roundabout ways of communication. Bill is afflicted with obsessive-compulsive disorder. He weighs himself repeatedly (every time he does it, the scale says 225 pounds), listens to the song “Dust in the Wind” more times than I can count, and recounts a local legend (“the Greenbrier Ghost”) a number of times.

The book details adolescent hijinks of a type that also have nothing to do with Appalachia specifically but are common pretty much everywhere, at least in America. The narrator and his friends like to indulge in crank calling, for instance. They like to watch TV (Walker, Texas Ranger is a particular favorite). They like to break rules and upset people in positions of authority. If you’re expecting a deep dive into the local culture and folkways, you might be disappointed. Nobody plays bluegrass fiddle – in fact, the only fiddler in the book can barely play her instrument. I don’t recall any mentions of illicit liquor. Sometimes it feels like McClanahan is deliberately suppressing cliches and stereotypes. This has its value, but brings with it the depressing odor of homogenization.

Local history is communicated in a series of anecdotes, asides, and poetic fragments. It’s mostly a tale of mining disasters, floods and poverty, all adding up to a sense of stoic fatalism. Among other things, I learned about William Marland, a West Virginia governor who was forced from office by the coal companies when he tried to tax them. He wound up driving a cab in Chicago, his fate discovered by a Chicago Tribune reporter who got a ride with him one day. (“He tried to protect and help the people once. This is what happens to you. You wind up a drunk, driving a taxi cab in the city of Chicago.”) There’s also a recipe for fried chicken and gravy (attributed to Grandma Ruby), and a list of coal mining fatalities for the years 1931-41 (over a thousand every year).

When considering McClanahan’s evocation of place, I thought about ’s very good novel Why Teach?, published earlier this year, a noteworthy product of “Substack Summer.” Shull does a more thorough job of creating a sense of place (in his case, western Kansas) than McClanahan does. It’s like the difference between a poetic method of evocation and a more sociologically based one. The autofictional comparison also came into my mind. Shull’s novel is also clearly autobiographical, but with enough distance between its author and his protagonist that the term “autofiction” never entered my mind while reading it.

Crapalachia is at its most autofictional in the “Appendix and Notes” at the end, where the author pulls the rug out from under the whole structure he’s built up. He tells us how his narrative diverges from real life. Example:

I didn’t live with Bill during high school. I lived with my mom and dad. I lived with Bill (Phil) years afterwards. Actually my grandmother died after I lived with Bill. I lived with Bill at college, but college never appears in Appalachian books. We can’t admit these sorts of things. We can’t admit we’ve gone to malls. We can’t admit we’ve gone to restaurants. We can’t admit we dream our dreams. People won’t believe you.

Even the fried chicken recipe is wrongly attributed (“This is a recipe I googled”). The upshot is that almost nothing the narrator has told us in this book about his own life can be trusted. Crapalachia may be a pack of lies and distortions, but it’s not novelistic; it has no plot in a traditional sense, just a procession of strange characters and events, presented in a jittery, fragmented style. If it’s a memoir, it’s a distorted and untrustworthy one. It’s one of those odd little books that makes for an enjoyable read while refusing to fit into the predetermined slots we like to use to categorize books. This may be the first unreliable autofictional regionalist memoir I’ve encountered. I’ll give the author the last word: “I just realized that I never look at a painting and ask, ‘Is this painting fictional or non-fictional?’ It’s just a painting.”

St. Petersburg is a great museum city, but I skipped its most famous museum, the Hermitage, because I had already seen it on my previous visit, and because it is not especially Russian in its exhibits. Also, housed in the Winter Palace, it is so enormous that it would take forever to do justice to it. If you just want to get a taste, a good source is Alexander Sokurov’s film Russian Ark, in which a camera prowls through the museum in a single shot lasting over an hour and a half. The film effectively communicates the museum’s labyrinthine vastness.

Instead, I took in the Museum of Ethnography, another wonderfully vast place stuffed with costumes, videos, paintings, maps, and other exhibits, focusing on the hundreds of peoples, tribes and religions that have inhabited Russia. I gave the place top marks, with one caveat for visitors: they really should provide information in languages other than Russian. If the museum were made more foreigner-friendly, it could become one of the city’s top tourist sites.

After that came the State Russian Museum, yet another huge place. It seems to hold about half the famous Russian paintings, with the other half in Moscow’s Tretyakov Gallery. I made the mistake of trying to see it all. By the time I left in exhaustion, I had received an education in the history of Russian art from the eighteenth century (unimaginative imitations of Western European models) to the twentieth (the revolutionary work of Vrubel, Malevich, Repin and so on).

And then, a small-scale museum: Dostoyevsky’s apartment. This is where Fyodor Mikhailovich finished The Brothers Karamazov, and shortly thereafter, died. The place itself is merely a typical middle-class apartment of its time, furnished as it was at the moment of the author’s death. “Father died today,” said his small daughter’s diary entry, displayed on one of the tables. Of more interest than the apartment were the walls and shelves of Dostoyevsky memorabilia: the photos, portraits, articles, and copies of the various editions of his books in every language one can imagine. Despite the slashing remarks that the dyspeptic novelist directed toward the city, he must have liked it on some level. He spent many years there, and it was the scene of some of his greatest inspirations. Several decades before Bely, Dostoyevsky was already exploring the capital as a personality in itself. One of the most picturesque examples of this comes from his early story “White Nights.” The story’s protagonist likes to spend his time promenading up and down the main streets, holding imaginary conversations with houses:

When I walk along the street, each of them seems to run before me, gazing at me out of all its windows, and practically saying to me, “Good morning, sir! How are you? I’m very well, thank you. They’re going to add another story to me in May”; or, “How do you do, sir? I’m going to be repaired tomorrow”; or, “Dear me, I nearly got burnt down, and goodness, how I was scared!” and so on and so on.

The scale increased again (though not to the immense size of the first two museums) with the Yusupov Palace. This wonder-world of a family home, situated right on the Moika canal, is a showcase for the incredibly lavish way of life enjoyed by Russia’s high aristocracy in the years before the Bolshevik Revolution. Rooms are furnished not only in European styles, but also in Middle Eastern and Asian; there is a private theater large enough for small-scale opera productions, where many of Europe’s leading musicians performed. In 1916, the last Yusupov to be master of the palace, Felix, led the plot to kill Rasputin. The death of the notorious Siberian holy man was a multi-stage affair. To borrow from that classic of Baltic literature, The Tin Drum (written by native Danziger Günter Grass): “They poisoned him with poison cake and poison wine; then, when he wanted more cake, they shot him with pistols, and when the lead in his chest made him feel like dancing, they bound him and lowered him into the Neva, through a hole in the ice.”

It’s easy to overlook St. Petersburg’s Baltic context, due to the grandiose role the city has played on the world stage, but its Baltic location has given it much of its personality. From the beginning, its oddly non-Russian character has been evident not just in its architecture but in its inhabitants. From its early days it was marked by a pan-Baltic cosmopolitanism.

“There is no town in the world,” noted an observer in 1765, “where more or less every inhabitant speaks such a large number of languages. Even the lowest servant speaks Russian, German and Finnish, and amongst people who have had some education one often meets some who speak eight or nine languages…which they sometimes mix up to quite pleasing effect.” This multilingualism was a practical necessity, as St. Petersburg’s early growth was similar to that of American cities in the nineteenth century: fast and frenzied, and pulling in vast amounts of labor and expertise from outside.

The Germans, who staffed the military, academic and administrative worlds (as well as being tradesmen and merchants), were often Balts themselves, from Estonia and Latvia. Polish and Lithuanian nobility – survivors from a state that had been wiped off the map of Europe – fed the aristocratic ranks of their new masters. The Swedes, active all along the eastern Baltic coast, also had a presence. Alfred Nobel (he of the prizes) was a university student here. An interesting case is the poet Edith Södergran. She came from a Finno-Swedish family long established in St. Petersburg, and though she achieved distinction as a poet in the Swedish language, never set foot in Sweden. In this she resembles Adam Mickiewicz, the greatest of Polish poets, who spent his whole life outside of Poland.

Finns may have been the largest minority. The isthmus on which the city stands is perched on the edge of the Finno-Ugric realm; any journey inland takes you into historically Finnic-speaking territory. Pushkin in “The Bronze Horseman” describes the region as priyut ubogovo chukhontsa – “the destitute Finn’s refuge.” Finns were very active in service jobs, and had a dominant position in some of them. There are frequent references to Finnish cooks, barbers, servants, drivers and the like in nineteenth-century Russian literature. In Gogol’s “Nevsky Prospekt,” the artist Piskaryov, delirious after taking opium, sees “the head of the Finnish woman he had once painted” and other unwelcome things. The Marquis de Custine, in his ferociously negative account of his 1839 journey in Russia, tells us that “most of the women that one meets in government circles in Petersburg are of the Finnish race.”

Germans also appear often in this literature, but they figure strongly as characters. While Finns are merely mentioned as part of the functional background – they do their jobs quietly and then disappear – the Germans are agents, and it is obvious that their cultural traits had made a deep impression on the Russian authors. A classic example is Hermann, from Pushkin’s story “The Queen of Spades.” He is a cold, logical, persistent figure who employs “calculation, moderation, and diligence” in an attempt to win a fortune at gambling. Hermann’s brush with the supernatural overwhelms his methodical, rational mind, and he goes insane, like that other Pushkin hero, Yevgeny. There’s the blond temptress in “Nevsky Prospekt,” who seduces a vulgar Russian officer. There’s Berg, like Hermann an army officer (a stereotypical German profession) in Tolstoy’s War and Peace. There’s Raskolnikov’s blustering landlady, Amalia Ludwigovna, in Crime and Punishment; Dostoyevsky could not resist poking fun at her Teutonic speech patterns.

As for the Baltic climate, it provides its own extremes, acting in stubborn counterpoint to the Mediterranean architecture. The cold and darkness of the long winter are payment for the brief glories of the summer months. During the summer the Italianate city, on the edge of the sub-Arctic realm of the Finnic peoples, basks in a long, spectral glow. The Marquis de Custine, in the city in July, describes it thus:

I was all of a sudden struck with wonder at the sight of the light effects which one experiences only in the North and during the magic clarity of the Arctic nights. Several tiers of very heavy, black storm clouds divided the sky into zones; it was half-past midnight – the nights which are beginning again for Petersburg are still so short one scarcely has time to notice them… in the spaces which separated the bands of motionless clouds one saw the base of the sky – its whiteness was so alive and so shining it resembled swords of silver separated by massive garlands of embroidery. This light was reflected on the motionless Neva – the Gulf, still agitated by the storm of the day, pushed the water back into the bed of the river and gave to this vast sheet of sleeping river the appearance of a sea of milk or a lake of mother-of-pearl.

The storied White Nights: traditionally a romantic, festive time in the city, memorialized by Pushkin and Dostoyevsky and modern figures like Nikolai Zabolotsky (“a fetus or an angel / opening its milky eyes / sways in a formaldehyde jar”); yet with a surreal, vaguely sinister undertone. At a recent visit, I saw the crowds moving along Nevsky, and massing on the banks of the river to watch the raising of the drawbridges after midnight. Fireworks burst and an impromptu rhythm section beat drums frantically as a convoy of boats and barges proceeded down the Neva. But a few streets away everything was quiet. It reminded me of Giorgio de Chirico’s ominous, deserted cityscapes: monumental buildings and statues fronting on empty boulevards and squares, illuminated in an eerie half-light. The streetlights snapped on incongruously with a beelike buzz, only to go dark again within a couple of hours. Along the Moika Canal, the great long buildings rose to a light blue liquid sky. Random pedestrians, singly or in groups of two or three, dotted the streets, slow and aimless in their motions, seemingly in no hurry to get anywhere. Shafts of light shot out from courtyards, where a few people were drinking, dancing, or loafing.

During this brief interval before the sun rises again, the city doesn’t sleep. Rather, it dozes, and just as a dozing person may confuse dreams with reality, such is the case here. After giving some small change to a passing drunk, I saw two girls, maybe thirteen or fourteen years old, riding horses in the middle of an otherwise deserted street. I had to stare at them for a while before I was convinced they were real. They chatted in low voices for a few minutes until one of them saw me. The young, bejeaned brunette on her black-and-white horse asked me for a few rubles; I said (not entirely truthfully) that I didn’t have any to spare. As she clip-clopped away, I heard her say: “Why are Americans so stingy?”

I stayed on Vasilevsky Island, in the apartment of an American expat named Ken, who was teaching English there. We were only two stops from Nevsky Prospekt, the main shopping street, but it felt like a different world. Ken’s building was one of a group of identical Soviet-built flatblocks, as anonymous and lacking in distinction as any neighborhood in the former Soviet Union. I went out to explore and found an outdoor market – stall after stall hawking goods of every kind, from food to socks to shampoo – and emerged at the other end into a bustling, newly built commercial district, sprouting colorful signs and vulgar logos of neon. The entrance to the Primorskaya metro station stood unobtrusively in the midst of this insta-development. I took a brief look inside the station. Between the lines of commuters extending from the ticket windows, a big shaggy dog was sleeping on the grimy floor, totally oblivious to the bustle around it.

I went back out and passed through the remainder of the commercial district. Coming out onto a wide street, I saw a veritable mountain range of enormous concrete buildings, gray and ugly, looming against the gray sky like an abstract study in one color. Around me, people were going about their business, rushing here and there with sacks full of goods. There seemed to be so many more of them than I had seen on my earlier stops around the Baltic, as if the population density had suddenly doubled or tripled. The huge, ominous, shabby grandeur of the city made it feel like a world apart after my visits to those tidy Hanseatic towns.

All cities are unique, but St. Petersburg is, if possible, more unique than others. The other Russian cities follow traditional Russian norms in the layout of their streets and the design of their important buildings. Churches have their round onion domes, palaces have their elaborate, colorful ornamentation, streets grew according to medieval logic: they curve in odd ways, get broader and narrower, are short or long according to necessity. In St. Petersburg, Italian, French, and British architects created a city of severe buildings in neo-classical style – harmonious in a single color or variations thereof, topped with Roman statuary, geometrical enough to serve as illustrations in a textbook on mathematics. They stand on broad, straight avenues of the modern type; some of the streets curve in a slight and gentle way, tracing the banks of the city’s numerous canals. At its most basic and physical, the difference between St. Petersburg and other Russian cities is the difference between the straight line and the curve. The capital’s consciously Western look, reminiscent of Amsterdam in some ways, of Rome in others, with maybe a touch of Vienna or Paris thrown into the mix, forms the strongest possible contrast to the older Russian cities.

From his perch at Tartu, not far away, Yuri Lotman declared that the history of his native city was inseparable from its mythology – a mythology created by literature. Among this literature, the great novel of the city, the book that captures and defines it better than any other, is Andrei Bely’s Petersburg, first published in 1913. This year, the last before World War I broke out, was the end of St. Petersburg’s golden age – and the last two decades of that golden age are known as the “Silver Age” (Serebryany Vek) of Russian literature. Bely’s Symbolist concoction deserves to be known as the great novel of the city because, in addition to being a great novel, it takes as its main character the city itself. Petersburg evokes the geometrical, rational character of the place, while also showing the mystical, surreal aspects that flourish in the interstices between all those straight lines. Perhaps Bely’s mathematical studies made him especially alert to the former, while his interest in Steiner’s anthroposophy and in Asian religions inclined him to attend to the latter. The city’s geometry becomes the principal source of comfort to the novel’s leading human character, a chilly, autocratic government official:

He wanted the carriage to fly forward, the avenues to fly towards him – avenue after avenue, so that the whole spherical surface of the planet should be embraced…by blackish-gray cubelike houses; so that all the earth, crushed by avenues, in its linear cosmic flight should intersect the unembraceable via its rectilineal laws; so that the network of parallel avenues, intersected by a network of avenues, should expand into the world’s abysses in planes of squares and cubes…

After the line, the figure that soothed him more than all other symmetries was the square …Sometimes, for long periods, he gave himself up to unthinking contemplation of pyramids, triangles, parallelepipeds, cubes, and trapezoids.

The key word for understanding this urban space is despite. That the city exists at all is only because one man decreed it into existence, despite the inhospitable location and sheer logistical difficulties of building anything substantial in a region of frostbitten fishing villages. Despite its location in Russia, it was designed to look as un-Russian as possible. Despite the severe, garrison-town appearance of the early city, it attracted people from all over the empire and became one of Europe’s greatest intellectual centers. Despite its location in a region where one would expect high-gabled Germanic houses, brick churches, and a dignified town hall, it is dominated by elegant Italianate palaces and massive monochrome office buildings. And finally, despite the unprecedented trials of the twentieth century, the city is still there, huge and looming.

From street level, things don’t look quite so imposing. Take a long walk on Nevsky Prospekt, or along one of the embankments or canals. One of the things that will stand out about the city is its lowness. It is built on low-lying, swampy territory, and in any extensive stroll through the center of town, your trek is frequently punctuated by stretches of water. The city has over sixty rivers and canals, and an enthusiastic pedestrian will cross many of them. Buildings, even the largest, tend not to be higher than a few stories, and are long and symmetrical; they look as if they are hugging the earth, in danger of drifting away. From a distance, some of them resemble gigantic stone houseboats. Along the inner rivers and canals, like the Moika and Fontanka, great long houses and palaces are strung together like links in a chain. The major exclamation points – the needle-like spires of the Admiralty building and the fortress of Peter and Paul – poke forlornly into the sky, lonely in their isolation.

Not surprisingly, the city is prone to floods. One major inundation in 1824 provided Pushkin with the subject matter for his narrative poem “The Bronze Horseman.” In Pushkin’s story an Everyman figure named Yevgeny loses everything he has in the flood and then proceeds to lose his mind as well. In front of the famous equestrian statue of Peter the Great that gives the poem its name, he curses the Tsar for building the city in such an inhuman location; his madness then causes him to believe that the statue is chasing him. On one of the central streets, there is a plaque (with words in German, for some reason) that marks the level the water reached in that flood. It stands disconcertingly high.

Peter’s spirit lingers in the city he founded. Neither the Soviet name change nor any number of post-Soviet cafes and sushi bars has been able to erase him from people’s minds. Bely underlines his enduring importance in a vivid way – by making the Bronze Horseman a living presence in the novel. In an echo of both Pushkin and the stone Commendatore in Mozart’s Don Giovanni, the statue comes to life and pays a visit to one of the book’s main characters:

Just three steps: the sound of three cracking beams under the legs of the enormous guest, the cast-bronze emperor brought his metallic behind down on a chair with a hollow crash, and the greenish elbow fell with all the weight of bronze onto the table with a clanging, bell-like noise. The emperor slowly removed his bronze wreath from his head, and the laurels were torn loose in a thundering roar.

And his hand, clanking and clattering, brought out a glowing red-hot pipe from the folds of his coat, and he indicated the pipe with his eyes, and winked at the pipe: “Petro Primo Catharina Secunda.”

On this day, though, there were no floods, just a cold, rapidly changing northern sky, alternately shining and spitting on the city below. At the statue of Peter there were no madmen shaking their fists, and the metallic emperor remained firmly immobile atop his block of Finnish granite with that Latin inscription meaning “To Peter the First from Catherine the Second.” Next to the mounted figure of the Tsar, a wedding party was having their pictures taken while a brass band pumped out upbeat music. Nevsky Prospekt, lined with upscale shops, looked once again like a leading shopping street, the sidewalks full of locals and foreign tourists and the street itself choked with traffic. On Nevsky stood the local branch of the Finnish department store Stockmann; next to it, worn and austere, was the curving, colonnaded Kazan Cathedral, in Soviet times converted into the “Museum for the History of Religion and Atheism.” Between the two of them, mocking the past, was an ad for a restaurant called Lenin’s Mating Call, which offered “Soviet and anti-Soviet cuisine.” The Soviet period was being mined for its humor value.

I left the crowds behind and found myself in the frosty isolation of Palace Square. The WinterPalace and HermitageMuseum, with their light green and yellow facades, delineate the boundaries of this field of gray stone, empty except for the column dedicated to Alexander I, which stands like a giant brown pencil thrust into the earth with a cross-bearing angel perched on the eraser. This square was the very epicenter of imperial Russian power. It is a chilly place, rather severe and charmless in its classicism. It lacks the throbbing commercial life that enlivens other European squares, as well as the warm touches of the Hanseatic towns – the merchants’ houses in various colors, the lovingly embellished Rathaus. But the impression it leaves is grand and imposing. The windows and doors of the palace repeat and multiply symmetrically over and over again, and continue repeating on the adjacent buildings, seemingly into infinity: government offices for privy councilors, court councilors, and so on, up and down Peter the Great’s army-style table of ranks. I was reminded of a statement attributed to an earlier resident of this neighborhood, Tsar Nicholas I: “I don’t rule Russia – my forty thousand bureaucrats do.”

Night trains are often romantic. Night buses are not. As I got into my assigned seat, surrounded by Russians making the same journey, I resigned myself to not getting any sleep on the road. By my calculations, we would reach the Russian border sometime after midnight. That would mean an extended nocturnal bureaucratic rigmarole, since Russia was the only country on my trip that I needed a visa for.

Apparently I was the only non-Russian on the bus. The driver was Russian, all the other passengers were Russian, even the bus company was Russian. We stopped in a couple of towns in northeastern Estonia – Rakvere, Kohtla-Järve – to pick up a few travelers; they were also Russian. This part of Estonia, stretching east from Tallinn, is the region most heavily marked by Soviet rule. Heavy industries and military installations were placed here, and the proletariat recruited to work in them came mostly from outside Estonia – from Russia first of all, but also from Ukraine, Belarus, Armenia, Georgia, and other places in the vast Soviet realm. This class of workers sprang up practically overnight in the years after World War II. Many of these people, displaced from their original homes and thrown together suddenly, had only a few basics to orient their lives around: the Russian language as a lingua franca, and Soviet (rather than Russian) culture. It was a very different background from that of Estonia’s pre-Soviet Russian population, which consisted mostly of Old Believers, members of the Tsarist administrative class, and the occasional anti-Bolshevik immigrant.

About two o’clock we pulled into Narva. This was the border town; the next stop would be Ivangorod, in Russia. Narva has a distinguished history. It was, like so many towns in the Baltic, a member of the Hanseatic League; it was the scene of a battle in 1700 between Russian forces under Peter the Great and Swedish forces under Charles XII. Charles, a boy-king and a military genius, scored a major victory, but its effects were short-lived. Only nine years later, Peter turned the tide near the Ukrainian town of Poltava, bringing an end to the “Swedish Age of Greatness.” Not long after, Narva, along with the rest of Swedish-ruled Estonia and Latvia, was ceded to Russia. Today, Narva is part of independent Estonia, but Russian-speakers form nine-tenths of its population – a statistic that sits oddly beside all the local signs in Estonian. Here, the state language was like a well-behaved child – seen but not heard. It’s rather like being in an airport or other public space in western Canada, with their numerous signs in French, a language few people in the vicinity can actually speak.

Despite its interesting history, Narva is nothing to look at from a bus window in the middle of the night (but what city is?). Typical, standard-issue Soviet housing blocks stood dimly in the darkness, with random occasional windows lit up inside them. Customs agents shepherded us off the bus into a brightly lit shack where we went through the frowning gauntlet of scrutiny that accompanies border crossings outside the EU. Though it was not a speedy process, the probing I remembered from Soviet times was absent. Nobody cared what books I was bringing with me, nor was I asked any questions about foreign currency or my motivations for entering the country.

After a couple of shivering, dismal hours of standing and shuffling, the bus was allowed to start up again, and we headed over the border and through the Russian city of Ivangorod. St. Petersburg was still several hours away. The almost deserted highway stretched through a largely deserted landscape. That peculiarly Russian feeling of endless, sprawling space slowly started to take over. The land rolled on into infinity. Distance and entropy joined forces to create a world of man-made particles and fragments adrift among forlorn and neglected nature. We passed through small towns that looked like urban housing developments detached from their original environment and planted in a grassy wilderness. The familiar dingy flatblocks fronted the highway; some of the modest town squares still boasted Lenin statues from Soviet times. It brought to mind an observation made by Igor Kotjuh, a Russian-Estonian writer, and as such intimately familiar with both sides of the border: “In Russia, disorder is justified by the availability of free space. If something doesn’t work out here, leave it as it is, and try to do it better somewhere else.”

About six o’clock, as dawn began meekly illuminating the sky, the scene started to get denser and more interesting: more people, more buildings, and more traffic under the suspicious eyes of the hectoring Russian traffic police. We stopped briefly to let a few passengers off at a station of some kind. The station itself was dark and forbidding, but next door was a neon-lit shopping strip, looking like an elongated casino in its straightforward vulgarity. The neon glowed garishly against the sullen surroundings, like a red-nosed clown sitting amidst a group of tired office workers. We had reached the suburbs of St. Petersburg.

The former imperial capital is by far the largest city on the Baltic. Maps can be misleading: a map of the Baltic shows various major cities along the periphery, bold-typed and heavy-dotted, but without giving much of an idea of the proportions among these cities, so you have to go to statistics for a more accurate picture. St. Petersburg’s population of four and a half million is roughly equivalent to three Copenhagens, five Stockholms, and twelve Tallinns. The entire population of Finland could fit into the city. Given the proper sort of management and development – two things not to be taken for granted – it could become the de facto capital of the region. But as of October 2004, it appeared to be a city being pulled in many different directions at once: toward squalor and prosperity, development and decay, the gleaming world of a cosmopolitan metropolis amid stretches of sleepy dilapidation.

The fact that it exists at all is a wonder in itself. Founded by decree of Peter the Great in 1703, it was placed in one of the most inhospitable locations imaginable for a major city. Peter put it there for strategic reasons (as a counterweight to Swedish power in the Baltic) and to provide easier access to Western Europe (as Russia’s “window on the West,” to use a post-Petrine cliche). Peter forced Westernization on Russia in a very personal way; he taxed the wearing of beards and sliced off the traditional long sleeves of his nobles with his own hands, and he studied the latest European techniques in everything from shipbuilding to dentistry (to complain of a toothache in the Tsar’s presence was to ask for trouble). He personally supervised the construction of his new city. Thousands of serfs labored at Alaskan latitudes to build Peter’s city. Within a few years, the frosty Versailles they had built was officially declared Russia’s capital.

Jumping ahead a couple of centuries, it is hard to think of another European city that suffered as badly during the twentieth century as did St. Petersburg. A war of unprecedented bloodiness led to revolution; revolution led to civil war, hunger, terror, and the loss of the city’s capital status; just when it was getting its breath back, the city underwent the shock of Stalin’s purges; and when that had subsided, another and even worse war began, and Hitler’s armies surrounded the city, choking it off from the rest of the country for almost a thousand days, while its people starved and perished in the intolerable conditions that resulted. By the end of the war, the city’s population had been reduced to a mere six hundred thousand or so, less than a third of the 1914 figures. Anna Akhmatova, returning after the siege was broken, was shocked by “the terrible ghost pretending to be my city.” Yet after all this, it still stands, struggling, but in some ways, thriving.

Off at the bus station, I bought my Russian phonecard. This one featured an advertisement for an exhibit of antique automobiles. I had made arrangements with a local guide, Tanya, to pick me up at the station and drop me at the apartment where I would be staying. While waiting for her, I sat bleary-eyed from the night bus in the center of the waiting room. Outside, a sky the color of lead hovered over the clammy suburbs, which looked even more unattractive than usual in the weak morning light. This station was considerably outside the central city, in one of those vast Soviet-built exurban zones where most of Russia’s people live. In my weariness, I kept slipping into the suspicion that I was somewhere other than where I should have been, perhaps in Kazan or Arkhangelsk or Ufa, or even the American equivalent, someplace like Pittsburgh or Cincinnati. But then the station’s announcer would bring me back, and I would reconstitute myself, pulling together all my distantly wandering thoughts into a coherent whole.

Instead of Old Town versus modern development, I thought of a new way of categorizing this huge urban area: “Petersburg space” versus “Leningrad space.” The former was the capital of the Russian Empire, a large city in its own right. The latter was everything else – all the mass housing, the factories and installations, everything that was built, smashed, and rebuilt from the 1920s to the 1980s, when the city bore the name of the Soviet Union’s founder. The two spaces are side by side and feel worlds apart. Petersburg space is what people come to see; Leningrad space is where most people live.

After an interval of somewhere between two minutes and two hours, Tanya arrived, loaded my bag and me into her car, and we were off. I sprang to life; we began conversing, and in a short time we arrived in the familiar Petersburg, the one I knew from the novels, poems, and pictures, shooting through the broad boulevards lined with long, low facades in soft shades of green and yellow and pink, peculiar apologetic shades characteristic of the Russian north, where (as Gogol puts it in his story “Nevsky Prospekt”) “all is wet, smooth, flat, pale, gray, and misty.”

It is hard to talk about the city without reaching for superlatives. It is both the youngest and the biggest city on the Baltic. It is the youngest major city in Europe – Boston and New York are almost a century older. It is the farthest north city in the world with a population of over a million people. During its two centuries as Russia’s capital (which ended in 1918, with Lenin’s transfer of the government to Moscow), it was home to many of the greatest writers, artists, scientists, and political figures in Russian, and indeed European, history. Grandiose events and calamities – floods, massacres, revolutions, battles – have scarred its landscape. The city’s residents have praised and cursed it in extravagant terms. “I love you, Peter’s creation! [Lyublyu tebya, Petra tvorenie]” wrote Pushkin. On the other hand, Dostoyevsky called the city “the most fantastical and intentional city in the world,” and saw it as the concrete manifestation of an alien will imposed without mercy on Russia. His Petersburg was a place of anti-Russian straight lines, bourgeois calculation, and non-Christian, rationalist Enlightenment architecture. In Crime and Punishment, one of his characters voices the observation that “this city is full of half-crazy people…One rarely finds a place where there are so many gloomy, sharp, strange influences on people’s souls as in Petersburg.”

We stopped in the center for a mid-morning snack. The venue was a café that had apparently been freshly restored, and which seemed to be striving for an upscale appearance. I refreshed myself with tea and a cranberry-stuffed pirozhok. The café had been done up in a self-consciously old fashion, with lots of carved wood, wall mirrors, and nineteenth-century photographs. The waitresses were dressed in black and white outfits like chambermaids, and their attitude was slightly chilly and supercilious. I couldn’t tell if this was a studied attempt at old-worldly elegance, or just a hangover from the Soviet habit of rude service.

Tanya seemed to be making a good living. She had her own detailed, user-friendly website, and was running a successful one-person travel agency, offering guidance, accommodation, transportation, and advice. Her husband worked as a computer programmer. They appeared to be typical members of the Russian middle class that was finally growing in the major cities. The three of us met a few days later, when we had dinner at an Indian restaurant. They were daring diners by Russian standards. We ordered the food medium spicy, but the resulting teary eyes and runny noses told me we should have asked for mild. “This is about my limit,” gasped Tanya; I think it was an understatement on her part. I, on the other hand, was happy. I was contemplating a move to Moscow, and was heartened to see that not all the Asian cuisine in this country had been blanded down to suit Russian tastes.

Today, I’m reviewing a few 21^st-century novels that take place in Central or Eastern Europe, written respectively in English, Polish, and Russian.

The Prague Sonata by Bradford Morrow

Morrow tackles a big, meaty theme: the way life and art get derailed by the hurricane-like force of historical events, and how we’re able to piece both life and art back together again afterwards. In this book, “piece together” is not even meant metaphorically when we’re talking about the work of art at the center of the story. Morrow takes as his starting point a piano sonata dating from the Classical period; when the Nazis occupied Czechoslovakia in 1939, the owner of the sonata manuscript divided its three movements among different recipients to keep it from falling into the wrong hands. Decades later, a New York-based musicologist embarks on a quest to put the sonata back together and identify its composer.

Like a lot of literary novels, The Prague Sonata feels more strongly researched than imagined and inhabited. The amount of homework Morrow put into it certainly adds to the verisimilitude, and his depiction of the city of Prague, past and present, is something that can be enjoyed on its own terms. It’s the kind of novel that you would find recommended in the back pages of a travel guide, in the “Further Reading” section.

Morrow’s characters are believable representations of their human milieux. They are moderately interesting without being truly memorable. They are the kind of people you’d enjoy hanging out with, because the company and conversation would be pleasant and intelligent. But they won’t shock you or inconvenience you too much.

On the front cover, Joyce Carol Oates informs me that “Morrow is an astonishing writer.” Judging by The Prague Sonata, he isn’t. He’s a highly polished and professional storyteller, has all his P’s and Q’s in place, dots all the I’s and crosses the T’s, and even gets those tricky Czech diacritics right. But there’s not enough daring or imagination to really astonish anyone (except perhaps Joyce Carol Oates). Even the answer to the big question that hovers over the entire story – Who wrote this sonata, anyway? – is disappointingly conventional.

Overall, I enjoyed this book. But I think most of my enjoyment was due to the fact that Morrow was writing about things that already interested me (the city of Prague; Central Europe in general; classical music). I found myself comparing Morrow’s picture of Prague with the city as I knew it – a natural thing to do, but which wouldn’t be possible if he’d been writing about Shanghai or Rio de Janeiro. In the latter case, I’d have to take a lot of things on faith.

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk

Tokarczuk is Poland’s latest Nobel literary laureate (2018). This book is, at its most basic, a murder mystery – in fact, a mystery involving a series of murders of prominent people. It is set in a bucolic part of southwestern Poland near the Czech border, and that border is crossed multiple times during the course of the story.

Our narrator, Janina Duszejko, is an elderly caretaker at the homes of a number of absentee owners. She is a complex character: an astrologer, a devotee of the works of William Blake (who provides the book’s title), and a lover of animals. She comes across as a person who doesn’t really fit into “respectable” society, with its assumed customs and conventional wisdoms. She disdains people’s given names, preferring evocative nicknames (Oddball, Big Foot, Gray Lady, Good News). She also spices her sentences with random capitalizations. There is no real explanation for the latter, except that William Blake did the same thing.

On the surface, this is a pleasant rural community. Look closer, and you’ll see a lot of death. Mainly, it’s the death of animals, who are being hunted enthusiastically. When human deaths begin to occur under mysterious circumstances, the picture becomes complicated further.

The murder mystery proceeds in a leisurely fashion – if you’re expecting a propulsive page-turner, you might be disappointed – because this is mostly a character study. Specifically, this is a study of how one person’s humanitarian instincts become perverted to the point that they engender a ferocious misanthropy. Janina’s idol William Blake once said: “If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise.” What he didn’t say, and what’s more appropriate to this story, was “if the saint would persist in her saintliness she would become a sinner.”

Doing a bit of research, I found that Tokarczuk is a vegetarian and environmental activist. On the one hand, it’s no surprise that her character Janina likes to rant about animal rights; you can imagine the author is merely channeling her own views here. What’s more impressive is that she was able to step back and consider where strongly held convictions might lead under certain circumstances. William Blake, being a connoisseur of contradictions and paradoxes, probably would have enjoyed this.

Headcrusher by Alexander Garros & Aleksei Evdokimov

One of the effects of the breakup of the Soviet Union was the emergence and flourishing of Russian-language literary scenes in the newly independent countries. The writing team of Garros & Evdokimov hails from Riga, Latvia, a city which (the last time I checked) was about half Russian or Russophone in population. At the time this book was published (2003), the city’s business community was predominantly Russian-speaking; I’m not sure what the situation is now.

Of the three books that are under my critical microscope today, this one feels rawest, truest, and most gripping. The fictions by Morrow and Tokarczuk are highly competent and smoothly written, the sort of books that win a lot of mainstream praise. The effect of Headcrusher is rather like having a desperate, disturbed person grab you by the collar and force you to sit down, because he’s got something really, really important to tell you.

Vadim works for REX International Commercial Bank in Riga. It’s a big enough bank to have its own publicity department, where Vadim, with his background in journalism, churns out the required corpspeak. Among the plethora of negative emotions that animate him, the most livid is his hatred for the boss, nicknamed Four-Eyes, who is described as looking “exactly the way the president of a massive, bloated banking house was supposed to look: the caricatured bourgeois sent packing by the implacable proletarian boot in one of those early Soviet propaganda posters.”

This book was published at a time when the initial post-Soviet phase of wild capitalism was settling down into something more stable and predictable. The story seems to be rooted in the tail end of that opening period of primitive accumulation, with its gangsters and corrupt bureaucrats, its ostentatious and raw consumerism. The description of Four-Eyes is characteristic of the authors’ style: they like to blend the outdated jargon of Soviet ideology with the slick language of commercialization, and sometimes (more alarmingly) with the slang of mobsters and jailbirds. Thus we get threats like the following: “Your fucking time’s up, Four-Eyes. You’re for rapid, brutal, merciless buggering by the iron prick of the proletariat.”

The book’s title comes from a brutal video game that Vadim likes to play. It leads to some real-life crushing of heads, as Vadim snaps under pressure. The result is that he embarks on a murder spree. An important aspect of Headcrusher is the granularity of it. Vadim’s first murder happens quickly and impulsively, but the process of cleaning up the scene and getting rid of the corpse is described in exhaustive detail, taking up an entire chapter. G&E want to rub your face in harsh reality so that it leaves a streak you won’t forget easily. One way they do this is via a style where the volume is turned up to the max. Welcome to the office – this is the world of work:

A ten-metre-square press room, divided into a dozen transparent, functional cells by a simple labyrinth of glass and plastic. Background noise. The patient murmuring of inkjet printers. The gentle, efficient farting of processors. The obsessive gasping of photocopiers. The perplexed sobbing of faxes. The insistent jangling of phones. The rapid rattling of keyboards. Work in progress. Employees on the job. Business purposefully assuming visible form in words, arithmetical ideographs and sometimes – very rarely – hieroglyphs.

Yes, it’s the international homogenized business style, the same thing whether you’re in Tokyo, Mexico City, Seattle, or in this case, Riga. But here, there’s nothing sedate about it: the office murmurs, farts, gasps, sobs, jangles and rattles.

The significance of Headcrusher goes beyond the usual satire of office life or workplace inanities; it replicates quotidian phenomena already familiar to Western readers, but in a harsher, more alien world. The wrenching social conditions caused by the collapse of one economic system and its rapid, breakneck replacement by another one based on opposite principles are beyond the scope of comedic cult films like Office Space or fantastic literary treatments like Gene Wolfe’s story (or novella) “Forlesen.”1 Revolutionary changes are traumatic even if you think the old system needed to go. A virtue of Headcrusher is that it doesn’t skimp on this reality.

Here's another post I’ve dredged up from my old blog. It’s too late to post it on Bloomsday (June 16), which would have been the appropriate day. But I decided to put it up anyway, and in the spirit of self-promotion I’m dedicating it to Ethan Traubert, the craft brewer in Social Distancing.

I did this experiment a few years ago – in fact, during Covid year 2020, as is clear from the text – so some of the recommendations may be out of date. I know for certain that Signature Select House Blend is no longer available. But I think the spirit of this experience survives; you can do it yourself with your own choice of beverages.

Ulysses is a book deeply immersed in the material, sensual world. It was famously banned in the United States until 1933 due to its sexual frankness. You also get to read about people’s bowel movements, the minutiae of taking a bath, and other quotidian things. Joyce, who never outgrew a little boy’s fascination with bodily functions, was unsparing in describing the mundane, animal aspects of living.

As is well known, the book has two heroes, Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus. As a gross generalization, Bloom is body while Dedalus is mind. We are told what Bloom likes to eat (“the inner organs of beasts and fowls”), and what he does indeed eat, during the course of the day. By contrast, Stephen at one point (Chapter 16, late at night) states that he hasn’t eaten anything since the previous day.

For this, my second go-round with Ulysses, undertaken in this Covidian year which makes hermits of all of us, I decided not to read it at all. Instead, I listened to the large-cast, multi-voiced, sound-effected reading done by Irish state broadcaster RTÉ back in 1982, the James Joyce 100th anniversary year. (You can find this spectacular audiobook here.) The novel can be intimidating on the page, but hearing it performed gives it a whole new dimension, a livelier, more inviting one. An enveloping, sensual dimension.

But the audio experience, just by itself, wasn’t enough. If you were sitting in one of the pubs mentioned in the book – in Larry O’Rourke’s or Davy Byrne’s, watching and hearing the cast of characters as they passed through – wouldn’t you feel a libation might be appropriate? And so, I accompanied each chapter with its own beverage, and (scandalously enough) more than one in the case of the longer chapters.

The action of Ulysses begins early in the morning of June 16, 1904. The banter of Buck Mulligan and Stephen Dedalus, and the fresh sea air, put me in a coffee mood. In this case, it was Signature Select House Blend, sold by Jewel, the local grocery store. This really is a case where “store brand” is better than name brands. Even my wife, who claims to be unable to tell the difference between types of coffee, commented on how good it tasted.

By the time I got to Chapter 4 (“Calypso”), where Leopold Bloom and his large appetites are introduced, I was still drinking coffee, because Bloom was in breakfast mode and so was I. By now I had switched to Lavazza Gran Selezione, in honor of Joyce’s long residence in Trieste and his love of Italian literature. However, Bloom’s breakfast preferences (“grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine”) are most definitely not mine. I stuck with oatmeal.

As we moved into midday, I felt the need for a change of beverage, but it had to be gradual. As Bloom went about his ad-selling business and began thinking about lunch, I relaxed with a glass of Camp Coffee Break, a coffee stout brewed by the downstate Illinois brewery Triptych. The smoky and intense blend of coffee and chocolaty smoothness was a perfect accompaniment to Joyce’s transition from morning to afternoon. I was sure that the Guinness-gulping denizens of the Dublin pubs would have appreciated this one if they’d had the chance to try it.

Chapter 12 (“Cyclops”) actually takes place in a pub, so the choice of tipple was in a sense predetermined. At the start, I went with an old favorite: Left Hand Milk Stout Nitro, a dark, smooth brew that goes down easily, suitable for post-lunch banter. I followed up with something lighter, the American pale ale Chilly Water, from Tighthead Brewery in a town not far from me, Mundelein. This fruity brew energized me for the rest of Bloom’s afternoon.

In Chapter 13, Bloom “commits adultery in his heart” (as Jimmy Carter would have put it) with Gerty MacDowell. To accompany this, I chose Neapolitan Milk Stout, by Saugatuck Brewing of Michigan. “Three bites in every sip,” the can tells me. The chocolate, vanilla and strawberry flavors made a good match to the sweet, florid, overheated language of this chapter. To make it even more appropriate, this beer won the Silver Medal at the Dublin Craft Beer Cup in 2017.

One of the densest stretches of prose ever written, Chapter 14 recapitulates the history and development of the English language in a series of parodic episodes. For this, I required an equally dense beer with a sense of history: Old Rasputin Russian imperial stout, made by North Coast Brewing, of Fort Bragg, California. It’s supposedly inspired by a beer created by English brewers in 18th-century Russia, who had been brought in for that purpose by Catherine the Great. During our big drive down the West Coast last year, we stopped at this very brewery for lunch, and I was able to pose for a photo with the life-sized cardboard cutout of Rasputin in their gift shop.

Night closes in shortly thereafter, and to fit the mood, I greeted “the heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit” (Chapter 17) while slowly sipping another elegant brew from Triptych, namely, Nü Troll, described by the brewery as an imperial stout in which “incredibly dark, bitter, semi-sweet chocolate mingles with a strong hint of peanuts, marshmallow, caramel and vanilla.” Then it’s time for bed with Leopold and Molly Bloom. For my nightcap, I chose Fat Pug Oatmeal Stout by Maplewood Brewery. It produces “a complex yet mellow flavor” that is perfect for inducing a good night’s sleep.

Although the action of Ulysses takes place in a single day, I do not recommend trying the above program in a single day. I took about three weeks to do it.

I approached Tallinn from the back end, that is, by land. This is exactly the wrong way to approach this picturesque city. It is considered advisable to arrive by sea, so that you can observe the medley of slim medieval towers coming at you dreamily as you slide into port, a romantic first impression that enchants new visitors. In my case, slouched in the bus from Tartu, my first impression was of the city’s name spelled out in big block letters, followed by rows of undistinguished Soviet-era housing. There was nothing especially ugly or decrepit about these buildings, but they were about as romantic as the frozen food section of your local grocery store.

The layout of Tallinn follows the norm for cities in this part of Europe. In the major cities that used to belong to the empires of Russia, Germany or Austria, and that came under Communist rule in the twentieth century, one can usually distinguish three levels of development, radiating outwards like rings on a tree. At the center is the Old Town, which may also be called something like “Main Town” (as in Gdańsk) and may even be next to an area misleadingly called “New Town” (new when it was commissioned by some enterprising monarch). The charm, beauty and atmosphere, nowadays relentlessly commercialized, are mostly here; this is what visitors come to see. If we compare the city to a sandwich, the Old Town is the nugget of meat surrounded by bread and condiments, tasty but often disappointingly small and buried in filler.

The second level of development occurred during the period of industrialization and expansion and contains buildings dating mostly from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These “late imperial” areas are less popular with tourists, but they contain much that is worth seeing. They tend to boast buildings in the styles of the time (like Art Nouveau or its German counterpart, Jugendstil) and are marked by numerous “ethnic” elements, reflecting the fact that they were built during a period of national awakening. For instance, in the neighborhood in Prague where I once lived stands a building decorated by a mosaic that records the dream of Libuše, the early medieval Czech sorceress credited with predicting the founding of a great city on that very spot.

The third level of development dates from after World War II, and consists of seemingly endless rows and clusters of faceless concrete apartment blocks. These buildings were created for the urban proletariat that crowded into the cities in short order, bloating the population and straining local resources. The buildings are utterly lacking in individuality and architectural distinction and look the same everywhere, from Estonia to Bulgaria. They are post-national, without any kind of specific cultural marker, a style for a working class that was assumed to have overcome the archaic notion of nationality. If you were blindfolded and dropped at random into one of these areas, only the language on the signs and possibly the weather would give you a clue as to where you were.

But perhaps one should not read this Second World style simply in ideological terms: it has its counterpart in the better constructed, but equally soulless, style of development of postwar Western Europe and America. The overriding consideration in putting up these flatblocks and “micro-regions” was the practical necessity of housing as many people as possible as quickly as possible. In most cities, this is where the largest segment of the population lives, so any program of wholesale demolition or reconstruction is currently out of the question. Occasionally you hear about an attempt to spruce things up. In Warsaw in the 1990s, when people realized they were going to be stuck with these concrete blocks for the foreseeable future, they took to painting them in all kinds of wild colors.

Unfortunately, the people of Mustamäe, the neighborhood of Tallinn where I wound up staying, had not followed the lead of Warsaw. The concrete façades came only in gray, or in a damp soil-like brown; the buildings were wedged together, hidden from the street, in long slabs, and in such a way as to make orientation difficult. Add to that my poor sense of direction, and I got lost a couple of times at night. The look and layout of the neighborhood seemed like a perverse form of ideological convergence, combining the blandness and shabbiness of Soviet housing with the hostility to pedestrians and eerie absence of street life characteristic of American urban planning. I don’t wish to pick on this part of Tallinn excessively, since it’s really not that bad, so I’ll just say that these neighborhoods in general are a good how-not-to guide for urbanists. The areas often radiate a feeling of hostility and atomization, as if they were designed for a different species than the one that actually inhabits them.

This neighborhood sparked a story by the Estonian writer Arvo Valton called “Love in Mustamäe.” In this fragmented urban landscape full of obstacles to direct human interaction, a man and a woman who live in apartments that face each other engage in a prolonged, meaningful relationship of mutual staring. Over time, strong emotions build up between them, and in the end the woman becomes pregnant – seemingly by telepathy – with the man’s child. At no point do they say even a word to each other, yet human feeling secures a triumph over a dispiriting environment.

I checked into my room, located in a massive concrete longhouse of a student hostel. The long corridors, half-lit stairwells, peeling paint, and lack of signs made the place a gloomy labyrinth, and I once again feared getting lost somewhere in its recesses. But I found my room without any trouble, managed to retrace my steps, and successfully got out of Mustamäe. The trolleybus picked me up on a broad boulevard that split the neighborhood in half, and we cruised lurchingly through the business district and towards the Old Town. Darkness enhanced the feeling of anonymity and disorientation; this was the “second ring of development,” full of sturdy, nondescript structures, built to last but lacking in charm. Occasionally a street sign or advertisement would remind me where I was. Placards announced the 600^th anniversary of Tallinn Town Hall (Tallinna Raekoda) with grainy, ominous photographs of that structure. I got off near the train station, and headed toward the brightly lit hill that housed the Estonian parliament and marked the entrance to the Old Town.

The Old Town is fairly small, a reminder that this remote Hanseatic city was never very big. It is also exquisite, and very well preserved; it somehow manages to look ancient and brand spanking new at the same time. The color and design patterns of the buildings contribute to this impression. Many houses and churches are in colors well suited to offset the gloom and darkness of the Baltic winter: beige and white and light tan; soft yellow and pale blue; pink and pale gray. Ornamentation is minimal, and on many buildings, practically nonexistent. Streets and squares strike the eye as harmonious arrangements of bright, pale slabs, an almost cubistic effect. Usually these facades are riddled with the repetitious punctuation of rectangular windows and doors, but sometimes they are virtually blank. This style ensures that at street level the Old Town looks light and airy, a contrast to the dense, dark, warren-like old towns in warmer, more populous parts of Europe. Its layout is an aid to orientation: the church towers, so much taller than the surrounding buildings, are easily visible from anywhere in the vicinity and thus form aesthetically pleasing, antiquated compass points. The height of the towers is impressive considering the small size of the medieval city. One of these churches, St. Olaf’s, was said by some to be the tallest building in the world during its medieval heyday.

Old Tallinn consists of two levels. The upper one is called Toompea (an Estonian rendering of the German Domberg, “cathedral mount”), which contains leading administrative and ecclesiastical buildings, including the parliament. In the town’s early days, this area housed the local Danish overlords and, after Denmark sold the whole place to the Teutonic Knights around 1346, the Knights’ leadership. Germany and Russia face off here architecturally. The city’s cathedral, with its graves of Baltic German noblemen and naval commanders who fought in Imperial Russia’s service, is a massive, squarish place that continues (with a corresponding Tallinnian lightness) the style of church architecture I had seen back in Lübeck and Gdańsk. Practically next door is the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral, a warm, round piece of Russia planted here in the nineteenth century, to care for the spiritual needs of the Tsar’s employees.

Just below Toompea is the lower town, a larger space that filled up early with German merchants and attracted Estonians from the countryside, and Finns and Swedes from elsewhere in the Baltic. Tallinn’s lingua franca was – as in all Hanseatic towns – Low German or Saxon, the language of northern Germany, which gives a clue to its merchants’ origin in cities like Hamburg, Bremen and Visby. Old Tallinn, like the Hansa mother city of Lübeck, is fig-shaped, and strongly resembles a fortress. The well-preserved city wall encircles the compact urban space within, and on opposite sides of the old town stand the local sentries: an imposing tower called Tall Herman, and a squat, round structure known as Fat Margaret. Like a divorced couple not on speaking terms, they stand far away from each other.

The dominant German population named the city Reval, after the Estonian name for the surrounding area. It was essentially the northeasternmost outpost of German urbanism, and one of the most handsome and prosperous members of the Hanseatic League. As in all cities governed by Magdeburg or Lübeck law, guilds were very prominent. Their organization in Tallinn sheds an interesting light on the ethnic complexities in the city. We tend to associate guilds with particular trades – baking, brewing, shoemaking, and so on – but the Tallinn guilds were also organized by language or nationality. The most prestigious guild was St. Canute’s, which was for Germans only. A rival guild, St. Olaf’s, sprang up to provide a base for non-Germans. The Undeutsche tended to practice the less prestigious trades, which meant that, although the city’s medieval landmarks were mainly designed by Germans, most of the heavy work of digging, moving, stacking and building was done by the native Estonians.

The ethnic segregation of the guilds was quite strictly enforced, and there were laws against such things as a German taking on an Estonian as an apprentice, or a German merchant taking an Estonian wife. However, a fair amount of ethnic mixing took place anyway. Estonian peasants frequently fled their estates for the city, where their labor was welcomed. The local variety of German became strongly marked by Estonian and Swedish words. In one instance, in the sixteenth century, an apprentice was fined for wondering out loud whether the town councilors could actually speak German.

Today’s Tallinn is proud of its Hanseatic history and features it prominently in promotional materials for travelers and tourists. There’s even a restaurant called Olde Hansa, where you can order supposedly authentic dishes from the Middle Ages, served by waiters in medieval costumes. I observed a couple of the restaurant’s employees, dressed in medieval garb, selling roasted almonds from a stand in the cobbled street in front of the old merchant’s house where the restaurant is located. Across the way stands a very un-medieval public television screen, showing the platefuls of roast boar and flagons of mead obtainable within.

Walking through the Old Town is, in and of itself, a considerable spur to the imagination. Enough of the old structures remain that it becomes quite easy to imagine what life must have been like back when the Raekoda was new, and burghers from the town and peasants from the country came to gawk at the imposing light-brown structure with its toothy windows, reddish slate roof, and needle-like tower piercing the cold sky. Furs and fish moved through the marketplace and onto ships that would take them to distant places like Bergen and Stockholm and Hamburg. The smell of roast meat and baked bread wafted through the kitchens; streams of freshly brewed beer washed it all down. In the shops and guilds the sound of hammering, sawing and cutting went on all day. Men named Hans and Ulrich and Diederich talked and joked and argued in a dialect that sounded a lot like modern-day Dutch. A peasant named Eino drove up to a shop with a load of wood to sell. Step out of the town and it felt like the edge of the earth. To your east and south – marshes and forests; pagan villages; the very long days giving way to very long nights; bears and wolves; cold and hunger. To your north and west – the gray, temperamental sea with its fogs, storms and chills. To live in Tallinn in the Middle Ages was to be a sort of pioneer – something that could not be said of anyone living in Rome, Paris, Bruges or London. And though a city to its inhabitants, a walled urban space, to us it would count for little more than a village, with a population of only several thousand, perched in a precarious location, its thin pale towers forming a mere blip on the hostile landscape.