On our 2010 visit to Palma, the capital of the Spanish island of Mallorca, Maggie and I made a point of hiking a mile or so up a path to visit famous Bellver Castle, which overlooks the city (and its magnificent cathedral) and the broad Bay of Palma.
The castle’s name is derived from the Latin phrase bellum verum, meaning “beautiful view,” and it’s that and more.
A.S. Boyd
Bellver is the only round castle in Mallorca, and one of the few in Europe. It was built for King Jaume II of Aragon and Mallorca (r. 1276–1311), and while it served him and several of his royal descendants as a residence, it eventually became a prison. As Mary Stuart Boyd mentions in her book The Fortunate Isles: Life and Travel in Majorca, Minorca and Iviza (Methuen,1911), Bellver had “frowned on many tragic sights,” but Maggie I were visiting on a sunny day, and it so happens that I’m writing about it on another, equally sunny day, so I’ll leave it to you to read up on those events if you care to. I think I’ll just enjoy the view …
A.S. Boyd
Our photo at the top of today’s post shows the castle’s donjon, the fortified tower to which the castle’s occupants could retreat if the castle were under attack. Besides living quarters, it featured a well and ample room for food, so that, if necessary, the occupants could survive almost indefinitely. The sketches are by Boyd’s husband, A.S. Boyd, and the Spanish stamp dates from 1970.
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As I expand and update my book When the Going Was Good, I’m posting revised entries from the first edition. Today’s deals with a memoir by French pilot and writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, who was born in Lyon, France, in 1900.
Wind, Sand and Stars (Terre des hommes. New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1939)
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Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was in a unique position to write about the early days of aviation. In 1926, as a student pilot for Latécoère, the first commercial French line, he carried the mail from France to Morocco and Senegal. Subsequently he worked as postal manager in Villa Bens (today Tarfaya) in what was then the southern zone of Spanish Morocco, and directed the line’s Argentine branch, pioneering a route between Buenos Aires and Tierra del Fuego. Later still, Saint-Exupery piloted hydroplanes between Algiers and Marseilles and flew reconnaissance missions in aid of the Allied war effort during World War II.
Unlike most pilots, however, Saint-Exupéry was able to translate the very essence of his vocation into literature, publishing his first story in 1926.
Fellow writer André Gide had suggested that Saint-Exupéry put together a “sheaf” of writings about flying, and Saint-Exupéry obliged. He included reminiscences of his early days in flying school, the story of a fellow pilot whose unbreakable yet selfless willpower helped him survive a crash in the Andes, an account of his own near-fatal crash in the Egyptian desert, and some pages of reportage from the Spanish Civil War.
Despite its seemingly varied content, Wind, Sand and Stars is a coherent work rather than a miscellany. The work’s opening chapters—especially “The Craft” and “The Men”—establish a philosophical tone that Saint-Exupéry maintains throughout. And although other sections turn to specific events, they are stripped of mundane details. Because Saint-Exupéry was reluctant to finalize his text, the English-language edition differs from the French, whose title, Terre des hommes, can be translated as “The Planet Where Men Live.” The English title emphasizes the work’s adventurous spirit, while the French suggests its almost mystical character. In either version the work is intimate yet epic, the record of an individual’s effort to establish his oneness with humankind and the universe. Saint-Exupéry took the final step in that effort in 1944, embarking upon a reconnaissance flight over German-occupied France from which he never returned.
If you’re searching for a good edition of Wind, Sand and Stars, the original English translation was made by Lewis Galantière. The Time edition (New York, 1965) contains a preface from the Time Reading Program’s editors and an introduction by Pierre Clostermann. The Penguin edition (London, 2000) is a new translation by William Rees based directly on the French text, and includes an introduction by Rees and a note on the differences among the various versions.
Saint-Exupéry’s other books include Southern Mail (1929), Night Flight (1931), Flight to Arras (1942), and the children’s classic The Little Prince (published posthumously in 1943).
For further information on Saint-Exupéry, I suggest: Curtis Cate, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: His Life and Times (New York: Putnam, 1970); Joy D. Marie Robinson, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (Boston: Twayne, 1984); Stacy Schiff, Saint-Exupéry: A Biography (New York: Knopf, 1994); and Paul Webster, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: The Life and Death of the Little Prince (London: Macmillan, 1993).
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September 19 is the anniversary of the death of Greek composer Nikos Skalkottas, arguably his country’s most talented composer.
Born in 1904 on the island of Euboea, Skalkottas began taking violin lessons at the age of 3 (!), and went on to graduate from the Athens Conservatory in 1920. Thanks to a scholarship, he was able to continue his musical education in Berlin, and for a time studied composition under Arnold Schoenberg, whose atonal twelve-tone technique, for better or worse, came to hold sway among a number of composers. Skalkottas adopted aspects of Schoenberg’s method for about two-thirds of his works, including the tone poem or (as it has also been characterized) programmatic symphony The Return of Ulysses (1942). Despite years of effort, I’m unable to appreciate such music, although many composers and musicians clearly can. If you’re curious, you can listen to Nikos Christodoulou conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra in a performance here.
Far more enjoyable are Skalkottas’s tonal works, particularly those based on genuine Greek rhythms and melodies. The composer began writing these shortly after his return to Greece in 1933, apparently at the behest of his father, who was a flutist. A further spur was Skalkottas’s involvement with the Greek Musical Folklore Archive of the French Institute in Athens. Here Skalkottas and several other composers and musicians worked on transcribing the hundreds of Pathé recordings of Greek folk music in the archive’s collection. Skalkottas was assigned recordings from the islands of Sifnos and Crete, but he also located some obscure printed scores on his own. According to the Archive’s director. Melpo Merlier, Skalkottas “not only did by far the best work, scientifically, but also worked most conscientiously, and our collaboration proved to be the most pleasant one.”
The composer’s experience at the archive resulted in a short time in his 36 Greek Dances for Orchestra. Those that were performed in Athens proved quite popular, and Skalkottas subsequently revised a number of them and reorchestrated several more for various combinations of instruments before his death in 1949. You can listen to eight of his dances, based on the 1948 edition of the French Institute in Athens and performed by the Urals State Philharmonic Orchestra (Sverdlovskaya, Russia) under the direction of Byron Fidetzis, on YouTube here. You’ll also find others played by Christodoulou and the BBC SO, but the British musicians’ playing is so refined that the performances aren’t as much fun as those by their livelier Russian counterparts.
For the details about the composition of the Dances, I’m indebted to the notes in the 1991 Lyra recordings by Fidetzis and the Urals State PO.The image on the cover of this CD is a watercolor, Dance at Delphi (1830), by William Kinnaird, and is reproduced courtesy of the Benaki Museum, Athens. The portrait of Skalkottas is by an unknown photographer, while the photograph at the bottom was taken (again, by an unknown photographer) in 1949 during the composer’s last visit to Thessaloniki in 1949. Behind him you see the Greek port’s famous White Tower, built by the Ottomans in the 15th century and rebuilt in the 16th.
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September 9 is the birthday of Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, and in preparation I’ve been researching the famed writer’s short 1863 novel The Cossacks. It draws on Tolstoy’s experiences in the Caucasus, the mountainous region between the Black and Caspian seas, in the early 1850s—a time during which Russian forces, aided by their Cossack allies, were involved in a struggle to subjugate the region’s indigenous inhabitants.
Plagued by guilt over his dissolute lifestyle, Tolstoy traveled to the Caucasus in the company of his eldest brother, Nikolay, who was then an army officer and had already served in the region. After proceeding down the Volga River by barge from the city of Kazan, the pair reached Astrakhan, some 60 miles west of the Caspian Sea. From there they traveled by coach to Kizliar, a settlement in the delta of the Terek River, where Nikolay was quartered (and which is now in the Russian “republic” of Dagestan). Shortly afterward, Nikolay’s battery was transferred to a camp near the village of Stary-Yurt (now Tolstoy-Yurt) in order to protect a sanatorium that had been built to take advantage of the area’s hot mineral springs. Writing to one of his aunts, Tolstoy described the setting this way: “This is a large mountain of piled-up rocks. Some of these in their fall have formed grottos; some are still hanging high in the air. In many places streams of hot water are rushing down noisily. The white steam from this boiling water envelops and obscures, in the morning especially, the upper part of the rocks.”
It was here, in a picturesque setting of mountains and streams of steaming water, that Leo spent much of the following three years. Initially, he served as a volunteer beside his brother, but he enlisted formally in the army in February 1852.
The protagonist of The Cossacks, Dmitry Andreich Olenin, is very much a portrait of the young Tolstoy himself—irresponsible, uncertain of himself, and torn in his desires. The naïve young man is billeted in the Cossack village of Novomlinsk; befriends an aging Cossack, Eroshka, whose primary interests are drinking and hunting; tries (not very successfully) to befriend a younger Cossack named Luka; and woos (again, not very successfully) a young woman named Maryanka who will soon be betrothed to Luka. In short, Olenin’s dreams of living as simply as they do are doomed, and although Eroshka appears to care about him, calling him “brother,” it’s clear that the old Cossack’s sentiments are fleeting. The novel’s high point involves a skirmish with Chechen raiders who’ve crossed the Terek River—a skirmish in which Luka is fatally wounded. And yet …
Tolstoy worked intermittently on The Cossacks for years, and saw publication of the first section of it, in the periodical The Russian Herald, only in 1863.
One of the novel’s aspects that I’ve noticed only on rereading is its mixture of elements. In his Rise of the Russian Novel (1973), critic Richard Freeborn describes it as “an ill-assorted amalgam of styles and themes”—a harsh assessment, but one that I understand more clearly now. There are several passages of cultural exposition that are interesting enough in themselves, but otherwise impede the story. But, would Tolstoy have integrated them more fully into his narrative had he written the novel later? I don’t think so, as he was never hesitant to slip miniature lectures into his books, as he does at the end of his vast War and Peace.
As A.N. Wilson writes in his long biography Tolstoy (1988), the writer’s literary career “really began in the Caucasus,” and The Cossacks is the first major achievement of that career.
My Penguin Classics edition of The Cossacks and Other Stories is translated and Paul Foote and David McDuff, and features a detail from the painting Cossacks Charging into Battle by Franz Roubaud (1856-1928). The map of the Caucasus was published by the U.S.S.R. Travel Company in 1930, while the painting Cossacks near a Mountain River is also by Roubaud. The portrait of Tolstoy dates from 1854.
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Corvo is the smallest and northernmost island of the Azores, and (as of 2021) has a population of only 384. Although the archipelago is a part of Portugal, it lies nearly 900 miles west of Lisbon, and is on the North American Plate. So far as we know, Corvo was discovered in 1452 by Portuguese navigator Diogo de Teive, but (and here’s where things get interesting) the mariner is also said to have found a statue on the island of a man sitting astride a horse and pointing … west.
In his Historia del Reyno de Portugal (1530), Manuel de Faria e Sousa describes the discovery this way: “In the Azores, on the summit of a mountain which is called the mountain of the Crow [i.e., Corvo], they found the statue of a man mounted on a horse without saddle, his head uncovered, the left hand resting on the horse, the right extended toward the west. The whole was mounted on a pedestal which was of the same kind of stone as the statue. Underneath some unknown characters were carved in the rock.”
And in his Chronica do Principe D. João III (1567), Portuguese historian and court official Damião de Goes has this to say: “In the island of Corvo … there was found on the top of a hill on the north-west side, a stone statue placed on a ledge, and consisting of a man astride on the bare back of a horse,… with one hand on the mane of the horse, and the right arm extended, the fingers of the hand folded, with the exception of the index finger, which pointed to the west.”
Early accounts also mention that the statue and the pedestal were removed and sent to Lisbon, but over the following centuries, as such things are wont to do, they’ve disappeared.
There have been more recent and far more scientific investigations into the early history of the Azores, however. Writing in a 2021 issue of The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a team led by Santiago Giralt (Geosciences Barcelona and the Spanish National Research Council) suggest an alternative theory for the discovery of the archipelago. In “Climate Change Facilitated the Early Colonization of the Azores Archipelago during Medieval Times,” the scientists write, “The occupation of these islands began between 700 and 850 CE, 700 years earlier than suggested by documentary sources. These early occupations caused widespread ecological and landscape disturbance and raise doubts about the islands’ presumed pristine nature during Portuguese arrival.”Theydate the “first appearance of unequivocal evidence of human activities” on Corvo itself to 850 CE, plus or minus 60 years.(That’s the island you see above in a photograph taken by Luissilveira and reproduced courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.)
In the past, commentators have suggested that the Phoenicians or the Carthaginians (who would have sailed into the Atlantic from the Strait of Gibraltar) may have been responsible for the statue. However, Giralt’s team posit a discovery at the end of the early Middle Ages by people “from northeastern Europe”—in other words, the Norse. It was a period when the “westerly winds were weaker, facilitating arrivals to the archipelago from northeastern Europe and inhibiting exploration from southern Europe.” They cite “variations in pollen, plant macrofossil, [and] charcoal particles,” mention that “northern European mice contribute significantly to the Azorean mouse gene pool,” and refer to the “presence of the archipelago on maps before the official Portuguese discovery.” You can read the entire paper here.
Such scientific studies are admittedly less exciting than a mysterious lost statue, but they don’t quite rule out the possibility that it once existed. Not quite. After all, horses were important in Norse culture. In addition, there are confirmed remains of a Norse settlement northwest of the Azores at L’Anse aux Meadows on the shore of Newfoundland in Canada, and there may well be more. It’s intriguing that the tantalizing accounts of the vanished statue that I’ve mentioned seem to be somewhat in accord with the most modern scientific discoveries. It’s either a coincidence, or …
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