The Birds Fall Down

[taelle]

I'm reading The Birds Fall Down by Rebecca West. At first it was very annoying as all the foreigners' books about Russia are - I couldn't believe what they were speaking about was Russia. But after a while it stopped mattering and the book became about people. But it's still strange in a way I can't quite define. I don't think I ever read a book

Comments

[oursin]

it feels not like a story but like a thought process

This feels to me like a very good way indeed to describe Dame Rebecca's writing - somewhere in the long coda to Black Lamb and Grey Falcon she talks about writing as a process of finding out what she thinks about things and why they trouble/concern her, also the essay 'Visit to a Godmother' she talks about this exploratory process as the root of her writing. And from very early on (journalism written in her teens) she was remarking that 'men are terribly poor stuff' - and looking at the way the ones in her life treated her, not surprising, perhaps.

A heroine who is, indeed, almost totally impervious to any hints about sexual/romantic love in her vicinity.

I wonder if there was an 'imagined Russia' for British writers and intellectuals of the Vict/Edwardian eras, based on their reading of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, etc, which never came into contact with the geographical actuality? (I suspect there was also the imagined Soviet utopia of the 20s/30s for a similar group of later

[taelle]

omewhere in the long coda to Black Lamb and Grey Falcon she talks about writing as a process of finding out what she thinks about things and why they trouble/concern her, also the essay 'Visit to a Godmother' she talks about this exploratory process as the root of her writing

Sounds interesting. Pity there was only this one book in the library (actually I picked it up mostly because of you mentioning this author).

Imagined Russia... I've been reading the writings of Natalia Trauberg, a marvellous Russian translator of Chesterton, Woodhouse, Sayers etc., and she uses often the idea/word which she took from I don't recall where - Logris, which seems to be the ideal, the idea of some place/country, distilled from its ordinary existence. This must necessarily be some OTHER place - was Russia the most other, and yet near, place that they could imagine?

[oursin]

I wonder if she means 'Logres', which is a word sometimes used for the utopian England under Arthurian rule, and was quite in vogue with the Inklings - Charles Williams wrote a long poem called 'Taliessin through Logres', and in That Hideous Strength Lewis has something about the emergence of the true Logres as a kind of Platonic England. I can't find a good definition via Google (they all seem weak/misleading to my understanding of the term) - that one is the least bad.

I'm sure there is a much bigger story about imagined countries, and whether they are the imagined ideal by the inhabitants of the country itself, or the way other people imagine them (apparently around 1900 there were various German writers producing Westerns... ).

[taelle]

That is probably so - since I only saw this word in Russian, I transliterated it back into English, and Trauberg wrote about the Inklings a lot.

And one has to wonder how much the imagined Russia of the Russians (because it does exist; there was a film in the late 80s or early 90s called "The Russia we lost") intersects (I'm not sure if that's a proper English word but my mind's stuck on it) with the imagined Russia of other countries. Back to Laura, for example - what does she really believe about Russia? Or does it even matter to her? Because it doesn's sound as if she's quite buying anybody's arguments.