As a teacher for young women and father of two daughters, I have, despite the fact that I am a man, assumed I might have some understanding of how transformative it can be for a female child to suffer from the bleeding that introduces her sexual maturation and long menstrual cycle.

My oldest and artistically gifted daughter recently asked me if I could possibly could remember a movie, or a novel, that touched upon the theme. All that came to my mind was Stephen King’s Carrie and the movie Brian de Palma based on that novel.

I also remembered a relatively unknown Italian children’s book. Of course, my daughter knew about the works of King and de Palma and not the least the children’s book, which had been written by a friend of hers. She even mentioned a horror movie I had never heard of – Valerie and HerWeek of Wonders. A kind of creepy Alice in Wonderland that hinted at a girl’s first confrontation with eroticism and threatening men. Menstruation was indicated by a drop of blood that initially fell on a flower.

My daughter told me that she several years ago had seen the film in Brighton and that it had not been particularly good. She remembered it had been about vampires. Since she recalled it as a “horror movie” I assumed it might have been a movie by Roger Corman, or one of Hammer Film’s more inferior and relatively unknown horror flicks. Or maybe something like Andy Warhol’s grotesque and, to put it mildly, blood-soaked Blood for Dracula, which was in fact directed by Paul Morrissey. In that film, Dracula travels down to Italy since he assumes that in a Catholic country there must be a greater access to virgin blood, the only thing he can feed on. But he is mistaken and suffers from violent vomiting, starvation and suffering, after attacking young women who treacherously had claimed to be virgins. When Warhol was asked about his contribution to the film, he replied: “I participate in the parties.” The film was in all its madness quite amusing, the set design was OK, while the historical environment and camera work were not at all as bad as I had expected. I guess so anyway, why would I else have remembered parts of it after fifty years?

However, it turned out that I was completely wrong. Valerie and Her Week of Wonders had been porduced in 1970 and is now considered to be part of the so-called ”Czech Wave”, with masterpieces which I had enjoyed in my Swedish hometown Hässleholm, where they were part of a range of movies from the Swedish Film Institute called Film Annorlunda, Different Movies. By purchasing an unusually cheap punch card, previously unimaginable worlds opened up to me twice a week, evoked by masters such as the Brazilian Glauber Rocha, the Senegalese Sèmbene Ousmane, the Japanese Kaneto Shindō, the Indian Satyajit Ray, and not the least Eastern Europeans such as the Pole Andrzej Wajda, the Hungarian István Szabo, and unforgettable pearls from the Czech wave – Miloš Forman’s The Firemen’s Ball, Jiří Menzel’s Closely Watched Trains and Juraj Herz’s The Cremator. The latter two were based on novels characterized by the playful, though at the same time darkly tragic and absurdly quiet narrative that characterizes so much Czech literature.

Jaromil Jireš’s Valerie and Her Week of Wonders has several admirers, though it does in my opinion not measure up to be mentioned together with the films I mentioned above. It is admittedly made in a lyrical fashion, with exquisite scenery. The Commander, who constantly changes shape – vampire, polecat, intriguer, father, ruthless lover – plays an important role in the novel and is quite frighteningly portrayed in the film, though all through it he remains superficial, sketchy. Monsters like Dracula or Frankenstein has in all their hideousness several human traits we can identify with, though in Jireš’s movie the Commander was unable to conjure any horror, fascination, or means of identification.

Likewise, much more could have been done with the character of the eerily perverted grandmother, who on the outside was endowed with a horrid kind of attraction, though her character did also develop into nothing more than an insipid exterior.

Valerie’s open, childishly healthy face is adorable, but the thirteen-year-old girl’s captivating freshness becomes polluted by the director’s soft-pornographic gaze.

Admittedly, the movie has a more veiled, pleasing look than the one that characterized the at the same time immensely popular Emanuelle-movies, grosser sequels to the Angélique dramas of the sixties, the first part of which was released by Communist censorship in 1969, five years after its Paris premiere. In the Soviet Union, Angélique sold more than forty-five million movie tickets and also became a huge popular success in Poland and Czechoslovakia. Of course, Emanuelle could not pass The Iron Curtain and the visually erotic starving Eastern Europeans had to make to do with a glimpse of Angélique’s naked breasts and artistic movies such as Valerie and her Week of Wonders.

Jireš Valerie consists of softed, shimmering images, which occasionally degenerate into embarrassing kitsch. As mentioned above, it is also difficult to overlook the sexual allusions surrounding the young Jaroslava Schallerová, who among 1,500 girls was chosen for the role of Valerie. It may seem strange that the film institute of the puritan communist Czechoslovakian State invested so much in a film adaptation of Vitezslav Nezval’s undeniably odd novel – the reason could possibly be that the author in recent years fell into the trap of social realist depictions of Communism’s blissful effect on healthy workers. Furthermore, the screenplay was critical of the Catholic Church and general religious superstition.

It is also difficult to explain that Jireš was chosen as director for the lavish film. The year before he had his film The Joke totally forbidden, it was based on Milan Kundera’s first novel which was a reckoning with Stalinism’s damaging impact on the Czechs’ emotional lives. Perhaps this to some extent contributed to the fact that international film criticism generally demonstrated such enthusiasm for Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, which, despite its “lyrical” appearance, with beautiful imagary and an excellent soundtrack, in my opinion could not hide a soft-pornographic approach, as well as a quite messy and supposedly, but misapplied, “sophisticated” appearance. Especially the ending gave a silly impression through its depiction of an erotic utopia, which is entirely missing in the novel.

Luckily, I had read Nezval’s novel before I saw the film. It possesses quite a lot of charm through a combination of dream play, fairy tale, gothic mystery and dated, romantic women’s magazine serials. With subtlety and preserved fascination the novel mixes a variety of styles but nevertheless manages to preserve a logically absurd dream atmosphere, obviously inspired by Alice in Wonderland, Dracula and not the least Max Ernest’s fanciful collage novel Une semaine de bonté, A Week of Benevolence, published in 1934, the year before Vítěslav Nezval wrote his Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, although it was not published until 1945.

Already as a child, I was fascinated by the pictures in Une semaine de bonté that had found in one of the literary magazines my father used to read. After buying the book several years later, I have on several occasions sunk into its fantastic world and marveled at Ernst’s ability to cut and combine images from a variety of Victorian encyclopedias and illustrated novels, most notably Jules Marys’ melodrama Les damnées de Paris, The Damned of Paris and Gustave Doré’s overwhelmingly rich production of fantastic illustrations.

Mx Ernst’s book is imbued with the same horror-romantic, rather discreet erotic mood as Nezval’s novel and like it Une semaine de bonté may be described as a “collage” based on horror stories and gothic novels at a time when they already had fallen out of fashion, though they evoked associations to Freud's congested reception room from anno dazumal, where patients had told the shrink about their dreams and afflictions, which after Freud having published his interpretations of them eventually became essential material and inspiration for the Surrealists’ art, fantasies and speculations. Actually, Freud should have received his Nobel Prize in literature instead of medicine.

In the 1920s, Nezval was a leader within Czechoslovak modernism and founded, together with Karel Teige and the future Nobel laureate Jaroslav Seifert, the left-winged society Devětsil, which published a number of cultural magazines and arranged exhibitions and happenings. At first, Devětsil was inspired by Dadaism and German “magical realism”, but gradually became more “Surrealistic”.

The members of the society questioned generally accepted thinking, while praising a change that they considered to be in harmony with innovative science, architecture and industry. Their watchwords were “Make it new!”, interpreted as everything old and outdated had to be studied, recreated and reinteroreted. The “poetry” behind each object would be evoked, simplicity deepened. According to Jaroslav Seifert, artists and writers should act as cameras, openly and unreservedly registering their surroundings, describing them as a photographer chooses camera angles, or how a director edits a film. They did not strive for originality, but a new way of thinking, a new way of looking at everything around them. This was the reason why Seifert declared that “art is dead”, a statement that Karel Teige clarified by his declaration that “the most beautiful paintings that exist today are those painted by no one.” By this he meant that artists should compile things that already existed around them – newspaper illustrations, posters, kitchen utensils, machines – and thus evoke associations that would deepen our attitude towards the world. An illustration of such thinking may be a picture by the Devětsil member Adolf Hoffmeister, who compiles looting soldiers, death, humor and war in the form of a wallpaper, i.e. an item found in most homes.

Teige and other members of Devětsil pondered on the inner nature of language – could it maybe be a conglomeration of abstract and actual depictions of our thinking and environment? Random imaginings of concepts and things? Just as texts are constructed by different small, limited units, like letters and morphemes, which obtain meaning through general consensus, art is composed of the arrangement of various elements, colours and texture. Seven notes build up an immense multitude of musical tunes; symphonies, chorals, songs. A movie is composed of single picture frames. Most poets and artists affiliated to Devětsil created ”picture poems” by combining cut-outs and photos into collages, at the same time as they experimented with photography, theatre and film. Below is a picture poem by Karel Teige:

Devětsil, Nine Forces, is the Czech name for a plant, which in English is called butterbur, butter container, due to the fact that its huge leaves once were used to package butter. The Czech denomination reminds that the plant since ancient times had been used to amend and cure a large variety of diseases and ailments, such as fever, lung diseases, spasms, migraine and various allergies. Members of Devětsil intended to, like the multifaceted plant, cure several of the wrongs and illnesses harassing our modern society, hoping that a conscious combination of various “elements and forces” inherent in words, musical notes, gestures and other body movements based on age-old traditions, though reinterpretation and “modernization” would eventually change human existence to the better.

An unusually gifted member of Devětsil was the Russian philosopher and linguist Roman Jakobson (1896-1982). Between 1920 he 1939 he shared his time between the universities of Brno och Prague, in the latter town he founded the so-called Prague School, or as its members preferred to call it – The Prague Linguistic Circle, which carried out epoch-making language studies within fields such as syntax, morphology, semantics and language education. Jakobson’s theories have had a huge impact on various means of communication – cybernetics, poetry, music, art and film, just to mention a few.

As a Jew, Jakobson was forced to leave Prague when it in March 1939 becme occupied by German armed forces and a relentless hunt after, and the consequent extermination of Jews was initiated. During 1940 Jakobson lived in Sweden. However, fear of an expected attack on Sweden convinced Jakobson and his wife that they had to leave and by the end of May 1941 they left for the US with the Atlantic cruise ship M/S Kungsholm, ten days later they arrived in New York. In his memoirs Jakobson wrote:

Without the obliging assistance from the University Clinic of Uppsala and the comprehensive library of the Karolinska Institute of Stockholm I would not have been able to conduct any comparative studies of linguistic and neurological syndromes, and in particular carry out a thorough classification and application of therapeutic methods to figure out the reasons behind aphasia, something which today increasingly has proven to be the basis for research related to children’s language development, as well as aphasia.

Aphasia occurs through damage to the brain’s language centers and impedes the ability to speak, write and understand language. Jakobson ended his career as an internationally respected professor emeritus at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). His extensive research and discoveries have been of great importance for such diverse fields as philosophy, linguistics, social anthropology, pedagogy, psychology and not least literature, art and film.

In addition to communication in the form of art, music, literature and film, several Devětsil members were fascinated by humans as sexual beings and artists and writers who joined the movement generally linked sexuality to artistic creativity. They regarded the genitals and the pleasure they gave rise to as the focal point of a life-affirming vitality. Most extreme in this regard was the uninhibited poet Jindřich Štyrský. Like many other contemporary Czech artists, he tried to create "poetry without words", expressed in abstract art and complicated collages, often filled with a promiscuous humor that combined pleasure with pain, masochism with sadism.

Like his wife Marie Čermínová, Štyrský was a skilled artist working with a variety of artistic means of expression. With Čermínová he shared a strong erotic interest and she contributed with erotic drawings to her husband’s Erotická Revue, a magazine published between 1930 and 33 and financed by a secret circulation of 150 copies. Most of Čermínová’s and Štyrsky’s illustrations were collages of a quite scabrous nature, but Čermínová also contributed with disturbing and often eerie works, such as this illustration in which death embraces a louse.

The couple worked intimately together and lived between 1924 and 1930 in Paris where they hung out with leading surrealists like André Breton and Paul Éluard. Members of radical Parisian artist circles had close contacts with most of their like-minded Czech colleagues, not least Teige and Nezval, who in 1938 wrote an admiring monograph on Štyrsky’s and Čermínová’s art and poetry.

The growing surrealist influence was one of the reasons why Devětsil was dissolved in 1930 and several of its members went separate ways, some of them immersed themselves more in the art and manifestos of surrealism, others disapproved of the group's connection to communism, which was increasingly overshadowed by Stalinist totalitarianism.

Marie Čermínová (1902-1980), who eventually adopted the name Toyen, was in many aspects a central personality within the Devětsil circle and later on the Czech surrealism. Already before she in 1922 had joined Devětsil, the poet Seifert had been wondering about the seventeen-years old worker from a nearby soap factory, who after breaking up with her parents lived with her sister in an apartment building at the opposite side of the street in front of Seifert’s home:

In front of our house in the former Husova třída in Žižkov, usually at the time when workers from the Karlín factories were coming home, I often encountered a strange but interesting girl. At a time when women’s attire resumed to skirts and dresses, the girl wore coarse cotton pants, a guy’s corduroy smock, and on her head a turned-down hat, such as ditch-diggers wear. On her feet she had ugly shoes.

It was typical for Seifert to pay attention to Čermínová’s way of dressing. True to Devětsil’s manifestos he was fascinated by how things shape people’s thoughts and behaviour – especially when it came to clothes and he often used them to describe people, as in his eerily beautiful poem Song at the End in which he remembers a Jewish friend, murdered in a Nazi death camp:

Listen: about little Hendele.
She came back to me yesterday
and she was twenty-four already.
And as graceful as Shulamite.

She wore an ash-gray squirrel fur
and a pert little cap
and round her neck she’d tied a scarf
the colour of pale smoke.

Hendele, how well this suits you!
I thought that you were dead
and meanwhile you have grown more beautiful.
I am glad you’ve come!

How wrong you are, dear friend!
I’ve been dead twenty years,
and very well you know it.
I’ve only come to meet you.

Sulamith is Solomon's beloved in the Bible’s Song of Songs.

Čermínová's dress was also noticed by another Devětsil member, the architect Karel Honzík, who described how Čermínová wore

a man’s suit, a man’s shirt, and a beret on her head, her hands in her pockets most of the time and perhaps a cigarette in the corner of her mouth. Her careless, swaying gait seem[ed] to say: “I don‘t care what you all think of me.”

However, this did not prevent Čermínová from gaining great esteem within Devětsil. She was undoubtedly one of the foremost artists in the group. Vítěslav Nezval described her:

She unites gentleness with eccentricity, ingenious charm with bizarre imagination, pure form with magical improvisation.

Like so many others of Devětsil’s followers, Čermínová was fascinated by how things, not the least clothes, create people. In her painting Parveny she portrayed a faceless, female creature who by means of two butterflies seems to have been united with a shadowy male figure. It is only the seductively shaped panther dress that suggests that it is a female figure, in front of the place of her sex, a panther gap opens, which in the painting is surrounded by a pair of crimson red women’s lips, formed by painted plaster.

Like many other men, the poet Jaroslav Seifert was fascinated by Marie Čermínová, who below by her husband Jindřich Štyrský is presented with a tear under one of her eyes.

Like Seifert, and several Devětsil members, not least the above-mentioned language revolutionary Roman Jakobson, Čermínová was sensitive to the nuances of the language and well aware of her own language use. In Czech not only the first name but also the end of the surname determines a person’s gender. It is an extremely gendered language and Čermínová, who felt limited by expectations and obligations generally applied to a woman, believed that the role of women, among other things, was determined by language and in her speech she did accordingly make an effort to always use the Czech masculine singular form.

Seifert wrote that Čermínová did not like to be treated differently as a woman and when they one day sat together in one of Prague's many cafes, she asked him to find a gender-neutral name for her. Seifert wrote down several morphemes on a napkin and then arranged them in a variety of compilations, when the letters formed the gender-neutral “Toyen”, Čermínová adopted the word as her name. She later explained that she was appealed by the association with the French word citoyen, citizen, and seized the latter part of the word for herself.

After the Nazis after 1939 kept Prague within their suffocating grip, Toyen’s life became difficult. Her partner Jindřich Štyrský died of pneumonia in 1942 and by then the couple had the Jewish poet Jindřich Heisler hidden in their apartment, where he spent most of his days and nights in their bathroom. At first, Heisler had been hidden by his sister and Teige, but when they were close to fall into the hands of the Gestapo, he moved to Toyen and Štyrský and did for four years not leave their apartment. Below, Toyen, Heisler and Teige can be seen sitting in an outdoor café in Prague, just before the city became occupied by the Germans.

Heisler published his first poem in 1939, with five drawings by Toyen and a cover by Štyrský. Fifteen copies were printed in Czech and 40 in German, the later books were noticed by the Gestapo and Heisler had quickly to go underground. In order to occupy themselves and the increasingly claustrophobic Heisler – Štyrský’s health got worse and he died a year after Heisler had moved in with him and Toyen – the three poets/artists wrote and drew continuously a number of small books. After Štyrsky’s death, Toyen and Heisler continued to create what eventually became a large number of illustrated books. All her life Toyen was occupied with creating such books and by her death in 1980 she had created more than five hundred strange books, each of which can be considered a work of art.

As part of a domestic resistance movement Toyen and Heilser did during the entire German occupation distribute their works, without specifying a publisher or printing place. At first Heisler wrote poems and Toyen illustrated them, though their activities became increasingly multifaceted.

Through The Kasematt of Dreams, they did in 1941, just after Štyrský’s death, create their most famous, joint work. Casemate is a room in a bastion where cannons and other artillery pieces have been placed.

On the book pages Heisler’s typewritten words were surrounded by photo montages, collages, drawings and “materialized poetry”, i.e. photographs of various objects that Toyen and Heisler had arranged in the apartment. 

Heisler wrote:

All stairways are shut. All mouths are

muffled from within.

No grain pecking anymore. The hens have been

choked to death and the fire extinguished.

A half chicken and a wet piece of bread

send their last pellets upward, where a

transparent umbrella of liver skin is

opening up.

At the Moderna Muséet in Stockholm, we find Toyen’s painting The Myth of Light. We see Heisler’s shadow cast upon the bathroom door to the confined space where he hid from the Gestapo and the watchful eyes of curious neighbours. He hands out an uprooted plant – an attempt at contact with the outside world? Perhaps a “materialized poem” reminiscent of his longing for light, freedom and nature? A pair of gloved female hands form a shadow image – a wolf´s head? Or maybe one of the Gestapo's dobermann dogs? Is it a warning, or is the shadow a foreboding of an impending betrayal?

However, back to the introduction – does Vítěslav Nezval’s Valerie and Week of Wonders really deal with a young woman’s first menstruation? Through its symbol-saturated plot, filled to the brim as it is with blood, underground labyrinths and tombs, musty religiosity, virgins, vampires and threateningly enticing eroticism, the novel is undeniably about a young woman’s sexual awakening.

Nezval’s novel begins with Valerie who hidden in a covered carriage witnesses how the Commandant, in the shape of a polecat, tears apart her grandmother’s chickens. She looks away and in the moonlight gazes at her bare feet:

As she was examining them, she felt that a tiny spider was spinning a thread down the inner side of her thigh. She raised her eyes to the sky and thought no more of the unusual sensation.

Valerie turns her gaze and ones again witnesses how the polecat tears the head of a hen. Somewhat later, she is in the process of sneaking out of the carriage, casting a worried look towards the lantern above the hen-house door.

Another cock chimed up, answered by two others from far away. But the night remained unchanging. When the girl glanced back to the door she saw about ten moths obstinately circling around the lamp. She felt the little spider had reached the ankle of her left foot. She glanced down at it and saw to her great dismay a thin stream of blood trickling over her ankle.

And Toyen? It would not surprise me at all if a woman like her, someone who had been thinking intensely about femininity and eroticism, captivity and freedom, had not touched upon themes connected with menstruation, blood and femininity. Perhaps such thoughts may be traced in Toyen's desolate and quite creepy Sleeper from 1937.

A girl with a butterfly net looks out across a sterile field under a dark sky. Is it the light of dawn or dusk that may be seen by the horizon? A girl, by the way? What the viewer is confronted with is actually not a human being at all, only an empty dress. Dress? Rather a kind of cone shaped metal sheet hovering freely above ground and crowned by a wig. It appears that the empty shell has been soiled, or oxidized. Are the black streaks on the right side signs of decay, or are they some kind of pollution? They may just as well be something completely different. Maybe feathers, hinting at a wing. The butterfly net is empty. Toyen often depicted butterflies, though in the Sleeper there is no life at all. Is her painting dealing with grief of a lost childhood? If the growing woman here regarded as an empty shell, without anchorage – unless she is married, or wealthy – and thus forced to face a threatening and uncertain future without any kind of protection?

I have previously stated that when I am writing blog post, books and articles tend to emerge out of the blue, affecting my writing. When the English book shop closed down (COVID-19 has been hitting hard on Rome's bookstores, while favouring Amazon and other delivery companies), I randomly picked up an unusually strange novel – China Miéville's The Last Days of New Paris.

In this book, John Whiteside Parsons finds himself in Marseille in 1940, where he makes contact with a group of Surrealists who are waiting for a boat to take them away from nazi-occupied and Vichy controlled France. Unbelievably, Parsons was actually a real person; a pioneering rocket engineer, while at the same time leader of the Thelemic Ordo Templi Orientis founded by the mad occultist and sexual mystic Aleister Crowley.

As a matter of fact, Parsons was not in Marseille in 1940, with the exception of visiting France as a thirteen-year-old in the company of his mother and wealthy grandparents, he never again traveled outside of the United States. Nevertheless, apart from that, Miéville's choice of Parsons as the protagonist in an insanely surreal tangle is well thought out. An ingenious, largely self-taught chemist, rocket scientist, science fiction fan and more than nutty occultist, without whose efforts future lunar missions and satellite launches would have been impossible – Parsons is almost too fantastic to be true. Since he in 1952 happened to blow himself up Parsons would not experience the triumph of seeing any huge spacecrafts fueled by his inventions. By his death he was entirely immersed in occultism and lonely experimentation with dangerous chemicals, while suffering from

some form of psychosis that as Parsons’ emotional life had been thrown into chaos and his professional achievments retreated further into the past, he should cling to his magic as it were a raft on a raging sea.

In Miéville's novel, Parsons is in Marseille searching for Ithell Colquhoun, another Crowley supporter – artist, writer, occultist and magician. However, he finds that Ithell has been expelled from the surrealist group due to her crazy beliefs and strange behaviour, not unlike the circumstances that had led to Parsons being removed from the company Aerojet, which he had co-founded, after it had been revealed that he was under constant supervision by the FBI, which had compiled a huge dossier about his leadership of a sex-magical sect, his friendship with suspected communists, as well as his “hazardous workplace behaviour”.

Ithell Colquhoun, who in fact never had been in contact with Parsons, was not only a skilled artist but also the author of bizarre novels, such as Goose of Hermogenes in which the narrator ends up in her uncle's labyrinthine mansion on an isolated island and there becomes entangled in alchemy and magic. In Miéville's confusing novel, Parsons search for Colquhoun to obtain her help while trying to materialize harmful thoughts and with his rockets send them to Berlin to create chaos and confusion that hopefully would lead to the collapse of The Third Reich.

Varian Fry, who in fact helped a large number of writers and artists to escape from the Nazi terror, introduces Parsons to a group of surrealists living in a run-down eighteen-room mansion, Villa Air-Bel, located in one of Marseille’s suburbs, where they are awaiting visas to the USA.

The Surrealists spent their time painting, engaging in strange, self-invented board games, designing playing cards and creating cadavre exquisite, exquisite corpses, which meant that the collectively creative artists added a section of a drawing, or a collage, without seeing what the others had previously accomplished. They also wrote poems and novel fragments, which they read aloud to each other.

All this coincides with reality, but not that Parsons, who felt excluded from the illustrious group, discreetly collected drawings, poems, novel fragments and images of surrealistic paintings and through occult, alchemist processes succeeded in transforming them into a kind of matter, which the Marxist influenced Parsons enclosed in a device he intended to send to Berlin by means of a rocket to explode over the city and spread mayhem all over the place.

Unfortunately, Parsons’ contraption was stolen and exploded in a café in Paris, instead of above Berlin. In this undisputed Capital of Art, a number of insane manifs were thus released, i.e. tangible “manifestations” of surrealist art – such as airplane-eating plants, wolf tables, humanized bicycles, shaky cadavres exquises and a bulletproof pajamas. In this chaos, French resistance fighters, many of whom were actually surrealists, fight against German army units, supported by French defectors and SS scientists, who have priests, German occultists and artists in their service. By dissecting surrealistic manifs, the SS and the Gestapo create their own monsters, based on Nazi muscle men created by such sculptors as Thorak and Breker.

The German scientists and occultists even brought into life an actually existing self-portrait of the young Adolf Hitler, in which he had depicted himself as sitting on a stone bridge with his feet dangling above a red river. Perhaps a premonition of the carnage he would soon drown the world in. To indicate that it was a self-portrait, the young Adolf had marked the figure with an X and next to it written his signature “AH”.

It was not only surrealistic works of art that Parsons loaded his bomb with, but also a variety of poems and other writings. The bulletproof pajamas was for example based on a poem by Simone Yoyotte (1910-1933), who with her brother arrived in Paris from Martinique, where they became members of a group of black surrealists from the Caribbean and Madagascar, who published a magazine called Légitime Défense, Legitimate Defense, which in poems and articles attacked French colonialism. A prose-poem by the now relatively unknown Yoyotte, who died young and was a bold advocate of feminism and anti-racism:

Pale blue line in a forced episode: I cut a hole in the flag of the Republic.

My beautiful bird in the eternal flow of the downspouts, I call upon you but don’t think about coming back. The feathers of a beautiful surname won’t fail to admit my fear of the wind in the glaciers. My beautiful bird of the thunder of all my desires, the satisfaction of a sun already set, and of all my confused thorns within an undifferentiated anguish of a sojourn I did not wish to impose upon you, my bird. […] I have wandered through the temples of desolation, by night and by day, at the setting of all the great sorrows and everywhere, beautiful bird, I saw you [...] The call of the rhododendron at the edge of April resembles the music of your own shadow, my useless bird, who only knows to revolt with all the great trees of the avenues and all the boulevards, when the trumpet of the banquet halls resonates under the windows of the woman you do not yet love.

Among a lot of other details that fascinated me in Miéville's bizarre novel was the large number of female surrealists appearing within it. The author made me realize the crucial role women had in Surrealism – both as inspiration for the often extremely self-centered men who dominated the movement, overshadowing female contributions and as surrealists in their own right. Women were far from only being as inspirators for male artists, they were actually independently creative individuals of crucial importance for the movement’s growth and survival. Women who, despite their art being at least as revolutionary, expressive and skilled as the one of male surrealists, have nevertheless been almost completely ignored at the expense of the by now well-known and widely acclaimed men.

It is only recently that masters such as Frida Kahlo, Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo, Meret Oppenheim and Leonor Fini have attracted the attention of a larger audience, though these extraordinary ladies are just the visible part of a huge iceberg and as is the case with all significant surrealist art that iceberg has branches deep down into the subconscious mind of humanity. It is largely only in recent decades that one or another occasional group exhibition has been devoted to surrealist women. An entrance to this treasure trove of profound, feminist art was, for example, the 2020 Fantastic Women exhibition in the Danish Humlebaek’s Lousiana Museum for which Leonora Carrington’s Catwoman might stand as an emblem for the strange and hitherto largely unknown world that was opened up there.

When I now read about these women’s art and literature, unusually many of them also appear to have been distinctive poets and novelists. It strikes me how so many of them viewed the world from a very specific perspective, characterized by their forced femine role. As creative artists these women were able to convey an outsider’s sharp gaze upon their surroundings and society as a whole. To a large extent their unique position was coloured by kind of affirmation of their own sense of exclusion. In manner similar to homosexual, literary masters such as Proust, Gide and James, the surrealist women created a unique literature and, like colored master writers such as Wright, Ellison and Baldwin, they convey insights into a painful and forced marginalization.

The literary and artistic world of surrealist women often conjures up an erotically coloured, often eerie and grotesque world. On closer inspection, many female writers appear to have moved within a mysterious, often terrifying world, beginning with Gothic masters like Mary Shelley, Emelie Brontë and Ann Radcliffe, through the ages up to J.K. Rowling’s work and unique, extraordinary scary ghost stories such as Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black and Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, or Angela Carter's ingenious paraphrases of Perrault’s horror stories in her The Bloody Chamber. A horror-romantic mix of the everyday with the fantastic that makes me think of Rose Nestler’s contemporary art. For example, her Weird Sisters. Search for the video online, hopefully with a soundtrack.

The deep drilling of surrealism into the “most forbidden” of the archetypal subconscious has coloured several “novels” such as Nelly Kaplan’s strange vampire worlds with their necrophiliacs, robots and ghosts, which occasionally are as distasteful as Poppy Z. Brite's depictions of a perverted and appaling New Orleans.

Or Joyce Mansour, who was born in England, grew up in Egypt and later through a wealthy husband became part of French Surrealism, whose books are characterized by unhinged eroticism and violent rage. As in Julius Caesar where a pair of twins born in Sodom live on a mountain as big as France, blaspheming God while being tormented by their fat nanny Julius Caesar, swearing “to drink all the blood in the world.”

To me, such writing goes far beyond the limits of what I can appreciate and since I do not find either sadism or masochism particularly amusing, instead I prefer to look at the surrealist women’s artwork, even though among many of them there are also undercurrents of both pent-up erotic perversions and attempts at revolt. I am more attracted to the fairy tale worlds of Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varos, than many of the surrealistic “women novels” that have come my way, with the exception such cunning and pleasant stories like Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet.

I discovered Carrington and Varo (who were best of friends) during a visit to Mexico, where Carrington's large fresco in the City of Mexico's Anthropological National Museum made me seek out her distinctive art and novels.

At the same time, I did in the same city come across an extensive retrospective exhibition of the mystic art of Remedios Varos, previously unknown to me but it has since then continued to fascinate me, not least because it reminds me of the Finnish-Swedish author and artist Tove Jansson’s quirky, mysterious Moomin world, which since my childhood years for me has constituted a great joy and inspiration.

Incidentally, it was in Mexico, with its welcoming refugee policy, that several European “surrealistic” women ended up after fleeing the terror and misery on the Nazi-occupied European continent. Some of them were also on the run from controlling and mentally suffocating husbands.

They came through different channels and for various reasons. The Hungarian photographer Kati Horna came with her husband, after having fled to Paris by the fall of the Spanish Republic in 1939, but after being expelled from the Socialist Party and under a mounting threat of a Nazi occupation they escaped to Mexico. The Spaniard Remedios Varo also arrived in Mexico, accompanied by her socialist husband, both on the run from Paris before the arrival of the Nazis, a year before that they had also fled Spain after the collapse of the Republic.

The same year that Horna and Varo arrived in Mexico, Alice Rahon also came in the company of her husband, but not on the run from persecution, but at the invitation of the Mexican artist couple Kahlo/Rivera, although the unrest on the European continent made them stay in Mexico.

Alice Rahon was born in France to wealthy English parents. At the age of three, she was seriously injured and spent a long time plastered, bedridden and isolated from other children. When she recovered her weakness meant that she was often separated from childish games and experiences, exacerbated by the fact that at the age of twelve she broke her legs again. She became pregnant at a young age, but the baby was mentally damaged and died some years after birth and Alice Rahon was since then unable to conceive. Sixty-two years old, she fell down a flight of stairs and injured her spine, but refused to receive any medical treatment by stating that the doctors had tormented her enough as a child. Twenty years later, she died after spending her time virtually isolated from the surrounding world.

Unntil Frida Kahlo’s death in 1954, Alice Rahon had been very close to her. They shared their frustrations from having wounded and fragile bodies and the inability to have children, as well as their habit of using art and writing to dispel pain and frustration. They were also interested in Mexican folk art, but in Rahon’s case this interest was in later years transformed into abstract painting.

At the same time as Alice Rahon arrived in Mexico, the Italian Leonor Fini and the Spanish Maruja Mallo came to Argentina. Maruja fled after fighting on the side of the Spanish Republicans during the Spanish Civil War. She had been at least as famous for her art as for her wayward behavior. For example, she had as an anarchist and anti-Catholic been arrested after cycling into a church during Mass. Maruja’s art, like so many other surrealistic expressions, was marked by narcissism, eroticism and death.

Leonor Fini was also an unusually independent and controversial person and artist. She often played out her exhibitionist and “poly-amorous” disposition in behaviour, paintings and photographs.

Several of the “surrealistic” women were startlingly beautiful and presented themselves as such in their works of art. Like Dorothea Tanning, who became Max Ernst’s companion for twenty years, until his death in 1976, after being married to both Leonora Carrington and Peggy Guggenheim.

Bridget Bate Tichenor “a glamorous, slender beauty with big azure eyes and full black hair” had worked as a model for Coco Chanel and appeared in centrefolds of Vogue. Tichenor also ended up in Mexico, but not as a refugee. Born and working in Paris, she came to Mexico from New York, attracted by the circle around Frida Kahlo. 

It was not only the charisma and artistic endeavors of the Rivera/Kahlo couple that attracted other artists to them, but also the fact that they were known as devoted radicals, as was the stalwart Stalinist María Izquerido, another artist well known at the time. Like Frida Kahlo, Izquerido was cohabiting with a well-known Mexican artist, in her case Rufino Tamayo, and like Kahlo, she painted in a “primitivist” often surreal style.

Tichenor’s art often revolves around the exclusion she suffered from, despite her charismatic beauty. For example, in the painting below, where an exotically beautiful woman is trapped within block of ice, being surrounded by threatening snakes and insects she seems to send out an emergency signal, similar to the Bengali Fires lit up by shipwrecked people. The woman trapped in ice makes me think of another artist – Anna Kavan and her novel Ice. Like several “surrealist women” Kavan was a sensitive individual who sought relationship after relationship. Furthermore, she was a drug addict and often admitted to sanatoriums and mental clinics.

It is typical that female artists and writers are generally mentioned in connection with their more well-known spouses and/or lovers and cohabitants and often considered as being some kind of appendix to them. If they are mentioned at all, it is generally as “inspirators”, or that their art is characterized by its affinity to the one of male geniuses. A fact that overshadows the fact that even before they met their famous husbands, many of these women were active artists and writers and that they, like their male companions met their partners within the artistic circles where they generally moved and even though they, like Frida Kahlo, lived in the shadow of strong, male personalities and often portrayed their hurtful relationships with them, they yet had strong personalities of their own.

Another beautiful woman whose career and notoriety came to be marked by her relationship with a famous man was the Belgian artist Rachel Baes, who had shared her life with the infamous fascist Van Severen, who had been both anti-Nazi and pro-Stalinist. Joris Van Severen was in 1940 by the French executed without trial. Baes never recuperated from her loss and grief. Her former relation with Van Severen isolated her from other Belgians, who did not want to be reminded of the war and demonstrated an open contempt for people whom they knew, or suspected, to have been collaboratoring with the dreaded, occupying Germans. It was first after her death in 1983 that the art of Baes once again became known to the general public. She had then since the end of the war lived an obscure and solitary life in Bruges.

Another Belgian surrealist was the subversive, anti-clerical and Stalinist artist and filmmaker Jane Gravero. Her participation in an erotic-Freudian slapstick movie directed against the Catholic Church, that became prosecuted and banned, came to be attached to the assessment of her continued artistry. Most of Gravero’s paintings reflect the woman as an erotic object. Several are painted in a style reminding of her famous male compatriots Magritte and Delvaux, as well as the Dutch Willink and Moesman, something that made her being accused as being plagiarist, even if she had developed her art and world view in parallel with her male competitors.

Some of the woman artists and authors who came to end up in Mexico had been marginalised by their male partners. One of them was Lenora Carrington, who after great mental and physical suffering was welcomed in the “exotic” country where she eventually came to be appreciated as one of its most celebrated artists, with several prestigious mural assignments.

When Leonora Carrington in 1940 ended up in Mexico, where she to begin with was taken care of by Kati Horna, she was like an injured bird. Her beloved and admired Max Ernst had like several other surrealists through the support of Varian Fry been provided with a sanctuary in the US. However, before he ended up in New York, Ernst had twice been interrogated and interned by Gestapo. The second time looked particularly bleak and Leonora was advised to seek refuge among relatives in Madrid, where she suffered a serious mental berakdown and was forcibly admitted to a mental institution, where she was subjected to repeated electric shocks and treated with heavy drugs like cardiazole and luminal. After being discharged, Carrington was monitored by a keeper who revealed that her parents had requested that she would be transferred to a South African nursing home. When Carrington in Lisbon was to be taken onboard a ship destined for Cape Town, she managed to escape and seek asylum at the Mexican embassy, whose ambassador Renato Leduc she had met by Picasso in Paris. Leduc agreed to marry Leonora in order to be able take her with him first to New York and then to Mexico. In New York Leonora met with Ernst only to learn that he was engaged to the millionaire and art patroness Peggy Guggenheim. After arriving in Mexico Carrington soon divorced Leduc and married a good friend of Kati Horna – Emerico Weisz, who as well as Horna was a refugee from the Spanish Civil War, Hungarian and photographer.

In April 1938, the “Surrealist Pope” André Breton arrived in Mexico and was there welcomed by Diego Rivera and Frieda Kahlo. For seven months Breton lived with his wife, Jacqueline Lamba, in Rivera/Kahlo’s famous Blue House, where Leon Trotsky and his wife Natalja Sedova also were guests and residents until 1939, when they became enemies with Diego Rivera.

With Trotsky, Breton co-authored a manifesto they called A Manifesto of a Free, Revolutionary Art and in which they advocated for the creation of an “International Federation of Prominent Artists and Writers Worldwide”. After returning to France from Mexico, Breton began organizing the Federation and managed to get several well-known artists and writers such as Yves Tanguy, André Masson, Victor Serge, Herbert Read, Ignazio Silone and George Orwell to join him and Trotsky. However, the whole endeavour soon collapsed. Breton admitted to Trotsky that:

Perhaps I am not very talented as an organizer, but at the same time it seems to me that I have run up against enormous obstacles.

Persecuted as he was by Stalin and his loyal henchmen around the world, Trotsky (who, despite his impressive intelligence hardly was one of God’s best children) had asked Rivera to replace him as signatory of the globally dispersed manifesto. From Buenos Aires, Jorge Luis Borges grumbled:

I believe and only believe that Marxism (like Lutheranism, like the moon, like a horse, like a line from Shakespeare) may be a stimulus for art, but it is absurd to decree that it is the only one. It is absurd for art to be a department of politics. That, however, is precisely what this incredible manifesto claims … A poor independent art they are imagining, subordinate to the pedantries of committees.

In a photograph, the three artistic and political giants Breton, Ruvera and Trotsky turn to Breton’s young and delicate wife, Jacqueline Lamba, who like Trotsky, eventually sought Frida Kahlo’s embrace. Even before she became Breton's second wife, Jacqueline was a prominent artist. Breton later remarried once more and had throughout his life many mistresses. Jacqueline divorced Breton in 1943, tired of “remaining nameless and always referred to as 'her' or as 'the woman who inspired, Breton', or as 'Breton's wife'.” Throughout her life, Jacqueline painted in different styles, but usually almost abstract landscapes.

During her time together with Jacqueline, Frida Kahlo painted a still life with different fruits, though when Jacqueline and Breton divorced in New York four years later, Frida repainted her nature morte by including a doll figure representing Jacqueline Lamba and painted the papaya as opened up, this reminding of female genitalia. Below the painting, Frida wrote La novia que se espanta de ver la vida abierta, the bride terrified by seeing the world open.

The Portuguese artist Paula Rego has accurately portrayed women as maids to her husbands and it seems that many artistically gifted individuals have been, and are, quite often extremely self-centered. 

'A handsome womanizer and accurate aesthete like Breton could often appear to be both despotic and aggressive, not least in his numerous relationships with women. Someone who got to experience this was Valetine Hugo, creator of a well-known group portrait of the surrealists Paul Éluard, André Breton, Tristan Tzara, Benjamin Péret, René Crevel and René Char, which she called the Star Constellation of Surrealism. As often is the case, this work is often reproduced without providing the name of its female creator.

Hugo’s relationship with Breton became “physical” for a time, and between July 1931 and May 1932, they lived together in extremely tumultuous and often violent circumstances. After an extraordinary aggressive incident, Hugo tried to take her own life, while dying she called Paul Éluard who at the last second got her under medical treatment. After they divorced, Breton never mentioned Valetine Hugo and she does not appear in his basic book about Surrealism – Le Surréalisme et la Peinture.

However, several other “surrealist women” were far from being as submissive to their husbands as Valentine Hugo. An example of a strong-willed and not particularly well-liked surrealist was the wealthy American artist and poet Catherine Linn Sage, known as Kay Sage. In Paris, she became known in Surrealist circles as The Princess, generous in her support of poor artist colleagues, though several of them nevertheless openly despised her because of her wealth and “superior attitude”. Breton’s friend Yves Tanguy fell violently in love with Kay Sage and left his wife for her sake, as well as he broke up his friendship with the jealous Breton. When the war broke out, Kay and Tanguy left Europe and settled in Reno, USA.

Tanguy’s and Sage’s relationship was violent to say the least. Tanguy was a strange, impulsive man, he was for example known to violently bang his own head against those of other men, even those he liked. He often attacked Kay Sage, both physically and with brutal language. On several occasions he threatened her with a knife. Tanguy did not appreciate his wife’s artwork and disliked when it was met with appreciation. At the same time, Kay Sage was often described as “difficult”; moody and haughty. Her art is more “reality-based” than her husband’s and I like it more than Yves Tanguy’s work, especially since Sage’s art generally opens up to different interpretations.

Tanguy’s death caused a severe depression in Kay Sage. She often declared that “Yves was my only friend, he understood everything.” After her husband’s death, Kay painted less and less, probably due to downheartedness, but also to an increasingly impaired vision. Instead, she wrote strange poetry in the partially invented French that she and Tanguy had used among themselves. Kay Sage also devoted herself to securing her husband’s legacy by arranging a number of exhibitions of his art and compiling a complete catalog of his works.

There are several other examples of close-knit artist couples who have mutually inspired each other and kept their lives togetherdespite widely differing characters. One such couple was the Americans Margaret Marley Modlin and her husband Elmer Modlin, who both dreamed of success, but who when they could not obtain it isolated themselves within a quite wretched, Spanish hippie existence. Elmer had had supporting roles in the TV series Bewitched and in Polanski’s Rosemary's Baby, while Margaret had marginally acted in films such as Love and Pain and the Whole Damn Thing and March or Die. However, above anything else, Elmer wanted to be known as a poet and Margaret as an artist. Although Elmer never got a poem published and Margaret did not sell a single painting. Something that does not mean that Elmer was a bad poet, or Margaret a second-rate artist. In fact, in their Spanish isolation they transformed their lives and their surroundings into a kind of universal work of art. Margaret devoted most her painting to portray Elmer and his poetic visions and the fantasy world she shared with him.

Another far more successful pair of artists is the filmmaker and artist Jan Švankmajer and his wife Eva Švankmajerová, although Eva is more of a visual artist than her more sculpturally gifted husband. Despite the fact that they collaborate in all projects, Eva is still significantly more unknown than Jan Švankmajer. Like several other surrealist women’s do, Švankmajerová depicts women’s bodies and death.

However, not all artistically gifted women are privileged enough to share their lives with creative, inspiring men, who provide them with an opportunity to create their own art. For example, it took the French-American painter Fanny Myers Brennan twenty years after the birth of her children before she could resume her painting. One of her paintings seems to allude to how life, or fate, place obstacles in the way of a creative woman – one of the renown, open highways of the American West is unexpectedly blocked by a mountain range.

Some surrealist women have managed to combine a successful professional life with their art. One such example is Grace W. Pailthorpe, who worked as a surgeon in the trenches of Flanders and later at a women’s hospital in Thessaloniki and as a general practitioner at a women’s prison in London, devoting herself to research of criminal behavior, about which she wrote scientific articles, published in the reputable medical science magazine The Lancet. In her art, Pailthorpe often portrays soft, organic forms that possibly are associated with her work as a surgeon and psychologist, for example her A Tale of Mother’s Bones.

Several female British surrealists managed to make a living from their art, like Edith Rimmington, whose work depicts difficult-to-interpret dream worlds with associations to ancient religions and/or fossilized creatures combined with modern clothing and habits.

Marion Adnams divided her time between Provence and her hometown around Derby. Her landscapes are often inspired by Derby’s surroundings, or the English coast, within which she places solitary female figures, and quite often different skeletal parts.

Perhaps because women to a greater extent than men live within their bodies; through menstruation and childbirth and not least the fact that their bodies are viewed and judged through men’s lustful glances. Someone who almost exclusively devoted her art to the depiction of female body parts was the Polish artist Alina Szapocznikow, who spent her difficult youth first in the ghettos of Pabianice and Ƚódź, then in the concentration camps of Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen and Theresientadt. During the rest of her life, Szapocznikow rarely spoke about her war experiences, traces traces of them are discernible in all her art, which often is expressed as what she called “human landscapes”.

Female surrealism is far from being a unique European and American phenomenon. In Japan, for example, we find Toshiko Okanoue, whose photographic montages seem to reflect the work of Max Ernst and the Czech surrealists, though with allusions to Japanese war experiences and a “feminist” universe.

Several modern “manga artists”, such as Takano Aya might also be included among female surrealists. In contrast to the much older Toshiko Okanue, Takano Aya is in her paintings inspired by the unusually rich Japanese, traditional monster/folk culture.

In India we find Ganesh Pyne Savitri’s dark and often macabre art, which like its European counterparts depicts death and female reality, though firmly rooted in Indian religiosity and folk art.

Amy Nimr was in 1898 born into an Egyptian upper-class family of Lebanese, Syrian, English and French descent. She spent her time between Egypt, England and France. During World War II while her family was on a picnic in Saqqara, her son was killed by a landmine. For a time Nimr was unable to paint, but when she resumed her art it was filled with corpses, skeletons and mutilated bodies. Apart from being a unique artist Nimr was a significant poet and literary critic.

After the Suez crisis in 1956 and the emergence of an increasingly pronounced Egyptian nationalism and xenophobia, Nimr and her husband moved to Paris, where she remained until her death in 1974.

With some exceptions, such as West African sign painting, Senegalese glass painting and paintings made with bicycle lacquer in Tanzania, easel painting has only recently gained entry on most of the African continent, but in many places there is a long tradition of various forms of carvings, expressing conceptions of life that might be described as surrealistic.

When it comes to African “surrealist” female artists, they have also recently begun to express themselves through paintings. Several of them have worked in their respective home countries before the market value of their art was discovered and they gained an opportunity to travel to Europe or America, where they had greater opportunities to expand and refine their means of expression. One of the women who has found such an opportunity is the Kenyan Wangechi Mutu who is now active in the United States. She engages in installations, performances and a collage-like painting in which she, like so many other female surrealists, expresses a female body consciousness, often in grotesque forms influenced by disease, cultural trauma and gender constructions in a manner that can be both mysterious in accordance with ancient traditions and critical in a more modern sense. Mutu’s art can often seem to be both repulsive and strangely appealing.

Virtually every country appears to have its more or less famous surrealist women. Sweden has, among others, Greta Knutson Tzara who in 1924 in Paris met the already well-known and in some circles infamous Romanian poet Samuel Rosenstock, who had taken the name Tristan Tzara and found himself by the sources of both Dadaism and Surrealism. They married the following year and Greta used the inheritance from of her wealthy parents to order a “Cubist/functionalist” house from the Czech architect Adolf Loos. The Tzara couple’s home soon became a gathering place for radical artists and writers and in 1927, after an unusually difficult and extremely painful birth, their son Christophe was born.

Greta has told that throughout her life she tried to find time and peace to be able to work with her art. This was one of the reasons why she invested her money in the radical Loos building to be a home and inspiration for her and Tzara. However, Loos had worked with a vision of open spaces and with as few doors as possible, which made Greta's studio completely open to the dining room, something she thought made her life difficult. Not until after what she described as “endless struggles” was she allowed to put up a wall between her studio and the rest of the house, something that made Tzara furious – he disappeared for a week and no one knew where he had gone. It may seem like an insignificant detail, though it was Greta’s lack of freedom that made her desperate and changed what had at first been a passionate love affair and mutual inspiration into cold indifference.

During his time with Greta, Tzara wrote what has come to be considered his masterpiece. The epic poem L´Homme approximatif, the Approximate Man, which he dedicated to his wife. Through the word approximatif Tzara wanted to indicate that each and everyone of us might be perceived as an unfinished sketch for an ideal human being. Every sketch is more or less perfect, but no one is perfect and the tragedy is that we especially want those around us to be perfect and therefore suffer a hard time accepting that other people are far from being impeccable and thus are unable to perceive tall he possibilities suggested by sketch. According to Tzara, all existence is cursory, even art can never gain perfection, though that is exactly what triggers a constant inspiration – a striving to understand and try to reproduce a vision as skillfully as possible. In his quest to explain life, Tristan Tzara makes everything appear to be much more complicated than it actually is. Accordingly, his language also becomes imaginative, disorganized and imperfect:

…lives are repeated endlessly until approaching atomic thinness

and rise so high that we cannot see where they end

and we cannot discern those lives next to us,

the ultraviolet radiance of so many parallel paths,

those we could have taken,

those through which we could not enter the world,

or those that already had been gone for so long

that we have forgotten them and their time

and the ground through which the world have sucked our flesh,

salts and liquid metals that once came clear from the wells…

World War II separated Tzara and Greta. With her son Chrsitophe, she moved to Aix-en-Provence.in search of a new career. Through her friend the author René Char she did the following year join the French Resistance, becoming leader of a group that manufactured fake passports for Jews and opponents to the terror regime, as well helping to smuggle refugees across the border into Spain. It became a turning point in her life. War and occupation revealed the true nature of human beings. Greta ended up in a tangle of violence, statements and counter-statements, but also sacrifices and kindness. Tzara, who had remained in Paris, also became involved in the active resistance to the German occupation.

After the end of the war and by her return to Tzara and Paris, Greta reacted strongly to the Stalinist wave that was sweeping across Europe, a phenomenon she defined ad a “mindless café Stalinism” that “overnight” turned most Surrealists into rabid “Marxists”. After her time as organizer and active member of the resistance movement, Greta had come to realize the marginalized role that constantly was accrued to women. Within Surrealist circles, they were regarded as gentle, sweet and compliant beings, objects of an absurd worship and were generally not considered to be independently creative individuals. Within Surrealist circles women were forced to remain silent and if they said anything, no one listened to them.

Greta was a prolific writer, among other things as an art critic. Before the Second World War her critique was published in the Swedish magazine Konstrevy. Later she wrote a number of short novels and prose poems and together with Gunnar Ekelöf she translated Swedish literature into French and French into Swedish. Ekelöf, whom I consider to be one of Sweden’s foremost, if not the best, poets, had already before the war met with Tristan Tzara and Greta Knutson-Tzara in their Parisian home where he had “enjoyed himself greatly, reading his own poetry aloud, singing songs by the Swedish poet Birger Sjöberg and jojked.” Jojk is a manner of singing typical for the Sami, the Nordic indigenous people. That Ekelöf was jojking might have been due to the fact that several surrealists nurtured a romantic conception of Sami culture and spirituality.

By the end of 1942, Greta had divorced Tzara and broken with the Surrealists. However, she continued with her artistic activity while becoming increasingly interested in philosophy, mainly in its phenomenological vintage with philosophers such as Husserl and Heidegger. She kept her name and two apartments, one in Paris and one in Stockholm, and although she exhibited her art in both cities she was never accepted as equal to male artists. For example, a review in Expressen, at the time Sweden’s leading evening paper, did in 1947 describe her works of art as “coward and problem-free”, an assessment I find it quite difficult be in agreement with.

During the latter part of her life, Greta Knutson-Tzara came to describe her art as “oniric”, while depicting dreamy scenes with water, ships and fantasy figures, often monstrous, and their encounters with humans.

In psychiatry, onirism refers to a mental state, often between dream and wakefulness, when almost tangible hallucinations might occur. A so-called “oniric” movement was in 1964 established in Bucharest (Greta Knutson-Tzara was linguistically gifted and fluent in Romanian, French, German and Swedish) by the writers Dumitru Ţepeneag and Leonid Dimov, who declared “we do not dream, we create dreams”. For several years they were accepted by the Communist regime, but in 1975 Ţepeneag was deprived of his Romanian citizenship while visiting Paris. He remained in the city and dedicated himself to translating French poetry and novels into Romanian, while feeling alienated from Western commercialism, as well as communism and totalitarianism in general.

In painting and her poetry, which she usually wrote in French, Greta Knutson-Tzara expressed a dreamlike exclusion, often in the vicinity of death. As in the following poem where she hinted at the sore relationship she had had with her mother:

The dying child

Mother, I wanted to sleep under the black water,
place the burning candle by my bed under the water.

Mother, do not be angry with me, rock me to sleep.

Moon, I wanted to sleep on the Island of the Seagull,
place your candle on the cliff edge by the seagull’s nest.
Moon, rock me to sleep.

June night, I wanted to sleep between two roses,
between evening and dawn.
Roses, rock me to sleep.

Skiff, I wanted to sleep in your drifting cradle,
among the green reeds.
Skiff, rock me to sleep.

Mother, if you knew, you would not have been angry with me,
then you would have let me sleep, mother, in the bed
deep below the water.

Over the years, her feelings of isolation and exclusion got worse:

Of all the faces in thousands of cities, none shall no longer be yours – you who are alone in not knowing how the earth weighs on your chest.
Under the roots of the alder, algae grow. Dreams of the water are getting darker under the rock. Even darker is your loneliness under the hoarfrost-covered stone. No-one calls your name anymore.

Since then, ash are falling to the ground, both summer and winter. Time passes by uselessly, no longer does anyone count the days, or years, gone by.

In 1983, Greta Knutson-Tzara took her own life in Paris.

Female “surrealism” seems to a large extent to revolve around the problems of being a woman in a male-dominated world and exclusion is often interpreted in terms of a “dreamy”, alternative reality where desolation, threats and loneliness affect women trapped in and marked by their own bodies. It is not without reason that a childhood which disappeared with the bloody transformation of menstruation often haunts these women’s art and writing, many of whom had been doomed to a shadowy existence behind a male-controlled art that so far has been allowed to dominate the cultural scene.

Colquhoun, Ithell (2018) Goose of Hermogenes. London: Peter Owen. Danchev, Alex (ed.) (2011) 100 Artist’s Maifestos from the Futurists to the Stuckists. London: Penguin Modern Classics. Ernst, Max (1976) Une Semaine De Bonté: A Surrealistic Novel in Collage. New York: Dover. Huebner, Karla (2020) Magnetic Woman: Toyen and the Surrealist Erotic. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Mansour, Joyce (1991) Julius Casar. St. Paul MN: Hourglass. Miéville, China (2017) The Last Days of New Paris. London: Picador. Nezval, Vítěslav (2005) Valerie and Her Week of Wonders. Prague: Twisted Spoon Press. Rosemont, Penelope (1998) Surrealist Women: An International Anthology. London: Athlone Press. Pendle, George (2006) Strange Angel: The Otherworldy Life of Rocket Scientist John Whiteside Parsons. Boston: Mariner Books. Seifert, Jaroslav (1998) The Poetry of Jaroslav Seifert translated by Ewald Osers. North Haven, CT: Catbird Press. Tzara, Tristan (1968) L’homme approximatif. Paris: Gallimard.

Som lärare för unga kvinnor och far till två döttrar har jag trots det faktum att jag är man trott mig förstå hur omvälvande det kan vara för ett kvinnligt barn att drabbas av de blödningar som inleder hennes könsmognad och mångåriga menstruationscykel.

Min äldsta och konstnärligt begåvade dotter frågade mig nyligen om jag möjligen kunde erinra mig en film, eller en roman, som berörde temat. Det enda jag kom att tänka på var Stephen Kings Carrie och filmen som Brian de Palma gjorde efter den romanen.

Jag kom också att tänka på en tämligen okänd italiensk barnbok. Min dotter kände givetvis till Kings och de Palmas verk och inte minst barnboken, som skrivits av en väninna till henne. Hon nämnde även en skräckfilm jag aldrig hört talas om – Valerie och hennes underbara vecka. En slags tämligen otäck Alice i Underlandet som antydde en flickas första konfrontation med erotik och hotfulla män. Menstruationen antyddes genom en blodsdroppe som i början faller på en blomma.

Min dotter berättade att hon för flera år sedan sett filmen i Brighton och att den inte varit speciellt bra, samt att den handlade om vampyrer. Eftersom hon sagt att det var en ”skräckfilm” antog jag att det kunde röra sig om ett verk av Roger Corman, eller ett av Hammer Films sämre och tämligen okända alster. Eller kanske något i stil med Andy Warhols groteska och milt sagt blodindränkta Blood for Dracula, som i själva verket regisserades av Paul Morrissey. I den filmen söker sig Dracula till Italien eftersom han antar att i ett katolskt land måste det finnas tillgång på jungfruligt blod, det enda han kan livnära sig på. Men han tar miste och drabbas av våldsamma uppkastningar, svält och lidande efter att ha anfallit unga kvinnor som förrädiskt nog sagt sig vara jungfrur. Då Warhol tillfrågades om sitt bidrag till filmen svarade han: ”Jag deltar i the parties”. Filmen var i allt sitt vansinne dock tämligen roande, scenografin var utmärkt, den historiska miljön och kamera-arbetet var inte alls så uselt som jag förväntat mig. Det antar jag i varje fall, varför skulle jag annars efter femtio år minnas delar av den?

Det visade sig dock att jag hade helt fel. Valerie och hennes underbara vecka spelades in 1970 och räknas nu till den så kallade ”nya tjeckiska vågen”, med mästerverk som jag avnjöt i min hemstad Hässleholm, där de ingick i ett utbud från Filminstitutet som kallades Film Annorlunda. Genom inhandlandet av ett ovanligt billigt klippkort öppnade sig två gånger i veckan sällsamma och för mig tidigare oanade världar, frammanade av mästare som brasilianen Glauber Rocha, senegalesen Sèmbene Ousmane, japanen Kaneto Shindō, indiern Satyajit Ray, och inte minst östeuropéer som polacken Andrzej Wajda, ungraren István Szabo, samt oförglömliga pärlor från den ”tjeckiska vågen” – Miloš Formans Det brinner min sköna, Jiří Menzels Låt tågen gå och Juraj Herzs Krematören. De två senare var baserade på romaner som präglats av det lekfulla, men samtidigt mörkt tragiska och absurt stillsamma berättande som utmärker så mycken tjeckisk litteratur.

Jaromil Jireš Valerie och hennes underbara vecka har åtskilliga beundrare, men enligt min mening håller den inte måttet för att kunna nämnas tillsammans med de filmer jag nämnde. Den är visserligen lyriskt filmad, med utsökta scenerier. ”Kommendanten” som ständigt växlar skepnad – vampyr, vessla, intrigör, fader, hänsynslös älskare – har en viktig roll i romanen och är förvisso skrämmande gestaltad i filmen, men han förblir enbart yta, schablonartat framställd. Ett riktigt monster som Dracula eller Frankenstein har i all sin mordiskhet mänskliga drag som vi kan identifiera oss med, men Valerie och hennes underbara vecka förmådde inte framställa sådana djup.

Likaså kunde mycket ha gjorts av den kusligt perverterade mormodern, som till sitt yttre onekligen var förlänad med en otäck attraktion, men även den utvecklades under filmens gång till ett matt utanverk.

Valeries öppet, barnsligt friska ansikte är bedårande, med den trettonåriga flickans intagande fräschör besudlas genom regissörens mjukpornografiska blick.

Visserligen en mer beslöjat behagfull blick än den som präglade de på sin tid populära Emanuelle-filmerna, som utgjorde grövre uppföljare till sextiotalets Angélique-dramer, vars första del släpptes av östcensuren 1969, fem år efter premiären i Paris. I Sovjetunionen sålde Angélique, marquise des anges, Angélique, änglarnas markisinna mer än fyrtiofem miljoner biobiljetter och blev även en stor publikframgång i Polen och Tjeckoslovakien. Givetvis kunde Emanuelle inte passera järnridån, utan de visuellt erotiskt svältfödda östeuropéerna fick hålla tillgodo med en skymt av Angéliques nakna bröst och konstnärliga filmer som Valerie och hennes underbara vecka.

Jireš Valerie består av softade, skimrande bilder, som emellanåt förfaller till pinsam kitsch. Det är som nämnt även svårt att överse med de sexuella anspelningarna kring den unga Jaroslava Schallerová, som bland 1,500 flickor valdes för rollen som Valerie. Det kan förefalla märkligt att den puritanskt kommunistiska tjeckoslovakiska statens filminstitut satsade så mycket på filmatiseringen av Vitezslav Nezvals onekligen udda roman – orsaken kunde möjligen vara att författaren under senare år förfallit till socialrealistiska skildringar av kommunismens saliggörande inverkan på sunda arbetare och för att romanen, såväl som filmmanuset, var kritiskt inställd till den katolska kyrkan och allmän religiös vidskepelse.

Det är också svårförklarligt att Jireš fick göra den påkostade filmen Året innan hade han fått sin film Skämtet totalförbjuden, en film som byggde på Milan Kunderas romaner som var en vidräkning med stalinismens skadliga inverkan tjeckernas känsloliv. Kanske bidrog detta i viss mån till att den internationella filmkritiken i allmänhet visade så stor uppskattning för en film som trots sin ”lyriska” framtoning, vackra bilder och utmärka soundtrack enligt min åsikt inte kunde överskyla en mjukpornografisk, tämligen rörig och förment sofistikerad framtoning. Speciellt slutet gav ett tämligen fånigt intryck genom sin skildring av en erotisk utopi – som inte alls hade sin motsvarighet i romanen.

Som tur var hade jag innan jag såg filmen läst Nezvals originella roman, som besitter en hel del charm genom kombinationen av dröm, saga, gotisk mystik och populär tidningsföljetong. Med subtilitet och bevarad fascination blandar romanen en mängd olika stilarter och lyckas bevara en logiskt absurd drömatmosfär, uppenbart inspirerad av Alice i Underlandet, Dracula och inte minst Max Ernest fantastiska collageroman Une semaine de bonté, En vecka av välvillighet, som publicerades 1934, året innan Vítěslav Nezval skrev sin Valerie och hennes underbara vecka, som dock inte publicerades förrän 1945.

Redan som barn fascinerades jag av bilderna i Une semaine de bonté som jag funnit i en av de litterära tidskrifter som min far brukade läsa. Efter det att jag flera år senare köpte boken har jag vid åtskilliga tillfällen försjunkit i dess fantastiska värld och förundrats över Ernsts förmåga att klippa itu och kombinera bilder från en mängd viktorianska uppslagsverk och illustrerade romaner, främst Jules Marys melodrama Les damnées de Paris, Paris fördömda, föråldrade uppslagsverk och Gustave Dorés överväldigande rika produktion av fantastiska illustrationer.

Max Ernsts bok har samma skräckromantiskt, tämligen diskret erotiska stämning som Nezvals roman och liksom den kan Une semaine de bonté beskrivas som ett ”collage” baserat på skräckhistorier och gotiska romaner som då de ställdes samman redan kommit ordentligt ur modet, men dock väckte associationer till Freuds överbelastade mottagningsrum från anno dazumal där patienter berättade om sina drömmar och anfäktelser och som då Freud skrivit ner dem blev till stoff för surrealisternas konst, fantasier och spekulationer. Egentligen borde Freud ha fått sitt Nobelpris i litteratur och inte medicin.

Under 1920-talet var Nezval ledande inom den tjeckoslovakiska modernismen och grundade tillsammans med Karel Teige och den framtida nobelpristagaren Jaroslav Seifert det vänsterorienterade sällskapet Devětsil, som publicerade en mängd kulturtidskrifter och arrangerade utställningar och särpräglade happenings. Till en början inspirerades Devětsil av dadaismen och den tyska ”magiska realismen”.

Sällskapets medlemmar ifrågasatte allmänt vedertaget slentriantänkande och hyllade förändring i samklang med förnyande vetenskap, arkitektur och industri. Deras fältrop var ”Gör det nytt!”, som tolkades som att allt gammalt och förlegat skulle studeras och omskapas. ”Poetiken” bakom varje föremål skulle manas fram, det enkla fördjupas. Enligt Jaroslav Seifert borde konstnärer och författare fungera som kameror genom att öppet och förbehållslöst registrera sin omgivning, beskriva den som en fotograf väljer en kameravinkel, eller hur en regissör klipper samman en film. Det var inte originalitet som eftersträvades utan ett nytt tänkande, ett nytt sätt att betrakta omgivningen. Detta var orsaken till att Seifert deklarerade att ”konsten är död”, ett påstående som Karel Teige förtydligade genom att konstatera att ”de vackraste målningar som existerar idag är inte de som målats av någon”. Därmed menade han att konstnärer skulle sammanställa sådant som fanns omkring dem – tidningsbilder, affischer, bruksföremål – och därmed väcka associationer som kunde fördjupa vår inställning till världen. En illustration till sådant tänkande kan vara devětsilmedlemmen Adolf Hoffmeisters bild som sammanställer plundrande soldater, död, humor och krig i form av en tapet, dvs. ett bruksföremål som finns i de flesta hem.

Teige och övriga medlemmar av Devětsil funderade kring språkets natur – var det kanske en form av abstrakta bilder, förment ”slumpmässiga” illustrationer till de begrepp och föremål som omger oss? Liksom texter består språk och bilder av en sammanställning av små element – hos litteraturen i form av bokstäver som får mening genom hur de sammanställs, hos konsten färger och andra bildelement. På ett liknande sättt används sju toner till att skapa en oöverskådlig mängd musikaliska stycken, och en film är en kombination av bildrutor. De flesta poeter och konstnärer som anslutit sig till Devětsil skapade ”bildpoem”genom att kombinera bilder till collage, samtidigt som de experimenterade med fotografi, teater och film. Nedan ett bildpoem av Karel Teige.

Devětsil, Nio krafter, är det tjeckiska namnet på en växt som på engelska och svenska kallas butterbur, smörförpackning, beroende på att dess stora blad en gång i tiden användes för att packa in smör. Det tjeckiska namnet Nio krafter kommer sig av att växten sedan urminnes tider har använts för att bota en mängd åkommor – som feber, lungsjukdomar, spasmer, migrän och olika former av smärtor och allergier. Medlemmarna i Devětsil ville liksom den mångfacetterade växten råda bot på en mängd av samtidens mentala åkommor och hoppades att det skulle kunna ske genom en oväntad kombination av olika ”element och krafter” – som bilder, ord, noter och olika kroppsrörelser som baserats på ett nytt sätt att betrakta och använda äldre kunskaper och erfarenheter.

En genial medlem i Devětsil var den ryske filosofen och språkforskaren Roman Jakobson (1896-1982). Mellan 1920 och 1939 vistades han i Brno och Prag där han grundat den så kallade Pragskolan som utvecklade principer och tekniker för epokgörande språkstudier inom områden som syntax, morfologi, semantik och språkinlärning. Jakobsons teorier har haft ett stort inflytande på en mängd olika former av kommunikation, inklusive cybernetik, poesi, musik, konst och film.

Som jude tvingades Jakobson fly från Prag då tyskarna i mars 1939 ockuperade staden och inledde sin skoningslösa jakt på judar. Under 1940 vistades han i Sverige. I fruktan för att Sverige skulle invaderas av tyskarna lämnade Jakobson och hans hustru med M/S Kungsholm Sverige i slutet av maj 1941 och ankom tio dagar senare till New York. I sina memoarer skrev Jakobson:

Utan den tjänstvilliga assistansen från universitetskliniken i Uppsala och det omfattande medicinska biblioteket vid Karolinska Institutet i Stockholm, skulle jag inte ha kunnat ägna mig åt jämförande studier av språkliga och neurologiska syndrom, framförallt en omfattande klassificering av och tillämpandet terapeutiska metoder för komma underfund med orsakerna till afasi, något som idag i allt större utsträckning utgör basen för forskning kring barnspråk och afasi.

Afasi uppstår genom skador i hjärnans språkcentra och försvårar förmågan att tala, skriva och förstå språk. Jakobson slutade sin verksamhet som en internationellt respekterad professor emeritus vid Harvard University och Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Hans omfattande forskning och upptäckter har haft stor betydelse för så skilda områden som filosofi, lingvistik, socialantropologi, pedagogik, psykologi och inte minst litteratur, konst och film.

Förutom kommunikation i form av konst, musik, litteratur och film fascinerades flera devětsilmedlemmarna av människan som sexuell varelse och de konstnärer och författare som anslutit sig till rörelsen kopplade i allmänhet sexualitet till konstnärlig kreativitet. De betraktade könsorganen och den njutning de gav upphov till som brännpunkten för livsbejakande vitalitet. Mest extrem i detta avseende var den hämningslöse poeten Jindřich Štyrský. Liksom många andra, samtida tjeckiska artister försökte han skapa ”poesi utan ord”, något som tog sig uttryck i abstrakt konst och komplicerade collage, ofta fyllda med en promiskuös humor som kombinerade njutning med smärta, masochism med sadism.

Štyrský var liksom sin hustru Marie Čermínová (1902–1980) en skicklig konstnär och arbetade med en mängd konstnärliga uttrycksmedel. Med Čermínová delade han ett starkt erotiskt intresse och hon bidrog med en mängd erotiska skisser till makens Erotická Revue, en tidskrift som mellan 1930–33 gavs ut och bekostades genom en hemlighållen cirkulation av 150 kopior. De flesta av Čermínovás och Štyrskýs illustrationer var collage av en tämligen skabrös art, men Čermínová bidrog även med oroande och ofta kusliga verk, som denna illustration där döden omfamnar en lus.

Paret arbetade intimt tillsammans och vistades mellan 1924 och 1930 i Paris där de umgicks med de tongivande surrealisterna André Breton och Paul Éluard. De radikala, parisiska konstnärskretsarna hade täta kontakter med de flesta av sina likasinnade tjeckiska kollegor, inte minst Teige och Nezval, som 1938 tillsammans skrev en beundrande monografi kring Štyrskýs och Čermínovás konst och poesi.

Det allt större surrealistiska inflytandet var en av orsakerna till att Devětsil upplöstes 1930 och flera av dess medlemmar gick skilda vägar, en del av dem fördjupade sig alltmer i surrealismens konst och manifest, andra ogillade gruppens koppling till kommunismen, som alltmer kommit att överskuggas av stalinismens totalitarism.

Marie Čermínová som sedemera antog pseudonymen Toyen, var i mångt och mycket en centralfigur inom Devětsil, och den tjeckiska surrealismen. Redan innan hon 1922 anslöt sig till Devětsil hade poeten Seifert uppmärksammat den sjuttonåriga arbeterskan vid en närliggande tvålfabrik, som efter att ha brutit med sin familj bodde tillsammans med sin syster i en våning mittemot Seiferts bostad:

Framför vårt hus i Husova třída i Žižkov, stötte jag ofta, vid tiden då arbetare återvände hem från Karlín-fabrikerna, på en märklig, men intressant tjej. Under en tid då kvinnans klädsel bestod av kjolar och klänningar bar den där flickan grova bomullsbyxor, en killes manchesteroverall och på huvudet hade hon en framskjuten keps, en sådan som dikesgrävare bär. På fötterna bar hon fula skor.

Det var typiskt för Seifert att uppmärksamma Čermínovás klädsel, trogen Devětsils manifest fascinerades han av hur ting formar människors tankar och beteenden. Inte minst kläder och han använde dem ofta för att beskriva människor, som i den kusligt vackra dikten Sång vid slutet i vilken han minns en judisk väninna som mördats i ett nazistiskt dödsläger:

Lyssna: om lilla Hendele.
Hon kom tillbaka till mig igår
och hon var redan tjugofyra år.
Lika graciös som Sulamith.

Hon bar en askgrå ekorrpäls
och en näsvis liten hatt,
runt halsen hade hon bundit en scarf,
blek som svag rök.

”Hendele, så väl det klär dig!
Jag trodde du var död
men under tiden har du blivit vackrare.
Jag är glad över att du är tillbaka!”

”Hur fel du har, kära vän!
Jag har varit död i tjugo år,
och du vet mycket väl
att jag enbart kom för att möta dig.”

Sulamith är Salomos älskade i Bibelns Höga Visa.

Čermínovás klädsel uppmärksammades även av en annan devětsilmedlem, arkitekten Karel Honzík, som beskrev hur hon bar

en herrkostym, en skjorta och en basker på huvudet, för det mesta hade hon händerna i byxfickorna och kanske en cigarett i mungipan. Hennes nonchalant svängande gång tycktes signalera: ”Jag bryr mig inte alls om vad ni alla tycker om mig.”

Det hindrade dock inte att Čermínová rönte stor uppskattning inom Devětsil. Hon var utan tvekan en av de främsta konstnärerna inom gruppen. Vitezslav Nezval beskrev henne:

Toyen, fullkomligt fylld av hav, lugna explosioner, obeständighet, skrik och sorg, längtande andars djupa lust, förenad med blinda geniers överflöd. […] Hon förenar mildhet med excentricitet, genial charm med bisarr fantasi, ren form med magisk improvisation.

Likt så många andra av Devětsils anhängare var Čermínová fascinerad av hur ting, inte minst kläder, skapar människor. I sin målning Parveny, Uppkomlingen, har hon framställt en ansiktslös, kvinnlig varelse som medelst två fjärilar tycks ha förenats med en skugglik mansfigur. Det är enbart den förföriskt formade panterdräkten som antyder att det rör sig om en kvinnlig gestalt och framför platsen för hennes kön öppnar sig ett pantergap, som på målningen är omgivet av ett par kvinnoläppar, formade av rödfärgad gips.

Även poeten Jaroslav Seifert var betagen i Marie Čermínová, nedan av maken Jindřich Štyrský målad med en tår under ena ögat.

Liksom Seifert, och flera av Devětsils medlemmar, inte minst den ovan nämnde språkrevolutionären Roman Jakobson, var Čermínová ytterst känslig för språkets nyanser och väl medveten om sitt egna språkbruk. På tjeckiska bestämmer exempelvis inte enbart förnamnet utan även slutet på efternamnet en persons kön. Det är ett ytterst genuspräglat språk och Čermínová, som kände sig begränsad av de förväntningar och skyldigheter som i allmänhet tillämpades på en kvinna, menade att kvinnorollen bland annat bestämdes av språket och vinnlade sig därför om att i sitt tal alltid använda den tjeckiska, maskulina singularformen.

Seifert skrev att Toyen ogillade att bli särbehandlad som kvinna och då de en dag satt tillsammans på ett av Prags många kaféer bad hon honom att finna ett könsneutralt namn åt henne. Seifert skrev då ner några bokstäver på en servett och arrangerade dem sedan i mängd sammanställningar, då bokstäverna bildade det könsneutrala ”Toyen” antog Čermínová ordet som sitt namn. Senare förklarade Toyen att hon tilltalats av associationen till det franska ordet citoyen, medborgare och för egen del lagt beslag på ordets senare del.

Efter det att nazisterna efter 1939 höll Prag i sitt kvävande grepp försvårades Toyens liv. Hennes livskamrat Jindřich Štyrský dog i lunginflammation 1942 och paret hade då den judiske poeten Jindřich Heisler dold i sin lägenhet, där han tillbringade större delen av sina dagar och nätter i deras badrum. Till en början hade Heisler även dolt sig hos Teige och hos sin syster, men då de varit nära att falla i Gestapos händer flyttade han till Toyen och Štyrský och lämnade under fyra års tid inte deras lägenhet. Nedan syns Toyen, Heisler och Teige på en uteservering i Prag, strax innan staden ockuperades av tyskarna.

Heisler gav ut sitt första diktverk 1939, med fem teckningar av Toyen och omslag av Štyrský. Femton exemplar trycktes på tjeckiska och 40 på tyska, de senare böckerna uppmärksammades av Gestapo och Heisler fick snabbt gå under jorden. För att sysselsätta sig själva och den alltmer klaustrofobiske Heisler – Štyrský blev allt sämre och avled ett år efter det att Heisler flyttat in hos dem – skrev och tecknade de tre poeterna/konstnärerna oavbrutet en mängd små böcker. Efter Štyrskýs död fortsatte Toyen och Heisler att varje dag skapa vad som blev en stor mängd illustrerade böcker. Toyen fortsatte hela sitt liv med sådan verksamhet och vid sin död 1980 hade hon skapat fler än femhundra märkliga böcker, av vilka var och en kan betraktas som ett konstverk.

Under den tyska ockupationen spred Toyen och Heilser sina verk, utan angivelse av förlag eller plats, som en del av en inrikes motståndsrörelse. Först skrev Heisler dikter och Toyen illustrerade dem, men deras verksamhet blev ständigt mer mångfacetterad.

Genom Sömnens Kasematt skapade de 1941 sitt mest kända, gemensamma verk. Kasematt är ett rum i en bastion där kanoner och andra artilleripjäser har placerats.

I boken omgavs Heislers maskinskrivna ord av fotomontage, collage, teckningar och ”materialiserad poesi” dvs fotografier av olika föremål som Toyen och Heisler arrangerat i lägenheten.

Heisler skrev:

Alla trappor är stängda.

Alla munnar tilltäppta inifrån.
Ingen pickar längre efter kornen.

Hönorna har kvävts till döds och elden släckts.
En halv kyckling och en blöt bit bröd
sänder sin sista hagelskur mot himlen,

där ett genomskinligt paraply av leverhud spänns upp.

På Moderna Muséet i Stockholm finns Toyens målning Myten om Ljuset. Vi ser Heislers skugga avteckna sig mot dörren till badrummet, där han höll sig dold för Gestapo och nyfikna grannar. Han räcker fram en uppriven planta – ett försök till kontakt med omvärlden? Kanske en ”materialiserad dikt” som minner om hans längtan efter ljus, frihet och natur? Ett par behandskade kvinnohänder formar en skuggbild – en varg? Eller kanske en av Gestapos dobermannar? Är det en varning, eller skvallrar skuggan om ett kommande förräderi?

Men, tillbaka till inledningen. Berättar Vítěslav Nezvals Valerie och hennes underbara vecka verkligen om en ung kvinnas menstruation? Genom sin symbolmättade handling, brädfylld som den är med blod, underjordiska gravkamrar, unken religiositet, jungfrur, vampyrer och hotfullt lockande erotik, handlar romanen onekligen om en ung kvinnas sexuella uppvaknande.

Nezvals roman tar sin början med att Valerie dold i en täckt vagn blir vittne till hur Kommendanten i skepnad av en iller sliter sönder hennes mormoders höns. Hon vänder bort blicken och börjar i månskenet betrakta sina nakna fötter:

Medan hon blickade mot dem kände hon hur en liten spindel spann en tråd längs insidan av hennes lår. Hon lyfte ögonen mot himlen och tänkte inte mer på den ovanliga känslan.

Valerie vänder blicken och ser hur illern sliter huvudet av en höna. Något senare är hon i färd med att smyga ut ur vagnen, alltmedan hon kastar en oroad blick mot lyktan ovanför hönshusets dörr.

En annan tupp gol och besvarades långt i fjärran av två andra. Men natten förblev oförändrad. Då Valerie blickade mot dörren såg hon hur tio nattfjärilar svärmade kring lyktan. Hon kände att den lilla spindeln nu nått fram till ankeln på hennes vänstra fot. Hon tittade ner mot den och såg då till sin stora förfäran hur en tunn strimma av blod sipprade över hennes fotled.

Och Toyen? Det skulle inte förvåna mig om en kvinna som hon, någon som funderat intensivt kring feminitet och erotik, fångenskap och frihet, inte hade tangerat tematiken kring menstruation, blod och kvinnlighet. Kanske kan sådana tankar spåras i Toyens ödsligt kusliga Sovande från 1937.

En flicka med fjärilshåv blickar under en mörk himmel ut över ett tomt, sterilt fält. Är det grynings- eller skymningsljus som lägrat sig vid horisonten? En flicka? Vad betraktaren konfronteras med är i själva inte alls någon människa, enbart en tom klänning. Klänning? Snarast en slags öppen strut som krönt av en peruk fritt svävar över marken. Är den gjord av metall? Det tycks som om det tomma skalet har smutsats ner, eller oxiderats. Är de svarta strimmorna på höger sida tecken på förruttnelse, eller är de en slags föroreningar? De är kanske något helt annat. De kan vara fjädrar, antydan om en vinge. Fjärilshåven är tom. Toyen framställde ofta fjärilar men i Sovande finns inget liv. Handlar hennes målning om sorgen över en förlorad barndom? Om den växande kvinnan betraktad som ett tomt skal, utan förankring, såvida hon inte är gift eller förmögen och därigenom tvingad att värnlös möta en hotfull och oviss framtid?

Jag har tidigare konstaterat att då jag funderar på ett blogginlägg så dyker böcker upp ur det blå och påverkar mitt skrivande. Då jag en vecka innan den stängde ner (COVID-19 har gått hårt åt Roms bokhandlar), plockade jag i den engelska bokhandeln impulsivt upp en ovanligt underlig roman – China Miévilles The Last Days of New Paris.

John Whiteside Parsons befinner sig 1940 i Marseille där han får kontakt med en grupp surrealister som väntar på båtlägenhet för att fly från Frankrike. Otroligt nog är Parsons en verklig person; en avgörande pionjär då det gällde raketteknik och samtidigt ledare för den Thelemiska Ordo Templi Orientis som grundats av den galne ockultisten och sexualmystikern Alestair Crowley.  Dock

befann sig Parsons inte i Marseille 1940, faktum är att han med undantag för då han som trettonåring besökte Frankrike i sällskap med sin mor och sina förmögna morföräldrar aldrig vistades utanför USA. Men förutom det är Miévilles val av Parsons som protagonist i en vansinnig surrealistisk härva synnerligen välbetänkt. En genial, i stort sett självlärd kemist, raketforskare, science fiction-fan och mer än lovligt galen ockultist, utan vars insatser framtidens månfärder och satellituppskjutningar varit omöjliga. Något han inte fick uppleva eftersom han 1952 råkade spränga sig själv i luften.

Besatt av sina livsvådliga experiment och en vildvuxen beläsenhet var Parsons en slags samtida Don Quijote som kom att leva i en absurd, magisk, parallell verklighet, men som stilig, charmerande och emellanåt tämligen charmerande och övertygande person lyckades Parsons till skillnad från Riddaren av den Sorgliga Skepnaden samla ett antal virrhjärnor kring sig, tills han drabbades av

någon form av psykos när Parsons känslomässiga liv kastats in i kaos och hans yrkesmässiga prestationer trätt tillbaka längre in i det förflutna, och han komma att klänga sig hålla fast vid sin magi som om det vore en flotte på ett stormande hav.

I Miévilles roman söker Parsons i Marseille efter Ithell Colquhoun en annan anhängare till Crowley men också konstnär, författare, ockultist och magiker. Han finner dock att Ithell på grund av sina galna åsikter och underliga beteende har blivit utesluten ur surrealistgruppen, inte olikt de omständigheter som gjort att Parsons avlägsnats från företaget Aerojet, som han varit med om att grunda, och därefter hamnat under ständiga misstankar från FBI:s sida, som samlade ihop en diger dossier kring hans ledarskap över sexmagisk sekt, kommunistiska umgänge och hazardous workplace conduct, vådligt arbetsplatsbeteende.

Ithell Colquhoun, som i själva verket aldrig var i kontakt med Parsons, var inte enbart en skicklig konstnär utan även författare till bisarra romaner, exempelvis Hermogenes gås i vilken berätterskan hamnar i sin farbrors labyrintiska gård på en enslig ö och där trasslas in i en ständigt växlande härva av alkemi och magi. I Miévilles förvirrande roman föröker Parsons kontakta Colquhoun för att med hennes hjälp kunna materialisera skadliga tankar och med sina raketer sända dem till Berlin för att där skapa kaos och förvirring, som förhoppningsvis skulle kunna leda till nazismens sammanbrott.

Varian Fry, som i realiteten hjälpte en stor mängd författare och konstnärer att fly från nazisternas terror, introducerar Parsons för en grupp surrealister han har boende i en nedsliten artonrumsvilla, Villa Air-Bel, belägen i en av Marseilles förorter där de avvaktar att beviljas visa till USA.

Surrealisterna fördrev tiden med att måla, ägnade sig åt underliga, egenhändigt uppfunna sällskapsspel, design av spelkort och skapandet av cadavre exquis, utsökta lik, vilket betydde att de kollektivt skapande konstnärerna lade till en sektion av en teckning, eller ett kollage utan att se vad de övriga tidigare hade åstadkommit. De skrev också dikter och romanfragment, som de läste upp för varandra.

Allt detta stämmer överens med verkligheten, men inte att Parsons, som kände sig utesluten ur den illustra gruppen, diskret samlade upp teckningar, dikter, romanfragment och bilder av surrealistiska målningar och genom ockult, alkemistiska metoder lyckades omvandla dem till en slags materia som den marxistiskt anstrukne Parsons inneslöt i en anordning som han avsåg att medelst en raket sända till Berlin och låta explodera över staden.

Dessvärre blev Parsons verk stulet och exploderade på ett kafé i Paris, istället för i Berlin. I konstens ovedersägliga huvudstad släpptes därmed loss en mängd vansinniga manifs, det vill säga påtagliga ”manifestationer” av surrealistisk konst – som flygplansslukande växter, vargbord, förmänskligade cyklar, kringvacklande cadavres exquises och en skottsäker pyjamas. I detta kaos kämpar franska motståndsmän, av vilka flera faktiskt var surrealister, mot tyska arméenheter, understödda av franska överlöpare och SS-vetenskapsmän, som i sin tjänst har präster, tyska ockultister och konstnärer. Genom att dissekera franska, surrealistiska manifs skapar SS och Gestapo egna monster, baserade på nazistiska muskelknuttestatyer av Thorak och Breker.

De levandegjorde även ett existerande självporträtt av den unge Adolf Hitler, där han framställde sig sittande på stenbro med fötterna dinglande över en röd flod. Kanske en föraning om det blodbad han snart skulle dränka världen i. För att visa att det rörde sig om ett självporträtt hade den unge Adolf markerat gestalten med ett X och bredvid det skrivit sin signatur ”AH”.

Det var inte enbart surrealistiska konstverk som Parsons laddat sin bomb med, utan även en mängd dikter och andra skrifter. Den skottsäkra pyjamasen var exempelvis baserad på en dikt av Simone Yoyotte (1910 -1933), som tillsammans med sin bror från Martinique anlänt till Paris där de blivit medlemmar av en grupp svarta surrealister från Karibien och Madagaskar, som gav ut en tidskrift kallad Légitime Défense. Legitimt försvar, som i dikter och artiklar angrep den franska kolonialismen. En prosadikt av den nu tämligen okända Yoyotte, som dog ung och varit en djärv förkämpe för feminism och antirasism:

En blek blå linje i en påtvingad episod: Jag klipper ett hål i Republikens flagga.

Min vackra fågel i stuprännornas oavbrutna skvalande, jag anropar dig, men tro inte att jag kommer tillbaka. Ett vackert efternamns vackra fjäderskrud ignorerar inte att kungöra min fruktan för glaciärernas vind. Min sköna åskfågel, född ur längtan och glädjen över en redan nergången sol, samt mängden av mina förvirrade törnen inom en enhetlig ångest skapad ur en vistelse som jag inte ville påtvinga dig, min fågel […] Jag har dag som natt vandrat genom förtvivlans tempel och medan jag bemästrade alla mina stora sorger såg jag dig överallt, vackra fågel. [...] Rhododendrons åkallan vid aprils början liknar din skuggas musik, värdelösa fågel, som enbart känner uppror tillsammans med alla de stora träd som kantar avenyerna och alla boulevarderna, då bankettsalarnas trumpet genljuder under den kvinnas fönster som ännu inte känner kärleken.

Bland en hel del annat som fascinerade mig i Miévilles bisarra roman var den stora mängd kvinnliga surrealister som förekommer i den. Författaren fick mig att inse vilken avgörande roll kvinnor haft inom surrealismen. Både som inspiration för de ofta ytterst självcentrerade män som dominerade rörelsen och som överskuggat kvinnornas roll, inte enbart som inspiratörer för deras verk, men också i deras egenskap av självständigt skapande individer med en stor betydelse för rörelsens framväxt och fortbestånd. Kvinnors som trots att deras konst var minst lika revolutionerande, expressiv och skicklig som de manliga surrealisternas likväl har kommit helt i skymundan av de numera välkända och allmänt hyllade männen.

Det är först på senare tid som mästare som Frida Kahlo, Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo, Meret Oppenheim och Leonor Fini uppmärksammats av en större publik, men de utgör enbart den synliga delen av ett väldigt isberg och som fallet är med all betydande surrealistisk konst har detta isberg förgreningar djupt ner i det undermedvetna. Det är i stort sett enbart under de senaste decennierna som en och annan samlingsutställning har ägnats åt surrealistkvinnor. En entré till denna skattkammare av djuplodande, feministiskt anstrukna konst var exempelvis 2020-års Fantastiske kvinder, en utställning i Humlebaeks Lousiana Museum för vilken Leonora Carringtons Kattkvinna kan stå som emblem för den märkliga och hittills i stort sett okända värld som öppnades där.

När jag nu läser om dessa kvinnors konst och litteratur, ovanligt många av dem var även särpräglade poeter och romanförfattare, slår det mig att flera av dem betraktade världen utifrån ett ett alldeles speciellt perspektiv. Präglade av sin påtvingade kvinnoroll förmådde de som skapande konstnärer vidarebefordra en utomståendes skarpa blick på sin omvärld. Till stor del färgade deras unika ståndpunkt även ett slags bejakande av sitt utanförskap. Surrealistkvinnorna kunde på ett liknande sätt som homosexuella mästare som då Proust, Gide och James skapa en unik litteratur och likt färgade författare som Wright, Ellison och Baldwin förmedla inblickar i en plågsam och påtvingad marginalisering.

Surrealistkvinnornas litterära och konstnärliga värld frambesvärjer allt som oftast en erotisk färgad, ofta kuslig och grotesk värld. Vi närmare eftertanke har många kvinnliga författare rört sig i en sådan mystisk och ofta skräckanfrätt värld, med en början hos de gotiska mästarinnorna Mary Shelley, Emelie Brontë och Ann Radcliffe, fram till J.K. Rowlings alster och unika spökhistorier som Susan Hills Kvinnan i svart och Shirley Jacksons Hemsökelsen på Hill House, eller Angela Carters geniala omskrivningar av Perraults skräckhistorier i The Bloody Chamber. En skräckromatisk blandning av det vardagliga med det fantastiska som får mig att tänka på Rose Nestlers samtida konst. Exempelvis hennes Weird Sisters, Kusliga systrar - sök videon på nätet och se till att få med ljudet

Surrealismens djupborrningar ner i det undermedvetnas ”mest förbjudna” har färgat  flera ”romaner” som Nelly Kaplans underliga vampyrvärldar med dess nekrofiler, robotar och spöken, som emellanåt kan bli lika osmakliga som Poppy Z. Brites skildringar av ett perverterat och mystiskt New Orleans.

Eller Joyce Mansour som föddes i England, växte upp i Egypten och sedermera genom en förmögen make blev del i den franska surrealismen och vars böcker präglas av erotik och raseri. Som i Julius Caesar där ett tvillingpar som fötts i Sodom bor på ett berg lika stort som Frankrike där de hädar Gud, plågas av sin feta amma Julius Caesar och svär ”att dricka allt blod i världen”.

För mig går sådant utöver gränsen för vad jag kan uppskatta och eftersom jag inte finner vare sig sadism eller masochism speciellt roande söker jag mig hellre till de surrealistiska kvinnornas konstverk, även om det bland många av dem finns underströmmar av såväl uppdämt erotiskta perversioner och revoltförsök så attraheras jag mer av Leonora Carringtons och Remedios Varos sagovärldar än de surrealistiska ”kvinnoromaner” som kommit i min väg.

Jag upptäckte Carrington och Varo vid ett besök i Mexiko där Carringtons stora fresk i Mexico Citys Antropologiska nationella museum fick mig att söka upp hennes särpräglade konst och romaner.

Samtidigt upptäckte jag där på en omfattande retrospektiv utställning den för mig tidigare okända Remedios Varos konst, som fortsatt fascinera mig, inte minst för att den påminner mig om Tove Janssons finurligt trollska Muminvärld, som ända sedan barndomen varit mig till stor glädje och inspiration.

Det var för övrigt i Mexiko, med dess öppna flyktingpolitik, som flera europeiska ”surrealistiska” kvinnor hamnade på flykt undan terror och likriktning på den naziockuperade europeiska kontinenten. En del av dem var även på flykt från sina kontrollerande och förkvävande män.

De kom på olika vägar och av olika orsaker. Den ungerska fotografen Kati Horna kom med sin make, efter att efter den spanska republikens fall 1939 ha flytt till Paris, men där uteslutits från det socialistiska partiet och sedan gett sig av inför det nazistiska hotet. Även spanjorskan Remedios Varo följde sin socialistiske make på flykt från Paris inför nazisternas ankomst, ett år innan hade även de flytt från Spanien efter Republikens sammanbrott.

Samma år som Horna och Varo anlände till Mexiko kom även Alice Rahon dit i sällskap med sin make, men inte på flykt undan förföljelse, utan på inbjudan av det mexikanska konstnärsparet Kahlo/Rivera, fast oron på den europeiska kontinenten fick dem att stanna kvar i Mexiko.

Alice Rahon föddes i Frankrike med förmögna engelska föräldrar. Tre år gammal skadades hon allvarligt och tillbringade en längre tid gipsad, sängbunden och isolerad från andra barn. Då hon tillfrisknat gjorde hennes svaghet att hon ofta var skild från barnsliga lekar och upplevelser, förvärrat av att hon vid tolv års ålder åter bröt sina ben. Hon blev gravid vid unga år, men barnet var mentalskadat och dog något år efter födseln och Alice Rahon var sedan dess oförmögen att bli gravid. Sextiotvå år gammal föll hon nerför en trappa och skadade sin ryggrad, men vägrade att ta emot medicinsk behandling genom att konstatera att läkarna plågat henne tillräckligt som barn. Tjugo år senare dog hon efter att tillbringat sin tid så gott som isolerad från omvärlden.

Fram till Frida Kahlos död 1954 stod henne Alice Rahon henne mycket nära. De delade sina frustrationer från sårade och ömtåliga kroppar och oförmågan att få barn, såväl som vanan att använda konst och skrivande för att fördriva smärta och frustration. De var även ytterst intresserade av mexikansk folkkonst, men i Rahons fall omformades detta intresse under senare år till ett abstrakt måleri.

Samtidigt som Alice Rahon kom till Mexiko tog sig italienskan Leonor Fini och spanjorskan Maruja Mallo till Argentina. Maruja flydde efter att under Spanska inbördeskriget ha stridit på republikanernas sida, där hade hon varit minst lika välkänd för sin konst som för sitt egensinniga uppträdande. Hon var exempelvis anarkist och antikatolik och hade arresterats efter att under en mässa ha cyklat in i en kyrka. Marujas konst präglades som så mycket annan surrealistiskt uttryckssätt av narcissism, erotik och död.

Leonor Fini var också som person och konstnär ovanligt självständig och konstroversiell. Hon spelade ofta i såväl tavlor som fotografier ut sin exhibitionistiska och ”poly-amorösa” läggning.

Flera av de ”surrealistiska” kvinnorna var uppseendeväckande vackra och framställde sig som sådana i sina konstverk. Som Dorothea Tanning, som under tjuugo år blev Max Ernst följeslagereska, fram till hans död 1976, efter det att han varit gift med såväl Leonora Carrington som Peggy Guggenheim.

Bridget Bate Tichenor ”en glamorös, slank skönhet med stora azurblå ögon och parktfullt svart hår” hade arbetat som modell för Coco Chanel och figurerat på uppslag i Vogue, hamnade även hon i Mexiko, men inte som flykting. Född och verksam i Paris kom hon till Mexiko från New York, lockad av kretsen kring Frida Kahlo.

Det var inte enbart parets Rivera/Kahlos konst och karisma som lockade artister att kontakta dem, utan även det faktum att de var kända som radikala, men samtidigt obundna kommunister, liksom María Izquerido en annan vid den tiden välkänd konstnär. Som Frida Kahlo var Izquerido sambo med en välkänd mexikansk konstnär, i hennes fall Rufino Tamayo, och liksom Kahlo målade hon i en ”primitivistisk” ofta surrealistisk stil.

Tichenors konst rör sig ofta kring det utanförskap som hon trots sin karismatiska utstrålning led av. Exempelvis i nedanstående målning där en exotiskt vacker kvinna sitter innesluten i ett isblock, omgiven av hotande ormar och insekter tycks hon sända upp en nödsignal, likt de ”bengaliska eldar” som tänds av skeppsbrutna. Den av is inneslutna kvinnan får mig att tänka på en annan konstnär – Anna Kavan och hennes roman Is. Likt flera ”surrealistkvinnor” var Cavan en ytterst känslig individ som sökte sig till förhållande efter förhållande. Hon var narkoman och ofta intagen på sanatorier och mentalkliniker.

Det är typiskt att kvinnliga konstnärer och författare i allmänhet nämns i samband med sina mer välkända gemåler och/eller älskare och sambos¨, samt betraktas som en slags bihang till dem. Om de överhuvudtaget nämns är det i allmänhet som ”inspiratörer”, eller att deras konst präglats av deras förhållande till manliga genier. Ett faktum som överskuggar att dessa kvinnor redan innan de mötte sina berömda män var aktiva konstnärinnor och författare och att de liksom sin manliga följeslagare träffat dem inom de artistiska kretsar där de rörde sig och i allmänhet – även om de, liksom Frida Kahlo, levde i skuggan av starka, manliga personligheter - ofta skildrade sina såriga relationer med dem, så var de likväl ytterst speciella och ofta starka personligheter.

En annan vacker kvinna vars karriär och ryktbarhet kom att präglas av hennes förhållande till en välkänd man var den belgiska konstnärinnan Rachel Baes som hade ett förhållande med den rabiate fascisten Joris Van Severen, ledare för Verdinaso, ett ultranationalistiskt fascistinspirerat parti som likväl var anti-nazisitiskt och pro-stalinistiskt. Joris Van Severen avrättades utan rättegång 1940 av fransmännen och Baes återhämtade sig aldrig från förlusten, samtidigt som hon genom sitt förhållande till Van Severen isolerades och det var först efter hennes död, efter ett liv som folkskygg enlsling i Brügge, som hennes konst 1983 började uppmärksammas i någon högre grad.

Belgisk surrealist var även den subversiva, antiklerikala och stalinistiska konstnärinnan och filmskaparen Jane Gravero. Hennes deltagande i en åtalad erotisk-freudiansk filmfars riktad mot kyrkan kom att prägla hennes liv och konstnärliga verksamhet, som ständigt återkommer till kvinnan som ett erotiskt objekt. Hennes stil, som påminner om de betydligt mer välkända belgarna Magritte och Delvaux, samt holländarna Willink och Moesman, gjorde att hon hamnade i skuggan av dessa mer välkända kollegoe och hon kom att betraktas som en "plagiatör" även även om hon utvecklat sin konst och synsätt parallellt med dessa konstnärer och i sin konst var betydligt mer mångfacetterad.

Betydande konstnärinnor som hamnat i Mexiko hade även de marginaliserats av sina män. En av dem var Leonora Carrington som efter stort fysiskt lidande hamnat i det mer välkomnande ”exotiska” landet och med tiden kom att uppskattas som en av dess konstnärliga storheter, med flera betydande beställningsverk som muralist.

Då Leonora Carrington 1940 kom till Mexiko och där till en början omhändertogs av Kati Horna var hon som en skadskjuten fågel. Hennes älskade och beundrade Max Ernst hade likt flera andra surrealister genom Varian Frys försorg blivit räddad över till USA. Innan Ernst kom till USA hade han gripits av Gestapo och Carrington hade då blivit rådd att söka sig till Madrid, där genomgick hon dock en allvarlig mental kris, tvångsintogs på ett mentalsjukhus och utsattes för upprepade elchocker medan hon behandlades med tunga droger som cardiazol och luminal. Efter att ha blivit utskriven övcervakades hon av en vårdare som avslöjade att hennes föräldrar begärt att hon skulle överföras till ett sydafrikanskt vårdhem. Då Carrington i Lissabon skulle föras ombord på ett skepp destinerat till Kapstaden lyckades hon avvika och söka asyl på mexikanska ambassaden vars ambassadör Renato Leduc hon träffat hos Picasso. Leduc gick med på att gifta sig med Leonora Carrington för att på så sätt kunna ta med henne till Mexiko. I Mexiko nåddes Carrington av meddelandet att Max Ernst i New York gift sig med miljonärskan och konstmecenaten Peggy Guggenheim. Carrington skilde sig sedermera från Leduc och gifte sig med en god vän till Kati Horna – Emerico Weisz, liksom Horna flykting från det Spanska inbördeskriget, ungrare och fotograf.

I april 1938 anlämnde ”surrealistpåven” André Breton till Mexiko och välkomnades där av Diego Rivera och Frida Kahlo och bodde tillsammans med sin hustru, Jacqueline Lamba, under sju månader i Rivera/Kahlos berömda Blå hus, där även Leon Trotsky och hans hustru Natalja Sedova var bosatta fram till 1939, då de blev ovänner med Rivera.

Breton skrev tillsammans med Trotsky ett manifest de kallade för Manifest för en fri, revolutionär konst i vilket de förordade skapandet av en Internationell federation bestående av framträdande konstnärer och författare världen över. Efter återvändandet från Mexiko satte Breton igång med att organisera Federationen och lyckades få flera välkända konstnärer och författare som Yves Tanguy, André Masson, Victor Serge, Herbert Red, Ignazio Silone och George Orwell att sluta upp bakom honom och Trotsky. Hela företaget klappade snart dock ihop. Breton erkände för Trotsky att:

kanske är jag trots allt inte så skicklig som organisatör, men samtidigt tycks det mig som om jag har ställts inför enorma hinder.

Förföljd som han var av Stalin och hans trogna hantlangare runtom i världen, bad Trotsky (som trots sin imponerande intelligens knappast var ett av Guds bästa barn) att Rivera skulle ersätta honom som undertecknare av det globalt spridda manifestet. Från Buenos Aires grymtade Borges några sanningens ord:

Jag tror och det är min enda tro … att marxismen (som lutheranism, som månen, som en häst, som en rad från Shakespeare) kan utgöra inspiration för konst, men det är absurt att förordna att det är den enda inspirationen. Det är absurt att hävda att konst skulle utgöra en politisk avdelning. Det är emellertid precis vad detta otroliga manifest hävdar ... en usel, oberoende konst som de föreställer sig skall vara underordnad kommittéers pedanteri.

På ett fotografi vänder sig de tre konstnärliga och politiska giganterna, Breton, Ruvera och Trotsky sig till Bretons späda hustru, Jacqueline Lamba, som liksom Trotsky sökte sig till Frida Kahlos omfamning. Redan innan hon blev Bretons andra hustru var Jacqueline en framstående konstnär. Breton gifte sig ännu en gång och hade under sitt liv en mängd älskarinnor. Jacqueline skiljde sig 1943 från Breton, trött på att vara ”utan namn och refererad till som kvinnan som inspirerade, eller enbart var Bretons hustru.” Under hela sitt liv målade Jacqueline i olika stilarter, men oftast särpräglade, i det närmaste abstrakta landskap.

Under sin tid tillsammans Jacqueline målade Frida Kahlo ett stilleben med olika frukter, men då Jacqueline och Breton fyra år senare skilde sig i New York målade Frida om sin tavla genom att inkludera en dockgestalt som förställde Jacqueline Lamba och målade papayan så att den öppnats och kommit att lika ett kvinnligt könsorgan. Under tavlan skrev Frida La novia que se espanta de ver la vida abierta, bruden skrämd över att se världen öppen.

Den portugisiska konstnärinnan Paula Rego har träffsäkert skildrat kvinnor som tjänarinnor till sina män och det tycks som om många artistiskt begåvade individer ofta är ytterst självcentrerade.

En stilig kvinnotjusare och träffsäker estet som Breton kunde ofta framstå som såväl despotisk och aggressiv, inte minst i sina talrika förhållanden till kvinnor. Någon som fick erfara detta var Valetine Hugo, skapare av ett välkänt grupporträtt av surrealisterna Paul Éluard, André Breton, Tristan Tzara, Benjamin Péret, René Crevel och René Char, som hon kallade Surrealismens stjärnkonstellation. I vanlig ordning reproduceras ofta detta verk av en kvinnlig artist utan angivande av namnet på dess skapare.

Hugos förhållande med Breton blev under en tid ”fysiskt” och mellan juli 1931 och maj 1932 levde de tillsammans under ytterst tumultartade och ofta våldsamma omständigheter. Efter ett aggressivt uppträdande dem emellan försökte Hugo ta sitt liv, döende ringde hon efter Paul Eluard som i sista sekund fick henne under medicinsk behandling. Efter det att de skilts åt nämnde Breton aldrig Valetine Hugo och hon förekommer inte alls i hans grundbok om surrealismen Le Surréalisme et la Peinture.

Flera andra ”surrealistkvinnor” var dock inte så underosdnade sina män som Valentine Hugo. Ett exempel på en viljestark och inte speciellt omtyckt surrealist var den förmögna amerikanskan Katherine Linn Sage, känd som Kay Sage. I Paris blev hon i surrealistkretsar känd som Furstinnan, generös i sitt stöd till fattiga konstnärskollegor, men flera av dem föraktade henne likväl på grund av hennes förmögenhet och ”överlägsna attityd”. Bretons vän Yves Tanguy blev våldsamt förälskad i Kay Sage och lämnade för hennes skull sin hustru och bröt med den svartsjuke Breton. Då kriget bröt ut lämnade Kay och Tanguy Europa och bosatte sig i Reno i USA.

Tanguys och Sages förhållande var milt sagt våldsamt. Tanguy var en märklig, impulsiv man, exempelvis var han känd för att ge andra män, även de han gillade, ”danska skallar”. Han attackerade ofta Kay Sage, såväl med ett brutalt språkbruk som handripligt. Vid flera tillfällen hotade han henne med en kniv. Tanguy uppskattade inte hustruns konst och ogillade då den möttes med uppskattning. Samtidigt beskrevs Kay Sage ofta som ”svår”, lynnig och högdragen. Hennes konst är mer ”verklighetsförankrad” än makens och personligen uppskattar jag den mer än Yves Tanguys verk, speciellt som Sages konst i allmänhet öppnar sig för olika tolkningar.

Tanguys död ledde hos Kay Sage till en svårartad depression . Hon deklarerade ofta att ”Yves var min enda vän, han förstod allt”. Efter makens död målade Kay alltmer sällan, antagligen beroende på svårmod, men också på en alltmer försämrad syn. Hon skrev istället märklig poesi på den delvis uppfunna franska som hon och Tanguy brukade använda sinsemellan. Kay Sage ägnade sig också åt att försäkra makens eftermäle genom att arrangera en mängd utställningar av hans konst och sammanställa en en fullständig katalog över hans verk.

Det finns en hel del exempel på sammansvetsade konstnärspar som ömsesidigt inspirerat varandra och hållit samman trots vitt skilda karaktärer. Ett sådant par var amerikanerna Margaret Marley Modlin och hennes make Elmer Modlin, som båda drömde om framgång, som då de inte kunde nå och isolerade sig i en fattig, spansk hippietillvaro. Elmer hade haft biroller i TVserien Bewitched och i Polanskis Rosemary´s Baby, medan Margaret marginellt hade agerat i filmer som Love and Pain and the Whole Damn Thing och March or Die. Främst ville dock Elmer bli känd som poet och Margaret som konstnär. Fast Elmer fick aldrig någon dikt publicerad och Margaret sålde inte en enda tavla. Något som inte säger att Elmer var en dålig poet, eller Margaret en usel konstnär. I själva verket omvandlade de i sin spanska isolering sina liv och omgivning till ett slags allkonstverk. Margaret ägnade exempelvis sin konst åt att i bild framställa Elmers poesi och deras gemensamma fantasivärld.

Ett annat långt mer framgångsrikt konstnärspar är filmskaparen och konstnären Jan Švankmajer och hans hustru Eva Švankmajerová, fast Eva är mer av en bildkonstnär än sin mer skulpturalt inriktade make. Trots att de samarbetar i alla projekt är Eva likväl betydligt mer okänd än Jan Švankmajer. Likt flera andra surrealistiska kvinnors konst skildrar  i sin konst kropp och död.

Det är dock inte alla konstnärligt lagda kvinnor förunnat att dela sina liv med skapande, inspirerande män som ger dem möjlighet att skapa sin egen konst. Det tog exempelvis fransk-amerikanskan Fanny Myers Brennan tjugo år efter sina barns födelse innan hon åter tog upp sitt måleri. En av hennes målningar tycks anspela på hur livet, eller ödet, lägger hinder i vägen för en skapande kvinna – en av den amerikanska västerns öppna highways spärras oväntat av ett bergmassiv.

En del surrealistkvinnor har lyckats sammanlänka ett framgångsrikt yrkesliv med sin konst. Ett exempel är Grace W. Pailthorpe som arbetade som kirurg i Flanderns skyttegravar och senare vid ett kvinnosjukhus i Thessaloniki och som allmänpraktiserande läkare vid ett kvinnofängelse i London ägnade sig åt att forska kring kriminellt beteende, om vilket hon skrev vetenskapliga artiklar som publicerades i den välrenommerade tidskriften The Lancet. I sin konst framställer Pailthorpe ofta mjukt organiska former som möjligen associerar till hennes verksamhet som kirurg och psykolog, exempelvis i hennes En berättelse om mors ben.

Flera kvinnliga, brittiska surrealister lyckades försörja sig på sin konst, exempelvis Edith Rimmington vars verk skildrar svårtydda drömvärldar med associationer till antika religioner och/eller uppenbart uråldriga fossilvarelser som kombinerats med moderna persedlar.

Marion Adnams delade sin tid mellan Provence och sin hemtrakt kring Derby och hennes landskap är ofta inspirerade av Derbys omgivningar eller den engelska kusten inom vilka hon placerar ensamma kvinnogestalter, och allt som oftast olika skelettdelar.

Kvinnor lever möjligen i högre grad än män lever i sina kroppar, genom menstruationer och barnfödande och inte minst genom att deras fysysika lockelser betraktas och bedöms genom mäns lystna blickar. Någon som så gott som uteslutande ägnade sin konst åt framställa kvinnliga kroppsdelar var den polska konstnärinnan Alina Szapocznikow som tillbringade sin svåra ungdom först i ghettona i Pabianice och Ƚódź, sedan i Auschwitzs, Bergen-Belsens och Thereszientadts koncentrationsläger. Under resten av sitt liv talade Szapocznikow sällan om sina krigsupplevelser, men spåren efter dem är tydliga i all hennes konst. Som ofta tar sig uttryck i vad hon kallade ”mänskliga landskap”.

Kvinnlig surrealism är långt ifrån ett unikt europeisk och amerikansk fenomen. I Japan finner vi exempelvis Toshiko Okanoue vars fotografiska montage tycks spegla Max Ernsts och de tjeckiska surrealisternas verk, men med anspelningar till japanska krigsupplevelser och ett ”feministiskt” universum.

Flera moderna ”manga-artister” som Takano Aya kan också räknas in bland kvinnliga surrealister. I motsats till den betydligt äldre Toshiko Okanue låter sig Takano Aya i sitt måleri inspireras av den ovanligt rika japanska, traditionella monster-folkkulturen.

I Indien finner vi Ganesh Pyne Savitris mörkt makabra konst, som likt sina europeiska motsvarigheter skildrar död och kvinnlig verklighet, men förankrad i indisk religiositet och folkkonst.

Amy Nimr föddes 1898 i en egyptisk överklassfamilj av libanesiskt, syriskt, engelskt och franskt ursprung. Hon tillbringade sin tid mellan Egypten, England och Frankrike. Strax innan Andra världskriget då hennes familj var på picknick i Saqqara dödades hennes son av en landmina och under en tid var Nimr oförmögen att måla, men då hon återupptog sin konst var den fylld av lik, skelett och lemlästade kroppar. Nimr var också en betydande poet och litteraturkritiker. Efter Suezkrisen 1956 och uppkomsten av en alltmer uttalad egyptisk nationalism och främlingsfientlighet flyttade Nimr och hennes make till Paris, där hon förblev till sin död 1974.

Med vissa undantag, som västafrikanskt skyltmåleri, senegalesiska glasmålningar och tavlor målade med cykellack i Tanzania har det förställande måleriet först under senare tid vunnit inträde på större delen av den afrikanska kontinenten, men det finns på många platser en lång tradition av olika former av snideri som ger uttryck för en livsuppfattning som skulle kunna betecknas som ”surrealism”.

Då det gäller afrikanska ”surrealistiska” konstnärinnor har även de på senare tid börjat uttrycka sig genom målningar. Flera av dem har verkat i sina respektive hemländer innan deras konsts marknadsvärde upptäckts och de därigenom har fått möjlighet att ge sig av till Europa eller Amerika, där de haft större möjligheter att utöka och förfina sina uttrycksmedel. En av de kvinnor som funnit en sådan möjlighet är kenyanskan Wangechi Mutu som numera är verksam i USA. Hon ägnar sig åt installationer, perfomances och ett collageartat måleri inom vilket hon i likhet med så många andra kvinnliga surrealister uttrycker ett kvinnligt kroppsmedvetande, ofta i groteska former påverkade av sjukdom, kulturella trauman och genuskonstruktioner, på ett sätt som kan vara mystiskt i enlighet med urgamla traditioner. Mutus konst kan ofta verka vara både frånstötande och märkligt lockande.

I stort sett varje land tycks ha sina mer eller mindre kända surrealistkvinnor. Sverige har bland andra Greta Knutson Tzara som 1924 i Paris träffade den redan berömde och i vissa kretsar ökände rumänske poeten Samuel Rosenstock, som tagit sig namnet Tristan Tzara och stått vid såväl dadaismens som surrealismens källflöden. De gifte sig året efter och Greta använde arvet efter sina fömögna föräldrar till uppförandet av en ”kubistiskt funktionalistisk” bostad av den teckiske arkitekten Adolf Loos. Paret Tzaras hem blev snart en samlingspunkt för radikala konstnärer och författare och 1927 föddes, efter en ovanligt svår och ytterst plågsam förlossning, sonen Christophe.

Greta har berättat att hon under hela sitt liv försökte finna tid och ro för att kunna arbeta med sin konst. Det var bland annat en orsak till varför hon satsade sina pengar på att den radikale, österikiske arkitekten Adolf  Loos skulle bygga ett hus åt henne och Tzara. Men Loos hade arbetat med en vision om öppna ytor och så få dörrar som möjligt, vilket gjorde att Gretas ateljé låg  helt öppen mot matsalen, något hon tyckte gjorde hennes tillvaro besvärlig. Inte förrän efter en, som hon själv beskriver det, oändlig kamp fick hon sätta upp en vägg mellan rummen, men det gjorde Tzara rasande – han reste bort i en vecka och ingen visste vart han tagit vägen. Det kan tyckas vara en detalj, men efter vad som varit en våldsam förälskelse gjorde  bristen på frihet Greta förtvivlad och kätleken  och den ömsesidiga inspirationen bröts successivt ner.

Under sin tid med Greta skrev Tzara vad som kommit att betraktas som hans  mästerverk - den episka dikten L´Homme approximatif, Den ungefärlige mannen, som han tillägnade sin hustru. Genom ordet approximatif ville Tzara visa att var och en av oss kan uppfattas som en ofärdig skiss till en idealisk mänsklig varelse. Varje skiss är mer eller mindre fullkomlig, men ingen är perfekt och vi vill framförallt att de som omger oss skall vara fullkomliga och vi har därför svårt att acceptera andra människor som inte är perfekta och ser inte de möjligheter som en skiss antyder. Enligt Tzara är all tillvaro skissartad, även konsten kan inte bli fullkomlig, men det det är just det som gör den till en ständig inspiration – en strävan efter att förstå och försöka återge en vision så skickligt som möjligt. I sina försök att förklara tillvaron får Tristan Tzara allt att framstå som betydligt mer komplcerat än vad det i själva verket är. Även språket blir infallsrikt, oorganiserat och ofullkomligt:

... liv upprepas oändligt tills dess det når atomens skörhet
och når så högt och långt att vi inte kan urskilja det
i förening med alla de liv som exiterar vid sidan av vårt eget.
Vi färdas färdas på så många parallella vägar
tills de som vi vi kunde ha tagit
för att förenas med världen
förloras och glöms bort så länge
att även vi borde ha glömt dem tillsammans med tiden,

samt den jord genom vilken världen har sugit upp vårt kötts
salter och flytande metaller,

de som var så klara och som  sprungit fram vid källflödena brunnarna …

Det Andra världskriget skilde Tzara och Greta åt. Med sonen Chrsitophe flyttade hon till Aix-en-Provence. Hon ville börja en ny bana och genom sin vän författaren René Char gick hon året därpå med i den franska motståndsrörelsen och blev ledare för en grupp som ordnade falska pass till judar och oppositionella, medan hon hjälpte till att smuggla flyktingar över gränsen till Spanien. Det blev en vändpunkt i hennes liv. Krig och ockupation avslöjade människors rätta natur. Hon hamnade i en härva av våld, angivelser och motangivelser, men också uppoffringar och godhet. Även Tzara, som stannat kvar i Paris och där engagerat sig i det aktiva motståndet mot den tyska ockupation, genomgick en tid av omvälvande förändring.

Vid krigets slut och återkomsten till Tzara och Paris reagerade Greta starkt mot den stalinistiska vågen som svepte över Europa, ett fenomen hon kallade för en tanklös ”caféstalinism” som ”över en natt” gjorde de flesta av surrealisterna till rabiata ”marxister”. Efter sin tid som organisatör och aktiv medlem inom motståndsrörelsen hade Greta kommit att inse den marginaliserade roll som ständigt tillföll kvinnor. Inom inom surrealistkretsarna betraktades de om milda, ljuva och medgörliga varelser, föremål för en absurd dyrkan och ansågs i allmänhet inte vara självständigt skapande individer. Inom den surrealistiska gruppen tvingades kvinnor tiga och om de sa något lyssnade ingen till dem.

1942 hade Greta skilt sig från Tzara och brutit med surrealisterna. Hon fortsatte dock med sin konstnärliga verksamhet och kom alltmer att intressera sig för filosofi, främst i dess fenomenologiska tappning med filosofer som Husserl och Heidegger. Hon behöll sitt namn och två lägenheter, en i Paris och en i Stockholm och även om hon ställde ut sin konst i bägge städer blev hon aldrig accepterad som en like till manliga konstnärer. Exempelvis beskrev en recension i Expressen 1947 hennes konstverk, statyer och målningar som ”fega och problemfria”, en bedömning jag har svårt att hålla med om.

Greta var en produktiv skribent, bland annat som konstkritiker, före Andra världskriget publicerades hennes kritik bland annat i den svenska Konstrevy. Senare författade hon en mängd kortromaner och prosadikter och tillsammans med Gunnar Ekelöf översatte hon svensk litteratur till franska och fransk till svenska. Ekelöf hade redan innan kriget träffat Tristan Tzara och Greta Knutson-Tzara och umgåtts i surrealistkretsen i deras parisiska bostad där han ”stortrivdes och läste egna dikter, sjöng Birger Sjöberg och jojkade”.

Under den senare delen av sitt liv kom Greta Knutson-Tzara att beteckna sin konst som ”onirisk” och den kom att präglas av drömska scener med vatten, fartyg och fantasigestalter, ofta monstruösa, och deras möten med människor.

Inom psykiatri refererar onirism till ett mentat tillstånd, ofta mellan dröm och vaka, då i det närmaste påtagliga hallucinationer kan uppkomma. En så kallda ”onirisisk” riktning grundades 1964 i Bukarest av författarna Dumitru Ţepeneag och Leonid Dimov som deklarerade ”vi drömmer inte, vi skapar drömmar”. Under flera år accepterades de av den kommunistiska regimen, men 1975 fråntogs Ţepeneag sitt rumänska medborgarskap medan han besökte Paris. Han blev kvar och ägnar sig åt att översätta franska poeter och romanförfattare till rumänska alltmeden han känner sig främmande inför såväl västerländsk kommersialism som kommunism och totalitarism i största allmänhet.

Även i måleri och dikt, som hon oftast skrev på franska, uttryckte Greta Knutson-Tzara ett drömskt utanförskap, ofta i dödens närhet. Som i följande dikt där hon antydde sitt såriga förhållande till modern:

Det döende barnet

Mor jag ville sova under det svarta vattnet
ställ det brinnande ljuset vid min bädd under vattnet, mor,
var inte ond på mig, vagga mig till sömns.

Måne, jag ville sova på måsarnas ö,
ställ ditt ljus på klippkanten vid måsens bo,
måne, vagga mig till sömns

Juninatt, jag ville sova mellan två rosor,
mellan afton- och morgonrodnaden,
rosor vagga mig till sömns.

Eka, jag ville sova i din drivande vagga,
mitt i den gröna vassen,
eka vagga mig till sömns.

Mor, om du vetat skulle du inte ha varit ond på mig,
då skulle du låtit mig sova, mor, i den djupa bädden
under vattnet.

Med åren blev hennes känsla av isolering och utanförskap allt värre:

Av alla ansikten i tusentals städer skall inget längre vara ditt – du som är ensam om att inte veta hur jorden tynger ditt bröst.
Algerna växer under alens rötter, vattnets drömmar blir allt mörkare under klippan. Än mörkare är din ensamhet under den rimfrosttäckta stenen. Ingen ropar längre ditt namn.

Sedan dess faller aska till jorden, sommar som vinter. Tiden förrinner onyttig, ingen räknar längre dagar eller år.

1983 tog hon livet av sig i Paris.

Den kvinnliga ”surrealismen” tycks i hög grad kretsa kring de problem det innebär att vara kvinna i en mansdominerad värld och utanförskapet tolkas ofta utifrån en ”drömsk”, alternativ verklighet där ödslighet, hot och ensamhet drabbar ensamma människor instängda i och präglade av sina kroppar. Det är inte utan hur en barndom som försvunnit i och med menstruationens blodiga omvandling ofta spökar i dessa kvinnors konst och skrifter. Flera av dem hade hänvisats till en skuggtillvaro bakom en manligt kontrollerad konst som så länge har tillåtits dominera den kulturella scenen.

Danchev, Alex (ed.) (2011) 100 Artist’s Maifestos from the Futurists to the Stuckists. London: Penguin Modern Classics. Ernst, Max (1976) Une Semaine De Bonté: A Surrealistic Novel in Collage. New York: Dover. Holst, Hans (2001) Nu brinner bergen: Greta Knutson och modernismen i Paris. Ystad: Holtres. Huebner, Karla (2020) Magnetic Woman: Toyen and the Surrealist Erotic. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020. Jangfeldt, Bengt (1997) ”Roman Jakobson in Sweden 1940–41”, i Cahiers de l’ILSL, N° 9. Nezval, Vítěslav (2005) Valerie and Her Week of Wonders. Prag: Twisted Spoon Press. Mansour, Joyce (2009) Julius Casear. Stockholm: Spinx Bokförlag. Miéville, China (2017) The Last Days of New Paris. London: Picador. Rosemont, Penelope (1998) Surrealist Women: An International Anthology. London: Athlone Press. Pendle, George (2006) Strange Angel: The Otherworldy Life of Rocket Scientist John Whiteside Parsons. Boston: Mariner Books. Seifert, Jaroslav (1998) The Poetry of Jaroslav Seifert translated by Ewald Osers. North Haven, CT: Catbird Press. Sommar, Carl Olov (1989) Gunnar Ekelöf. Stockholm: Bonniers. Tzara, Tristan (1968) L’homme approximatif. Pars: Gallimard. Tzara-Knutson, Greta (2006) Månstycken i svensk översättning av Lasse Söderberg. Lund: ellerströms.

To me, Flaubert's  The Temptation of Saint Anthony early on opened the doors to an aspect of History of Religions that I only had suspected, but which now interests me more and more, i.e. the religious, often violent, clashes between various sectarians that repeatedly exploded during the third century when Saint Anthony was active in Egypt. An impressive syncretism paired with an unbound fanaticism which repeatedly heated the minds of Christians, Jews, adherents of a multitude of mystery cults, ancient philosophers, confused agnostics, as well as believers in a wide variety of ancient and new religions from all corners of the world. The absolute focal point of all these brawls and riots was the cosmopolitan, affluent and cultural melting pot constituted by ancient Alexandria. A metropolis that maybe could be glimpsed from Anthony’s solitary cave dwelling.

What first struck me as I read The Temptation of Saint Anthony was Flaubert’s account of how heavily armed monks from the monastery of Nistra repeatedly rushed into the vast city, spreading terror and devastation among its non-Christian and Jewish population. How distant such a brutal behaviour was from Jesus’ teaching to turn the other cheek. Far from the adorable depictions served by my childhood’s Sunday School about the soothing effect Christianity had on the minds of men and women and how it eventually defeated the anti-human paganism through no other weapons than its all-forgiving gentleness.

In Flaubert’s novel I discovered how religion actually is a reflection of humanity's unfortunate dichotomy of love/compassion and fanatical bullying/unrestrained violence. A discrepancy which, according to Flaubert, during a moonlit night one thousand and seven hundred years ago, was revealed to a tormented hermit, who under the thin shell of his skull housed a universe of urges and multifaceted knowledge, spiced with and boiling through influences from a life of travel, experience, unbridled lust and desire, paralysing egocentricity, and above all an incessant reading and writing. An limitless universe of words. A literary cosmos within which Flaubert had been on a constant look-out for Le mot just – The Right Word.

The Temptation of Saint Anthony followed me when I began to study theology and history of religions at Lund University. Particularly obvious was the religious fanaticism of some of my companions among the theology students, whom we used to call Black Rockers (Swedish has the same word for “coat” and “rock”) due to their predilection for the black robes of the priesthood. Most often they were pale-looking sons of conservative high-church Lutheran pastors and accordingly fervent opponents to women priests.Most of these pimply youngsters nested at the Laurentii Foundation, a privately financed hostel for young men aspiring for the priesthood.

These Black Rockers nurtured an exaggerated fanaticism and a selfishly blissful perception of themselves as martyrs for the true Christian faith, due to their opposition to the state-induced acceptance of women priests. They were the last proponents of true Lutheranism, heroic guardians of the Word of the Scripture. An even more vulgar reflection of such fanaticism could recently be found among the lunatics who stormed the Washington Capitol in the belief that they “defended democracy”, or among ISIS-fighters who imagine that by slaughtering Christians and Yazidis they will after death be rewarded with eternal bliss in Paradise, the Jannah.

Literalists have caused a lot of misery. The Black Rockers based their entire “martyrdom for the true faith” on their stubbornly rabid opposition to women priests on Saint Paul’s words in his First Letter to the Corinthians:

Women should be silent during the church meetings. It is not proper for them to speak. If they have any questions, they should ask their husbands at home, for it is improper for women to speak in church meetings.

Nevertheless, the Black Rockers ignored, or explained away, other Bible passages like Jesus’ command that “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” or his statement “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God.” Similarly, fundamentalist Muslims have taken the words of The Qur'an’s thirty-third surah, Al-Ahzab, as a pretext for punishing women who do not cover their faces:

O Prophet! Enjoin your wives, your daughters, and the wives of true believers that they should cast their outer garments over their persons (when abroad): That is most convenient, that they may be distinguished and not be harassed.

While they overlook what is written a few lines further down:

Surely, Muslim men and Muslim women, believing men and believing women, devout men and devout women, truthful men and truthful women, patient men and patient women, humble men and humble women, and the men who give Sadaqah and the women who give Sadaqah, and the men who fast and the women who fast, and the men who guard their private parts and the women who guard theirs, and the men who remember Allah much and the women who remember – for them, Allah has prepared forgiveness and a great reward.

Christianity and Islam are scriptural religions. Written words carry their messages. Most of us have a laid back attitude when it comes to words, after using them we forget their purpose – if we don’t consider them to be so significant that we decide to write them down. When such writings are considered as being “sacred” are endowed with an existence and meaning far beyond what one person has happened to say to another at any given moment. Such sacred words become law and religion, solid foundations for a community’s existence and endurance, obtaining a decisive significance for an individual’s thinking and acting.

The Bible and the Qur'an have much in common. Millions firmly believe that they are the words of God and include the truth about the entire purpose and meaning of life. Like anations’s laws and constitution, holy scriptures are guidelines which by believers are assumed to be valid for each and everyone. History indicates that those who do not follow what has been interpreted by authorities as divine statements may suffer horrible consequences. The Bible and the Qur'an were revealed in the same part of the world and their monotheistic manner of perceiving divine forces and the traditions they are based upon have resulted in unity as well as division, feelings of community as well as blatant intolerance, peace and war, life and death.

Recently, I read a quite a lot about pictures, spells, and ritual instructions found on the walls, in coffins and among papyrus scrolls in Egyptian tombs. Like many other peoples, the ancient Egyptians believed that if their rites were to be effective they had to be accompanied by the utterance of powerful and transformative words. The Greeks called the Egyptian characters hieroglyphs, sacred letters. Scribes were considered as craftsmen who had learned the language of the gods and through their writing they were able to convey divine messages and instructions to the people.

Thoth, the god of wisdom and maintainer of the universe, was believed to own a book that included the entire set of rules of the Cosmos and it could thus also be used to bring about changes – comprehensive, as well was quite insignificant ones. Words transmitted power to objects and deeds integrated in the ancient Egyptians’ exceedingly complicated sacrificial acts, and not the least in their attempts to awaken their dead to a new existence beyond life. Every sacrificed object – water, necessities of life, incense, ornaments and much more – was to the maximum magically charged through words. Ritual actions were guided by recitation of written words allowing the deceased to absorb drink and food, to be clothed and anointed, be able to speak and move, ascend to Heaven, as well as enjoying protection and benevolence of the gods. Such notions characterized the entire ancient Egyptian mindset and in particular the funeral ritual which transformed the deceased into a god – s/he eventually became Osiris.

It was not only objects that by the use of words were filled to the brim with power, individual/single words were also loaded with power, something that was achieved through so-called “word plays” or “puns” that endowed words and entire sentences with a variety of meanings and allusions. A single word could thus allude to objects, the deceased, gods and demons, forces and a large variety of powerful concepts and notions.

Mastering all this was not easy. Becoming a writer required a long, hard education that included not only the complicated writing of characters and letters, the difficult grammar and a vast amount of underlying allusions, it furthermore included forgotten language usage, rituals, mythology, accounting, mathematics and geometry. All requirements not only for mastering religious beliefs, but also the sophisticated state administration.

However, rewards were worth the effort. A scribe escaped hard work under a scorching sun, did not pay taxes and most scribes reached high positions. Sometime 3,200 years ago, someone wrote on a papyrus a text he called The Good Scribe:

Be a writer, take it to heart, so that your name will fare likewise. A book is more effective than a carved tombstone or a permanent sepulchre. […] Man perishes; his corpse turns to dust; all his relatives pass away. But writings make him remembered in the mouth of the reader. A book is more effective than a well-built house or a tomb-chapel in the West, better than an established villa or stela in the temple! Is there one here like Hordedef? Is there another like Imhotep? None of our kin is like Neferti or Khety, their leader. May I remind you about Ptahemdjehuty and Khakheperraseneb. Is there another like Ptahhotep or Kairsu? Those wise men who foretold what was to come: what they said came into being; it is found as a maxim, written in their books.

Few Egyptians doubted the power of words and their Greek rulers, members of the Ptolemaic dynasty that ruled Egypt from 303 BC to 30 AD were well aware of this fact and used Egyptian knowledge and reverence for the word to hold together their multifaceted and quite incomprehensible domain. In few places was the realization of the cohesive power of word/knowledge greater then in the capital of the Ptolemies, the mighty Alexandria.

During the life of Saint Anthony (251-356?), Alexandria was one of the world’s largest and richest cities. Through the fertile fields on the other side of the Lake Mareotis, with their abundance of wheat, grapes and olives, the city was more than well supplied and could export its abundance. The Roman poets Horace and Virgil praised its exquisite wines and Alexandria’s wheat supplied both Rome and Massilia (Marseille), and not only that – according to the geographer and historian Strabo, large merchant fleets sailed with more than 120 ships each year with the monsoon winds from the Red Sea to India and brought back valuable goods that were consumed in Alexandria, as well as passed on to wealthy customers around the Mediterranean. A papyrus text from the second century AD announced that the ship Hermapollo to one of Alexandria's three ports from India brought with it 60 chests with “fragrant plants”, five tons of “other spices”, more than a hundred tons of elephant tusks and 135 tons of ebony.

In the well-planned streets of Alexandria, people crowded from all corners of the known world – Egyptians, Greeks, Jews, Nabataeans, Arabs and Indians. However, from such a fact we cannot assume that the inhabitants of the city were equals. The Ptolemies, whose capital was located on a tightly controlled island, kept a close eye on the origin of each an everyone of the city’s more than half a million inhabitants and categorized them according to a strict system.

According to preserved lists, such a division of the Alexandrian city dwellers meant that in order to become a full-fledged citizen you had to be Greek-speaking, as well as born and raised in Alexandria. It was only after careful examination of your information that it was decided whether you, or your sons, could be offered a place in the Greek education system and gain access to the city’s sports facilities. The next category of citizens was composed of Greek-speaking people who had arrived from other areas. People belonging to this specific category enjoyed no other benefit than that they could consider themselves “Greeks”. A third category consisted of Egyptians and Jews.

Alexandria included the world’s largest Jewish congregation and two districts were called “The Jewish Ones”. One of them was denominated Delta and located close to the Royal Palace. However, Delta was not a ghetto, Jews were free to settle wherever they wanted in the Egyptian reign and it has been estimated that the Jews of Egypt at the time of Jesus’ birth constituted one million of the country’s population. To some extent, Jews belonged to a state within the state, with its own administration, a so-called politeuma. They were judged by Jewish judges. If a Jew was to be punished with flogging, or execution, the punishment could only be carried out by Jewish executioners.

Like the Greek presence in Egypt, the privileged position of the Jews had mainly arisen from two activities – war and trade. Few Egyptians were enlisted for military service, their efforts were considered essential for agriculture, construction, handicrafts and administration, which meant that for hundreds of years the country’s defence and conquests largely depended on foreign legionaries, most of whom were Greeks or Jews. Military power provided these population groups with influence, for example, the Nile traffic was monitored by Jewish customs and police. A large part of Mediterranean trade was in the hands of Greeks, while Jewish merchants were of great importance for the land-based foreign trade to the south and east.

To rule their kingdom, the pragmatically minded Ptolemies realized that they could not do so without the knowledge and skills of Jews and Egyptians, especially Egypt's highly educated scribes and clergy were essential for their exercise of power. Over time, both Jews and Egyptians gained increasing influence in the Ptolemaic administration.

The Macedonian general, historian and Alexander’s confidant – Ptolemy I Soter (367-283) became after Alexander’s death uncontested ruler of Egypt and chose the newly founded city of Alexandria as seat for his government. It was Ptolemy I and his son Ptolemy II who organized Alexandria into five locally managed districts, laid out its street systems, organized effective law enforcement, and constructed two large saltwater ports and a port facing Lake Mareotis. A canal was dug to supply the metropolis with Nile water, which filled a huge underground reservoir, to secure Alexandria’s water supply during dry periods. During the reign of these two Ptolemies, the huge lighthouse was also built, one of the “seven wonders” of antiquity, 135 meters high and with a dazzling light source, which fuel and construction remain an unsolved mystery.

The Ptolemies’ awareness of the power of knowledge were manifested through the establishment of two huge libraries, the largest had fifty years after its founding 400,000 carefully registered papyrus scrolls, while its smaller branch contained 42,800. Libraries were nothing new to Egypt, the pharaoes’ offices had for more than a thousand years back extensive archives and several temples had special rooms for “holy scriptures”. In addition, several temples obtained a significant income from their production of precious scrolls, especially the so-called Books of the Dead, which were placed in the tombs.

The Ptolemies knew how to take advantage of all this knowledge. For example, Ptolemy I had the learned priest Manetho compiling extensive books on Egyptian history, traditions, religion, administration, and regent lengths, most of which have now been lost. The interests of Ptolemy I and his son extended far beyond the borders of Egypt, they had Jewish scholars translate their scriptures into Greek, and so did experts in Persian and Indian scriptures. Scholars were active at a “research institute” attached to the large library – Museion, which in addition to scribes included scientists, who exchanged experiences, gave lectures and researched among the libraries’ books and scrolls.

By the end of the Ptolemies’ more than three hundred years of Egyptian rule, Cleopatra's father, Ptolemy XII, was to be able to maintain his power forced to pay large sums to Roman patrons providing him with intelligence and military protection, a situation that worsened under Julius Caesar. It was in connection with his troops invading Alexandria that the library caught fire and was burned to the ground, although it was apparently “only” the branch that was destroyed.

Through intelligence and love making, Cleopatra managed to retain her power under both Caesar ad his successor Mark Antony. However, when Augustus finally defeated Mark Antony, Egypt became 31 BC a Roman colony.

After the catastrophic fire during Casear’s interference in the Ptolemies’ internal power struggles, the library was almost immediately restored to its former splendour. Already Marcus Antonius, fascinated by Cleopatra’s alluring personality and apparently planning to move the Empire’s power centre to Alexandria, seized 200,000 books and scrolls from the rival library in Pergamon, donating them all to Cleopatra. Long before that, the Ptolemies had tried to protect their knowledge monopoly by banning papyrus exports to Pergamon, where the much more expensive parchment, made from lamb and calfskins, had to be invented as an alternative writing material.

The Library of Alexandria continued its policy of requiring those who sought admission to deposit a previously unregistered book, or scroll. Furthermore, the Ptolemies rulers generally demanded precious scriptures as a customs duty from foreign merchants. The greatest threat to the library came not from invading conquerors, but from domestic, fanatical Christian sectarians.

In the religious area, the Ptolemies tried to ascertain the support of the Egyptians and a general acceptance of their Greek rule by introducing a “new” deity – Serapis, who eventually became popular among both Egyptians and Greeks.

Probably, the ancient Greeks generally distinguished between philosophy and religion. The latter concept had to do with tradition, community and communal life. Aspects of human existence that made you feel connected with those individuals you shared your life with. Religion was primarily beliefs in and respect of a superhuman power existing above all and everyone, to which the people had certain obligations. Like most other languages, ancient Greek had no specific word for religion, the closest concepts were apparently eusebeia, piety and threskeia, cult.

Philosophy was something else. A human activity involving the gathering knowledge, as well as sharing one’s thoughts and conclusions with others. A means of promoting imagination and critical thinking. An examination of our living conditions and a basis for science and progress. Acceptance of one belief did not have to mean exclusion of another. It was conceivable to be deeply religious and a sceptical philosopher, at the same time

In ancient Egypt, the situation was somewhat different. Ancient Egyptians also lacked words for “religion”, a notion that hardly could cover their extensive and varied system of beliefs and rites which joint focus was to maintain Cosmos, the ordered world, through an interplay between human and divine realms. All indications suggest that during prehistoric times, each Egyptian location had its own specific deity. It is also probable that each such place, tribe or clan was ruled by a powerful man, or woman, considered to be more or less divine, or in any case assumed to be in contact and interaction with deities, who in accordance with human, analogous thinking, often were depicted in animal form.

Egyptian culture developed over thousands of years and during such a long time period local rule was seized by more powerful rulers, linked to other local deities. For example, the king of Nekhen (Hierakonpolis) was identified with a falcon, a symbol of the local god Horus, which in turn symbolized the sky, while one of his eyes was the sun and the other the moon. To prove his special position, the ruler was identified with this Horus, who when other areas were conquered thus became superior to the gods of defeated peoples.

However, this did not mean that the worship of ancient local gods disappeared. Instead, it became common practice a creatie “super-deity” including aspects, and even the “personality” of other gods and thereby came to be worshipped as a new divine “unit”. For example, when Thebes’ Amon was united with Iunus’ (Heliopolis) Ra and came to be venerated as the sun god Amon-Ra. Thus new deities were created, while others disappeared. Nevertheless, nature persisted – the life-giving water of the Nile’s regularly occurring floods irrigated and fertilized the earth; the sun and other celestial bodies moved across the sky, while greenery died and was reborn.

Sun worship was the unifying aspect of the Egyptian religion. A worship filled with joy and gratitude over a world where anxiety and evil were kept away by the benevolent sun and fertilizing Nile water, which force permeated all living things. Under the dominion of the Sun was the mighty Osiris, the deity of fertility; the dying and resurrected god. The sun god Ra was the ruler of everything and everyone. He was immortal, no human being could understand or identify with his omnipotence, though every Egyptian could understand and resort to Osiris. The god who changes between life and death, happiness and misfortune, light and darkness. Like mortal women and men, Osiris was subject to the power of the sun and the shifts of nature, but unlike humans he was immortal.

The myth tells us that Osiris once was the just ruler of the city Busiris. But, he was murdered by his evil and power-hungry brother Seth, who to make sure his brother would never be resurrected, dismembered his body and scattered the parts throughout the land of Egypt. Osiris’ loving wife, Isis, fled to the swamps of the Nile Delta. To defeat the evil Seth and end his power over the world, Isis needed a son. Together with her sister Nephtys, she secretly managed to gather the body parts of her deceased husband and with the help of the god of wisdom, Thoth, who owned the Book of Knowledge, which includes all secrets of life, Isis succeeded in resurrecting her dead husband and trough him conceived the couple’s son, Horus, who grew strong and finally, as Egypt's rightful ruler, succeeded in defeating the usurper Seth.

Horus, and his representative among the humans – the Pharaoh, became the guarantee that humans, through knowledge and cooperation, would be able to hold off those evil forces which constantly threaten nature and humanity. As supporters and protectors Horus count upon the eternal presence of his mother Isis and father Osiris, who from the Underworld made greenery and prosperity sprout. Above them all, Re, the Sun, tries to make the deities governing the earth to work in unison, not the least Seth, who despite having been defeated by Horus, by his powerful nature is forced to keep the powers of evil, which he knows so well, in check. Despite this, Seth has a double nature and it is not possible to fully and firmly trust in him. As little as man is perfectly capable of governing the world. We must therefore live, die and resurrect according to the examples of Osiris, Horus and Isis and in their name and in obedience to their maintain justice, cooperation, compassion, law and order. With the help of that specific triad of gods, and not least with the support of Thoth’s wisdom, we humans can be granted eternal life – an even become identical with Osiris.

With his Greek-educated, practical reasoning, Ptolemy I Soter recognized the importance of religion as a unifying force for Egyptians and Greeks. Instead of, like other foreign rulers had done before him, introducing a deity alien to Egyptians as representative of his power and authority, Ptolemy chose to create a “new” divinity firmly grounded in the Egyptian soil. A creature that included various, multifaceted aspects.

Perhaps by following advice from experts like the Egyptian priest Manetho, Ptolemy I announced that the god Serapis in a dream had revealed himself to him and asked the Greek ruler to establish a cult of Serapis as Egypt's supreme lord. It is probable that this Serapis found his origin in already existing places of worship for the Apis bull. An animal that through its strength and fertility through the ages had been likened to the creator god Ptah, to Osiris, the sun god Atum and not the least – the Pharaoh. Apis bulls were sacrificed/slaughtered and then “resurrected” in their own graves after being mummified and buried during complicated rites. Through its association with Osiris the sacred bull was called Osiris-Apis, wsjr-ḥp in Egyptian, Userhapi in Coptic and Serapis in Greek.

To attract Greek worship of Serapis, Ptolemy had a huge sculpture of the god made by sycamore wood and placed it in a temple on Alexandria’s highest, though nevertheless rather insignificant hill. The Greeks did not understand the Egyptians’ worship of animals, let alone their animal-headed gods. Accordingly, Ptolemy had Serapis portrayed as a bearded figure with features combining Zeus, Dionysus and Hades. On top of his head of the god carried the fertility goddess Demeter’s calathos, wheat measure, as a crown. This was not at all particularly shocking to the Egyptians, accustomed as they were to worship human beings, in addition to their animal-headed deities. They willingly accepted the god of a foreign ruler, insofar as he did not disclaim any Egyptian gods, but united his worship with theirs and assisted the deities of Egypt in their main task – to watch over and maintain the life-giving floods of the Nile, support the order of Cosmos and maintain the Egyptian mindset. Several Greeks living in Egypt submitted to the same rites as the Egyptians and worshipped their traditional gods, adapting some of the Egyptian cultic behaviour and religious iconography to Greek fashion.

Cerberus rested by the feet of Serapis’ effigy. He was the three-headed watchdog of Hades and could thus be equated with the Egyptian shakal-headed Anubis, who guarded Egypt’s cemeteries.

Other renderings presented Serapis as a crowned pillar. The god then had, like the sun god, luminous rays surrounding his head. His pillar-body was adorned with the signs of the zodiac and surrounded by a serpent, the symbol of rebirth. In Pharaonic Egypt the cobra, Naja haje, was called  Uraeus by the Greeks and by the Egyptians j’rt, Rearing Cobra. The ancient Egyptians incorporated it, in its upright shape, in the royal diadem of the Pharaohs. Snakes were associated with the Greek god Hermes, who accompanied the deceased to Hades, the Kingdom of the Dead and he was then depicted with a cadeceus. In Egypt, Hermes was equated with Thoth and the cadeceus could then be connected to a pillar, a symbol of stability and thus also with Osiris’ spine, djed, symbol of life, stability, strength, resurrection and dominion. The djed was occasionally depicted as wrapped by a snake.  

Egyptian priests declared that Serapis was Osiris in his Greek manifestation and thus equated with the Greek ruling house’s intention to rule in collaboration with the Egyptian clergy to ensure the order of the Universe – the annual floods of the Nile and the divinely established laws of society, as expressed in the holy scriptures of ancient Egypt. The Egyptians were still free to continue worshipping their traditional deities, and the Ptolemies constructed new temples and restored ancient ones. Egyptian clergy and scribes were supported and allowed to retain their former functions and privileges. Thus the Ptolemies won the full support of the theological establishment and Serapis was served by both Greek and Egyptian priests.

By establishing the Museion, Ptolemy I furthermore secured the support of philosophers and he and his heirs to the throne favoured research that affirmed both religion and science, supporting a far-reaching openness to other religious beliefs, and the preservation/exploration of sacred scriptures. When Christianity made its entrance to Alexandria’s multicultural sphere, it turned out that the tolerance of the Ptolemies had nourished a snake at its breast. The Ptolemies’ Roman successors admitted a Christian-oriented group of philosophers within the framework of the Museion’s activities and allowed them to establish a Christian department – Didascalium. However, this philosophy seminary was soon subjected to sectarian riots and in 381 its library was burned down by opponents who disagreed with the Didascalium philosophers’ view of the true nature of Christ.

Over the centuries, Serapion grew larger, the hill were it was located was raised even further, a wide staircase with one hundred steps led up to its courtyards and the central building with Serapis’ huge wooden sculpture. The hill was hollowed out and housed, in addition to embalmed Apis bulls, Serapion’s constantly enlarged library. This book- and papyri collection was initially called the Daughter’s Library, since it mainly contained copies made from the most important documents preserved in the huge central library. Gradually, more and more documents were transferred to Serapion, which increasingly resembled a fort with its own guard force. A bastion protecting the remnants of ancient philosophy against the intolerant, Christian mob. Sometime by the beginning of the fourth century, the central library was finally looted and burned down to the ground. The preservation and protection of Serapion’s invaluable papyri and books thus became increasingly important to the few philosophers and scientists who cared for their preservation.

During the first century of our era, Christianity had entered the Jewish circles of Egypt. Most Alexandrian Jews had gradually become more “secularized” and liberal forces among them had increasingly accepted proselytes attracted by Judaism’s denial of images of gods and, more and more, the bloody sacrifices of the temples. Philosophically minded people who converted to Judaism also appreciated its intellectual approach, the reverence for sacred scriptures, and the worship of an immaterial, almighty deity. An attitude favoured by complex Jewish, Persian and Neoplatonic speculations which, in the wake of Alexandria's cosmopolitan syncretism, had become more and more common among Museion’s philosophers.

From this thicket of theological speculations developed the intricate and multifaceted reasoning that came to be known as Gnosticism. The Gnostics who were attracted by Judaism, and later joined the emerging Christianity, seem to have believed in an unimaginable power, incomprehensible to us humans, and infinitely exalted above its own creation. According to them, the Universe consisted of a number of spheres, which for lack of better comparisons were equated with divine beings, so-called eons. These eons appear to have been personified qualities such as Pleroma, the Complete, Sophia, Wisdom, Dynamis, Power, Logos, the Word, or Nous, Consciousness. The lowest of these eons was the Demiurge, who created our imperfect world and was by several Gnostics identified with the Yahweh of the Jews.

Humans were considered to be composed of divine and material elements and should free their souls from their material imprisonment, something that could only be achieved through a profound knowledge, gnosis, of humanity’s actual situation. Christian Gnostics generally identified gnosis with Jesus, a Saviour who had come down to humanity from a sphere of divine light to liberate our souls, which have been trapped in the darkness of matter.

Gnosticism appealed to the most talented thinkers of the time, but eventually also became a popular movement, splitting up Judeo-Christian congregations. Different Gnostic belief systems created a variety of scriptures often taking the form of “gospels”. Leading Christian authorities soon considered it as one of their primary tasks to sort out and analyse these scriptures to determine which of them were truly “genuine” in the sense that they could be considered as reiable descriptions of Jesus’ actual life and message.

It was probably by the end of 100 AD that the four Gospels of the New Testament were established as being the most reliable depictions of the life and teachings of Jesus. Leading in this process were Ireneaus (130-202 AD) from Smyrna, as well as the Alexandrian philosophers Clement (150-215) and his disciple Origen (184-253). The latter two were well versed in Greek philosophy, especially in the form of Plato’s writings and were assuredly influenced by the earlier Jewish scholar Phil of Alexandria (20-50 AD). Philo tried to harmonize Judaism with Greek philosophy and put forward an abstract conception of God. By searching for the “hidden meaning” of words, Philo interpreted the Jewish Bible in an allegorical manner, for example – he made Adam symbolize “consciousness” and Eve “sensory impressions”. Philo believed that God had created and now ruled the universe through various “mediators”, among them Logos, the Word, an intangible force that Philo called “the Shadow of God” and the Creator’s “firstborn son”. Thoughts adopted by the Gnostics and not the least by Clement and Origen.

The Gospel of John was probably written for a gnostically educated audience, evident from the prologue’s description of how Logos initially existed with God and then became “the light of men”. However, the Christian Church did not go further beyond recognizing gnostic notions than an acknowledgement of the Gospel of John. Below is the first page of the Gospel of John from the Bodmer Papyrus, so called because it together with twenty-two other papyrus sheets in 1952 was excavated from the remains of a Coptic monastery and then smuggled to Switzerland, where they were bought by the Swiss book collector Martin Bodmer. The largely well-preserved papyrus sheets were found to contain the oldest records to date of the Gospel of Matthew, the Gospel of John, Paul’s Letters to the Corinthians, as well as several fragments of texts from the Old Testament, Christian writings not included in the Bible, copies of Homer and an intact comedy by the Greek playwright Menander (342-390 BC). All these texts had apparently been written down by three different people, probably around 200 AD.

A number of gospels about Jesus were considered too “contaminated” by Gnosticism and thus rejected. As it grew stronger, the Christian establishment attacked Gnosticism. Its followers were mercilessly persecuted, while their writings were destroyed. Until the middle of the 20^th century, Gnostic teachings were known only in fragments and by their mentioning of Christian opponents. However, a lot of Gnostic writings have now been found, suggesting how extensive this tradition once was. Although most of these writings are rather abstract speculations, and/or obviously consist of legendary stories, it is possible that there once existed several more “authentic” stories about the life and activities of Jesus. Perhaps some of these had been destroyed since their contents did not appeal to the ancient “Church Fathers”.

Remembering my youth’s adversaries to women priests I am now reminded that the so-called Apocryphal Gospels contain several allusions to women who spoke with and about Jesus. The so-called Gospel of Mary tells us:

Peter said to Mary, “Sister, we know that the Saviour loved you more than the rest of the women. Tell us the words of the Saviour which you remember – which you know (but) we do not, nor have we heard them.

Unfortunately, some of her answer is missing in the papyrus fragment, though the apostle Andrew was upset by her testimony and stated that Mary’s words could not be true since they did not coincide with what Jesus had told his apostles. Peter agreed with Andrew:

Peter also opposed her in regard to these matters and asked them about the Saviour: “Did he then speak secretly with a woman, in preference to us, and not openly? Are we to turn back and all listen to her? Did he prefer her to us?”

In the Gospel of Thomas, which for the most part consists of detached quotations from Jesus and his apostles, we find the following rather strange passage, which can either be defined as male chauvinist, or possibly as an affirmation of the value of women:

Simon Peter said to them: “Let Mary leave us, for women are not worthy of life.” Jesus said, “I myself shall lead her in order to make her male, so that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males. For every woman who will make herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven.”

It would not surprise me if a book nerd and librarian like Jorge Luis Borges had the library in Alexandria in mind, with its thousands of unexplored and lost texts, not least confusing Gnostic speculations, while writing his fantastic story The Library of Babel. It may be that Origen also got lost in the vast library that the Universe constitutes. At the same time, however, he tried to get the Gnostic texts in order, while he, like his contemporary Christian brothers, pondered about Jesus’ “true nature”. Origen was a strong believer John's assertion:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

But, what did it mean? Was John a Gnostic? Was God equal to the Demiurge and Jesus an eon? Was he God? Was he human? Was he perhaps both God and man? Who then was the Father? Who was the Son? What was the Holy Spirit? In his search for answers, Origen may have become lost in the writings contained in Alexandria’s vast library. As a learned philosopher he wanted to affirm the truth of Christianity, without denying all the ancient knowledge he had accumulated.

Origen was Egyptian, his name was derived from “son of Osiris”, i.e. Horus whom several Christian Egyptians equated with Jesus. Origen did of course visit Alexandria’s main library and the papyrus collections in the Serapion. No doubt was he aware that Serapis was equated with God, Isis with the Virgin Mary, and Horus with Jesus.

For an Egyptian believer well versed in the ancient tradition of searching after layer by layer of meanings in every word, every deed, every myth, it was of course not at all difficult for Origen to realize that the words of the Bible, as well as the inscriptions in Egyptian tombs and temples, besides its more or less obvious meanings, did like an iceberg beneath the words hid other truths. It was quite natural for Origen to interpret the Bible “allegorically”, meaning that even if its stories and words might be compatible with reality, they had been written down by people who, like the Egyptian scribes, knew that every word could have several meanings. Although, for example, the story of Adam and Eve might be true, it hid beneath its fabulous surface insights and truths about God and the condition of men and women here on earth.

After a bloody, but short war, Theodosius became in 394 the single ruler of the entire Roman Empire, which now for the last time was subdued under one emperor. He abolished religious freedom and made Christianity the state religion throughout his kingdom, extinguished the eternal fire in Rome’s Vestal Temple, banned the Olympic Games and gave his go-ahead to destroy all “pagan” temples, or turn them into Christian churches. However, in Alexandria, perhaps out of concern that the ancient gods would no longer guarantee the life-giving floods of the Nile and/or in competition with the increasingly powerful Constantinople, the majority of its citizens refused to follow Theodosius’ edict. The defender of the Serapion persisted, but fanatical feelings brewed within the town. The Jews were attacked and they responded to the violence by killing their Christian attackers and any instigator they could lay their hands on. After bloody riots the Jews were expelled from the city. Then it was the Gentiles’ turn to come under fierce attacks from fanatical monks. Violence was met with violence, Christian instigators were tortured to death in Alexandria’s arena and soldiers from the fortified Serapion counter-attacked.

The city’s livid archbishop, Theophilos, incited the Christian mob against the “God deniers” who had taken refuge in the Serapion. Alexandria’s authorities turned to Theodosius in Constantinople and pending the emperor’s ruling peace reigned in the city. However, when Theodosius’ answer was solemnly announced at Alexandria’s agora, establishing that the pagan cult was abominable and henceforth forbidden, hell broke loose. Theodosius incited his Christian brethren to crush the idols and cleanse the town from godless idolaters. Heading his fanatics Theophilus broke into the Serapion, turned the valuables into scrap metal, looted the library, throwing out all the writings that displeased them, burning papyri and books all over the town. The buildings and Serapis’ statue were demolished. In The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire the always engaging Edward Gibbon described the dramatic events:

 It was confidently affirmed that, if any impious hand should dare to violate the majesty of the god, the heavens and the earth would instantly return to their original chaos. An intrepid soldier, animated by zeal, and armed with a weighty battle-axe, ascended the ladder; and even the Christian multitude expected with some anxiety the event of the combat. He aimed a vigorous stroke against the cheek of Serapis; the cheek fell to the ground; the thunder was still silent, and both the heavens and the earth continued to preserve their accustomed order and tranquillity. The victorious soldier repeated his blows: the huge idol was overthrown and broken in pieces; and the limbs of Serapis were ignominiously dragged through the streets of Alexandria. His mangled carcase was burnt in the amphitheatre, amidst the shouts of the populace; and many persons attributed their conversion to this discovery of the impotence of their tutelar deity. 

However, there was no peace – the pagans remained and the Christian fanatics now included several “Christian heretics” among their enemies. Theophilus’ nephew, Cyril, considered Jesus Christ to be a unified, entirely divine person. The Virgin Mary had thus not given birth to a common man, but God himself and should thus be named Theotókos, the Mother of God. Considering Cyril´s Egyptian roots it is not inconceivable to assume that the source for this opinion might be found in ancient notions about Isis as the mother of the god Horus and, of course, Alexandria’s need to assert herself against the imperial influence of Constantinople.

Cyril’s opponents were numerous, but he had Alexandria’s riches by his side. Cyril’s envoys bribed Constantinople’s officials with expensive gifts; luxurious carpets, ivory carvings, gold coins, and even a living ostrich. In this manner the wealthy bishop was able to in 431 convince the emperor to convene a Church Council in Ephesus, where his opponents were defeated and the majority agreed that Christ has two unadulterated natures joined in a single deity and that Mary thus ought to be worshipped as the Mother of God – Theotókos.

Fifteen years before his triumph in Ephesus, Cyril had secured his influential position in Alexandria. The Roman prefect, Orestes, had in vain tried to alleviate the bloody conflicts between Christian fanatics and increasingly desperate Pagans and Heretics. Even if Orestes was accused of being more willing to punish Pagan perpetrators than Christian ones, this did not hinder Cyril from directing violent, verbal accusations against the Roman prefect. This virulent propaganda caused that Orestes became seriously injured by a stone thrown by one of Cyril’s fanatic followers. When the culprit had been executed, he was by Cyril hailed as martyr for the Christian faith.

It was a well-known fact that Orestes was a student of and still admired the beautiful and intelligent Hypatia, who was active at the Museion, its philosophical seminars had continued to operate, in spite of the fact that its original premises had been set on fire and destroyed. Hypatia was astronomer, mathematician and, above all, a Gnostic philosopher, with a suspiciously vast knowledge of Greek philosophy. She was respected by the philosophers and scientists who still took a stand against the intolerant Christian fanaticism advocated by Cyril. With his consent, or as the always eloquent Gibbon put it “a murderer with clean hands”, Hypatia was torn down from her chariot and dragged into Kasarion, a former temple erected in honour of the Roman emperors that had been converted into Alexandria’s main church and site of the episcopate. There the mob tore off Hypatia’s clothes and discarded her skin with sharpened seashells and potsherds, as well as they stuckout her eyes. Then the killers dragged the dying, horribly flayed Hypatia through the streets to a place called Cinaron, where the remains of her body were burned to the cheers of the jubilant mob.

It was through Flaubert’s Temptation of Saint Anthony that I became to realize the bias of Sunday School lessons, films like Ben Hur and Quo Vadis, and even the school’s history lessons, which had served up a harmoniously arranged version of unified, mild and forgiving Christian congregations. For me Flaubert shattered that rosy image, revealing it all as a myth. The time of the birth of Christianity, like most other similar occurrences in the history of humanity, was far more dynamic, cruel, and fragmented. The new doctrine developed and was spiced up in a variety of places, among different people during time of intense reflection, great concern, experimentation, debate and external, as well as internal, strife. It was a time of anger, often characterized by bloody clashes, which erupted after absurd exchanges of opinions about whether Jesus was god or man, father or son, or both.

Although Flaubert regarded The Temptation of Saint Anthony as his life’s work, few friends and writers realized its originality. They had a hard time understanding how a writer, who in his lifetime was considered to be a great master, could have been capable to publish such scandalous mishmash, especially after his flawlessly realistic Madame Bovary.

Flaubert wrote three versions of La tentation de Saint Antoine. The first and longest he wrote in 1849, at the age of twenty-seven. Enthusiastic about his work, Flaubert devoutly read his manuscript to two of his best friends, Maxime Du Camp and Louis Bouilhet. He asked them not to interrupt his reading aloud. The friends promised to keep quiet, kept their word and listened to Flaubert during four days, without interrupting or commenting the reading. He read to them from noon to four o’clock in the afternoon, after a break for dinner and rest he continued reading aloud from eight o’clock in the evening until midnight. After the last session, Flaubert waited with excitement for what he assumed would be his friends’ enthusiastic praise.

To Flaubert’s great dismay, Maxim and Louis were in complete agreement: “Burn the misery and never mention it again.” Flaubert was speechless, he could not understand what they meant. As in all his writing, Flaubert had been extremely careful with the language. He was pleased with the novel’s rhythm and composition. It could not get any better and he found it impossible to put all this work aside. After travelling with Du Camp through Egypt, Palestine, Syria and Turkey for more than a year and a half, writing Madame Bovary, which was a great success, Flaubert once again took up The Temptations of St. Anthony, shortened and honed his original version, and 1856-1857 he published parts of the novel in the literature magazine L'Artiste – Scandal! The criticism was harsh, derogatory and struck above all at what hed been found to be obscene and distasteful. Few realized that the novel was a fresco composed of different parts and actually was engaged in the description cosmic visions and sumptuous frescoes, than in describing their opposite – base desire and filth, which are also a part of human existence and even religion. The worst, according to the critics, was Flaubert’s deliberately distasteful depiction of how St. Anthony finds himself transformed into a pig wallowing in shameful uncleanness:

A whole world’s rotting filth was spread around me to satisfy my appetite, I caught sight of clots of blood through the fumes, blue intestines and every kind of animal excrement, and the vomit of orgies, and like slicks of oil the greenish pus that runs from wounds; it all thickened about me, so I was walking with my four trotters almost sinking into this sticky slime, and on my back there fell a continuous drizzle of hot rain, sweet and sickly …. all this gurgled inside my body, all this lapped against my ears, I was grasping, I was howling, I was eating and swallowing it all. Ugh! Ugh …

Although Flaubert, upon the earnest request of his friends, deleted the repulsive filth from the novel’s last and final edition, the image of the wallowing pig had forever stuck with him. For example, the following caricature makes fun of Flauberty when he was releasing of the last version of La Tentation de sainte Antoine: “M. Flaubert publishes his Temptation of St. Anthony at same time as the great Ham Fair. What arrogance.”

The first edition – two thousand copies – was immediately sold out. A second and larger one also disappeared after a week or so. However, the initial enthusiasm waned after a devastating critique, which that for the most part was directed more at the author than the work, although the novel was also condemned in harsh terms. Flaubert consoled himself by stating: “I’m rolled in dirt by the hacks, but that only means that the novel will sell even better.” Though he was proven wrong – the novel was full-fledged disaster.

The renown historian of religions, Ernest Renan, whose controversial Vie de Jésus, Life of Jesus, from 1863 had become a bestseller and one important source for The Temptation of Saint Anthony, wrote in 1875, by the publication of the last revised version of the unfortunate novel, to Princess Julie, cousin of Napoleon III and an influential personality among Paris’ literati:

Flaubert is a somewhat saddened by the lack of enthusiasm for his temptation of St. Anthony. He had dreamed of success for this bizarre work, which he should have reserved it for a few scholars who might have appreciated it, he hoped for the success he had had with his Madame Bovary. Have you read the novel, dear Princess? It's unhealthy, often bad, but at times filled with an astonishing historical flair and high poetry. However, the bourgeoisie may justly be excused for its disinterest.

Even if most writers and literary critics did not appreciate the novel, it was soon discovered by artists who were immediately inspired by it. Admittedly, it was generally the quite few erotically charged scenes that attracted the attention of most of them. Not least the wallowing pig. An example of this is the somewhat too vulgar Felicien Rops, who in several of his works alluded to La tentation de sainte Antoine.

It is only natural that artists should be captivated by Flaubert's pictorially vivid descriptions of Anthony’s temptations. Flaubert’s fantasies about the hermit’s tribulations were triggered after he in a palace in Genoa became fascinated by one a Pieter Breughel’s at least seven different versions of St. Anthony’s temptations.

While writing his novel, Flaubert always had Jacques Callot’s etching presenting the temptations in the form of a depiction of Hell, lying on the desk in front of him.

Ever since a damaged fresco from the eight century in Santa Maria Antigua here in Rome depicted Anthony’s temptations, the motif has been common in European art and then generally connected with beautiful ladies, the Devil and horrendous demons.

One of exception to that rule is Mathias Grünewald’s depiction in which both the Devil and the alluring ladies are missing, but where there are plenty of malformed demons, some of whom seem to be affected by malignant diseases, perhaps even of a venereal nature, something that undeniably tormented Flaubert.

The motif continues to be fairly common in modern art, not the least inspired by Flaubert's novel and paired with inner and outer and outer torments, like Otto Dix’s versions created during the Nazi tyranny.

Of course, there are also hints to Anthony´s temptations in the movie world. First was the magician Georges Mèlié’s short and delightfully comic La tentation de Saint Antoine from 1898. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_aKqRVsKPdI&ab_channel=CinemaSdC

Incidentally, Mèlié’s world was portrayed in a quite excellent manner in Martin Scorsese’s Hugo Cabret from 2011. The only really successful 3D movie I’ve seen. It managed to take full advantage of all the possibilities of that technology and evidenced Scorsese as a magician of the same film genre as the none of the great Mèliés.

It would not surprise me the imaginative, but flawed American director Abel Ferrara, who lives in Rome, also has been inspired by La tentation de sainte Antoine. In any case, this seems to be the case of his film Siberia from 2020, which depicts visions and hallucinations of a lone American who has retreated to the isolation of a wintry Siberia, where he owns a primitive bar serving the surrounding Samoyeds. This film could have been a masterpiece, but unfortunately it isn’t. It was saved by the Willem Dafoe’s skilled acting, something that unfortunately could not save Ferrara’s earlier failure – Pasolino, a big disappointment.

A somewhat strange guest appearance in the world of film was when La tentation de sainte Antoine appeared in a rather unsuccessful film adaptation of the Flaubert disciple Maupassant’s novel Bel Ami, in which a painting by Max Ernst in colour is included in a key scene within the otherwise black-and-white movie.

In his film, The Private Affairs of Bel Ami, the director Albert Lewin wanted to repeat an effect he successfully had used two years earlier in his 1945 film adaptation of Dorian Gray’s Portrait, in which the main character’s portrait was gradually transformed into an abominable image of his inner moral decay. The portrait had then been shown as a colour image in this otherwise black-and-white horror film.

As part of the marketing for the lavish production of Bel Ami, twelve of the current foremost representatives of an art genre which the director and producer described as “surrealistic, magical realism” were asked to submit their interpretations of The Temptation of Saint Anthony. All but one of the invited artists submitted their entries, probably attracted by the generous conditions – five hundred dollars for each submitted entry, which, along with the accepted works, would be exhibited in various locations in the United States and Europe. A USD 3,000 award would be presented to the artist whose work would be included in the film.

The jury members gave prestige and weight to the prize – the controversial and well-known artist Marcel Duchamp, Alfred H Barr, director of The New York Museum of Modern Art, and Sidney Janis, New York’s most respected gallery owner. The winner was Max Ernst who described his work as:

Shrieking for help and light across the stagnant water of his dark sick soul, Saint Anthony receives as an answer the echo of his fear, the laughter of the monsters created by his visions.

Not all critics were happy with the verdict. New York Times’ film critic Bosley Crowther displayed no enthusiasm whatsoever for neither the film nor Max Ernst’s artwork, which he described as “downright nauseous, looking like a bad boiled lobster.”

Ernst's depiction of Antony’s temptations lacked the usual naked women. However, they appeared in most of the other contributions. Of course, they were present by Paul Delvaux, whose painting does not seem to have anything at all to do with Anthony’s temptations. He probably submitted an uninspired work that he had previously been unable to sell, in order to get the easily earned five hundred dollars.

Delvaux could just as well have been submitting any of his much better and mysterious works depicting temptation and exclusion.

Mysterious was, as might have been expected, Leonora Carrington’s contribution, which lacked the naked ladies, but depicted the saint’s pig.

Demonic female characters, on the other hand, were present in the painting of another of Max Ernst’s talented mistresses, Dorothea Tanning, who was certainly less unhappy in her relation with the ingenious Ernst than Carrington had been.

An abundance of naked female flesh was found in the Englishman Stanley Spencer, who placed his Saint Antonius in an open tomb.

Fear, claustrophobia, decay and outright threatening eroticism were all present in Ivan Albright’s repulsive version of the temptations, through which he seemed to have tried to repeat the shocking effect he had achieved with his contribution to Lewin’s earlier film about Dorian Gray.

A couple of the participating artists were new acquaintances to me, especially the now relatively unknown Louis Gugliemi, who was born in Cairo, grew up in Italy and became an interesting painter of New York, in a style reminiscent of the German New Objectivity. Unfortunately, I have only seen his contribution to Bel Ami reproduced in black and white.

Accordingly, the competition attracted several skilled artists and left behind at least one painting I believe to be an original and truly fascinating work of art, which also comes close to the mood of Flaubert's novel – Salvador Dali’s naked Antonius, who in a desert landscape with the help of the cross in vain tries to protect himself from baroque, bizarre visions. By placing elephant bodies on spider legs, Dali combines compact, menacing weight with an insect-like, emotionally cold and treacherous fragility. Certainly an absurd and nightmarish logic which reminds me of hallucinations I once had during a high fever caused by a meningitis.

A cat among the ermines was the self-taught naivist painter Horace Pippin, who died the year before Bel Ami premiered. His contribution, through its obvious naivete, aroused a certain superior cheerfulness when compared to the works of the other, more skilful and better-educated artists. However when I now study Pippin’s contribution, I find it to be in harmony with Flaubert’s Anthony, with its depiction of the lonely, isolated and emaciated saint finding himself in an inhospitable, darkly shaded valley, filled with skeletons. He is viewed from above by two white-clad figures, a god or devil, and a goddess or seducer, as dawn is approaching after Anthony’s horrible tribulations.

However, none of these artists came close to Odilon Redon’s congenial interpretations of Flaubert's work. From the primordial soup of ancient embryos:

The Fall of the Ancient Gods:

Jesus’ suffering and Christian martyrs:

Isis and the immobile, enigmatic sphinx’s encounter with the unbound, flying chimera:

Antonius’ student Hilarion, who is doubling a Satan in his guise as tempter and accuser making the obviously pious hermit doubting the purpose and meaning of life.

The Buddha’s sermon about the infinity of the Universe.

Redon’s interpretations come close to the literary critic and journalist Jules Lemaître, who in 1879 wrote that Flaubert’s La tentation de sainte Antoine was much more subtle than its prosaically single-track critics had claimed:

This journey through religions depicts the various manners in which man has perceived the world, it moves in the same sphere where stars are travelling; and thus also within the confusion of our minds. “What is the point of all this?” asks Antoine. “There is no meaning, no goal” answers the Devil. “Things are happening in your mind. Like a concave mirror it distorts objects and you lack the ability to confirm their true nature. You will never perceive the Universe in its entirety, you cannot grasp its origin, neither understand who God is, nor realize that the universe is infinite. Form and shapes might be fallacies of the mind, unknown substance and imagination. The world is a constant flow of things and phenomena, its appearance is all that is true. Illusion, the only reality!

This is possibly one reason to why image makers, visionaries and lunatics, more than writers and logicians, have been attracted by La tentation de sainte Antoine. By the end of his novel, Flaubert lets a new day dawn outside Antonius’ cave and within the solar disc, Egypt’s all-superior Lord and Master, Antonius seems to discern the face of Christ. This has been regarded as a late admission by Flaubert that Christianity is, after all, the source of all religions and life itself. However, after re-reading the novel, I assume that Flaubert, who within it paid homage to Buddha, has more than Christianity approached the philosophical religiosity of the Indian subcontinent. A doctrine that encompasses all aspects of life, positive as well as negative and considers the energy of the sun and the universe as sources of existence.

Flaubert managed to capture an aspect of the lives of the early hermits that I found long after I had read his novel. Derwas Chitty’s fascinating book The Desert a City mentions the Desert Fathers’ reverence for and interaction with the harsh nature that surrounded them. Athanasius, who was contemporary with Anthony, wrote the biography that constitutes the basis for the legends about the temptations the pious hermit suffered. Athanasius quotes in several places of his tale about Anthony’s wondrous life what his hero had to say about his desert dwellings. When Anthony, a he former farmer, saw the desert for the first time, he “fell in love with it,” fascinated by its pristine “purity” and he told hermits who sought him out: “My children. Let us not defile this place, because the fathers who preceded us here have cleansed it.” It seems as if Anthony believed that if you learn to live in harmony with your surroundings, even if they might be the desolate and barren desert, you will eventually learn to respect the living beings with whom you share the habitat: “If we reverence everything with moderation it will allow us humans to become stewards even over wild animals.”

In La tentation de sainte Antoine we notice a permanent presence of nature, as if it is a living being. Desert animals occasionally appear, like the jackals, which not at are presented as threatening as the imaginary beings that harass Saint Anthony. And it is perhaps not so strange that Antonius out there in the solitude of the desert strongly felt that he was an integrated a part of heaven and earth, at the same time as he was tormented and amazed by the dazzling presence of the sun.

The life-giving power of light and warmth as part of the inconceivable, immense, living universe is a thought expressed in the Bhagavad Gita, Song of the High, written sometime during the sixth century BC. Like several other well-meaning religious writings, the Bhagavad Gita preaches what is called Bhakti, an unconditional love for one’s neighbour and an acceptance of the incomprehensible power of the Supreme God as man’s only path to inner peace. Of course, that idea has also been abused, distorted and misunderstood.

He is the source of light in all luminous objects. He is beyond the darkness of matter and is unmanifested. He is knowledge, He is the object of knowledge, and He is the goal of knowledge. He exists in the heart of everyone.

Suddenly within the skies – a burst of a thousand suns all at once flooding the earth with rays, though not even that could resemble the splendour of the majesty and glory of the Holy One. So did Arjuna see the entire Universe unfold, divided in all its huge diversity, but in one great shape, visible and viewed in one body and one in all – subtle, splendid, nameless – all comprehending, God of gods, the Never Ending Deity!

Assmann, Jan (2005) Death and Salvation in Ancient Egypt. Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press.  Biasi, Pierre-Marc de (2002) Flaubert: L’homme-plume. Paris: Gallimard. Cannuyer, Christian (2000) L´Égypte copte: Les chrétiens du Nil. Paris: Gallimard. Chitty, Derwas J. (1966) The Desert a City: An Introduction to the Study of Egyptian and Palestinian Monasticism under the Christian Empire. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir´s Seminary Press. Empereur, Jean-Yves (2002) Alexandria: Past, Present and Future. London: Thames & Hudson. Flaubert, Gustave (1980) The Temptation of St Anthony. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Classics. Gibbon, Edward (2005) The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: Abridged Edition. London: Penguin Classics. . Mascaró, Juan (1972) The Bhagavad Gita. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Classics. Mori, Luca (2020) Ipazia: Un fatale catena di eventi. Milano: RCS Media Group. Pagels, Elaine (1989) The Gnostic Gospels. London: Vintage. Wilkinson, Toby (2017) Writings from Ancient Egypt. London: Penguin Classics.

Some time ago it was Easter. What touches me during this holiday is not the cosmic, abstract-theological drama, but the personal tragedy. An attempt to come to terms with life, to accept my fate.

As far back as I can remember I have been fascinated by religion and have of course been asked: “Are you a believer?” I owe the questioners an answer though I am utterly unable to follow Jesus’ command in the Gospel of Matthew (5:37): “Let your message be ‘Yes’ for ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ for ‘No.’ Anything more than that comes from the Evil One.” Being a doubtful and hesitant person, I am not at all attracted to dogmas. As a child, I found church visits infinitely long, even downright painful. Worst were the largely incomprehensible sermons; winding, tedious and incoherent. Speech for the sake of speech, “a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal,” devoid of meaning and context. The substance was missing, the reality; anything that could have reached my innermost me, but the rambling only made me aware of the hard wood of the pew.

I also remember school and university, with all those teachers whose lectures did nothing more than making sound waves vibrate. Few teachers and professors have actually shaken me up, opened new worlds, provided with important insights. Possibly I can count friends and teachers that impressed me on the fingers of both my hands. However, I remain eternally grateful to them.

Among friends and teachers, I should include the books I liked. While thinking of the incoherent pastor who high up in his pulpit, above the heads of his inattentive congregation, interpreted and muddled what he had read and heard, without ever reaching the hearts of his audience, a constant companion appears – William Shakespeare. For example in the shape of his Hamlet; the drama about a young man torn between thought and action, doubt and certainty, feeling and duty. Among so many other thought-provoking reflections that Shakespeare inserted in this tragedy he highlighted the relation between words and deeds. The value of words, whether they reflect and govern our lives.

In Hamlet, deliberations about words are common, both up-front and in an allusive manner. What is their actual value? Do thoughts and words lead to action? Do they help us to discern our inner being? Do they transform us? Of course they do. Shakespeare’s words are one of several proofs that that words actually matter. However, the peerless bard also emphasized their crippling effect. Not unlike Buddha’s teachings, Shakespeare does in Hamlet seem to want to imply that actions should be well thought through – chosen with care:

Correct speech: Refrain from lying. Do not engage in gossip, misleading, hurtful, or loose speech.

Right intention: Your intentions should be based on kindness and compassion.

Proper action: Refrain from harming living things. Do not take any statement for granted.

Proper effort: Prevent the appearance of unfavourable thoughts, if they would arise – avoid them and make an effort to develop a mindset that benefits you and others.

Hidden from sight, Hamlet observes the murderer of his beloved father, his uncle – lover and accomplice in crime of Hamlet’s mother. Intending to kill the bastard, the prince grabs the handle of his knife, though once again ... he hesitates. Could it be right to kill the wretched usurper, especially if the villain is engaged in a heartfelt prayer to God? Hamlet refrains from killing the foul murderer, assuming it cannot be right to kill a praying man, though he suspects that his evil uncle’s prayers for mercy, relief and forgiveness might not be so particularly sincere after all. Why would God listen to such a despicable being? Hamlet’s suspicions seems to be confirmed when he hears his uncle say:

– My words fly up, my thoughts remain below: Words without thoughts never to heaven go.

The powerlessness of words. The emptiness of babble is also revealed when the moderately intelligent and extremely servile courtier, Polonius, on behalf of Hamlet’s manipulative uncle, tries to find out if Hamlet is actually as crazy as he wants people to believe. The confusing conversation ends with Polonius politely asking Hamlet:

- What do you read, my lord?

- Words, words, words.

- What is the matter, my lord?

- Between who?

- I mean, the matter that you read, my lord?

- Slanders, sir. For the satirical rouge says here that old men have grey beards, that their faces are wrinkled, their eyes purging thick amber and plum-tree gum, and that they have a plentiful lack of wit, together, with most weak hams – all which, sir, though I must powerfully and potently believe, yet I hold it not honesty to have it thus set down; for yourself, sir, should be old as I am, if like a crab you could go backward.

Polonius mumbles aside:

- Though this be madness, yet there is method in it.

Doubts about intentions, words and deed mix within Hamlet with self-contempt and scepticism about the meaning of life, as in his constantly repeated monologue, which nevertheless has not lost an ounce of its eloquent strength:

To be or not to be, that is the question: Whether it is nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them. To die – to sleep, no more; and by a sleep to say we end the heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to: it is a consummation devoutly to be wished.

Reading this I assume that the indecisive, doubtful Hamlet, like me from time to time, has lost himself in in Borges’ Library of Babel.

The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite, perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries.

Borges explains that the order and content of the books in this library apparently are random. The inhabitants of this literal universe state that the books contain every possible ordering of 25 basic characters (letters, plus period, comma and space). The vast majority of them might be pure gibberish, but the library nevertheless contains every coherent book ever written, or that might ever be written.

As a preparation for their web placement of books available around the world Google did once from renowned expertise commission an “estimate” of the assumed, current global stock of accessible books, calculated on basis of individual copies/titles and translations. Through complicated algorithms the experts presented Google with an estimate of 130 million books. An assumption I assume must be on the low side. However, in comparison with the immensity of the Universe – infinitesimal. In this limitless expanse, humans and their limited knowledge is insignificant, to say the least. Nevertheless, every human is part of this infinity and with the help of our confined awareness, combined with those tiny fractions we have found in the library dreamt up by Borges, we grope for words and insights that might help us on our cumbersome journey through our finite existence. Nevertheless, it is words that unite us with the Universe.

Here I find Jesus’ anguish in the nightly olive grove of Gethsemane:

He withdrew about a stone’s throw beyond them, knelt down and prayed, “Father, if you are willing, take this cup from me; yet not my will, but yours be done. […] And being in anguish, he prayed more earnestly, and his sweat was like drops of blood falling to the ground (Luke 22: 41-44).

The Easter passion tells us about a lonely person’s anxiety and suffering, describing how someone with good intentions, who thousands had turned to, admired and put their trust in, suddenly becomes lonely. Both friends and enemies turn their backs on him, maybe due to disillusion after finding that their Master and Idol after all was just an “ordinary person”. Like them endowed with shortcomings and doubts, suffering from pain and loneliness. Jesus had not met their lofty expectations, cynically expressed in comments from spectators to his agonizing execution:

“He saved others,” they said, “but he can’t save himself! He’s the king of Israel! Let him come down now from the cross, and we will believe in him.”

Had Yeshua failed by denying that he was the same inadequate person as everyone else? By showing anger and despair? In his solitude, Yeshua ha Notzri clings to his faith. A force that for the past three years had guided him in his effort to make people change for the better by affirming and showing their love of their neighbour, following a gospel of compassion and commitment. A faith that made Yeshua trust in his own abilities, his gift for convincing others, an ability to provide them with hope and strength. A belief in himself and the saving love he spread and preached. A love he was now denied, which had resulted in solitary despair, nailed to the cross. He shouted: Elahi, Elahi, lama šƏbaqtanī? My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

The fascination with Jesus’ fate moved me early on, perhaps even shortly after I had learned how to read and after receiving my first Bible from my grandfather. Maybe there is one of the sources of my great interest in religions, which has followed me throughout life. A personal address, mixed with exoticism, an attraction of the unknown, a sense of mystery that has made me more receptive to the Catholic mass, than the preaching of Protestants.

To me, religion and logic are incompatible. Religion is inexplicable, as is music, art, flowers and birds. For my part, such things might just as well remain unknown. I am more attracted to the emotions they evoke, than the mechanics behind it all, though – after all – those can also be fascinating. I do not believe in virgin birth, heaven or hell, I believe in the great unknown. I can easily agree with Gustave Flaubert when he in 1857 wrote in a letter:

What attracts me most of all else is religion. I mean all religions, no one more than any other. Every dogma in particular is repulsive to me, but I consider the feeling that invented them as the most natural and poetic of humanity. I have small liking for philosophers who have seen nothing but trickery and nonsense in it

Flaubert knew and respected the value of words. It is probably here we find his interest in religion and mysticism. Literature and art open a door to the essentials of life; the hidden meaning of existence. The incomprehensible core of “being here”, the brilliance of existence that we sometimes might sense, be intoxicated by and perhaps even convey to others. Like art and music, true religion is a reflection of the greatness of the universe and thus perhaps also its inner meaning. In the Bible, God creates with his words:

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day.

Dogmatists despised Flaubert, authoritarian oppressors who want to make us believe that faith equals truth and “realism”. That everything necessary is written down in their holy scriptures. That all scribbled on their pages has actually happened, is happening and will happen. Thus, they degrade the universe. With their contempt and spider-grey disciplining they defile art, imagination and human ingenuity. They destroy joy and the inner mystery of true religion – the glory of creation. Through their gloomy dogmas they deny faith and piety. Through dictates, orders and lies they have darkened the lives of others. Have those who censor words and thoughts actually read the introductory words of the Gospel of John?

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.  He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind.  The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

I assume that the evangelist writes about the precondition of humanity – our use of a multifaceted language as a means of stimulating imagination, expanding our consciousness, enabling our coexistence with other living creatures in such a way that we may find fellowship and joy among each other. Religion as something deeply human and ever-present, completely different from the fundamentalists’ oppression of joy, openness and inventiveness. Their idiotic attempts to degrade religion into a straitjacket, a tool of torture, in twisted attempts to reshape humanity in accordance with their own lonely, troubled and distorted personalities – a Hitler, a Stalin, a Mao. Their utopian dream worlds became living Hell, entirely distant from a realm of harmony, compassion and happiness. In those totalitarian infernos you did not at love your neighbours as yourself, you feared them, just as you distrusted everyone around you, even your most intimate friends, your own family. There, people were tortured and killed in accordance with a dictator’s personal whims and fears, his intention to turn everything and everyone into tools for the creation of his own, as well as his adoring and fearful minions’ unattainable utopia. Now Islamist terrorists and ISIS supporters are behaving in a similar manner manner, urged on ny an egocentric desire to reach the Kingdom of Heaven, Jannah, by torturing and executing those who are unable to believe like them.

Like other paradises, Jannah is a realm created by dreams and imagination. A glorious kingdom established for desert wanderers and reflected in the wondrous fairy tale collection Arabian Nights, which was certainly inspired by the Quran’s vision of Jannah as a heavenly realm to which the newcomer at each gate is welcomed by angels with words like “Peace be with you, because you have now endured the trials of life with patience. Your reward will be the pleasure of Jannah where every human being lives in the presence of God, within a lush garden where eternal happiness reigns.”

A paradise with rippling brooks, clear springs and cooling rivers with constantly fresh water, or eternally tasty milk. Each garden is more vast than heaven and earth combined. In the middle of each restful haven there is a huge palace with a high throne of dignity within a shaded grove with exquisitely cushy sofas, among soft, magnificent carpets, wine-filled goblets and the best meat and most delicious fruits that earth can provide. Jannah’s residents are dressed in golden robes, pearl bracelets and green garments of silk and brocade. Both men and women are endowed with beautiful and spotless spouses, accompanied by happy children and are by perfect youngsters with a captivating appearance, like well-hidden gems. An eternal refuge, characterized by indescribable happiness and great pleasure, all that is God’s desire.

An ideal far from reality and earthly toil. A longing for the unoccupied, the oppressed, the discriminated, the sick and the weak. But why crave bliss after death? “You’ll get pie in the sky when you die.” It is actually here and now that Hell exists, here on Earth within us, around us. Just as Hell exists on earth, cannot the Kingdom of Heaven be created here as well? Would it not be a better pursuit than obtaining personal bliss after death?

Once, on being asked by the Pharisees when the Kingdom of God would come, Jesus replied, “The coming of the Kingdom of God is not something that can be observed, nor will people say, “Here it is,” or “There it is,” because the Kingdom of God is in your midst.”

Jesus appear to have been assuming that a child’s open joy and wonder, its imagination and curiosity, were the way that leads to what he called the Kingdom of God:

One day some parents brought their little children to Jesus so he could touch and bless them. But when the disciples saw this, they scolded the parents for bothering him. But Jesus called the children to him and said, “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these.”

It is words that for a child open the gates to its entry into the world. When a child discovers the enchantment of words, its existence begins as a human, as a social being. Through our own and others’ words, we partake in the world. It is believed that thoughts and words precede action. They have an immense significance and it is not without reason that in the Catholic sacrament of Penance and Reconciliation action is preceded by thoughts and words:

I confess to God Almighty, 

and to you, my brothers and sisters,

that I have sinned

in thoughts, words, deeds and omissions;

in what I have done and in what I have failed to do,

by my fault, by my fault, by my most grievous fault;

mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

Gustave Flaubert was obsessed with words, constantly in pursuit of the right words, those that would enable him to describe an incredibly diversified reality. Immersed in this search he could for days be sitting in front of a sheet of blank paper, unable to find what he called Le mot juste, the right word. In the preface to his novel Pierre and Jean, Flaubert’s “student” Guy de Maupassant described in detail his master’s teachings. How everything in the world is different. There are not two grains of sand, two flies, two hands or two noses, which are exactly the same:

In everything there is an unexplored element because we are prone by habit to use our eyes only in combination with the memory of what others before us have thought about the thing we are looking at. The most insignificant thing contains some little unknown element. We must find it. To describe a fire burning or a tree on a plain let us stand in front of that fire and that tree until for us they no longer look like any other tree or any other fire.

Flaubert's counsel reminds me of Jesus’ words about the Kingdom of God as belonging to children. Perhaps he meant that if you contemplate the world with the same astonished curiosity as a child, it might be possible to divine its inner meaning, i.e. the Kingdom of God, and maybe even find Flaubert’s mot juste. In an infant’s life this is an everyday miracle described by the Finnish poet Elmer Diktonius:

The child in the garden

is a strange thing:

a small animal,

a little flower.

Like a cat it snuggles by carnations,

strokes its head

against the sunflower’s giant stalk.

Maybe thinking: Sun is good –

green is grass colour.

Maybe it knows: I'm growing.

Maupassant sums up Flaubert's observations by stating that an author, just like an artist, should ardeously observe something before reproducing it. A writer should make an even greater effort than an artist, who tries to decide upon the right colour. Unlike the artist who has the colours right in front of her/him, the author has to find the words that are hidden inside her/himself. Admittedly, according to Flaubert, Maupassant was a talented young man. However, to become a full-fledged artist, he had to combine his talent with great patience – and not the least, hard work.

Whatever we want to convey, there is only one word to express it, one verb to animate it, one adjective to qualify it. We must therefore go on seeking that word, verb or adjective until we have discovered it, and never be satisfied with approximations, never fall back on tricks, even inspired ones. Or tomfoolery of language to dodge the difficulty.

Flaubert made a great effort to find le mot juste, the right word. In his extensive correspondence, which is as fascinating as his novels, Flaubert often describes his writing method. For example, he generally first wrote one or two pages, read them carefully, rewrote them, corrected details, pondered, and then wrote them all again. An endevour that could take days and yet – the end result was filled with corrections and deletions.

According to Flaubert, a writer was a craftsman whose tools consisted of words. He considered himself to be a kind of scientist who, with the help of the language, would be able to reproduce what he had found out through careful studies of nature and people. According to him, literature should be a scientific, artistic and theoretical endeavour, as well it had to be as concrete and true to life as possible. Above all, an authorship worthy of the name would be apt to apply all the means at its disposal and in particular language, which had to be cultivated and chastised to enable a use of its representative capacities to the highest possible degree. Flaubert was so engrossed in his writing that he told Louise Coles, perhaps the only woman he had truly loved, apart from his sister and her daughter, that:

It has turned out that my character is a system, an organism where the whole has devoured the individual, in a way that makes the polar bear live on the ice and the camel walk on the sand. I'm a man of the pen. I feel through it, live because of it, in relation to it and much more within its company.

Identifying so completely with his role as a writer was perhaps the reason to why Flaubert considered himself to be a “pantheist”. Someone who, like his admired philosopher Spinoza, came to regard the universe as an all-encompassing, almost mechanically functioning system in which concepts of evil and good constituted limitations created by a human instinct that prevented us from considering our existence as part of a whole, where everything, every single being, must fulfill the potential hidden in its nature. Flaubert declared that

I do not know (nor does anyone know) what is meant by these two words: soul and body, where the one ends, where the other begins.

He was fascinated by the human, as well as animal, nature’s, violent oscillations between passion, unbridled desire and rigid control. Probably the reason for his “cannibalistic interest” that allowed him to study and describe everything that surrounded him with the cool attention of a scientist. Perhaps this inclination also also constituted a part of his ruthless promiscuity that made him remorselessly exploit both female and male prostitutes, at the same time as he could show great compassion and be a faithful friend and companion.

For long periods, Flaubert isolated himself in research and writing. He hated the bourgeoisie, but enjoyed all its privileges. He considered himself an anti-clerical atheist, but was at the same time a pantheistic mystic in the same spirit as the German philologist, archaeologist and historian of religions Georg Friedrich Creuzer (1771-1858), whose books Flaubert constantly returned to. Their illustrations became a source for the visions he excelled in while writing The Temptations of St. Anthony, a book he considered to be his life's crowning achievement.

Creuzer eloquently a described a multifaceted, all-encompassing religious sphere in which every animal, every human being, every natural object, and phenomenon, played it’s part in all the world's religious beliefs and cultures and was thus became a minuscule screw or bolt in the universe’s all-encompassing, sacred machinery.

Flaubert assumed a similar intimate relation between people and things. His writing was guided by a drive to try to grasp, to understand, what role each individual object, each impression and thought play in an individual's everyday life. Something he tried to portray in his magnificent novel, Madame Bovary. By describing the novel’s actors as being either tragic or instinctively cynical Flaubert clearly wanted to make it evident that life is deterministically predisposed, but that this obvious “order” nevertheless is meaningless. When he began conceiving Madame Bovary, Flaubert wrote to his mistress and conversant, Louise Coles

What seems beautiful to me, what I should like to write, is a book about nothing, a book dependent on nothing external, which would be held together by the strength of its style, just as the earth, suspended in the void, depends on nothing external for its support; a book which would have almost no subject, or at least in which the subject would be almost invisible, if such a thing is possible. 

In his more than two thousand pages long and unfinished “biography” of Flaubert, L'Idiot de la famille, The Family Idiot, Jean-Paul Sartre wrote about his author colleague's feeling of “the silent, icy laughter of nothingness”. Madame Bovary is a novel of solitude and desire, as well as a detailed depiction of a rural backwater; the lives and characters of its inhabitants. The power of the novel is carried forward by a language perfectly adapted to what it describes and in spite of its descriptions of a limited environment it is entering the place and its inhabitants in-depth and in a multifaceted manner and thus becomes valid everywhere, everywhen and for everyone. Not the least, Madame Bovary seems to reflect Flaubert himself, his voyeurism paired with a contemplative exclusion.

Madame Bovary is in pursuit of something far beyond her everyday boredom. She enters a fantasy world which does not allow her to perceive her surroundings as they are, being prevented from indulging herself in heart-warming motherly feelings and/or enjoy a lasting love. A crippling impotence to live in the present, an inability to feel gratitude, to realize that our joy is to be found in other people’s happiness and share it with them. Madame Bovary is thus reminiscent of the Christmas tree in H. C. Andersen’s fairy tale. The tragically lonely spruce which allows joy and moments of satisfaction to be constantly overshadowed by thoughts of what will happen next. An unquenchable desire whipping its victim towards an uncertain future, only to constantly find that everything was so much better before.

Flaubert also dreamt about bygone times. Preferably very far back. To Antiquity and further back than that:

… an immeasurable sadness overwhelms me as I think of that age of magnificent and charming beauty passed beyond recall, of that world quite vibrant, quite radiant, so coloured and so pure, so simple and so varied.

Even during his visits to that world, Flaubert did not make it easy for himself. To write his exotically abundant novel about ancient Carthage, Salammbô, he not only buried himself in all the scientific literature he could find about this largely unknown culture. He also visited places in Tunisia and Libya where his novel would take place and made careful notes about what he saw and heard, supplemented by detailed sketches in which he marked the distinctive features of the landscape.

Flaubert’s comprehensive literary landscape is at the heart of Jean-Pierre Richard’s comments about his work. Richard (1922-2019) quite correctly claimed that criticism and literary analyses break down and fragment the texts that are clinically examined by meticulous scholars. A dissection that transform novels and poems by tearing them apart, cutting them to pieces and thus creating something entirely different from what actually has to be considered as a unity. Accordingly, a captivating literary work becomes transformed into a fragmented body, which can only be restored through of an engaged reader’s empathy and unconditioned attitude

Richard makes an effort to in great detail study an author’s complete work in order to find a pattern within a unity that has been accomplished by the harmonization of different themes and motifs. Richard’s intention was to create an idea about ​​a novel's “imaginary landscape” and to that end he carefully studied both the text and its author, as well as the time and world in which s/he lived.

A novel is made up of visual and spatial concepts, but also of tactile and sensory aspects. An imaginary landscape is an expression of choices, desires and obsessions based on personal characteristics and experiences. Even if Richard emphasizes that literature is a form of experience, for readers as well as writers, he does not succumb to any gross psychologization. His studies are above all a search for the moment when a literary work is conceived. The silence and thoughts that precede a transformation into the “speech” an author uses to convey. In that sense, both the author and the text becomes reflections of something elusive – what we tend to label as “imaginary”.

As I now with my wretched French struggle with Richard’s book about Flaubert, I find that several of his ideas seem to have been inspired by the remarkable Gaston Bachelard (1884-1962), a professor at the Sorbonne University, where he taught history and philosophy. Bachelard devoted himself to epistemology. A concept that got on my nerves during the eighties, especially as "Marxist" friends and acquaintances used it as an insult, often directed at me. I really never understood what it meant. Maybe something like “theory of knowledge”, i.e. something that has to do with a questioning the methods, theories, thinking and generally accepted opinions which form the basis of beliefs and actions.

Thankfully, I had other friends as well, whose views were far more stimulating than the ones exposed by rabid salon revolutionaries. For example, my good friend Örjan who a few years later gave me several books by Bachelard, which I read with great interest. In them the rigorous professor exposed a different angle of his personality than the epistemology that I had found to be so intricate. He wrote about daydreaming, fantasy and poetry. About the duality of human thinking. Like Richard, Bachelard wrote about the imaginary, about the opposite poles that consist of “concepts” and images/performances. Bachelard appeared to reckon that “pure, modern science” has obtained an uncompromising “intellectual” foundation and is thus in many ways lacking le imaginaire that previously characterized science. I do not know whether I have perceived the French philosopher quite correctly, but on the other hand I am convinced that he considered that “poetic thinking” does for both readers and writers open up the gates to a boundless future.

I got this impression after reading Bachelard’s stimulating books on various themes; “water” (rest), “air” (movement) and “earth” (willpower and work, but also rest). He could write about how memories are brought to life by watching a blazing fire, or the fluttering flame of a candle. About how we, immersed in our daydreams, can find the still waters hidden within us.

In The Poetics of Space Bachelard describes how we in the silence that prevails within the “corners of existence” may evoke images that provide us with peace, confidence and strength. There we can encounter ourselves as we once were in our childhood. When we with a child’s open gaze could look into other “rooms”, where other beings spend their lives – bees, moles and humans. If we look at a bird’s nest, thoughts are born about the bird’s existence: “Would the bird build its nest if it did not have its instinctive confidence in the world.” Such thoughts may lead us to an empathy that makes us feel a closeness with the bird, imagining how its “bird life” would be. In similar manner our compassion can be brought to life by contemplating the environment created around our fellow human beings. As Flaubert wrote in Madame Bovary: “The most mediocre libertine has dreamed of sultanas; every notary bears within him the debris of a poet.”

Bachelard’s writings about space and the intimate and quiet corners of existence make me remember that several authors have written about Flaubert's “inner space”. The worlds of text and imagination he created and entered into. If you can enter such worlds the experience could be overwhelming. The poet and essayist Paul Valéry felt completely exhausted after reading Flaubert's The Temptations of Saint Anthony. Pictures and associations become too much for him, too compact: “He´s read too much … as we say of the tipsy man that he’s drunk too much.”

Like Madame Bovary, Flaubert had his secret chamber, which characterized much of his life and writing. Madame Bovary’s inner room had to do with love, or rather passion. She wanted, as in the romantic novels she revelled in, to be engrossed in an all-encompassing love passion. Her heart had been replaced by a romantic novel and the blood it pumped through her body poisoned her perception of reality and brought her to self-destruction.

Flaubert tried get out of both his outer and inner rooms. He wanted to escape from France, from his despised bourgeoisie. Away from his dominant mother, his tiresome obligations, his caged self and get lost in exoticism and passion. Instead, he ended up in sultry brothels and fell ill with venereal diseases, not the least syphilis, which poisoned his life and also the lives of those he thoughtlessly exploited through his promiscuity. What he hoped would be an outlet for his desire became depressing lewdness. On the other hand, his writing, even if it occured in solitude and confinement, remained a pleasurable, albeit a cumbersome entry into inner, more open territories. In there Flaubert got drunk, not like Valéry’s tipsy man through alcoholic beverages, but with words. And as the true French gourmet that Flaubert was, he savoured his words and his authorship became the equivalent of exquisite French wines cultivatecd with care and love.

In November 2011, I went with my friends Mats and Didrik on a road trip through Normandy and among other places we visited Flaubert's home town Rouen and its Museum. In one room, some furniture from Flaubert's home in Croisset had been placed. To me, this bare room made an almost shocking impression, especially considering Flaubert's book-laden writing den in Croisset, just outside of Rouen, where he spent days and nights writing by a large round table, surrounded by manuscripts and opened up books.

That room is still there, but I have not seen it, apart from a sketch by Rochegrosse, one of Flaubert's artist friends – prominent representative of the overloaded genre so much appreciated during the Second Empire and usually labelled as L'Art Pompier. Rochegrosse was for certain inspired by the exoticism of Flaubert’s stories Salammbô, Hérodias and La Tentation de Saint Antoine.

A somewhat more detailed drawing of Flaubert's study was made by his niece, Caroline:

The museum in Rouen also housed Flaubert's famous, stuffed, green parrot. However, not the one that seems to be the original, which can be encountered in his house in Croisset. There is also the author's round desk, as well as the stuffed Loulou, provided with a note affixed to her bird stick: Juillet 15, 1876. Prèté à M. G. Flaubert: 1 perroquet amazone monté, July 15, 1876. Finished for Mr. G. Flaubert: A mounted Amazon parrot. This piece of information might be of some interest since Julian Barnes in his 1984 novel Flaubert’s Parrot lets a retired doctor named Geoffrey Braitwaite find that there are no less than two museums claiming to own the stuffed parrot that had been placed on Flaubert's desk when he wrote his famous story A simple heart.

Barnes’ tale about Braitwaite’s hunt for the authentic parrot provides him with an opportunity to identify three “levels” of Flaubert's life: An optimistic one, characterized by travel, success and erotic conquests; one negative – the death of friends and mistresses, harsh criticism, illness and other shortcomings, and finally a third level that could possibly be reconstructed through quotes from Flaubert's letters and “work books”. The result is a multifaceted picture that is difficult to grasp, just as Braitwaite was unable to clarify which of the fifty stuffed parrots he hears about could be the one that originally stood on Flaubert's round desk.

A Simple Heart is a touching portrait of the old, inconspicuous and faithful servant Félicité. From poor rural conditions and after an unfortunate love story, she comes to Rouen as a maid. Shy and profoundly religious, Félicité carries out her duties without complaint and falls in love with a man who does not care for her, with her employer’s children who forget her when they grow old and an ungrateful nephew. After leaving her employment Félicité devotes herself to the care of the homeless, the cholera-sick, and wounded soldiers. She is getting lonely. An old woman makes sure that Félicité gets some food and calls for a doctor when she finally falls ill with fatal pneumonia. Félicité’s last love is her green parrot, Loulou, whom she has stuffed after it died. During her final years, the dead parrot becomes Félicité’s only companion. She speaks to it and comes to believe that she in the parrot’s jet black glass eyes can discern a reflection of God’s Holy Spirit.

Félicité is based on the worn, faithful and “simple” maids Flaubert remembered from his childhood and who first appeared in his Madame Bovary as the pain broken, almost unnoticed, old Catherine Leroux, who in an unforgettable scene during a cattle market by the self-righteous representatives of the small town bourgeoisie is awarded a silver medal for fifty-four years of faithful service as a farmhand. When she, after hesitation and with great anguish is cheered on by the amused audience enters the stage and speechless stand in front of the pompous mayor, he exclaims with a beaming voice: “Fifty-four years of faithful service! A silver medal! Twenty-two francs! To you!”

While looking at it after receiving her medal, a grateful smile spreads across Catherine Leroux’s life worn features. When she leaves the stage people around her could hear her mumbling: "When I come home, I’ll give it to our priest, so he can say some masses for me.” The burghers laugh heartily at her words.

Somewhere Gaston Bachelard wrote:

What benefits new books bring us! I would like a basket full of books telling the youth of images which fall from heaven for me every day. This desire is natural. This prodigy is easy. For, up there, in heaven, isn't paradise an immense library? […] Thus, in the morning, before the books piled high on my table, to the god of reading, I say my prayer of the devouring reader: ‘Give us this day our daily hunger.

This is how I often felt when in my early youth botanized among my father’s and grandfather's book collections and there found one book gem after another. Today I do not understand how I at such a tender age could read books that today would would cause me quite a lot of difficulties. I read The Odyssey and Divina Commedia with the same joy and sense of benefit as Donald Duck and The Phantom. I do not know when I found Hjärtats Begärelse, Desire of the Heart, the Swedish title of Flaubert’s La Tentation de Saint Antione, in my father's bookshelf, but for several reasons I became fascinated and it became a reading experiences I have not forgotten.

I had previously devoured the historical adventure novels by the Finnish author Mika Waltari, which I had found in Grandpa’s bookshelves, becoming particularly taken in by Sinuhe the Egyptian. In Granpa’s hous I had also devoured a Swedish translation of H. Rider Haggard’s thrilling Morning Star.

While searching through my father’s books I had got stuck with a coffee table book called Treasures of Egypt. Time and time again I admired its pictures, amazed by being confronted with such an exotic and utterly strange place. It was probably this Egyptian interest that made me interested in The Tempation of St. Anthony, since the cover of its Swedish translation depicted the daughters of Pharaoh Echnaton.

Flaubert's “novel” takes place during a night in Egypt around 300 CE. Saint Anthony has retired from the world to live as a hermit in a rock tomb. During a painful, moonlit night, he suffers violent and almost tangible hallucinations, which takes the shape as visits from a number of legendary and historical figures who evoke huge historical panoramas and summon grotesque demons. These visions, hauntings and temptations force Saint Anthony to confront himself with his inner fiends and concealed desires – sexual urges, carving for greatness, his betrayals and shortcomings.

The whole thing is obviously a reflection of Flaubert's “inner space”. His promiscuity, loneliness, external and internal travels, vast readings, historical-religious interests, pantheism, syphilis, presumed epileptic seizures, escapism, orientalism and above all – his writing; its meaning and purpose.

The text takes the form of a reading drama, a pictorially overloaded prose poem which in many ways resembles Goethe’s tangled second part of his Faust, which I much later immersed myself in and remain puzzled by. However, as a kid I was not at all puzzled by the sometimes kitschy intricacies of The Temptation of St Anthony. When I now as an ageing man reread the novel I found that it contains, among other things, Flaubert’s rapture while confronting the immense mysteries of the universe. A feeling he expressed in several of his letters, for example in one where he describes his experience while he together with a friend is standing on a beach, looking out across the ocean:

We regretted that our eyes might not reach to the heart of the rocks, to the bottom of the seas, to the ends of the sky, so as to see how the stones grow, how the waters are made, how the stars light up, that our ears might not hear the gravitation in the earth of granites forming, the push of sap through plants, the rolling of corals in the solitude of the ocean.

Within the framework of The Temptation of St. Anthony Flaubert lets a slightly mad hermit during a painful nigh be exposed to harrowing hallucinations. Supported by “the right words”, extensive reading and unbridled imagination he creates a pantheistic cosmos. Through myths and legends, past and present, Flaubert invokes a library of Babel. A panopticon of different voices, baroque, overloaded images and deep-seated moods.

Like Anthony, who in an abandoned tomb is confronted with himself, his diverse experiences and intricate nature, suffers from the attacks of monsters created by his mind. Incarnations of memories of sins and shortcomings take the form of magnificent, image-laden hallucinations and this is not only taking place in a rock-cut tomb in ancient Egypt, but also in a book cave in Croissant, where the isolated, epileptic, and syphilis-infected Flaubert conjures up images from his own infested sub-conscious. No wonder that Sigmund Freud was fascinated by The Temptation of St. Anthony.

In Croisset, Flaubert, like St Anthony, suffered (and enjoyed) a self-imposed martyrdom, seeking relief through a constant struggle to find the right words. For Flaubert, Croisset became the quiet corner of existence that Bachelard wrote about and from which he could step into what Richard described as his “imaginary landscape”.

Writing is a solitary occupation. Something that we engage in in our loneliness and like Flaubert, an author search her/his innermost to find useful material. S/he uses experiences, living conditions and her/his character. At the same time, it is common for a writer to study the writings of others; their experiences and manner of formulating thoughts and imagination.

Several translators proceed in a similar manner. Like Flaubert, they must also be word smiths, who in solitude search for the right expressions – within themselves and with the help of the works of others – the author they are translating, poems and novels and a wealth of non-fiction; biographies, dictionaries and descriptions of the author’s other production, her/his time and environment. I read Flaubert’s La Tentation de Saint Antoine in English translation and then found that his interpreters into both English and Swedish were rather odd people. Writers in search of the right words and their own place in Universe.

The English translation I read was made in 1980 by a certain Kitty Mrosovsky. Her introduction to the novel was impressive, in fact one of the best I have read within that particular genre. I searched for her online, though there I could not find much about Ms. Mrosovsky; no images, no Wikipedia article. She was born in Oxford in 1946 as the daughter of Russian immigrants, grew up in Southern France and in her late teens she returned to Oxford. After a Masters in History of Literature, Mrosovsky got a job as lecturer at the University of York, but after a year she left her position to become a full-time writer. She found odd jobs, while writing poetry, theatre criticism and novels. When she died in 1995, Kitty Mrosovsky had only managed to publish her Flaubert translation and one novel. Something I find strange considering her skilful, well-written and elaborate preface to The Temptation of Saint Anthony, with its fluent language and multi-faceted information.

Like Flaubert and his Saint Antoine, Kitty Mrosovsky was certainly harassed by inner demons, which she tried to alleviate herself from by giving into a misguided desire. Her novel, Hydra, took its title from Hercules’ fight against a multi-headed monster, on which a new head grew as soon as he had chopped off one of them:

In a wretched room in an American city lies a bedridden, young man. After an accident, he has become paralysed from the neck down. When the accident happened, he was struggling with a dissertation on Euripides’ drama about Heracles, in which the Greek hero in an outburst of madness murders his wife and their children. Even before his accident, the literature student had suffered from another kind of paralysis – Writer’s Block. The desperate and now entirely helpless man can only express himself through his speech. He is visited by an emotionally cold tutor, who through his objectively dry argumentation only aggravates the condition of his incapacitated student. Unlike Heracles, the disabled man lacks a faithful friend able to assist him in his fight against the multi-headed, mental hydra that harass him, tears apart his inner self through painful memories and an ever-growing anxiety about a misfortune that undoubtedly will lead to his death. In his desperate paralysis he is also tormented by thoughts of the misery around us all – threat of nuclear war, natural resource destruction and the annihilation of our entire biosphere. No doubt Kitty Mrosovsky was inspired by her own torments and in-depth studies of Gustave Flaubert and his La Tentation de Saint Antione.

Of course, a novel as tragic and intellectually demanding as Hydra lacked commercial appeal. After being rejected by a number of publishers, Mrosovsky finally got it published by a small London-based book publisher – Allison & Busby. The novel went by almost unnoticed. However, a few encouraging words from some members of the literary establishment strengthened Mrosovsky’s waning self-esteem, and after a long sojourn in Italy, she returned to London with a new novel, which, however, was rejected everywhere. It has never been published. Upon her return to London, Kitty discovered that she was HIV positive. During her last years, during which she was inexorably broken down by her illness, she devoted herself to issues concerning HIV/AIDS and environmental degradation, went to concerts and played Mozart sonatas on her piano. In one of the few articles she got published, Mrosovsky wrote: “AIDS is not a special and unmentionable disease limited to the sub-categories of society.” During her painful death struggle, Kitty wrote a will in which she stipulated that her modest savings would be used to keep her surviving cat alive.

My web search for Kitty Mrosovsky resulted in an unexpected find. Craig Anthony Raine (born in 1944) is a poet and essayist and since 2010 professor emeritus at Oxford University. After his Oxford education, he became editor-in-chief with the famous publishing house Faber and Faber, literary critic with the influential New Statesman and New Review magazines, as well as Quarto, which later merged with the Literary Review, still considered as one of Britain’s foremost introducer to contemporary literature. In 1999, Raine founded the deliberately sophisticated magazine Areté, whose policy he formulated as:

We publish anything we like. The result is a magazine catholic in its taste ... The purpose of any literary magazine is the correction of taste, the creation of mischief and entertainment—and the discovery of new writers. 

Craig Raine appears to be someone who is unbearably “full of himself”. Among other things, Raine has published novels and collections of poems with ironic titles such as The Divine Comedy and A la recherche du temps perdu. The cover of the latter volume is filled with reviews where famous names rank Raine alongside “literary giants” such as Auden, Browning and Conrad. A voice in this chorus of praise belongs to the occasionally quite good Ian McEwan, who quotes Joseph Conrad’s statement that good literature “makes you hear, makes you feel, and, above all, makes you see. That is all, and it is everything,” with the addition that is what Raine makes his readers do. There is no doubt that Raine is part of an English-language variant of authors engaged in a game of mutual admiration, not unlike what is the case with the literary connoisseurs who in Sweden’s public spaces engage in mutual flattery.

Raine describes his forty-pages book of poetry A La Recherche du Temps Perdu: A Poem, as an elegy, a melancholy mourning of his dead mistress Kitty Mrosovsky. And not only that, Raine declared that with his nostalgic lament he intended to “recreate the elegy to what it should be in English.” I do not understand what he meant by that, but Raines’ “elegy” can hardly be called neither melancholic, nor tender. He reconstructs his “love affair” with careful indications of time, places, restaurants and notthe least his own wittiness. About Mrosovsky he writes that “you laughed at my jokes,” though he does not show much appreciation of his mistress’ intelligence and literary talent. Apparently, he does not like her writing, describes her taste in music as “doubtful” and considers her to be “a literary snob”. As we used to say as children: “The one who said it, he was it!”

That an experienced writer, an acclaimed and generously published author and university professor like Raine exposes such an embarrassingly banal language, surprises me … to say the least. He does certainly not like Flaubert be on the look-out for the right word. About Mrosovsky, he writes, “I can't accept you’re dead./ You're still here, in my head.” Hardly unconventional, as an art collecting friend of mine use to say when he is confronted with a work of art he does not appreciate. When Raine writes poems about his love making with Kitty Mrosovsky, the shallow awkwardness becomes almost unbearable. Here he wallows in the same annoying descriptions of details that seem to be common in his other literary works. Craig Raine describes Mrosovsky's body in a puerile and embarrassingly stereotypical manner; her body hair (“20 chin hairs, nine around her nipples”), her breasts (“like melons”), her eyes (“green”), clean-shaven legs (“sleek and sexy as stripped twigs,” strange parable – sexy twigs?), cheekbones (“high”), hair (“dark, brown, soft”) and “bush” (“black, smoking”– smoking? It sounds almost eerie). Raine ends this strangely banal description with an idiotic wordplay “and now I have re-membered you again.” Is this a joke? Parts for the whole, woman as body? After his shallow and ridiculous description of Kitty’s body comes Raine’s hardly unconventional assessment of their love making: "You taught me sex / was conversation, and not a speech.”

No wonder if the author of an elegy dedicated to a lost mistress, who instead of describing her face and talent presents detailed descriptions of her “cunt” and “arsehole”, has made other authors cringe. On several occasions, Craig Raine has deservedly been nominated for The Literary Review's Annual Bad Sex in Fiction Award. An award which, according to the literary magazine, intends to pay

attention to the poorly written, redundant, or downright cringeworthy passages of sexual description in modern fiction, the prize is not intended to cover pornographic or expressly erotic literature. 

The fact that a deceased and thus defenceless author and ingenious translator was dedicated to such a scabrous and lousy “elegy” as Raine’s  grandiloquent belly flop, did upset Michael Hofmann, one of England’s most skilled translators of German literature by masters like Wolfgang Koeppen, Joseph Roth, Thomas Bernhard, Hans Fallada, Alfred Döblin, and not the least Kafka. Hofmann has accurately defined Raine’s literary production as

a school prize day atmosphere is overhanging the whole thing: pomposity and cleverness in smelly socks.

As a translator, Hofmann is a fastidious hunter for “the right word”. Well aware that such a thing does not always appear through a direct translation from German to English, Hofmann argues that for a sensitive translator it is important to find the right nuances. To take a step back, examine the original and sincerely try to understand the author’s mood and unique use of language. It does not concern finding the exact, but the right words. If a translator works in such a manner, it creates a feeling of co-creation and affinity with the translated author. Hofmann states that if a translation flows well, it may be similar to the pleasure that may occur during an enjoyable car ride. You follow a set path, but are still taken by a sense of freedom, “the whole thing will appear automotive: look, it’s running on English rather than limping after the German.”

If a translation works as if it were an original, in general no one will discover that the translator has dared to make minor deviations from the original text and thereby does not start whining and exclaiming: “Mistake! Mistake!" If a translator works with commitment, joy and care, it provides “ a little bit of self-esteem, a little bit of originality, a little bit of boldness.” Nevertheless, Hofmann emphasizes that translators might feel a certain bitterness. At best, their work is seldom noticed, but often they are criticized and even contemptuously regarded as “literary parasites”, incapable of reaching the mastery of the authors they have translated. Furthermore, Hofmann also states that conceited writers can have a detrimental effect on a translator’s work. They tend to “minimise the space of translators”. Hofmann claims that

it’s partly why I have mostly ended up translating dead people. They are more appreciative.

Hofmann has translated all novels by his deceased father – Gert Hofmann. With great pleasure I recently read Michael Hofmann’s translation of his Father’s Luck. A tragic/comic story about a failed writer's Schreib Blockade and impending divorce, observed by his young son and sharp-tongued, six-year-old daughter it is a linguistically excellent tale.

It is no wonder that such a skilled writer/translator as Michael Hofmann does not have much left for a pompous, well-established egocentric like Craig Raine, who with his puerile sexuality succeeded smearing Kitty Mrosovsky’s literary contribution. However, it seems that Raine nevertheless gave some relief to Mrosovsky's pain, her blockages and unsuccessful search for appreciation and tenderness, something that led her into the dead end of promiscuity. According to Raine, she “fucked everyone”, even an apparent jerk like him, although it obviously would never occur to him to define himself as such.

Flaubert’s La Tentation de Saint Antione is filled to the brim with images, sins and temptations, most of them linked to religious beliefs and depictions of all sorts of delusions emerging and disappearing throughout the ages. It depicts the origin and decay of a variety of philosophical teachings and cosmic speculations. Although sexually tinted temptations permeate parts of the text, they are certainly far fewer than the artistic representations of erotic allure that have been inspired by the novel. More or less realistic depictions of the steadfast hermit who is confronted with lavish, naked women. For example, the in my opinion masterful La Tentazioni di Sant ’Antonio by Domenico Morelli, which I several times have admired in the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna here in Rome.

Or the lushly vulgar Lovis Corinth's Die Versuchung des heiligen Antonius in Munich, in which the terrified hermit seems to have been trapped inside a ladies’ bathhouse, filled with naked, randy women.

Or in a more modern “realistic” representation by Erik Sandberg, who also points out the trapped vulgar atmosphere in the holy Anthony’s cave dwelling, where he is confronted with a pig and naked lady whose body has been crowned with a skull.

Nevertheless, La Tentation de Saint Antione, does actually not give the impression of erotically charged claustrophobia, he slightly mad James Ensor’s depiction comes closer to its source of inspiration; with its swirling, colourful, cosmic version, which mixes women, landscapes and monsters.

Undoubtedly, it is Odilon Redon who in his illustrations has offered the best interpretations of this strange novel.

It cannot be denied that several interpreters, translators as well as artists, seem to have found a promiscuous allure in Flaubert’s novels. Well expressed in the title of Vargas Llosa’s study of Flaubert's authorship La orgía perpetua, The Interminable Orgy, which despite its title is a sensible and captivating depiction of Flaubert’s narrative techniques. This is not to say that Vargas Llosa also is prone to wallow in rather pubertal pornography, for example in his Cinco esquinas, The Neighbourhood, which to me was a great disappointment.

It seems that Kitty Mrosovsky may have suffered from a “hypersexuality disorder”, a condition which previously was referred to as nymphomania. However, the sparse information I have found about her makes such an assumption pure speculation. There is no trace of this in her impressive preface to The Temptation of Saint Anthony, which does not emphasize any sexual undercurrents but instead accentuate Flaubert’s firm grip on his material, his sharp, fluent style, pantheism, abundant imagery and empathetic portrayal of religious beliefs. She also, in an excellent manner, exemplifies what the novel has meant to later writers.

Someone who undoubtedly combined promiscuity, self-imposed exclusion, significant erudition and a certain stylistic certainty was the novel’s Swedish translator, Per Meurling. I was surprised to find that he was the one who had translated Flaubert’s novel, calling it Hjärtats begärelse, The Desire of the Heart. I knew that Meurling was one of Jan Myrdal’s favourite writers. The recently departed Jan Myrdal was the son of two Nobel laureates, Gunnar and Alva Myrdal, and a Nestor for Swedish communism. Like Jan Myrdal, Per Meurling could be an amusing and rather skilful author, though he could also, just like him, appear to be somewhat mad and far too great in his own eyes. In addition, Meurling was an extremely erratic communist and an unbridled pornographer. Apparently belonging to a type of pastor sons whom my father used to call “God’s grandchildren”, suggesting a rebellion against paternal authority which had alienated them from a God with whom they were, after all, quite familiar. Meurling could complain about his sorry fate by pointing out:

I am corrupted, fundamentally corrupted by bad Christianity. Many of us are in our cruel world forced to experience the anguish of Gethsemane and we will all, sooner or later, be forced to carry our heavy cross.

Could such feelings have led him to translate a religiously and visionary supersaturated fresco like La Tentation de Saint Antione? The Meurlings were one of Sweden's oldest priest families. For more than 370 years, they had been pastors in the same small, rural and very pious parish. Of course, the parishioners wondered which of Pastor Erik Meurling’s four sons who would take over the ministry after him. However, three of them became fierce communists, one of them died as a volunteer during the Spanish Civil War, two of them became principals of schools, while the eldest, Per, became a doctor of history of religions (eventually called the “Porn Doctor”), author, translator, first rabid Stalinist and then rabid anti-communist. His epithet came from the fact that Meurling was the author and translator of gross pornography, but he also wrote well receieved books about Shakespeare, Karl Marx, Jesus, Swedish Communism, Jacques Villon, Jesus and Marquise de Sade. Meurling wrote articles for the socialist press, as well as Sweden’s foremost literary magazine, Bonniers Litterära Magasin and the main stream Social Democratic Aftonbladet, but he also contributed to disreptuable so called “men’s magazines”, such as Top Hat and Lektyr.

For the porn publisher Hson, responsible for distasteful, pornographic “magazines” like Piff, Raff and Ecstasy, Meurling wrote quirky “sex novels” with titles like Fanny Hill’s Daughter, Gulliver’s Sex Journeys, Münchausen’s Erotic Adventures, Black Ecstasy and I was a Master of the Art of Love Making. Books immediately translated into Danish and German, the latter being plagiarized and sold by his good friend Johnny Bode, a charming couplet writer, operetta singer, thief, deceiver and Nazi, who had much in common with the Marxist Per Meurling. Like Bode, Meurling constantly left behind deceived women and unpaid restaurant bills. Men of a kind that you would probably “like to have a conversation with across a café table, but whom you should be very careful of cultivating a closer acquaintance with, especially when it came to finances and loans.”