First published in 1910, this is a novella by Ricarda Huch (1864-1947). I read the German original (downloadable from Gutenberg), but the year 2017 (yes, more than a century later...) saw the appearance of the first English translation (by Jamie Bulloch).

The book, set in Russia, is told entirely in letters, and covers a period of about three months. While I am not generally a fan of the epistolary format (they can be disjointed, and hard to dig into), this one I found very powerful. There's a looming quality that only increases as the book progresses, and the fact that correspondence drives the plot gives us a more intimate appreciation, as onlookers, of the multiple ironies that build up over the course of the text, unbeknownst to our epistolarians themselves.

The first letter, dated "5 May 19--", introduces us to Lju, who has inveigled himself into the household of Jegor von Rasimkara (the governor of a Russian province that includes St Petersburg), ostensibly to act as bodyguard and secretary, but actually to assassinate him...

We're at the Rasimkara summer residence, on the country estate of Kremskoje. The governor's life has been threatened because he closed the city's universities in order to crack down on student unrest, the leaders of which are now facing the death penalty. It's actually Rasimkara's wife, Lusinja, who is most in fear for the governor's safely; he himself is pretty phlegmatic about the whole thing.

Lju, on the other hand, is a revolutionary. He's a very cool customer, who rapidly finds himself welcomed and accepted not only by the governor and his wife, but by their three 20-something children, son Welja, and daughters Katja and Jessika (indeed, the latter two both fall in love with him).


Russia, 1993. It's a matter of deep regret to me that any chance of returning to Russia seems to have been pushed into a future too remote to be meaningful

Bit by bit, we learn more about the family, who come across as a loving and likeable little band, and worthy of our sympathies. But, of course, they're part of a bigger problem. In Lju's initial sketch, he notes "something childishly harmless about the whole family" -- a charm that is nevertheless undergirded by "boundless arrogance".

He enlarges on the contrast like this: "The family has all the merits and demerits of its class. Perhaps we cannot even speak of demerits; they have the supreme demerit of belonging to a time that must pass, and of standing in the way of a time that is developing. When a fine old tree has to fall to make way for a railway line, it hurts; you stand by it as though with an old friend, and admire and mourn it until its fall. It is undeniably a pity about the governor, who is a fine example of his species; however, I believe that he has already passed his peak... He is, as is often the case with people who are regarded as severe and unsympathetic in office, benevolent, even infinitely good-natured, to all individuals as long as he encounters loving compliance and submission. Rebellion stuns him... He seems to me like a sun... and does not doubt that the planets are in their element revolving around him all their lives."

Admiring the governor's noble head, he admits: "I thought how much I would rather make that head more accessible to my thoughts and intentions than to destroy it with a bullet." He would dispense with the murder if only he could succeed in controlling and influencing his target. But although the governor is malleable in small things, he has an iron-like determination when it comes to important matters.

Our would-be assassin also becomes fond of the young people, and works to ensure they are out of the way before his mission is due for completion. Conversely, the young Rasimkaras are also open to Lju's revolutionary ideas, which he (very carefully) shares with them. They understand that there's something wrong with the way things are being run in Russia, and they see the justice in the students' demands. But they are not activists.

Welja recognizes that Lju is basically a revolutionary, "only there is something else that raises his views sky high above the average". Nevertheless, Welja misjudges the young man, categorizing him as a theoretician of revolt, rather than a practitioner. His father, on the other hand, has no inkling of these qualities. It wouldn't occur to him, says Welja, that someone in decent clothes, who treats him politely and doesn't contradict him, could somehow be situated outside the system as he knows it.

Katja at one point vociferously resists her father's idea that it's the rebels who bear responsibility for the closure of the university. That amounts to slandering the victims, she says, whereas the leaders of the protests are martyrs, who acted bravely and selflessly. She starts out very enthusiastic about Lju, but her nose is put out of joint by the (admittedly very tenuous) bond that seems to have formed between him and Jessika. This distancing makes her view their new household-companion with more suspicious eyes. As she writes to her brother, Welja: "You don't even see that Lju should not stay with us if he has the views he told you about. We might think that Papa is wrong, and that ultimately the other side is not to blame for killing him, but that is quite different from a stranger thinking it. What do we actually know about Lju?... Don't you see that he really would have Papa killed quite calmly?... He fixes his icy eyes on Papa, and thinks: actually they would be right if they killed you."

Their mother, too, while continuing to be captivated by Lju, is aware not only that does she not entirely understand him, but also that he might have very different ideas. She even wonders whether he thinks he shouldn't protect them, adding: "Oh God, all people are right, all those who hate and murder and slander -- oh God, what a world! What an entanglement!"

Lusinja is full of respect for her husband's character, asserting that he has never acted from motives of cruelty or vengeance, but has always believed himself to be doing the right thing, even if it was difficult; nor has he enriched himself illegally as so many others have done. But she is acutely aware of his vulnerability. Whereas she used to call him her "immortal", she now clearly recognizes the aura of mortality that surrounds him.



It's amazing, then, what can be done just through a bunch of letters...

There's also plenty of suspense. As readers, with that crucial information about Lju's motives, we realize that the family misses LOTS of clues. There are numerous points at which things could have taken a different direction, and the dangers of cognitive bias are all too apparent. Which is really quite salutary... We need to trust our instincts more...

And, again because we're privy to the threat advancing inexorably towards the family, we are able to appreciate the melancholy that starts to gather round that sun-lit, rose-filled, strawberry-perfumed place: "Wherever I look," says Lusinja, "everything is dark."

In fact, as Keith Leopold points out, these themes -- the consciousness both of transience and of the irony of life -- are very characteristic of Huch, and the format of The Last Summer allows her to revisit them very effectively: "From the title on, the reader is constantly aware that death and radical change are near at hand: the happiness of the Rasimkara family, their way of life, even the lives of some of them are doomed from the start... [Irony] is expressed in the basic situation: to protect the Governor the one man is chosen who is determined to take the Governor's life."

The epistolary structure also enables Huch to exploit "the power of the multiple narrator to create a world with no solid and objective basis". This gives the book a very modern feel: "Everyone is right and everyone is wrong. Everything is relative. The only truth is that there is no truth."



*_*_*

Knowing what we know in the wake of 1917, this family's situation comes across a microcosm of the Russian ruling class... Huch might not have been able to foresee those events, but after the "first Russian Revolution" of 1905, she might have felt the writing was on the wall. The beginning of that year's unrest was marked by Bloody Sunday (22 January), when over 400 demonstrators were killed or wounded by the Imperial Guard. (This is the slaughter so memorably commemorated in Shostakovich's 11th Symphony.)

Huch is not recording actual events, but her content is clearly linked to actuality. D. Morison, who writes very interestingly about Russian students of the era, concludes: "If the government had been more conciliatory and sensitive in its handling of [issues affecting the students], the series of confrontations which helped to develop a certain degree of political awareness amongst ordinary students could have been avoided. Government ineptitude drove them into the hands of the political activists, and made them into a political force of at any rate some significance in 1905."

Leopold comments: "Ricarda Huch's intention in Der letzte Sommer is not to depict a revolutionary situation in Russia, but the revolutionary situation per se. The Russian setting is merely a matter of convenience, for such events as Ricarda Huch depicts were taking place in Russia at about the time the story was written... [The book embodies] the realization that had come to Ricarda Huch in her historical studies; namely, that in any such situation there is always equal justification: both sides are right and both sides are wrong."



*_*_*

Huch is a fascinating woman, whose work seems to have been unjustly neglected. Here's Clive James on her significance (she features in his book Cultural Amnesia): "Ricarda Huch, the first lady of German humanism in modern times, can be thought of as a bridging figure between Germaine de Stael and Germaine Greer. Poet, novelist and above all historian of culture, she started out as the very model of the stylish female troublemaker, the upmarket bluestocking as inveterate social bugbear. Breaker of many male hearts, including those of her husbands, she began her career of role reversal as one of the first female graduates from Zurich University, where she studied history, philosophy and philology. (The universities of her native Germany still did not admit women.) Her books on romanticism retain their position as key works. Her historical novel Der dreissigjahriger Krieg (The Thirty Years War) richly demonstrates her uncommon gift for talking about the powerless as if they had the importance of the powerful. She got into history herself in 1933, when she publicly rejected the blandishments of the Nazis, who were keen to co-opt her prestige. After quitting her position as the first woman ever elected to the Prussian Academy of the Arts, she went into internal exile in Jena. A lifelong rebel against the class structure of capitalist society, after the war she stayed in the East, spending her last years as a figurehead: in the year of her death she was honorary president of the First German Writers Congress in Berlin. If she had lived to see the regime ossify, she would probably have written yet another book that her would-be masters would not have liked."

This is only my second Huch. In my recent post on Henry James, I referred to the book memorial I drew up after the Great Clear-Out that marked the transition between Australia and Malaysia. There I mention The Deruga Case by Ricarda Huch (published in 1917). I bought the book in 1981, and it's coded WROBPNTOA**. The letters stand for "Would Read Others But Probably Not This One Again", while the stars signify I really remember enjoying it, even if I can't remember much about the story. Actually, now I probably WOULD read this one again, and I've downloaded a couple more. Not done with Huch yet then...