Showing posts with label Russia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Russia. Show all posts

Wednesday, October 16, 2019

Travel riches

In various ways, the past few Type M posts have been about setting. Airports, our favourite places to write, and visiting new parts of the country. I too have been thinking about setting. I recently returned from a trip to Russia, with brief detours into Finland and Sweden. It's why I missed my last Type M post. I had a fight with Google, who wasn't happy with my trying to log in on a different device (my mini-iPad) in the middle of the Baltic Sea. It was even less happy when I couldn't confirm my identity using the code they sent to my iPhone (which had a Russian sim card that didn't work on the ferry to Stockholm). It deemed me a security threat, and I had to wait until I was home to convince it otherwise. Clearly the tech world has not caught up with world travelling.

I love travelling the world and seeing different landscapes, cultures, city-scapes, and lifestyles. Admittedly, one can do little more than scratch the surface in two weeks, but even two weeks through the eyes of an eager stranger can be enlightening. In preparation for my trip to Russia, I started to read A Gentleman in Moscow, set in the decades following the Communist Revolution. The author's wry, charming observations on Soviet life provided a rich backdrop to the sights I was seeing, especially now that Russia is in the post-Soviet era, allowing me an even longer view of history. I visited the summer and winter palaces of the tsars, which rival le Palais de Versailles in opulent, gilt-dripping excess. It is this lifestyle that our hero in the book lived as a young Count, and it was fun to imagine him, if not in these grand halls, at least dancing in something similar. And it was sobering to imagine the struggles of the peasants on whose backs all this extravagance was built.

The Winter Palace, Saint Petersburg
I wasn't able to finish the book while I was there, so I finished it at home, and this provided another kind of enjoyment. I had walked many of the squares and streets the author described in the book, and I'd sipped champagne at the famed Metropol where the Count spent forty years under house arrest. I could picture the potted palms and the marble floors.

Champagne at the Metropol Hotel with Vicki Delany
I could picture the grandeur of Nevsky Prospect in Saint Petersburg and the bridges over the Fontanka Canal. I could picture the walk up from the Moskva River past St. Basil's Cathedral into Red Square. What fun to follow a character through streets in your mind!

St. Basil's Cathedral, Moscow
I have always made a point of visiting the settings that I write about, spending time there and trying to walk all the paths my characters will walk. I have travelled across Canada for each of the four Amanda Doucette books I have written so far, and have loved every minute of the exploration. Well, perhaps not the snowstorm in Calgary last fall I have learned so much about my country, and I hope that my books take my readers on a virtual voyage of discovery, even if they have never visited the places in reality.

I have also written ten books set in my own city of Ottawa, and I know how much local readers love buzzing around the familiar streets with Inspector Green. Here's a little hint of what is to come... An eleventh Inspector Green novel, which I have only just begun. Who knows what back alleys and elegant neighbourhoods I will drag into the spotlight this time!

Saturday, February 14, 2015

Waldeinsamkeit and Winnetou

 Jeanne Matthews is the author of the Dinah Pelerin international mysteries published by Poisoned Pen Press, including Bones of Contention, Bet Your Bones, Bonereapers, Her Boyfriend’s Bones, and Where the Bones Are Buried. Originally from Georgia, Jeanne lives with her husband in Renton, Washington. For more information, visit her website at www.jeannematthews.com. Or, follow her on Twitter @JMMystery.
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Sometimes one word can convey a mood or a sentiment that requires many words to articulate. It may hold special meaning in the language and culture that coined it, or the feelings that it connotes may have to be experienced to be understood. Vladimir Nabokov, who was fluent in both English and Russian, struggled to translate the Russian word toska. “No single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning.”

While in Berlin researching my new Dinah Pelerin mystery, Where the Bones Are Buried, I discovered a similarly complex German word – Waldeinsamkeit. The approximate meaning is the feeling of being alone in the woods, of being connected to Nature. During the Romantic period between 1800 and 1850, there was a great longing for a place of tranquility in which to contemplate the loneliness of existence. Poets wrote about the quest for spiritual wholeness in Nature and the aesthetic and healing pleasures of woodland beauty. But as Germany transformed from a rural country to an economic and industrial power, the cities grew and the forests shrank. Two devastating World Wars in the 20th Century reduced the realm of Nature still more.

Today, Germany is one of the most densely wooded countries in Europe, but its forests are not primeval. Most are planted and maintained for the production of timber. It’s hard to be alone in the forest and there’s no longer the danger – or the thrill – that one might fall into the clutches of witches or wolves. The enchanted forests found in the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm have disappeared. The hero or heroine can no longer enter into the dark unknown and encounter magic. In his novel Rat, the writer Günter Grass expressed that sense of loss:

“Because men are killing the forests the fairy tales are running away… [they] have trotted off to the cities and end badly.”

The idea of the forest occupies a profound place in the German psyche, which may explain their fascination with the American frontier and the untamed tribes who once roamed there. This fascination began with the adventure novels of Karl May, who created a fictional Apache chief named Winnetou, a “wise and noble savage.” Without ever seeing the landscape he wrote about, May pictured the scenery and characters so vividly that he lost track of reality. He came to believe that he was the living embodiment of Old Shatterhand, the white blood brother of Winnetou. May died in 1912, but his tales of Winnetou and the “Wild West” continue to have a grip on the German imagination. Over two hundred million copies of his books have been sold and they have inspired numerous festivals and theme parks. One such park, Pullman City in southern Germany, is special. A recreated frontier town straight out of a Clint Eastwood western, it encourages visitors to regard themselves as actual cowboys and Indians rather than as spectators. Like Karl May, they mingle reality with fantasy and join in the saloon gunfights and Indian rain dances.

The inspiration for Where the Bones Are Buried occurred when I learned about der Indianer clubs, in which aficionados dress as Indians, adopt Indian names, collect Indian artifacts, and gather for drumming ceremonies and powwows. Some go so far as to live in teepees in their back gardens, sew their own deerskin clothes, and eschew all technology. At first, I thought this Indian obsession bizarre, even laughable. But when these people speak of their affinity and nostalgia for the Comanches and Apaches of long ago, they are touchingly earnest. It’s an astonishing subculture that defies both time and geography. Since Dinah is a cultural anthropologist and also part Seminole, the phenomenon seemed a perfect motif for another of her foreign exploits.

I don’t know if the German desire to play Indian reflects something as psychologically abstruse as toska – a vague yearning for wilderness and for a romanticized past that never really existed. I don’t know if the concept of Waldeinsamkeit blends into the mythology of Winnetou. Maybe wearing feathered headdresses and buffalo horns is a way to hold onto a semblance of magic, a way to keep the fairy tales from trotting off to the cities forever. Understanding the mystery requires a journey across cultures, which is the kind of journey Dinah loves best.