Monday 11 December 2023

When Chekhov met Tolstoy

Chekhov and Tolstoy at a subsequent meeting, in Gaspra in 1901
It’s a curious and entertaining picture. The first meeting of these two giants of Russian literature taking place, on 8th August 1895, up to their necks in water at Tolstoy’s estate, with Tolstoy’s beard floating out in front of him on the water. 

Chekhov caught a cold while he was there. Could it have been because the two men had their first conversation while bathing? This is the story told by one Aleksei Ivanovich Yakovlev, who as an impressionable student visited Chekhov two years after the incident. He recounted (some years after both writers’ deaths) that “on their arrival (Chekhov was not alone, this was early morning), [Tolstoy] brought him to bathe, and their first conversation happened up to their necks in the water”. 

There’s an entertaining essay about this meeting in Russian Life, in which the author quotes the biographer Elif Batuman: “… Chekhov arrived at the exact moment when Tolstoy was headed to the stream for his daily ablutions. Tolstoy insisted that Chekhov join him; Chekhov later recalled that, as he and Tolstoy sat naked in the chin-deep water, Tolstoy’s beard floated majestically before him.” 

 Alas, Russian Life suggests that “Chekhov was kidding young Yakovlev”. It seems not to match other first-hand accounts. According to the article: “Chekhov mentioned his visit a handful of times in letters over the next two months of 1895, and he didn’t recount bathing with Tolstoy then, and he seems never to have mentioned it to anyone else. Neither did Tolstoy…” So the beard-floating episode probably didn’t happen. 

But cyclist-watching did. Later that day, we learn, Tolstoy suggested to his various guests they should join him in walking up to the main road “to see how our young people bicycle to Tula”, a city nearby. Why? Cycling was still something of a novelty and not entirely respectable, but Tolstoy was an enthusiast and had recently taken it up as a hobby. In his diary of that year he wrote: "I began to learn how to ride the bicycle at the [Moscow] Manège. It's very strange that I am attracted to this… I don't feel ashamed. On the contrary, I feel that this is a form of natural idiocy, that I don't care what people think, that it is sinless and fun in a childlike way." 25 April, 1895 

Chekhov had recently bought a country estate not too far away, and was in the middle of a creative period in which he was writing short stories. We know the two writers talked about the novel Tolstoy was writing at the time, Resurrection. And Chekhov was able to correct a factual detail about prison sentences. During the visit, Tolstoy also asked Chekhov for help in getting accommodation for an old soldier who had gone blind. 

It certainly seems that the meeting was friendly, with Chekhov no doubt expressing his admiration for the older writer (Tolstoy was 67 and Chekhov 35). They enjoyed mutual respect, and in due course Tolstoy was said to love Chekhov dearly, though they disagreed on certain issues. They would meet several more times. But Tolstoy remained the dominant father figure, tormenting Chekhov at what might have been their last meeting with a famously damning comment. According to an account by Chekhov of a visit to Tolstoy in Gaspra, “He was bedridden due to illness. Among other things, he spoke about me and my works. Finally, when I was about to say goodbye he took my hand and said, 'Kiss me goodbye.' While I bent over him and he was kissing me, he whispered in my ear in a still energetic, old man's voice, 'You know, I hate your plays. Shakespeare was a bad writer, and I consider your plays even worse than his.'"

References
https://russianlife.com/the-russia-file/when-chekhov-met-tolstoy/
https://russianlife.com/the-russia-file/cycling-with-the-count/
https://www.rbth.com/lifestyle/326317-7-renowned-russian-bike-riders
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Leo-Tolstoy/Fiction-after-1880
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/jul/11/tolstoy-thought-chekhov-worse-than-shakespeare



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Saturday 11 February 2023

When Leonardo da Vinci met Michaelangelo

Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) was the established genius and Michelangelo (1475-1564) the young prodigy when their working lives overlapped. But rivalry led to mutual dislike, and they kept their distance. 

Their relationship has been talked about ever since. How often did they meet? Were they so very different? But there is just one account of a meeting between the two. It shows them barely on speaking terms. 

Things were certainly not going to go well after 1504, when they were put in direct competition with each other. In 1503, Leonardo had been commissioned to paint a battle scene - The Battle of Anghiari – in the Council Hall of the Palazzo Vecchio. He was immensely famous by this stage (the Mona Lisa was recently finished), and was the obvious choice for a project. But the young and rather dashing Michaelangelo began to muscle in. Leonardo had had to take part in a committee decision about where to place his famous sculpture, David, and it ended up in prime position on the square right outside the Palazzo Vecchio. Then the governing officials decided to invite Michaelangelo to paint another scene - The Battle of Cascina - for the very same room in the Palazzo. 

The artist Giorgio Vasari gives us an insight into the relations between the men in his Life of Leonardo, written in around 1560. He tells us: “There was great dislike between Leonardo and Michelangelo, and the competition between the two was to blame for Michelangelo leaving Florence... When Leonardo heard this, he also left and went to France, where the king owned several works of his and was very fond of him.”

Vasari’s might seem to suggest that the artists fled from each other. In fact, Michaelangelo was invited by the Pope to work in Rome in 1505, and the next year Leonardo was summoned to return to Milan. But they may have jumped at the chances nonetheless. And their joint project remained unfinished.
 
It seems to have been before this time, however, in Florence, that our meeting took place, (according to Jonathan Jones in his book The Lost Battles). The single source for the story is an anecdote in a manuscript known as the Codice Magliabecchiano, apparently written in the 1540s and attributed to Bernardo Vecchietti, which contains surveys of the lives of famous artists, old and new. 

We are in a public meeting place at the Palazzo Spini Feroni, near Santa Trinita. Leonardo and his friend Giovanni di Gavina arrive on the scene, encountering a gathering of men, who are discussing a passage in Dante. According to the account: They called Leonardo over and told him to explain it to them. And when Michelangelo happened to pass by and was called by one of them, Leonardo replied, "Michelangelo will declare it himself." Michelangelo, thinking that he had said this to mock him, replied angrily, "You too should be able to explain it, for you made a drawing of a model to cast it in bronze, and could not cast it, and out of shame left it alone." And having said this, he cut them off and left, whereupon Leonardo remained, blushing. 

To understand the insult thrown by Michaelangelo, we need to go back to an incident by then a few years old, that was obviously still a talking point. Leonardo was known for numerous unfinished projects – as Vasari comments: “He would have achieved great things as a scholar in the sciences if he had been less fickle and changeable. But he undertook many things and very soon abandoned those he had begun” – but on this occasion, circumstances went beyond his control.

Leonardo was commissioned to provide a bronze equestrian monument for Ludovico Sforza in Milan in the 1480s, and he planned something grand – and huge. The finished piece would be 20 ft high and bigger than any bronze statue had ever been. Leonardo worked on different designs and models for years, and by 1493 had produced a full-size model. But he never had the chance to finish it, because with the French threatening invasion, the Sforzas used the bronze that Leonardo has stockpiled to make cannons for the defence of the city. In the event, the French did invade in 1499, and had fun using the model horse as target practice. 

This very public failure must have become a touchy subject for Leonardo, so the insult was telling (if not very original). Vasari remarks: “as envy often causes people to judge maliciously, there were those who thought that Leonardo had begun it like other of his works so that it would not be completed.”

But that wasn’t quite the end of the encounter. The manuscript’s account then goes on to say that Michaelangelo threw one more insult as he left, along the lines of: “and to think you were believed by those castrated Milanese cockerels!” 

So much can be, and has been, read into these few lines of manuscript. Jonathan Jones interprets this last insult as a reference to Leonardo’s ambiguous sexuality.  And in order to explain Michaelangelo’s anger, novelist Stephanie Storey imagines an earlier encounter when she has Leonardo pointedly humiliate him in public, for no apparent reason other than that he dresses scruffily.

Anyway, after 1506 Leonardo returned to visit Florence at least once but he never lived there again. He and Michaelangelo couldn’t avoid each other for good, though. In 1513 Leonardo went to Rome to work for the Pope at a time when both Michelangelo and Raphael were there as well. There is no specific record of them meeting again, but presumably they remained well aware of each other’s work, and Leonardo will have had the opportunity to enter the Sistine Chapel and inspect – perhaps with grudging appreciation - its fresh new ceiling.


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Thursday 19 January 2023

When Mahler met Freud

In 1910, at a desperate time in his life, though at the height of his fame, Gustav Mahler decided to seek the advice of the equally celebrated Sigmund Freud. 

He had returned to Europe after an exhausting tour of America, just before which he had suffered the devastating loss of his daughter Maria, and he had been diagnosed with a form of heart disease. 

And that Summer he discovered that his wife was involved with another man.

After a couple of cancellations – perhaps he was wary of what he would learn – Mahler eventually arranged to meet Freud in Leiden in Holland, on 26 August.

Freud and his family were on holiday and staying nearby, but were about to leave for Italy. So this was Mahler’s last chance. Freud took the tram into town, and they spent four hours together, meeting at The Gilded Turk café and walking through the botanical gardens until late in the evening.

It seems they found an immediate rapport. Indeed, despite Freud lacking much interest in music, they had much in common, with their Viennese backgrounds and being of a similar age (Mahler was 50 and Freud 54). Freud had also travelled to America. They were pre-eminently deep thinkers.  

Freud apparently said he’d never met anyone who so quickly understood the nature of psychoanalysis. 

Various accounts of this meeting speculate on how Freud would have analysed Mahler, and what advice he might have offered. We know that Mahler told his life story – plenty enough to occupy the four-hour walk. He would have related episodes from his emotionally traumatic childhood: his violent father, the untimely death of his brother Ernst, and, we can assume, the incident he related elsewhere when he rushed from the house to escape hearing his parents quarrel, and was stopped short by the music of a barrel organ playing, incongruously, an amusing folk melody - an experience that he drew on in juxtaposing extremes of emotion and context in his music. 

Recent events would also have occupied them. Mahler had had to leave his post at the Vienna Opera, and, the main reason for the meeting, his wife Alma’s affair with Walter Gropius. (After Mahler’s death, Alma and Gropius would marry, and he went on to found of the Bauhaus school of architecture after the war.)

Psychoanalysts agree that Freud would have identified a mother fixation. For Mahler, Alma Mahler had become a mother figure, whom he could not bear to lose. Throughout their life together, he and Alma had wild, obsessive swings from being utterly devoted to desperately needing to get away from each other. Notoriously, Mahler wrote her a letter before their marriage, explaining that her life would have to be committed and subordinated entirely to his in order for him to achieve his musical vocation: "The role of composer, the worker's role, falls to me, yours is that of a loving companion and understanding partner”, he wrote, demanding that she abandon her own musical ambitions, including composing. We know that Freud told Mahler that this was damaging, and after the meeting Mahler did encourage Alma to compose. He also dedicated his Eighth Symphony to her – it received a triumphant first performance in Munich in September that year. 

However, Alma kept up her relationship with Gropius, albeit discreetly. The meeting with Freud seems to have been helpful, but the two never met again. Mahler died just eight months later, in May 2011.

Sources include
https://mahlerfoundation.org/mahler/locations/netherlands/leiden/meeting-with-freud/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23439545/
https://www.npr.org/2010/07/02/128192566/a-composer-on-the-couch-mahler-meets-freud
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustav_Mahler

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