The Master and Margarita (4 of 5)
Chimeras, the Blue Moon and the Devil's Podium
Dear classics reader,
In this week’s golden ointment box you will find:
Birthday wishes to Nerval;
A preview of coming attractions and other notices;
And for paid subscribers:
The week’s new classics – including a new translation of St John of the Cross;
And our fourth discussion of The Master and Margarita – with notes on Walpurgisnacht and living chessmen.
This newsletter may be too long for your email inbox. If so, please click ‘View entire message’ at the bottom – or visit Substack.
Happy Birthday Nerval
Gérard de Nerval was born on this day in 1808.
Gérard Labrunie was the son of a French army doctor. He published political poetry as a teenager and translated Goethe’s Faust at the age of nineteen (see more on Faust below). He was a friend of Théophile Gautier, a follower of Victor Hugo and worked for a time as a ghost-writer for Alexandre Dumas.
In 1841, he suffered a breakdown and remained mentally unstable for the rest of his life. During this period, he traced his genealogy back to the Roman Emperor Nerva, which suggested his nom de plume. Confined to a sanatorium in Passy, Nerval described his madness in the memoir Aurélia, based on Dante’s Vita Nuova.
His last days were spent as a vagrant on the streets of Paris and on the morning of 26 January 1855, he was found hanged in the Rue de la Vieille-Lanterne. For Baudelaire, Nerval was one of the few writers who remained, even in death, ‘forever lucid’.
Selected Writings by Gérard de Nerval (1839-55)
Poet, visionary, short-story writer and autobiographer, Nerval explored the uncertain borderlines between dream and reality, irony and madness, autobiography and fiction with his groundbreaking writings.
This comprehensive selection of his works includes Aurélia, the memoir of his madness; the haunting novella of love and memory Sylvie (considered to be a masterpiece by Proust); the hermetic sonnets of The Chimeras; as well as Nerval’s experimental fictions and selections from his correspondence, which demonstrate his lucid awareness of how nineteenth-century psychiatry consigned his fertile imagination to the status of mental illness.
Together these pieces confirm Nerval’s place as a pioneering modernist, a precursor of the French Symbolists and a vital model for such writers as Marcel Proust, André Breton, Antonin Artaud and Michel Leiris.
[UK] Penguin Classics | 448 pages | translated by Richard Sieburth
[US] Wakefield Press | 144 pages | translation by Napoleon Jeffries | as Little Castles of Bohemia
Coming Attractions and Other Notices
Future monthly read-alongs
For a sneak preview of our upcoming monthly read-alongs, take a peak here. I have recently added our November read-along to the list.
June – The Third Policeman
Next month we will be reading Flann O’Brien’s absurd, hilarious, nightmarish The Third Policeman. Join us!
We will be reading over three weeks, starting in a fortnight’s time on Friday 5 June. Here are the details.
The Evesham Festival of Words
If you’re near Worcestershire on Friday 26 June, come to the Evesham Festival of Words! I will be speaking at 3.30pm about the history of the Penguin Classics, which marks its 80th anniversary this year. Here are all the details.
The Idler Festival
And then if you’re in London on Sunday 12 July, it would be lovely to see you at the glorious Idler Festival at Fenton House in Hampstead. I will be leading a guided walk of literary Hampstead at 12 noon on the Sunday. Here are the details.
Annual book subscription
If you’re enjoying our read-alongs, why not treat yourself to the Hatchards Classic Book Club annual book subscription?
You (or a friend) can 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 choose to read along with us, if you wish.
To find out more, follow this link or email Hatchards directly: subscriptions@hatchards.co.uk
