1910-2010: Suffragette Century (Threads and Sparks)

Jane Goldman's paper, delivered on Sunday morning, captured perfectly the interweaving of "centenary reflections and contemporary debates" that the conference as a whole aimed for.

Responding to Makiko Minow-Pinkney's 'invitation "to write a short statement exploring personal and/or scholarly meanings of Woolf's December 1910 remark"', Jane's paper charted a beautifully elegiac trail through the 'Suffragette Century', from 1910 to 2010. For me, the paper produced the same effect as reading did for the 21 year-old Virginia Stephen in 1903: '"I read some history: it is suddenly all alive, branching forwards and backwards and connected with every kind of thing that seemed entirely remote before"'.

Following the 'more personal meanings, which nevertheless have always and already underpinned my researches', Jane traced how the 'influence of 1910' has 'threaded' and sparked through her career and thinking.

Starting with George Dangerfield's note that 1910 is 'a landmark in English history', standing out 'against a peculiar background of flame' (2010 doesn't seem too far away, with students on the streets of London, Edinburgh, Glasgow and other cities, and burning barracades in Rome), Jane remarked on the impossibility of 'properly' understanding 'the formalist aspects of modernist aesthetics as occuring in a political vacuum'. She laid out the relationships between political and aesthetic actions and ideas, before moving on to the 'personal degrees of separation'.

Vanessa Bell, having already exhibited in the second Post-Impressionist exhibition in 1912, exhibited in 1922 at London's Independent Gallery with Othon Friesz, the Fauvist. As Jane reminded us, Friesz had exhibited alongside Matisse and Braque, was a friend of Raoul Dufy, and had once had a conversation with Cézanne (of which more later). He gave a painting to Clive Bell, and a couple of his canvases can now be found at Charleston.

John McNairn was born in September 1910. A long-time friend of Jane's and a resident of Hawick in the Scottish Borders, he came from a line of artists rooted in the town. Both his father and his grandfather were painters, and both called John. As a student at the Edinburgh College of Art in 1927, McNairn's 'own staple reading' was Roger Fry; he also saw Picasso's sets for the Diaghilev ballet when it visited Edinburgh. He travelled in the 1930s to Paris, moving in Surrealist circles, balancing out his conservative training in Edinburgh. Upon his arrival, the dismissal of his work by Friesz ('"seulement illustration!"') spurred him on enough for Friesz to credit his effort with the sage-like '"You have searched the form"'. McNairn, Jane recalled, 'enjoyed pointing out that Friesz, his revered mentor in Paris, "as a young man had a conversation with Cézanne. So I can claim to have spoken with someone who has spoken with Cézanne."'

In addition to his artistic connections, Jane traced McNairn's relationship with the Suffragettes, noting the 1909 Gude Cause pageant in Edinburgh (gloriously re-staged in 2009) and the alleged burning of churches in Whitekirk near Eyemouth ('a McNairn holiday destination') in 1914 and Yarrow Kirk, near Hawick itself, in 1922. John's wife Stella was the first to introduce a young Jane to Simone de Beauvoir, and their daughter Caroline was known as Ca, in reference to 'the Bloomsbury 'Neo-Pagan' and lover of Rupert Brooke' Ka Cox, 'for whom Stella had a passion'.

Caroline herself became a painter, continuing the McNairn line, exhibiting in New York in the 1980s to the admiration of Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat and working in the Soviet Union in 1990, having a painting bought by the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow (the first since the Revolution), it being exhibited alongside Cézanne, Gauguin and Matisse. Her paintings interweave the figure and the abstract, themselves re-weaving 'post-impressionist threads', whilst her 'gleefully subversive occupation of the tank in which the war-mongering Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher once posed for triumphal publicity shots' revealed her suffragette sparks.

Jane's paper ended on a sad note, relaying how Caroline died of cancer on the 29th September 2010, 'three days after the centenary of her father's birth and four days before the opening of the centenary exhibition in Hawick museum'. In creating out of these sparks and threads of radical art and feminist politics a beautiful memoir of lives dedicated to a "gude cause", Jane gave us a melancholic-yet-affirmative testament to the power, potential and importance of art and politics; and, in December 2010, with an ever-more uncertain future for the arts and humanities, a compelling demonstration of their necessity.

Interceptions

Interceptions: Theory's Modernism and Modernism's Theory was a postgraduate symposium that ran parallel to the conference on Saturday.

The day kicked off with an opening keynote from Stephen Ross, whose edited collection Modernism and Theory was a big influence on our thinking when organising the symposium. His paper 'Modernist Ethics and the Force of Critique' performed a hilarious and virtuosic close reading of the car crash in E.M. Forster's A Passage to India, the highlight of which was an analysis of Adela and Ronny's decision that the cause of the crash was a hyena. These animals, it turns out, have long been associated in folklore with sexual perversion. In the 1930s it was discovered that hyenas have very complex genitalia (helpfully illustrated with a PowerPoint slide-show) and their sexual behaviours don't correspond to those found more generally in the animal kingdom. In his paper Stephen developed an argument that modernism took up the task of critique that the Englightenment let slip, that modernism's "make it new" is the 'battlecry of critique'. He touched on the possibility of 'opening the door to the other knowing that it can't come in', on the violence of truth and knowledge and the pros and cons of the poststructuralist deferral of decision-making.

The symposium came in part out of Glasgow University's Theory at Random reading group, and the reading group model was a guiding concept. The morning's panels had 6 speakers whose papers had been distributed a month before the conference to delegates. On Saturday, those speakers had ten minutes to summarise or expand on their papers, leaving an hour for group discussion. The panel on 'Modernism, Posthumanism and Theories of the Avant-Garde' featured Tom Betteridge's paper on Badiou, the body and contemporary art; Mark West's on the 60s counterculture, small presses and theories of the avant-garde; Derek Ryan's on Virginia Woolf's Flush and Derrida's cat; Sam Wiseman on Mary Butts' Dorset and the nature/culture boundary; and Kaori Kikuchi reading Virginia Woolf's architectural politics through a dialogue between Foucault and Merleau-Ponty. The discussion took in the degree to which the category of the 'new' has been co-opted by business, the worth of Donna Haraway's neologism 'nature-cultures', and the tasks and errors of representation, amongst other subjects.

In the afternoon, the symposium was given over to Theory at Random reading workshops, with reading material from Ivan Illich's Deschooling Society, Giorgio Agamben's The End of the Poem (Henry King's introduction title possibly taking the award for the weekend's best title, 'Troubadour Buggery from Pound to Agamben'), and Jean-Luc Nany's "The Intruder". The Illich discussion centred around the possibilities for a less hierarchical education system, the pluralisation of learning, the potentialities of the reading group model, and the questioning of the function of education. Although not the answering of that question!

The symposium ended with Pamela Caughie's keynote address, 'On or about December 2010, human character changed, again: Modernism and Posthumanism'. She tracked the development of the posthuman through the history of the reproduction of the human voice, from the phonautograph to the gramophone and beyond. It posed provocative questions about the nature of our era - if 1910 was the age of modernism and 1985 that of postmodernism, then is 2010 the time of posthumanism?

Roll away the reel world

An unsuspecting young man accepts the offer of some goat's milk fresh from the animal which has recently been persecuting him, when something extraordinary happens: horns burst from the top of his head and grow larger with each sip. Suddenly, he starts behaving like a goat - chasing passers by with his horns and butting into people, objects and buildings. He knocks down a brick wall and even a horse-drawn omnibus. We are in the magical world of early cinema, richly comic and fascinated with the fantastic potential of a new medium.

The film, 'A Glass of Goat's Milk' (1909) was shown to Dublin audiences in February 1910 at the new Cinema Volta as part of a programme of films put together by James Joyce, a young and then unknown aspiring writer. Delegates at our December 1910 Centenary Conference and intrepid Glaswegians prepared to brave the slippery pavements and thawing ice, were treated to a showing of this film last night at the Glasgow Film Theatre, along with other films shown at the Volta, including 'La Pouponnière', 'Monsieur Testardo' and 'Sapho! An Ancient Greek Drama'. This programme was assembled, introduced and presented by film historian Luke McKernan and excellent live piano accompaniment was provided by Forrester Pyke.

The Cinema Volta is an unusual episode in James Joyce's life. As part of his self-imposed exile from Ireland, he moved to the European continent in 1904 with his partner, Nora Barnacle and eventually settled in Trieste - then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, now part of Italy. By 1909 he had a family of two children and was teaching English language in order to make ends meet, whilst he tried to get publishers to accept the short stories that were eventually published as Dubliners.

Trieste at that time was a hub of cinematic activity. (There were twenty-one cinemas in 1909.) A chance remark by Joyce's sister, Eva that Dublin lacked cinemas suggested a business opportunity and in October 1909, he signed a contract with three local businessmen (Antonio Machnich, Guiseppe Caris and Giovanni Rebez) to set up Ireland's first permanent film house at 45 Mary Street, just of Sackville Street (now O'Connell Street).

Milo O'Shea as Leopold Bloom

The full history of this endeavour is set out in Roll Away the Reel World: James Joyce and Cinema. And the evening's events at the GFT concluded with a roundtable discussion of the influence of the Cinema Volta on Joyce's writings with questions from the audience. This was chaired by John McCourt (editor of Roll Away the Reel World) and featured Katy Mullin and Keith Williams as well as Luke McKernan. Having seen the extraordinary close-up scene in which the horns sprout from the protagonist's head in 'A Glass of Goat's Milk', it's hard not to think of the scene in Ulysses where antlers sudden shoot out from the head of Leopold Bloom in the form of a hatrack.

Ultimately, however, the Volta project failed - in part because the Italian backers failed to adjust their cinema stock to an English speaking audience. Cards had to be handed out to the audience with translations of the intertitles. Joyce had hoped that it would bring him the money he needed to subsidize his artistic career, although, typically, invested no money in it himself (because he had none). But it failed to bring a profit and his sponsors sold it in June 1910. (The cinema would run until 1948 under other management.)

If this was a brief interlude in his artistic career, as the roundtable discussion showed, it was highly influential. The play in early films with narrative, space and magical effect is something all reader's of Joyce fiction will recognise.

The Periodical Scene in 1910

Today's second round of parallel panels featured papers under the titled Women in the Modern(ist) World, The Periodical Scene in 1910, Film and Theatre in 1910, H.D.'s Late Writing and Edwardianism Pt 1.

The panel on the "little magazines" (the subject of the inverted commas was indeed raised in the questions afterwards!) featured a particularly cohesive set of papers that fed off each other in numerous fascinating ways and contributed to a lively examination of the breadth of the little magazine culture in the modernist period.

Andrew Thacker's paper set the scene with descriptions of a wide-spread awareness amongst magazine contributors and editors of the need for and presence of cultural change. New forms of expression were needed; new idioms and new diction. Thacker quoted from a piece in a December 1910 edition of The New Age entitled 'A Parting of the Ways' by a mysterious, and possibly pseudonymous author - no-one knows anything about them. It foresaw that "1911 will usher in a new dispensation". Thacker continued with a particularly intriguing piece from Arnold Bennett, also in The New Age in which Bennett appeared to foresee Virginia Woolf's later criticisms of him.

"F.T. Marinetti hated the book" announced Eric Bulson at the start of his paper. Marinetti did indeed, and hoped cinema would kill it. He pondered over the (still extremely relevant) question of how to be modern yet rely on outdated technologies. Inspired by 1910's inaugural transmission of live wireless sound, Marinetti penned "Imagination Without Wires" and began thinking of how the printed magazine could learn from the distribution techniques of the wireless. He imagined what Bulson jokily called "a global avant-garde village".

Victoria Kingham's piece on the "little magazines" of Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Emma Goldman explored the way both women approached feminist politics, socialism and anarchism in their magazines The Forerunner and Mother Earth.

In the questions, Thacker brought up Bourdieu's cultural field, and all three speakers agreed on the need to map and trace lines of continuity in relation to the "little magazines" across temporal and geographic fields.

So what of those inverted commas? A few questions revolved around what does "little" actually mean in relation to these magazines? Circulation? Amount of issues? Physical size? The room seemed to agree that perhaps the only way to get round such a slippery issue was to forever encase them in those protective commas.

1910, Post-Impressionism and Beyond

The conference kicked off today with four parallel panels on Popular Culture in 1910, Europe and Modernism, 1910 and History, and 1910, Post-Impressionism and Beyond.

The latter panel began with Maggie Humm's talk, entitled "Roger Fry, Gertrude Stein, Post-Impressionism and John Maynard Keynes in 1910". Using scribbles in notebooks (the Steins' address, written in French) and newspaper cuttings from Duncan Grant and others' scrapbooks, Humm created a more "kaleidoscopic" picture of the environment across Europe at the time of the Grafton Gallery's Post-Impressionism show in December of that year.

Federico Sabatini, in his paper "'To Find an Equivalent for Life': Virginia Woolf, Transference Modernism through Roger Fry and the 1910 Post-Impressionist Exhibition", explored the relations between biography, autobiography and fiction through Woolf's biography of Fry and her diaries. His paper looked at questions of the possibility of biography as art, the Freudian and Lacanian ideas of transference, the biography being as much a portrait of the biographer as the subject, as well as the tensions between reality and fiction and Woolf's struggles in creating a biography that included "scattered and incongruous fragments" and the many "lives that Roger Fry lived simultaneously".

Roxana Preda's paper was entitled "Before and after 1910: The Life and Death of Gertrude Stein's art collection" and followed the Steins' construction and destruction (in a sense) of their collection of modernist art. It explored the relationships between the arrangement of art on walls and that of words on the page and the clues to Gertrude Stein's biography as seen in her tastes between 1904 and the 1930s. Preda's paper included a fascinating recreation of the collagistic arrangement of Picasso, Cezanne and other paintings in Stein's rue de Fleurus flat by arranging reproductions of the paintings on a white background in the same combination as in the historical photographic record.

'Glasgow Girls': Artists and Designers in the Early Twentieth Century

Margery Palmer McCulloch (University of Glasgow) writes:

The major ‘Glasgow Boys’ exhibition recently moved from the Kelvingrove Art Galleries in Glasgow to the Royal Academy in London, receiving broad (and in some places, mixed) attention in the press. But another exhibition currently on show at Glasgow’s School of Art reminds us that we should not forget the ‘Glasgow Girls’.

Designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh in the last years of the nineteenth century, the modernist School of Art opened in two stages in 1899 and 1909. Under its enterprising director Francis (‘Fra’) Newbery, it was also the catalyst for the avant-garde ‘Glasgow Style’ in the early years of the new century. Significant female Glasgow artists of this period included the Macdonald sisters, Margaret and Frances, who exhibited with (and respectively married) Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Herbert MacNair in European exhibitions such as the Vienna Secession in 1900 and the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative Art in Turin in 1902. Both sisters challenged traditional representations of women with their elongated female images in water-colour paintings and embroidered panels. (Their detractors described this as the ‘Spook School’.) Margaret also exhibited widely on her own and in association with MacNair, and her work was featured in the principal European art magazines of the time such as The Studio, Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration and Dekorative Kunst.

Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh, Cover of 'Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration', May 1902, 1902.

© The Hunterian, University of Glasgow 2010.

Another successful designer and illustrator was Jessie M. King who exhibited in Turin and Berlin, as well as in Ireland and India. In 1910 (the object of Woolf’s famous remarks) she went to Paris with her husband where they established a private art school. King was influenced in Paris by the designers of the Ballets Russes and brought their vivid use of colour into her own work.

Strong painters among this group of women artists included Nora Neilson Gray who went to France during the war as a volunteer nurse with the French Red Cross. Gray worked after her night shifts, producing chalk drawings of soldiers and striking oil portraits such as ‘The Belgian Refugee’ (1916) and a group portrait of the nurses and soldiers in the reception space for the injured in the medieval cloisters of the Abbaye de Royaumont where she was stationed.

The Silk Dress c. 1918, Eleanor Allen Moore, self-portrait, oil on canvas, 
private collection

Other women specialised in female subjects, but painted their sitters with a female as opposed to a male ‘gaze’, as in Eleanor Anne Moore’s exotically dressed but sceptically-eyed woman in ‘The Silk Dress’. At the turn of the century, Bessie MacNicol exhibited in Glasgow, London, Liverpool and Manchester as well as in Munich, Vienna, Dusseldorf, St Petersburg, Venice and regularly in the USA between 1896 and 1901, but death in childbirth put an end to her career in 1904.

These talented women helped put ‘Glasgow Style’ on the international map, but they were neglected by art historians who traditionally focused on male artists such as the ‘Glasgow Boys’ and the ‘Scottish Colourists’ who were influenced by European post-Impressionism. They were neglected, that is, until American art historian, Jude Burkhauser’s seminal exhibition, ‘Glasgow Girls’: Women in Art and Design 1880-1920 was shown to much acclaim and huge audiences at Kelvingrove in 1990 during Glasgow’s year as European City of Culture. The accompanying catalogue, published by Canongate (and still available), is full of biographical and bibliographical research material, essays, photographs of the artists themselves and their Glasgow School of Art environment and, most importantly, illustrations of paintings, ceramics, fabric and other design work. Its influence has been phenomenal in establishing the ‘Glasgow Girls’ within our understanding of the visual arts and their importance in the early twentieth-century history of the city.

In ‘Beyond the Reaches of Feminist Criticism’, Shari Benstock argues that if we were to ‘dig deep enough’ among the ruins of the Panthéon, that ‘burial place for distinguished men’, then we would find there the forgotten women of literary modernism. Burkhauer’s exhibition precisely achieves this act of recovery. So the Glasgow School of Art’s decision to host a smaller version at the present moment should be met with enthusiasm. Although a small exhibition cannot display the larger art works that made such an impression in 1990, the current showing opens an important window onto the contribution to modernism in the visual arts made by the women of Britain’s ‘Second City of the Empire’ around the time that ‘human character changed’.

Diaghilev in Glasgow

Professor Graham Watt writes:

On this Friday 26 November it will be 82 years to the day since the Ballet Russes began a six day stint at the Kings Theatre in Glasgow. This was the company's only appearance in Scotland, apart from a similar visit to the King's Theatre in Edinburgh a week later. Jane Pritchard, curator of the current Diaghilev exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London,* provides an excellent list of their performances between 1922 and the death of Diaghilev in 1929 in a long article in Dance Research: in November and December of 1928, the company undertook a five week tour of UK cities, performing in Manchester (Opera House), Birmingham (Prince of Wales), Glasgow (Kings), Edinburgh (King's) and Liverpool (Empire), before a Christmas and New Year engagement in Paris (Theatre de l'Opera).

Kings Theatre, Glasgow

The six Glasgow performances, including a Saturday matinee, took place at the Kings Theatre in Bath Street between 26th November and 1st December, 1928. They were fronted by Sir Thomas Beecham who conducted the orchestra and acted as a public voice for the company on its provincial tour. Eight ballets were performed in varying combinations of three or four: Le Tricorne, The Gods go a-begging, Aurora's Wedding, Cimarosiana, La Chatte, Prince Igor, La Boutique Fantastique and Les Sylphides.

These Glasgow performances by the Ballet Russes were advertised in the Herald newspaper on every day on which the company performed. Although there were no feature articles or photographs, this coverage included two reviews by the newspaper's music critic:

There was a great audience to welcome the Russian Ballet at the Kings Theatre last evening when they made their first appearance in Glasgow. It is a great venture to bring so large a company of famous dancers and a large and capable orchestra to the city and the great success of the opening performance encourages the hope that the week's visit will justify the venture and that other visits will follow.

Compared with Continental peoples, we do not know very much in this country about opera, and we know even less of ballet dancing as a fine art. Russia for two generations has been the foremost exponent of this art. The ballet is taken more seriously there than anywhere else and the fine work that has been seen in London so often and was presented in Glasgow for the first time last night is the result of a long and higly specialised education. The provinces are fortunate in having the opportunity of seeing what the ballet at its highest can be and the experience will arise in some spectators and strengthen in others a feeling of discontent with the limtations that attach to our theatrical system.

There follows comments on each of the ballets featured on the first night. Apart from Massine's choreography none of the company are mentioned by name. The reviewer concludes:

The stage always offers something that holds the eye and it is at the same time as eloquent as it is graceful. And the beauty of the dancing is matched by the beauty of the final pose in each incidental event with groupings and decor as enhancements of the picture.

Despite the reviewer's hopes, this was the first and last performance by the Ballet Russes in Glasgow, and the English regions. Witin a year, Diaghilev had died in Venice, of septicaemia following furunculosis, due to diabetes mellitus (penicillin had been discovered only a year earlier and was not yet in general use). Diaghilev's company folded, but in 20 years he had not only transferred classical ballet from Russia to the western world (including what would become the Royal Ballet); he also revolutionised the repertoire and ignited a host of related careers, including those of Massine, Balanchine, Fokine, Larionov, Nijinska, Bakst, Benois, Goncharova,  Picasso, Cocteau, Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Satie and Chanel.

When King Alfonso of Spain teased Diaghilev, "What is it then that you do in this troupe? You don't dance. You don't direct. You don't play the piano. What is it that you do?" Diaghilev replied, "Your majesty, I am like you. I don't work. I don't do anything, but I am indispensable".

*The V&A maintain an excellent, ongoing blog dedicated to aspects of this exhibition.

The Death of Lev Nikolayevich

Darya Protopopova (University of Oxford) writes about the centenary of Leo Tolstoy’s Death (20 November 1910 – 20 November 2010)

On the eve of the centenary of Tolstoy’s death the Russian TV channel Culture will be showing a four-part documentary ‘In Search of Tolstoy’, directed by Alexander Krivonos. The first part explores Tolstoy’s war experience, first in the Caucasus and then, during the Crimean War, in Sebastopol. It searches for the roots of Tolstoy’s pacifist philosophy in his first-hand impressions of death on the battlefield. The second part looks at Tolstoy’s complicated relationship with his wife Sofya Andreyevna. The third part tells the story of Tolstoy’s daughter Alexandra who fulfilled her father's wishes by turning his estate into a museum. Alexandra Tolstoy was arrested several times by the Soviet government, but in 1929 she managed to emigrate, first to Japan, and then to the USA, where she founded the Tolstoy Foundation, active to this day. The last part of the documentary contains a somewhat ossifying message. According to the channel’s website: ‘Tolstoy’s philosophical quest will always be cherished by the progressive mankind’. Out of all people across the world who have dedicated their lives to studying and promoting Tolstoy’s works, the creators of the documentary have chosen to talk about a certain Alexander Shevchenko, an 82-year-old industrial worker from the Crimea who propagandises Tolstoy’s teachings on the streets of Sebastopol. They obviously wanted to demonstrate that Tolstoy, like Lenin from a famous Soviet slogan, ‘lived, is alive, and will live’ in the hearts of simple Russian people. Tolstoy’s works, especially his novels, are indeed still loved by the common Russian reader. But does his ‘quest’ resonate in the hearts of modern Russian politicians?

According to Miriam Elder, Fyokla Tolstaya, a great-great-granddaughter of the writer, said in a recent interview:

Lev Nikolayevich [Tolstoy] posed very uncomfortable questions. The problems he wrote about — militarism and pacifism, justice, religion, the Caucasus — none of them have been solved.

‘He is a very difficult author for today’s leadership,’ she added in the same interview. Tolstoy’s nonconformist views may be the reason behind the lack of official ceremonies commemorating the writer’s death in his homeland. But the absence of government-organised tributes is probably for the better: Tolstoy himself hated public homage. Alexander Goldenveizer remembered how Tolstoy said, with reference to the addresses and congratulations on his eightieth birthday (28 August 1908):

I believe I am right in saying that I have no vanity, but I can’t help being touched involuntarily. And yet, at my age, I live so far away from all this, it is all so unnecessary and so humiliating. Only one thing is necessary, the inner life of the spirit. (Trans. by Samuel Koteliansky and Virginia Woolf)

In a diary entry for 7 September 1908, Sofya Andreevna Tolstaya gives a detailed account of her mixed feelings about the ‘so called Tolstoy’s eightieth jubilee’, through which, to use her words, the family had to ‘survive’. Tolstoy received around 2,000 congratulatory telegrams, along with presents, from his admirers. But some ‘presents’ showed that he remained a controversial figure even amidst this universal approbation. A mother who probably had lost her son during the revolutionary turmoil in Russia at the time, sent a box with a hanging rope and a note wishing Tolstoy to die. Tolstoy preached peace, but his ideas of equality were often misused or misinterpreted by Russian radicals.

Tolstoy's deathbed - from Smert' Tolstogo (Moscow, 1929)

So perhaps it is best in the end that in Russia the commemoration of Tolstoy’s death at Astapovo railway station is restricted to TV documentaries and an opening of the Tolstoy Educational and Tourist Centre in Lipetsk, the administrative centre of the area to which Astapovo belongs. The railway station itself will be at the heart of the commemoration. The death that it witnessed on 20 November 1910 was not a tranquil event and certainly did not lack in publicity. Tolstoy’s ‘escape’ from his estate, his sudden illness at Astapovo, his wife’s futile attempts to see her husband, who was being guarded by his daughter and close friends including Vladimir Chertkov – these famous aspects of Tolstoy’s last days make up a dramatic and, in a way, sordid story, which was reported daily by international newspapers. The Times, for instance, published fifteen articles dedicated to Tolstoy between 14 November and 26 December 1910, covering Tolstoy’s death, funeral arrangements, and proving of the will.

While Tolstoy was lying on his deathbed, Astapovo was surrounded by a whole camp of prying people: journalists, devotees, and simply curious. They stayed in tents, warmed themselves around fires, and kept vigil under the station’s windows. They also sent and received numerous telegrams from Astapovo, over a thousand in total, which in 1929 were collected in a book titled The Death of Tolstoy (Smert’ Tolstogo), published by the Russian (then Soviet) National Library.

This collection of telegrams constitutes a valuable and moving source for today’s reader. Around 5.50 am on 20 November telegrams started flying from Astapovo to the rest of the world, containing two words, ‘Tolstoy skonchalsya’ (‘Tolstoy has passed away’). Two hours later journalists started telegraphing more detailed accounts of Tolstoy’s death. By that time it had become known that the writer’s last words were: ‘There are many people in this world, and you are worrying about one Lev [the Russian version of Tolstoy’s name]’. Telegrams were also flying from the outside world back to Astapovo: in one night the station received 8,000 words of condolence.

An interesting telegram was sent by a correspondent of the Russian newspaper The Morning of Russia. It reports that a few hours after Tolstoy’s death the sun was shining brightly and the station started attracting ‘pilgrims’ from nearby villages and towns. People were coming in big numbers to venerate Tolstoy’s body. Among crowds of agitated peasants the legend was born that Tolstoy did not die, but is only asleep, like miraculous saints of the past. Other journalists were using this legend figuratively, asking their newspapers to announce that although Tolstoy died in Astapovo, his spirit lives on in all Russia and the rest of the world, ‘for where love is, death does not exist’.

Tolstoy’s body being carried outside the Astapovo station - from Smert' Tolstogo

To me, the most touching evidence of Tolstoy’s life after his death is the story of the writer’s posthumous portrait by Leonid Pasternak. Pasternak, who admired Tolstoy greatly and painted numerous portraits of him during the writer’s life, arrived at Astapovo a few hours after the tragic news. With him he brought his twenty-year-old son Boris, at the time a philosophy student at the Moscow University. Thirty-five years later Boris Pasternak started working on his novel Doctor Zhivago, which can be described as the War and Peace of the twentieth century. The epic novel tracing personal biographies against a vast historical background, Doctor Zhivago undoubtedly continues the Tolstoyan tradition of fiction-writing. And the symbol of this for me is an image of the young Pasternak at Tolstoy’s deathbed.

On or about Diaghilev and the Ballet Russes

As defining moments go, 29 May 1913 is more famous in the history of the Ballets Russes than December 1910. That was the date of the first performance of Igor Stravinsky's Rite of Spring at the Théâtre du Champs-Elysée in Paris; and it was an occasion that saw riots amongst the first audience, requiring police intervention.

Critics are divided as to whether the audience was upset most by the polytonal asymmetrical rhythms of Stravinsky's music, by the Fauvist costumes and set designs of Nicholas Roerich, by the unorthodox choreography devised by the Ballet Russes star dancer Vaslav Nijinsky (dancers shuffled on with pigeon-toed movements), or by the subject matter of the ballet itself: a young pagan girl is chosen by her tribe as a sacrifice and dances herself to death, to the orgiastic accompaniment of Stravinsky's rhythmic chords.

The BBC's recent drama, 'Riot at the Rite' neatly captures the aura of controversy surrounding the Rite, from the personal tensions between the artists involved to the behaviour of the audience.



It also rightly identifies the central role of Sergei Diaghilev, the director of the Ballet Russes. Diaghilev is an unusual figure in the history of ballet: after a failed attempt to become a composer, he made a name for himself in Russia, through editing an avant-garde arts magazine, Mir iskusstva, but came to prominence in the West through a series of art exhibitions, promoting Russian painting in Paris during the early years of the Twentieth Century.

Diaghilev, by Léon Bakst (1906)

Diaghilev's career is currently the subject of an exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London ('Diaghilev and the Golden Age of the Ballets Russes 1909-1929'), which makes it very clear that his strengths did not lie in artistic creation. Instead, Diaghilev had the ability to spot provocatively modern talents, such as Stravinsky and Nijinsky, bring them together and, by dint of his personality (and his person - he was Nijinsky's lover for five years) keep them together for the period of their collaboration. Given the precarious condition of his finances, this was no mean skill.

Ballet, even more so than other theatrical art forms, is supremely collaborative. It depends on the combined talents of choreographers, dancers, musicians, designers and composers for the creation of spectacle. The V&A conveys this through the sheer variety of media on display in the exhibition: dancing shoes, costumes and musical scores vie with video projections of archive performances and the rooms are dotted with small booths playing an excellent series of informative films by Howard Goodall about the musical background to Diaghilev's ballets. In fact, the only problem with the exhibition is that there is so much multimedia on display that it is sometimes difficult to make out what Goodall is saying over the sound of Stravinsky's Firebird in another part of the room.

Stravinsky in 1910

In terms of collaboration, though, perhaps Virginia Woolf's choice of 1910 does have a claim upon our attention. For it was in 1910 that Stravinsky first started working on his score for the Rite of Spring. But, there is some uncertainty here. As Sjeng Scheijen points out in a recent biography of Diaghilev, Stravinsky and his artistic collaborator Nicholas Roerich couldn't agree on who first came up with the idea. What's more Schejen describes an earlier production, The Pavillion d'Armide in 1907 as marking ‘a new era in the ballet culture of St Petersburg’ and Diaghilev’s first major success in bringing together avant-garde choreography and dance (in this case, Nijinsky and Michel Fokine).

It may, then, be a mug's game to try and pin down particular transformative moments in cultural history, but the first performance of the Rite of Spring certainly made a commotion. Diaghilev’s response? ‘Exactly what I wanted’.

Guerres imaginaires

Mark West (University of Glasgow) considers the literature of invasion:

On the 19 March 1906, the Daily Mail began the serialization of William Tuffnell Le Queux's The Invasion of 1910, an "invasion-fantasy" in which Germany invades Britain. Its enormous popularity was no doubt helped by a marketing strategy that included sending actors in German military uniforms to march down London's Regent Street. It sold over a million copies and was translated into 27 languages. One marker of its success was a film version entitled If England Were Invaded, released in October 1914.

From, I.F. Clarke, 'Future-War Fiction',
Science Fiction 24:3 (1997)

The book couches events as a military history, incorporating excerpts from journals and military descriptions of troop movements. Convinced that Britain was in constant threat of invasion by the Germans, Le Queux stresses the importance of preparation and training and devises a British resistance called the "League of Defenders" who manage to incite an uprising against the invading hordes.


The phenomenal success of The Invasion of 1910 testifies to the popularity of what I.F. Clarke calls “Future-War Fiction”, in the wake of the Paris Commune in 1871 and Germany’s unification. Writers across Britain, France and Germany imagined variations on “The Next Great War”, “der nächste Krieg”, and “La Guerre de demain”. H.G. Wells would go as far, in The World Set Free (1914), as to imagine a bomb so massive in its destructive capabilities that its use as a deterrent would lead to a new era of peace on earth.

Clarke suggests that the tone of this "massive European interest” in the next great was was a "cheerful language of anticipation", a language by no means limited to the military minds that first wrote such stories. Is it, then, a great leap between such popular fictions and the martial language of early Modernists, such as F.M. Marinetti and his gang of Futurists?

The Futurist Manifesto
in Le Figaro 20 February 1909

In his “Futurist Manifesto” of 1909, Marinetti describes how "like young lions we ran after Death". Singing "the love of danger", they "glorify war – the world's only hygiene – militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture". These are "beautiful ideas worth dying for", lit by "the vibrant nightly fervor of arsenals and shipyards blazing with violent electric moons".

If, as Virginia Woolf asserted, 1910 ushers in a new mode of human character, it was long in the making; and wide in its reach, too. Change of this kind embraces not merely the artistic consciousnesses of those that went to the Grafton Galleries in the last months of the year. These future-war tales and fantasies suggest a longing for change. There is a desperate desire in these “fantasies of the future” for what Clarke calls a “newer universe”. Of course, as we know now, the realisation of such a desire would have a terrible “human” cost.

"And so you are going abroad..." T.S. Eliot in 1910

1910 was the year that T.S. Eliot graduated from his first degree at Harvard; it was the year he published his first poem ('Humoresque: After Jules Laforgue'); and it was the year he travelled to Paris to hear Henri Bergson lecture.
According to some, Eliot's sojourn in Paris was life-changing. Lodging at 151 bis rue St Jacques, Eliot took French lessons from Alain Fournier (author of Le Grand Mealnes) and befriended a fellow-lodger, Jean Verdenal. In The Making of an American Poet, James E. Miller speculates that this friendship with Verdenal constitutes the first great gay love of Eliot's life - and his first great loss: Eliot marked Verdenal's death in World War I by dedicating Prufrock and Other Observations to his memory.

Charles-Louis Philippe

Miller suggests that Verdenal is a strong presence in The Waste Land too, one that lies behind the figure of Phlebas the Phoenician. A memory of Verdenal informs the vision of the lilac girl in 'The Burial of the Dead', he argues; and, more tenuously, he suggests that a boat trip to St Cloud with Verdenal lies behind the 'Damyata' section of the 'What the thunder said'.
There are more convincing, material influences upon Eliot to be traced from this period too. It seems that Verdenal introduced him to l'Action Français - Charles Maurras' right-wing movement, an influence upon Eliot in the 1930s; and Fournier introduced to Jacques Rivière, secretary to La Nouvelle Revue Française (established in 1909) and an associated group of writers, including André Gide. In turn, it is likely that Gide's tribute to Charles-Louis Philippe in November 1910 helped to introduce Eliot to Philippe's work, particularly Bubu de Montparnasse, which strongly influenced the urban landscapes of Eliot's early published poetry.

(c) Houghton Library

It's striking that Eliot should turn to another written source to make sense of Paris. Biographical speculations aside, it's certain that this period saw significant developments in his poetry. According to Christopher Ricks' edition of his poetic notebooks (Inventions of the March Hare), it was during Eliot's stay in Paris that fragmentary scraps of verse began to cohere into 'The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock' (a discarded passage, 'Prufrock's Pervigilium' shows the heavy influence of Philippe) and in November 1910, Eliot composed the first section of 'Portrait of a Lady' (a poem that closes with the narrator's departure for Europe). In other words, this is the period in which Eliot starts to shrug off his reliance upon Laforgue and write his earliest and most striking mature verse.

A Century, a Lifetime and a Comet

Celebrating the appearance of Halley's Comet in April 1910, Tom Coles (University of Glasgow) ponders comets and periodisation:

"I came in with Halley's comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don't go out with Halley's comet. The Almighty has said, no doubt: 'Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out  together.' Oh! I am looking forward to that." 

Albert Bigelow Paine, Mark  Twain, A Biography,
Ch. 282 ‘Personal Memoranda’

Halley’s Comet means almost as much to me as it did to Mark Twain: I was born in early 1986, around the time when it last appeared, and in 2061 when it next approaches close to Earth I suppose I will not be too sad, like Twain, if I leave with it. As a period of study, the 75 years that the comet takes to return is curious, perhaps more useful than the equally arbitrary 'century'. A century tends to be the default time-frame of the rise of empires, the dominance of an art-form, the epoch of a revolution. It has become the primary frame through which we view history, even if we often have to make it ‘long’ and ‘short’. The century is always followed by another century; it is a method of linear chronology that invites concepts of procession or improvement.

We risk fetishizing a unit of time of our own making. In contrast, a comet offers an image of the same object returning unimproved, unadorned, for its own reasons - but measurably. The problem is that one hundred years in any direction is that it is just out of reach. It exists as a social rather than a personal memory. A hundred years is simply a hundred years: within it much can happen while little changes, or much can change with little happening. The world a hundred years ahead or behind is an older or younger peer. The orbital period of Halley’s comet, a single transit of a lump of rock, ice and gases around the sun is, on the other hand, a lifetime. It seems longer, somehow, than a century.

Tycho and Kepler were able to place the comets beyond the moon; to make further roads out of a geocentric totalised world-view; to chalk one up for rationalism. They participate in what Gabriel Josopovici has described in his recent Whatever Happened to Modernism?  as part of a “powerful myth, that of the Renaissance as the triumph of the individual after centuries of subservience to authority and tradition… of light coming out of darkness and the myth of the emancipation of the individual…” (p.11). How does the symbol of this comet, which Halley proved to be engaged in an almost eternal return, fit in with a procession of knowledge unwinding its secrets? If there is no permanent triumph, but only return, how do we create a narrative of our own and others' lives within history?

This contradiction, that the scientific universe is guided by stronger and more rigid rules than those of any social or cultural system that previously claimed to govern our worlds, is what Schiller calls the disenchantment of the world: it is the difficulty that we have when our problems are too satisfactorily explained. Explained in so rigorous a fashion their very rationalism, meeting our needs perfectly, becomes a sort of magic in itself. Knowing that Halley was coming back in 1910 didn’t stop people from claiming that it threatened cataclysm – its very predictability seemed terrifying. The millennial feeling is perhaps the overburdening of what we know to be an arbitrary date. It is simply another day, but because it is ‘simply another day’ how could it possibly survive the weight of expectation we have placed upon it?

Josipovici suggests that to argue over the ‘beginnings’ (and endings) of Modernism as occurring at one date or another, is short-sighted: instead we should be looking at what in the past is still present for us, where we still live in the same space. Rather than looking for what has left or arrived on a certain date, it may be better to look for what came back.

Mark Twain did, after all, die the day after the comet’s appearance, as he promised, on the 21^st April 1910. He was seventy-five. His autobiography, which has been under a publication ban, is to be published in November 2010, one hundred years (and a few months) after his death, as, for his own reasons, he insisted.

Novelties and Nostalgia

Guest contributor, Will May (University of Southampton), reviews 'The 1910 Last Night of the Proms' - a tribute to Henry Wood. This programme of music, conducted by Paul Daniel, was based on Wood's own Last Night from 1910. Clips from this prom can be viewed here until 18 September.

The 1910 Last Night of the Proms, September 5, 2010

Henry Wood

Given that the event is already a ritual re-enactment, restaging the 1910 Last Night of the Proms seems a risky move. Petroc Trelawney pitches the evening half-way between respectful tribute to Sir Henry Wood and historical curio: laugh at the mock-1910 fake palm trees; squirm at the gruelling three-hour programme; marvel at Wood’s thick baton; imagine the thick smoke of gentlemen’s cigar smoke filling the Queen’s Hall! The odd boater hat, kerchief and diamante aside, few prommers seem to have made an effort to recreate Edwardian dress. The mixed messages are verbal as well as sartorial: the national anthem which closes the concert offers the bizarre spectacle of an audience unsure whether to save the King or Queen.

Ralph Vaughan Williams

   1910 was the year Ralph Vaughan Williams wedded the twentieth-century to the Tudor period in Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis, as Rob Young reminded us recently in the Guardian; European audiences were reeling from Schoenberg’s Five Pieces for Orchestra (1909) with its ‘total chromaticism’. Yet the Last Night finds little space for incipient musical modernism, alternating between the late romantic overtures of Wagner and virtuosic diversions by Dvorák or Paginini. Hindsight provides its shocks through programming rather than musical language: 16 separate items make up the bulging set-list, leaving the BBC Concert Orchestra a little exhausted by the conclusion. The evening’s eclecticism shames modern classical concerts: here late Romantic titans mingle with tin-pan alley tunesmiths. Readers who have spent a century imagining Beethoven‘s goblins in Howards End (1910) might not expect Helen Schlegel to have heard Dorothy Forster’s music hall favourite ‘Mifanwy’ in the same sitting.

   Other dates haunt this centenary concert too. In 1941, after a performance of Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius, the Queen’s Hall was destroyed by an incendiary bomb; we have forgotten the Royal Albert Hall’s status as a substitute. The following year, Vaughan Williams began a cello concerto, unfinished at his death. It finally has its premiere here, arranged by composer David Matthews and played with conviction by Steven Isserlis. It fulfils the role of what Henry Wood affectionately termed ‘novelties’; heard as part of an otherwise faithful recreation of the 1910 programme, its plaintive cello lines fall halfway between an elegy for something already lost and a prophetic warning of its destruction. 

The Proms - courtesy BBC.

Carrie Nation at the Britannia Panopticon: Smash Ladies, Smash!

As part of the conference, we are organising a visit to the Britannia Panopticon Musichall on the afternoon of Sunday 12th December (for more information see here). As part of the visit, onsite curator Judith Bowers will be giving an introductory talk about the Panopticon and its history. Judith has kindly given permission for us to reproduce part of her book Stan Laurel and Other Stars of the Panopticon (available here) on this blog. It tells of a colourful incident in the Panopticon's past involving the famous temperance campaigner, Carrie Nation:

SMASH LADIES, SMASH

This next turn was not a fighter in the fist-i-cuffs sense of the word, but rather a fighter for moral decency. Her name was Carrie Nation, and she was known across the globe as “the Saloon Smasher.” Her fight was for the abolition of alcohol at a time when alcohol was the ruin of the age. “Smash, Ladies, Smash!” was her Battle cry.

    Carrie Nation the Saloon Smasher held a public meeting at the Panopticon in December 1908 to warn Glaswegians of the evils of drink, quite a tall order in Glasgow! Underneath Britannia’s Balcony floor we have uncovered blank temperance pledges dropped by members of the audience which we believe are remnants of her 1908 visit.

Carrie Nation

       Standing at nearly 6ft tall and weighing 180Ibs, Carry Amelia Moore Nation, Carrie Nation as she became known, was a lady not to be meddled with.

      As a member of the Women’s Christian Temperance Movement, she had been jailed on numerous occasions for entering saloons in the United States and smashing all the bottles of alcohol with a hatchet! No-one stood in her way, even the prize fighter John L. Sullivan was reported to have run and hid when Nation burst into his New York City saloon. In 1908 - 09 she extended her crusade to Europe, Glasgow being at the top of her hit list!

     Her life had begun on the 25th November 1846 in Gerard County, Kentucky. Her childhood was quite normal and when she left school, Carrie trained to be a teacher. This was not a successful avenue for Carrie who found her temperament constantly being challenged by her pupils, so when she married in 1867, she gave up teaching to become a good wife and hopefully in time a mother too. Her first husband was Dr. Charles Gloyd, a physician and together they had one daughter, Charlene.

     Gloyd was an alcoholic and his excessive drinking kept his wife and daughter poor. When Charlene became sick and died in infancy Carrie blamed her husbands excessive drinking. Unable to reconcile her feelings about her husband’s alcoholism, her marriage to Charles was not to last and within a year she had left him.

      Ten years later she remarried, this time setting her sights on a man 19 years her senior who was also a well respected pillar of the community; he was David Nation a minister. Under his influence Carrie became a devout woman and through scripture and her dedication to God, her calling became clear, she must lead the war against the vices of tobacco and liquor.    

      In 1880 the voters of Kansas adopted a constitutional amendment prohibiting the manufacture of intoxicating beverages, except for medicinal purposes. Kansas saloon keepers, however, did not adhere to the law and neither did the majority of the male population. Carrie asked God to use her to save Kansas and God told her to “Go to Kiowa” which she did and there she smashed her first saloon on June 1st 1900.

       And so her career as a saloon smasher began.

     Soon people from other counties urged Carrie to “Save their towns from saloons”. She promptly obliged using stones and bricks wrapped in newspaper, but before long she purchased herself the small hatchet for which she would become famed. The hatchet became a symbol of her mission and pewter hatchet brooches went on sale, her thousands of supporters bought the brooches to show their support and the resulting income paid Carrie’s numerous jail fines. Between 1900 and 1910 the pious lady was jailed thirty times!

     Even Carrie's enemies were compelled to acknowledge that her extraordinary methods had produced definite and concrete results. In less than six months she did more to enforce prohibition laws than had been done by churches and temperance organisations in the years before or since.

       Sadly Carrie Nation died penniless on June 9th 1911 at Levenworth, Kansas where she is buried beside her mother. Her epitaph reads; “She Hath Done What She Could”

     As mentioned at the beginning of this piece, Carrie appeared at the Panopticon January 1908. The following was recorded by the press:

     “On Saturday week, Mrs Carrie A. Nation, previous to her departure for Aberdeen, visited Mr Pickard's Panopticon, and although the American saloon smasher only made up her mind the day previous to visit the old “Brit” as this establishment has been termed for the last half century, and notwithstanding that the time advertised for the hall to open was 6.30, as early as 4 o’clock crowds began to wend their way to the Trongate. By five o’clock it was necessary for the chief constable to dispatch a brigade of gentlemen in blue, under the command of inspectors and sergeants, in order to regulate the traffic, the Trongate at this hour being a mass of humanity all eager to gain admission as soon as the doors opened.

        At six o’clock it was quite evident that the crowds lined up were in excess of the capacity of the hall, but still they came from all directions, adding themselves to the three long queues which already existed.

The Britannia Panopticon

     By  6.15 further squadrons were requisitioned from the Central Police Station to regulate the crowd and traffic, for trams had been held up for fully half an hour owing to the dense mass which was so anxious to get in, if it was only  to get a glimpse of the notorious Bar Wrecker. At 6.30 Mr Pickard instructed his staff who were in readiness, to pass the waiting crowds through the turnstiles, thus preventing any rush, disorder or panic, and great praise is due to his men for the able, manner in which they handled the crowd. By 6.45 it was necessary to post up “House Full” much to the disappointment of thousands of people who would have liked to gain admission.

      At seven o’clock sharp the sacred concert commenced, it wasn’t until eight o’clock that Mrs Nation arrived in Mr Pickard’s motor car, having been detained at the Primitive Methodist Church, Alexandria Parade where she had been lecturing that evening. Her arrival was signalled by cheers and hooting from the crowds outside, and some difficulty was experienced as the police tried to keep the crowds back, while the motor car was run up to the side entrance of the Panopticon. A few minutes later the sprightly old lady was on the platform, and here another ovation was in store for her. Carry bowed her acknowledgements and with a smile upon her face and a bible in her hand she addressed the crowded meeting, explaining how she started her crusade against drink, how she smashed the saloons in the States with her hatchet, and what induced her to visit her cousins on this side of the ’Herrin’ pond’. She described her experience in Scotland, where she had seen women and children half clad and foodless, which were the results of that hellish curse drink. At the conclusion of her lecture she thanked Mr Pickard and the audience for the cordial welcome she had received, and hoped she might be spared a visit to the old “Brit” again shortly. She left the mass outside, as she journeyed along to her hotel. We hear on good authority from some of the oldest inhabitants of the Trongate that this was the largest gathering ever witnessed in this part of the city.” 

Welcome

Welcome to the 1910 Centenary Blog. This week sees a flurry of online activity for the 1910 Centenary Conference: registration goes live on Tuesday 24 August and the website for the conference is being overhauled at the same time. This posting also represents the inauguration of the 1910 Centenary Blog. A dedicated team of bloggers will be reporting on events from the conference as they happen, but in the run up to the conference a series of postings on matters relating to 1910 and the conference themes has been planned. Check back for updates or subscribe to our RSS feed.

Matthew