Beloved (4 of 4), Anna Karenina (10 of 14) & Yukio Mishima
Nightingales, great snipe and a small bench by the road
Happy Halloween, dear classics reader,
In this week’s trick or treat bag you will find:
Birthday wishes to that thing of beauty, John Keats;
The week’s new classics, including a fresh translation of Luigi Pirandello’s comic novel One, None, and a Hundred Grand;
A little background on Yukio Mishima and the ‘Way of the Sword’;
A preview of coming attractions;
Our tenth monthly instalment of Anna Karenina – with a note about Laska and the great snipe;
And our final discussion of Beloved and its legacy.
This newsletter may be too long for your email inbox. If so, click ‘View entire message’ at the bottom to see the full newsletter – or visit Substack.
Happy Birthday John Keats
Today – Halloween – was also John Keats’s birthday. He would have been 230 today. Why not reach down a poem by the Romantic poet ‘whose name was writ in water’, perhaps his magnificent short ode ‘To Autumn’.
Keats trained as a surgeon at Guy’s Hospital in London, before abandoning medicine for poetry. His first volume, Poems (1817), was a failure, as was his second, Endymion (1818). He was growing desperately ill from tuberculosis as he prepared his final volume for the press. He died in Rome soon after it was published, at the age of just 25.
Over the course of his short life, Keats honed a raw talent into a brilliant poetic maturity. By the end of his brief career, he had written poems of such beauty, imagination and generosity of spirit, that he had – unwittingly - fulfilled his wish that he should ‘be among the English poets after my death’.
Selected Poems by John Keats
This wide-ranging selection of Keats’s poetry contains youthful verse, such as his earliest known poem ‘Imitation of Spenser’; poems from his celebrated collection of 1820 - including ‘Lamia’, ‘Isabella’, ‘The Eve of St Agnes’, ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ and ‘Hyperion’ - and later celebrated works such as ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’. Also included are many poems considered by Keats to be lesser work, but which illustrate his more earthy, playful side and superb ear for everyday language.
[UK / US] Penguin Classics | 320 pages | introduced by John Barnard
What’s new this week?
There are two new translations of classics this week: Pirandello’s last novel – which took him fifteen years to write – and selections from The Philokalia, the book of Orthodox wisdom. We also have postmodern American gay fiction from San Francisco. This week Vintage Classics also rejacketed their editions of Salman Rushdie’s best-loved titles, ahead of his new novel, The Eleventh Hour, which is due to be published next Thursday 4th November.
Jack the Modernist by Robert Glück (1995)
A classic of postmodern gay fiction, Robert Glück’s Jack the Modernist portrays the slow disintegration of a love affair set in the early 1980s. Bob is excited and lonely. He meets and pursues the elusive Jack, a director who is able to transform others without altering himself. Bob goes to the baths, gossips on the phone, goes to a bar, thinks about werewolves, has an orgasm, and discovers a number of truths about Jack. Out of print for decades, Glück’s paean to desire and obsession explores the everyday in an idiom both intimate and lush. Sensual as well as sensational, self-conscious, but never self-serious, Jack the Modernist is a candid and heartfelt lover’s discourse unlike any other.
[UK / US] NYRB Classics | 176 pages | Rob Halpern
One, None, and a Hundred Grand by Luigi Pirandello (1926)
When Vitangelo Moscarda’s wife tells him his nose leans slightly to the right, his entire world swings off kilter. Loafing about, suddenly estranged from himself, he accosts friends, strangers, and passersby to look closely and confirm: Am I not the self I thought I was? Wandering from mirror to mirror, Moscarda embarks on a dizzying pursuit to see himself as others see him, to root out the stranger within. Searching endlessly for his true self, Moscarda ricochets through insecurity, reclusiveness, self-detachment, and doubt — resolving, with icy recognition, that “people roll through their lives like stones, complacent, insensate, and closed,” locked in an unknown face. Things quickly escalate from pensive reflection to dramatic confrontations as the protagonist disintegrates. With sharp dialogue and comic brilliance, Pirandello dissolves the fixity of perception, challenging us to question the solidity of our own identities and to consider the ways we are each held captive by the gazes of others.
[UK / US] Archipelago Books | 200 pages | translated by Sean Wilsey
The Philokalia: A Selection (1782)
The Philokalia is the most influential book in the recent history of the Orthodox Church, aside from the Bible. It is an anthology of thirty-six spiritual texts written between the fourth and fifteenth centuries by the masters of Eastern Orthodox Christianity, tracing a continuous tradition of the prayer of the heart, or hesychasm, from Evagrios of Pontos to Gregory Palamas. First published in Greek in 1782, and revered for offering a rich tapestry of wisdom on the path to union with God, the texts, largely of monastic origin, serve as a guide to the pursuit of contemplative prayer, ‘inner asceticism’ and the purification of the soul.
[UK / US] Penguin Classics | 496 pages | translated by Jonathan L. Zecher and Andrew Louth
The book descriptions above are taken from the publishers’ online blurbs.
Yukio Mishima (1925-1970)
I’m very much looking forward to reading Yukio Mishima’s The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea together in November. We will start reading next week, on Friday 7th November. All the details are here.
First, though, here is a little about Mishima.
Mishima was born 100 years ago this year. As a child, Kimitake Hiraoka’s father banned him from playing with other boys or in direct sunlight.
His father ripped up the stories Hiraoka wrote as a teenager and held him up to the side of speeding trains, but Hiraoka continued to write secretly and began publishing under the pseudonym ‘Yukio Mishima’. In 1944, he left school with a commendation from the emperor and in 1946 he visited Yasunari Kawabata, the future Nobel Laureate who became his mentor.
Inspired by Georges Bataille and Witold Gombrowicz, Mishima wrote novels that broke social taboos, in a Japan that was changing rapidly. His interests included modelling, acting, bodybuilding, karate, kendo and training as a samurai. He worshipped the traditional culture of Japan and his far-right ideology became increasingly controversial.
In 1968 he founded a civilian militia, the Tatenokai (‘Shield Society’), which was dedicated to restoring power to the emperor of Japan and overturning the parliamentary constitution of 1947.
In 1970, he and four members attempted a military coup, which failed. After a rousing speech from a balcony, which was greeted by jeers, Mishima stepped inside and performed seppuku, ritual disembowelment and suicide.
‘Mishima is lucid in the midst of emotional confusion,’ wrote Christopher Isherwood, ‘funny in the midst of despair.’
The New York Times called him ‘one of the outstanding writers of the world.’
I look forward to reading The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea with you, starting next Friday.
Other Coming Attractions
There’s a sneak preview of our upcoming monthly read-alongs here.
And as I’ve mentioned, over the course of 2026, we will be reading The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, from January to December. This read-along will be available for free for all subscribers. More details to follow soon, including a discussion of the various different English translations in a couple of weeks’ time.
If you’re looking for a the perfect Christmas present, look no further than the Hatchards Classic Book Club annual book subscription. You (or a friend) could receive all the books we read each month here on Read the Classics, beautifully gift-wrapped and delivered to your door, anywhere in the world, as well as a year’s complimentary subscription to Read the Classics, so you can also choose to read along with us, if you wish. To find out more, follow this link or email Hatchards directly: subscriptions@hatchards.co.uk
Anna Karenina (10 of 14)
We’ve finished the tenth instalment of the novel – what a lovely, pastoral instalment. Here are my thoughts:
I’d love to hear yours!
As I say in the video above, my favourite section of this month’s instalment was the extending snipe-hunting episode – and in particular the incredible moment when Tolstoy gives us Laska’s stream of consciousness (page 595 in the Oxford edition).
Tolstoy has an almost uncanny ability to render the dog’s-eye-view of the situation:
Amongst the familiar smells of roots, marsh grasses, rusty water, and the foreign smell of horse dung, Laska immediately detected the scent of a bird whose smell excited her more than any other. . . . As she drew in air through her dilated nostrils, she immediately sensed that not only their tracks but they themselves were right there in front of her, and not just one, but many of them. . . . Although she did not see what was underfoot and was annoyed at stumbling on the high tussocks and landing in the water, her strong, supple legs carried her, and she began to make the circle which would make everything clear to her. She was picking up their scent with ever greater intensity and precision, and suddenly it became perfectly clear to her that one of them was there, behind that tussock, five paces in front of her, and so she stopped and her whole body froze.
This act of putting us inside Laska’s mind is a beautiful example of ostranenie, or ‘making strange’ – the technique identified by the Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky – and usually translated as ‘defamiliarisation’.
In 1917, Shklovsky published the essay ‘Art as Technique’, in which he says that:
The technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar,’ to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object: the object is not important.
After we see an object several times, we begin to recognise it. The object is in front of us and we know about it, but we do not see it – hence we cannot say anything significant about it. Art removes objects from the automatism of perception.
He brings in Tolstoy as the supreme manipulator of ostranenie:
Tolstoy makes the familiar seem strange by not naming the familiar object. He describes an object as if he were seeing it for the first time, an event as if it were happening for the first time. In describing something he avoids the accepted names of its parts and instead names corresponding parts of other objects. For example, in ‘Shame’ Tolstoy ‘defamiliarizes’ the idea of flogging in this way: ‘to strip people who have broken the law, to hurl them to the floor’, and ‘to rap on their bottoms with switches,’ and, after a few lines, ‘to lash about on the naked buttocks.’ Then he remarks:
Just why precisely this stupid, savage means of causing pain and not any other - why not prick the shoulders or any part of the body with needles, squeeze the hands or the feet in a vice, or anything like that?
I apologise for this harsh example, but it is typical of Tolstoy’s way of pricking the conscience. The familiar act of flogging is made unfamiliar both by the description and by the proposal to change its form without changing its nature. Tolstoy uses this technique of ‘defamiliarization’ constantly.
Presenting the snipe hunt from the point of view of Laska is another example of this technique. The dog doesn’t name the snipe – they are simply ‘the birds whose smell excited her more than any other’ – and the combination of her experienced circling technique, low-to-the-ground view and canine intuition transform the scene into something fresh, gripping and memorable.
You can read Shklovsky’s full essay here.
I hope you enjoy the next monthly instalment of Anna Karenina. On 28th November we will discuss Part Six, Chapters 16-32. These chapters formed the eleventh instalment of the novel, first published in the Russian Messenger in February 1877.
Here are links to our previous Anna Karenina posts:
The Schedule (18 December 2024)
Leo Tolstoy (3 January 2025)
0. Introductions (10 January)
1. Part One, Chapters 1-23 – and Nabokov on Time (31 January)
2. Part One, Chapters 24-34, Part Two, Chapters 1-11 – and John Sutherland on Anna’s English novel (28 February)
3. Part Two, Chapters 12-29 – and Sergei Eisenstein at the races (28 March)
4. Part Two, Chapters 30-35, Part Three, Chapters 1-12 – and the Mowing Scene (25 April)
5. Part Three, Chapters 13-32 – and the Mirror of the Revolution (30 May)
6. Part Four, Chapters 1-17 – and Nabokov’s double nightmare (27 June)
7. Part Four, Chapters 18-23, Part Five, Chapters 1-6 – and the Mystery of Crowning (25 July)
8. Part Five, Chapters 7-20 – and Aleksandr Voronsky on Art (29 August)
9. Part Six, Chapters 1-15 – and Patti (26 September)
