Recent online reading

Public Seminar has Andrei Platonov's short story "Antisexus",

a provisional translation by Anna Kalashyan of an occasional piece by Platonov. In ‘Antisexus’ (1925-26), Platonov writes in a parodic vein about what Béatriz Préciado calls the sex-gender industrial complex. The production of gendered and sexualized bodies via technologies of the image and the orgasm appears here as something that might be implicated in both the western and Soviet modes of spectacle.

Please note the article also has a link to Platonov's Chevengur (pdf)!


Llewelyn Morgan posted about a tale from the Alexander Romance feeds into a scene in Shakespeare's Henry V. And more.


I'm so intrigued by Michael Orthofer's review of Leg Over Leg (Vol. 1) by Aḥmad Fāris al-Shidyāq that I've added it to my TBR pile.


Speaking of the to—be read—stack, I'm anxiously awaiting the upcoming translation of Marketa Lazarová by Vladislav Vančura. In the meantime, enjoy Alex Zucker's essay on the novel and its film adaptation. There's quite a bit on Vančura, too.


Stefany Anne Golberg has an essay on how a crisis in Miguel de Unamuno's life led to his philosophical outlook:

This “crisis of 1897” marked the crossroad of Miguel de Unamuno’s spiritual and intellectual journey. The philosopher would build no system that would eliminate his inner turmoil. He would not turn his back on the Angel of Nothingness. Rather, he would embrace this angel as his wife had embraced him in his grief. Miguel de Unamuno would develop from his nightmare a messy, passionate philosophy of conflict, a philosophy of tragedy. In short, a philosophy of himself.

Greg Grandin looks at fact and fiction behind Herman Melville's Benito Cereno. As is often the case, real life proves to be stranger than fiction.

Mist summary

A street artist portraying Unamuno, Barcelona, 2006
Photograph by luna (follow the source link for more pictures)
Picture source

I didn't provide any online resources for Unamuno or Mist, but hopefully I'll get to more of his works soon and can do so at that time. Links for posts related to Mist:

Mist discussion

Quotes from The Life of Don Quixote and Sancho and Mist

Quote from Mist when Unamuno received a visit from his character

Mist discussion

I don’t feel too bad “giving away” the ending or the plot twist in previous posts since Unamuno talks of Augusto’s death in the Prologue as well as begins the author’s playful take on the blurring fiction and reality. Unamuno has one of his characters (Victor Goti) write the Prologue, which allows the author to give some of his views in the third person. Unamuno then pens a Post-Prologue, disclaiming some of Goti’s statements while allowing others to (ambiguously) stand. And with that the fun is just beginning. Such an approach allows Unamuno to defiantly leave things open-ended and allow multiple possibilities.

Ivan Turgenev’s speech on “Hamlet and Don Quixote” looked at man torn between the differing traits of those characters. Perverting his intent, imagine a Hamlet-like character dropped into a Quixote-esque world and you have a sense of Mist. The novel reflects not just the problems of man but also how novels represent him. Unamuno places heavy emphasis on dialogue (which includes soliloquies) to highlight the uncertainty between reality and fiction, between what we hear or see and what is. While this removes some levels of doubt, it introduces many others. With dialogue the narrator is apparently removed, but as the visit of the character Augusto to the author Unamuno shows it is simply a substitution of one arbitrary point of view for another. Literature, in Unamuno’s mind, does more than reflect life, it creates it as well.

But who is the creator and who is the created? Unamuno turns this question in on itself with the meeting between Augusto and the author:

“It cannot be, my poor Augusto,” I said, taking him by the hand and lifting him up. “It cannot be. I have now decreed it—it is written—and irrevocably; you can live no longer. I no longer know what to do with you. God, when he does not know what to do with us, kills us.”
(All translations are by Warner Fite)

The alleged creator of Augusto is but the creation of someone else. Unamuno (the character) confesses that he is restricted by basic rules of art on what he can have his characters do and say. So Unamuno (the character? the author?) is twice constrained, by his creator and by his creation. As several characters mention, life is a play and we all play our roles.

There is much that can be discussed about the novel (or nivola). Fiction vs. reality, images vs. reality, the mist of life, and the tragic sense of life just for starters. I’ll just cherry-pick a few of the notes I made…

Unamuno has one character (Victor) lay out how Mist will be written—dialogue, monologues, a dog to talk to, etc. By saying dialogue is preferable over description and later saying that man lies when he speaks (or with the dog Orfeo’s lines about man falsifies with speech—quoted in a previous post), what is to be trusted? Or can nothing be trusted?

Man’s craving for immortality, as Unamuno saw it, is the basis for “the tragic sense of life” (his work of that name was published in 1912…Mist in 1914). Some thoughts from that work appear throughout Mist. “Yes, the second birth, the real birth, consists in being born through pain to that consciousness of ever-continuing death of which we are dying all through life.” One outcome of man’s craving for immortality was marriage and procreation. Yet the depictions of relationships and marriages in Mist run from the hilarious to the wretched. The twists and turns of many of the relationships add much of the comic nature to the novel. Unfortunately it turns out that love can be a lie, just like speech. However love can help offset the realization and sooth the acceptance of death, too. Although in Augusto’s case, he sees love as clearing his muddled outlook, while the reality is quite the opposite.

The tension between our knowledge of death while desiring immortality can cloud our outlook, which is only one reason for the title of the novel. Two quotes from the novel on the mist of life:

“It is not the great pains, nor the great joys, to which we succumb; and this is because the great pains and the great joys come wrapped in a vast mist of trifling incidents. And life is just this—mist.”

“The mist of life precipitates a gentle tedium in the form of a bitter-sweet liquor.” This tedium “has invented all the games and distractions, the novels, and love.”

Which includes this novel. There is much more to this nivola and I highly recommend exploring it.

Mist excerpt: existence

The character Augusto Pérez, upon feeling suicidal, visits author Miguel de Unamuno:

”Very well, then. The truth is, my dear Augusto,” I spoke to him the softest of tones, “you can’t kill yourself because you are not alive; and you are not alive—or dead either—because you do not exist.”

“I don’t exist! What do you mean by that?”

“No, you do not exist except as a fictitious entity, a character of fiction. My poor Augusto, you are only a product of my imagination and of the imagination of those of my readers who read this story which I have written of your fictitious adventures and misfortunes. You are nothing more than a personage in a novel, or a nivola, or whatever you choose to call it. Now, then, you know your secret.”

Upon hearing this the poor man continued to look at me for a while with one of those perforating looks that seem to pierce your own gaze and go beyond; presently he glanced for a moment at the portrait in oil which presides over my books, then his colour returned and his breathing became easier, and gradually recovering, he was again master of himself. He rested his elbows on the arm of the sofa opposite me, against which he was leaning; and then with his face in the palms of his hands he looked at me with a smile and he said slowly:

“Listen to me, Don Miguel—it can’t be that you are mistaken, and that what is happening is precisely the contrary of what you think and of what you have told me?”

“And what do you mean by the contrary?” I asked, rather alarmed to see him regaining his self-possession.

“May it not be, my dear Don Miguel,” he continued, “that it is you and not I who are the fictitious entity, the one that does not really exist, who is neither living nor dead? May it not be that you are nothing more than a pretext for bringing my history into the world?”

- From Chapter 31, Mist, Miguel de Unamuno (translated by Warner Fite)

Mist discussion: quotes

In which I give away the ending and hint at a major plot twist in Mist:

And I even suspect that while I have been explaining and commenting this Life of Don Quixote, I have secretly been visited by the two of them, and that without my being aware of it they have unfolded and uncovered the innermost recesses of their hearts. And I must add here that though we oftentimes consider a writer to be a real, true, and historic person because we see him in the flesh, and regard the characters he invents in his fictions as purely imaginary, the truth is exactly the reverse. The characters are real, it is they who are the authentic beings, and they make use of the person who seems to be of flesh and blood in order to assume form and being in the eyes of men.

- from Chapter 74, The Life of Don Quixote and Sancho, Miguel de Unamuno (translated by Anthony Kerrigan)

Maybe this is a good time to point out that the English subtitle for Mist (Niebla) is a "tragicomic novel", while Unamuno subtitled his novel (novela) a nivola in order to distance his work from 'standard' novels. ""My novel hasn't any plot; or rather, the plot is what comes out of it. It makes its own plot." (from Chapter 17 of Mist) OK, enough with quote marks and italics.

It is customary at the end of a novel, as soon as the hero or protagonist has died or married, to give an account of what happened to the rest of the characters. We shall not follow custom here… . We shall make only one exception, and that will be in favor of him who felt the death of Augusto most deeply and sincerely, namely, his dog Orfeo.

Orfeo found himself an orphan. When he jumped upon the bed and, sniffing at his dead master, scented his master’s death, his canine soul was enveloped in a thick, black cloud. He had experienced other deaths. He had smelt dead dogs and cats, and he had seen them; he had killed an occasional rat, and he had scented the death of men; but his master he supposed to be immortal. Because his master was for him a god. And when he saw now that he was dead he felt that within his own soul all the foundations of belief in life and the world were crumbling; and his heart was filled with an immense desolation.

And crouched at the feet of his dead master, he thought: … “What a strange animal is man! He never seems to notice what is before him. He caresses us and we never know why—but not when we offer to caress him. When we devote ourselves most to him he drives us away and beats us. There is no way of knowing what he wants, if indeed he knows it himself. Always he seems to be somewhere else than where he is, and what he looks at he never sees. It is as if there were another world for him. And, of course, if there is another world this world has ceased to exist. …

But he barks in a way all his own—he speaks. And this has enabled him to invent what does not exist and to overlook what exists. As soon as he gives a thing a name he ceases to see the thing itself; he only hears the name that he gave it or sees it written. His language enables him to falsify, to invent what does not exist, and to confuse himself.

- from “Funeral Oration (By Way of an Epilogue)”, Mist, Miguel de Unamuno (translated by Warner Fite) [emphases mine]