It is much harder than I thought to keep up a blog. Especially when you are in the habit of saying yes to too many things. This is the most exhausted I have ever been at the end of a semester. There were six talks at conferences, symposia, colloquia, other people's classes, all within three and a half weeks, and in the middle of it I took a test in Mandarin. And all the talks (I also ran a session at a conference) were on completely different topics. I made it hard on myself by deciding to do the Chinese class. In spite of all that I am going to try to keep up with the second semester. In the photo above, alongside the title page of the novel is a sheet of my attempts to practice characters with a brush pen. The larger characters are my Chinese name, 史北思 (Shi Bei Si). The Bei Si sort of sounds like Beth in Chinese (about as close as you can get) and means northern thinker (or scholar) , which is funny because I am from the north and a professor. Shi also has an appropriate meaning ('tho I forget it at the moment) and is a common last name in China. It was selected for its meaning and because my family name begins with S.
But in spite of all the work I did manage to read the Merejkowski. Now I can cross off the to-do list the idea of writing a novel on Leonardo's life to parallel the Agony and the Ecstasy for Michelangelo. That was a bit of a stretch anyway. This book, written in 1899 in Russian (the translation was from 1928), does that. It seems to start in the middle of his life but manages to go back to his childhood through cleverly inserted sections of Leonardo's reminiscences. This works well because the evidence for his early years is much fainter in detail and a bit unclear, like memories. For much of the book, nearly the first 2/3s of it, we don't get much of a view of Leonardo and certainly are not privy to his thoughts. As a character, he is seen in the background. Other people are the narrators and we see him glimpsed through their eyes and thoughts. One whole chapter was supposedly pages from Beltraffio's diary, which reports things he has been told by Leonardo. They are straight out of Leonardo's notebooks! Alongside such nearly non-fictional chapters are people experiencing drug induced hallucinogenic parties with pagan deities. I kept thinking how clever it all was, keeping Leonardo himself at a distance so that his character and story are as mysterious as the historical Leonardo. Then, slowly, we see him closer and closer, through the door of his studio, then in conversations with his employers and others, then we are with him in the studio, and finally we hear his thoughts. I don't think I'm giving anything away by this description. It's such an old book, and anyone who would read it certainly is already aware of Leonardo's life and work. It ends of course with his death, not the mythologized dying in the king's arms but a scene that is much more plausible and in its own way poetic.
The translation is beautifully written except for one thing. The upper-class and educated characters and the artists all speak in a quasi-Elizabethan dialect with lots of thou's and doth's and such. It bothered me at first, but then the stiffness and oddness of it began to fade. Then I noticed tradespeople and peasants spoke in a country English dialect. So I fully expected when Salai showed up he would speak Cockney or something. But no, he spoke the gentlemanly Elizabethan too, and was not referred to as Salai but by his first name. He did not play a significant part except at one point he saves the day… no, I won't give that surprise away.
Most odd was the realization as I read it that nearly everything that scholars of the 20th and 21st centuries have found to say about Leonardo is in this novel, at least implied in it, including the attempt to characterize Mona Lisa as Leonardo in drag. This is refuted in the novel nearly 80 years before that idea was proposed and a believable explanation for the similarity of Leonardo's self portrait (if that is indeed his self portrait) and Mona Lisa is offered. I can't believe my luck to have this copy of the book fall into my hands by chance. Ands thanks, Carey, for recommending it.
