The Heart of a Stranger

by André Naffis-Sahely

Although the Russian poet Elena Shvarts (1948–2010) is now generally considered among her generation’s most important voices, her translator Sasha Dugdale noted that “she was not adequately recognized in Russia”, and that while she “received more critical attention and admiration elsewhere, like many unofficial Soviet poets, she was denied the opportunity to travel abroad until 1989”. Shvarts’s essay “Why, Let the Stricken Deer Go Weep” is about her mother, Dina, who studied at the Leningrad Theatre Institute during World War II and the infamous Siege of Leningrad, and who was evacuated in 1942 to Pyatigorsk. As the essay begins, the Germans have advanced so rapidly that the soldiers and the town’s administration all flee again, this time south to Tbilisi. “While Shvarts barely sketches the scene,” Dugdale elucidated,

  Any Russian reader would understand immediately the contrast between starving Leningrad and the beautiful southern spa town of Pyatigorsk, where the poet Lermontov was killed in a duel, with its mountain air, mineral springs and sanatoriums, which were operating as war hospitals until the German invasion in August 1942. When the Germans invade Pyatigorsk, not everyone leaves. With our gift of hindsight the reluctance to flee may seem suicidal, but if you consider the suffering and fearful confusion that was Soviet Russia at the time, German occupation and staying put may have seemed the lesser of a number of evils. Radlov’s decision to remain, and his tour of Hamlet in Germany, is a curious legend which I first heard quite recently from the theatre critic Alyona Karas. Shvarts maintains that Radlov chose not to evacuate his theatre south to Tbilisi when the Germans approached. I have read elsewhere that the theatre troupe left and Radlov and his wife remained. Other versions of the story describe how Radlov simply did not manage to evacuate his theatre from Pyatigorsk in time. But all seem to agree on the fact that Radlov’s theatre was moved by the Germans to Zaporozhye, where the theatre premiered Hamlet, and then, in September 1943, to Berlin. Part of the theatre subsequently went to France, where it performed Ostrovskii’s Guilty Without Guilt: an example of rarely bettered theatrical irony.”

  Not long before the events described in Shvarts’s essay, Mussolini’s Fascists had busied themselves with invading and oppressing Ethiopia, the only African country to survive Europe’s bloodthirsty scramble for its territories in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the words of her translator, Aaron Robertson, Martha Nasibù’s (1931–) sole literary production, Memories of an Ethiopian Princess, was produced by the “daughter of Nasibù Zamanuel, one of the most significant political and military figures of twentieth-century Ethiopia, who served as mayor of Addis Ababa in the 1920s and early 1930s and who commanded the Ethiopian armed forces under the last emperor, Haile Selassie, during the Second Italo–Ethiopian War (1935–37)”. In the excerpt featured in this anthology, Nasibù produces an atmosphere of constant deracination, as we watch the Italian authorities displace these exiled Ethiopian aristocrats from Rhodes to Naples and finally to Tripoli, all in the space of slightly under a year, a narrative where “time is more elliptical than linear; because the exilic element is always changing where the ‘center’ is located … and where the future is a horrific ellipsis with no intention of becoming anything else”.

  VICTOR HUGO

  To Octave Lacroix

  30th June 1862

  Dear Sir, — I readily answer your letter, for I recognize in you a valiant combatant for truth and right, and I greet a noble mind. After having, like you, fought against the Second of December, I was banished from France. I wrote Napoléon le Petit at Brussels; I had to leave Belgium. I went to Jersey, and there fought for three years against the common enemy; the English government was subjected to the same pressure as the Belgian government, and I had to leave Jersey. I have been in Guernsey for seven years. I have bought a house here, which gives me the right of citizenship and protects my person; here I am safe from a fourth expulsion. However, I am bound to say that Jersey two years ago, and Belgium a year ago, spontaneously reopened their doors to me. I live near the sea in a house built sixty years ago by an English privateer and called Hauteville House. I, a representative of the people and an exiled soldier of the French Republic, pay droit de poulage7 every year to the Queen of England, sovereign lady of the Channel Islands, as Duchess of Normandy and my feudal suzerain. This is one of the curious results of exile. I live a retired life here, with my wife, my daughter, and my two sons, Charles and François. A few exiles have joined me, and we make a family party. Every Tuesday I give a dinner to fifteen little children, chosen from among the most poverty-stricken of the island, and my family and I wait on them; I try by this means to give this feudal country an idea of equality and fraternity. Every now and then a friend crosses the sea and pays me a visit. These are our gala-days. I have some dogs, some birds, some flowers. I hope next year to have a small carriage and a horse. My pecuniary circumstances, which had been brought to a very low ebb by the coup d’état, have been somewhat improved by my book Les Misérables. I get up early, I go to bed early, I work all day, I walk by the sea, I have a sort of natural armchair in a rock for writing at a beautiful spot called Firmain Bay; I do not read the seven hundred and forty articles published against me during the last three months (and counted by my publishers) in the Catholic newspapers of Belgium, Italy, Austria, and Spain. I am very fond of the worthy, hard-working little people among whom I live, and I think they are rather fond of me, too. I do not smoke, I eat roast beef like an Englishman, and I drink beer like a German; which does not prevent the España, a clerical newspaper of Madrid, from asserting that Victor Hugo does not exist, and that the real author of Les Misérables is called Satan. Here, dear sir, you have nearly all the details for which you ask me. Allow me to complete them by a cordial shake of the hand.

  Translated from French by Elizabeth Wormeley Latimer

  7 The payment of two hens a year to the British monarch.

  LOUISE MICHEL

  Voyage to Exile

  While I waited for deportation, I was kept in the Auberive prison. Once again I can see that prison, with its enormous cell blocks and its narrow white paths running under the pines. There is a gale blowing, and I can see the lines of silent women prisoners with their scarves folded at their necks and wearing white headdresses like peasants. In front of the pines burdened with snow during the long winter of 1872–73, the tired women prisoners passed slowly by, their wooden shoes ringing a sad cadence on the frozen earth.

  My mother was still strong then, and I waited for my deportation to New Caledonia without seeing what I have seen since: the terrible and silent anguish under her calm appearance. She was staying at her sister’s in Clermont, which was very near the Auberive prison, and I knew she was well. She brought me packages of cake and biscuits the way she used to when I was a student at Chaumont.

  How many little gifts her old hands sent me, even in the last year she was alive. We revolutionaries bring so little happiness to our families, yet the more they suffer, the more we love them. The rare moments we have at home make us intensely happy, for we know that those moments are transient and our loved ones will miss them in the future.

  According to the few pages remaining from my journal of the trip to New Caledonia, we left Auberive on Tuesday, 5th August 1873, between six and seven in the morning. The night before we left my mother came to say goodbye, and I noticed for the first time that her hair was turning white.

  When I left for exile I wasn’t bitter about deportation because it was better to be somewhere else and not see the collapse of our dreams. After what the Versailles government had done, I expected to find the savages in the South Pacific good, and perhaps I would find the New Caledonian sun better than the French one.

  We were put on a train and while we were crossing through Langres on the way to Paris, five or six metalworkers with bare arms black up to their elbows came out of their workshop. One white-haired worker flourished his hammer and let out a yell that the noise of the railroad carriage’s rolling wheels almost drowned out. “Long live the Com
mune!” he cried. Something like a promise to stay worthy of his salute filled my heart.

  Translated from French by Elizabeth Gunter and Bullitt Lowry

  ERNEST ALFRED VIZETELLY

  Zola Leaves France

  From the latter part of the month of July 1898, down to the end of the ensuing August, a frequent heading to newspaper telegrams and paragraphs was the query, “Where is Zola?”. The wildest suppositions concerning the eminent novelist’s whereabouts were indulged in and the most contradictory reports were circulated. It was on July 18 that Zola was tried by default at Versailles and sentenced to twelve months’ imprisonment on the charge of having libelled, in his letter “J’accuse”, the military tribunal which had acquitted Commandant Esterhazy. On the evening of the 19th his disappearance was signalled by various telegrams from Paris. Most of these asserted that he had gone on a tour to Norway, a course which the Daily News correspondent declared to be very sensible on Zola’s part, given the tropical heat which then prevailed in the French metropolis.

  On the 20th, however, the telegrams gave out that Zola had left Paris on the previous evening by the 8.35 express for Lucerne, being accompanied by his wife and her maid. Later, the same day, appeared a graphic account of how he had dined at a Paris restaurant and thence despatched a waiter to the Eastern Railway Station to procure tickets for himself and a friend. The very numbers of these tickets were given! Yet a further telegram asserted that he had been recognised by a fellow-passenger, had left the train before reaching the Swiss frontier, and had gaily continued his journey on a bicycle. But another newspaper correspondent treated this account as pure invention, and pledged his word that Zola had gone to Holland by way of Brussels.

  On July 21 his destination was again alleged to be Norway; but — so desperate were the efforts made to reconcile all the conflicting rumours — his route was said to lie through Switzerland, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands. His wife (so the papers reported) was with him, and they were bicycling up hill and down dale through the aforenamed countries. Two days later it was declared that he had actually been recognised at a café in Brussels whence he had fled in consequence of the threats of the customers, who were enraged “by the presence of such a traitor”. Then he repaired to Antwerp, where he was also recognised, and where he promptly embarked on board a steamer bound for Christiania.

  However, on July 25, the Petit Journal authoritatively asserted that all the reports hitherto published were erroneous. Zola, said the Paris print, was simply hiding in the suburbs of Paris, hoping to reach Le Havre by night and thence sail for Southampton. But fortunately the Prefecture of Police was acquainted with his plans, and at the first movement he might make he would be arrested.

  That same morning our own Daily Chronicle announced Zola’s presence at a London hotel, and on the following day the Morning Leader was in a position to state that the hotel in question was the Grosvenor. Both the Chronicle and Leader were right; but as I had received pressing instructions to contradict all rumours of Zola’s arrival in London, I did so in this instance through the medium of the Press Association. I here frankly acknowledge that I thus deceived both the Press and the public. I acted in this way, however, for weighty reasons, which will hereafter appear.

  At this point I would simply say that Zola’s interests were, in my estimation, of far more consequence than the claims of public curiosity, however well-meant and even flattering its nature.

  One effect of the Press Association’s contradiction was to revive the Norway and Switzerland stories. Several papers, while adhering to the statement that Zola had been in London, added that he had since left England with his wife, and that Hamburg was their immediate destination. And thus the game went merrily on. Zola’s arrival at Hamburg was duly reported. Then he sailed on the Capella for Bergen, where his advent was chronicled by Reuter. Next he was setting out for Trondheim, whence in a few days he would join his friend Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, the novelist, at the latter’s estate of Aulestad in the Gudbrandsdalen. Bjørnson, as it happened, was then at Munich, in Germany, but this circumstance did not weigh for a moment with the newspapers. The Norway story was so generally accepted that a report was spread to the effect that Zola had solicited an audience of the Emperor William, who was in Norway about that time, and that the Kaiser had peremptorily refused to see him, so great was the imperial desire to do nothing of a nature to give umbrage to France.

  As I have already mentioned, the only true reports (so far as London was concerned) were those of two English newspapers, but even they were inaccurate in several matters of detail. For instance, the lady currently spoken of as Mme. Zola was my own wife, who, it so happens, is a Frenchwoman. At a later stage the Daily Mail hit the nail on the head by signalling Zola’s presence at the Oatlands Park Hotel; but so many reports having already proved erroneous, the Mail was by no means certain of the accuracy of its information, and the dubitative form in which its statement was couched prevented the matter from going further.

  At last a period of comparative quiet set in, and though gentlemen of the Press were still anxious to extract information from me, nothing further appeared in print as to Zola’s whereabouts until the Times Paris correspondent, M. de Blowitz, contributed to his paper, early in the present year, a most detailed and amusing account of Zola’s flight from France and his subsequent movements in exile. In this narrative one found Mme. Zola equipping her husband with a nightgown for his perilous journey abroad, and secreting bank notes in the lining of his garments. Then, carrying a slip of paper in his hand, the novelist had been passed on through London from policeman to policeman, until he took a train to a village in Warwickshire, where the little daughter of an innkeeper had recognised him from seeing his portrait in one of the illustrated newspapers.

  There was something also about his acquaintance with the vicar of the locality and a variety of other particulars, all of which helped to make up as pretty a romance as the Times readers had been favoured with for many a day. But excellent as was M. de Blowitz’s narrative, from the romantic standpoint his information was sadly inaccurate. Of his bona fides there can be no doubt, but some of Zola’s friends are rather partial to a little harmless joking, and it is evident that a trap was laid for the shrewd correspondent of the Times, and that he, in an unguarded moment, fell into it.

  On the incidents which immediately preceded Zola’s departure from France I shall here be brief; these incidents are only known to me by statements I have had from M. and Mme. Zola themselves. But the rest is well within my personal knowledge, as one of the first things which Zola did on arriving in England was to communicate with me and in certain respects place himself in my hands.

  This, then, is a plain unvarnished narrative — firstly, of the steps that I took in the matter, in conjunction with a friend, who is by profession a solicitor; and, secondly, of the principal incidents which marked Zola’s views on some matters of interest, as imparted by him to me at various times. But, ultimately, Zola will himself pen his own private impressions, and on these I shall not trespass. It is because, according to his own statements to me, his book on his English impressions (should he write it) could not possibly appear for another twelve months, that I have put these notes together.

  The real circumstances, then, of Zola’s departure from France are these: on July 18, the day fixed for his second trial at Versailles, he left Paris in a livery-stable brougham hired for the occasion at a cost of fifty francs. His companion was his fidus Achates, M. Fernand Desmoulin, the painter, who had already acted as his bodyguard at the time of the great trial in Paris. Versailles was reached in due course, and the judicial proceedings began under circumstances which have been chronicled too often to need mention here. When Zola had retired from the court, allowing judgment to go against him by default, he was joined by Maître Labori, his counsel, and the pair of them returned to Paris in the vehicle which had brought Zola from the city in the morning. M. Desmoulin found a seat in another carriage.

 
; The brougham conveying Messrs. Zola and Labori was driven to the residence of M. Georges Charpentier, the eminent publisher, in the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne, and there they were presently joined by M. Georges Clemenceau, Mme. Zola, and a few others. It was then that the necessity of leaving France was pressed upon Zola, who, though he found the proposal little to his liking, eventually signified his acquiescence.

  The points urged in favour of his departure abroad were as follows: He must do his utmost to avoid personal service of the judgment given against him by default, as the Government was anxious to cast him into prison and thus stifle his voice. If such service were effected the law would only allow him a few days in which to apply for a new trial, and as he could not make default a second time, and could not hope at that stage for fresh and decisive evidence in his favour, or for a change of tactics on the part of the judges, this would mean the absolute and irrevocable loss of his case.

  On the other hand, by avoiding personal service of the judgment he would retain the right to claim a new trial at any moment he might find convenient; and thus not only could he prevent his own case from being closed against him and becoming a chose jugée, but he would contribute powerfully towards keeping the whole Dreyfus affair open, pending revelations which even then were foreseen. And, naturally, England which so freely gives asylum to all political offenders, was chosen as his proper place of exile.

  The amusing story of the nightgown tucked under his arm and the bank notes sewn up in his coat is, of course, pure invention. A few toilet articles were pressed upon him, and his wife emptied her own purse into his own. That was all. Then he set out for the Northern Railway Station, where he caught the express leaving for Calais at 9 P.M.