Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination

INVENTING RURITANIA THE IMPERIALISM OF THE IMAGINATION

VESNA GOLDSWORTHY

Yale University Press New Haven and London 1 ‘)<)X

C opyright © 1998 V esna G oldsw orthy

All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press) without written permission from the publishers. Set in Times by Print Line, New Delhi Printed in Great Britain by St Edmundsbury Press Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 98-84046 ISBN 0-300-07312-7 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. 2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 I

To Simon

CONTENTS

Preface Acknowledgements Map o f the Balkans A Note on Spelling

ix xii xiii xiv

Chapter One ‘And what should I do in Illyria?’: English Literature and the Balkans Chapter Two Byron’s Children: Literary Perceptions of the Balkans in the Nineteenth Century Chapter Three The Balkans in Popular Fiction Prisoners o f Zenda: The Imagined States of the Balkans The Balkan Threat: Vampires, Spies, Murder and the Orient Express

1

14

42 43

Dracula and the Balkan Gothic Balkan Settings o f the Spy Novel On the Orient Express Route

73 87 101

Chapter Four War and Diplomacy in the New Ruritania: Comic Visions o f the Balkans

112

Bernard Shaw’s Bulgaria Saki’s Lost Sanjak E. M. Forster’s Passage to ‘The Heart o f Bosnia’ vii

113 117 126

Lawrence Durrell and Mis I’ic iIc it s s o is : B ritish D iplom ats in the B alkans

131

Kvelyn Waugh: An English Officer with the Partisans

146

Chapter Five Spectres o f War: Representations o f the ‘Real’ Balkans Edith Durham and the Balkan Tangle Rebecca West Travels East Olivia M anning’s Balkan Cityscapes ‘Why the Balkans Attract W omen’

160 161 171 184 198

Chapter Six Reclaiming Balkan Erewhons

202

Notes Chronology Bibliography Index

213 231 234 246

PREFACE

A in I Balkan?, 1 ask m yself as, having worked on this book for some years, I return to its beginnings and ponder again the possible implications o f the term. Being referred to as such frequently has negative connotations - it is ii toponym which easily becom es an insult. The B alkan peninsula is undoubtedly part o f the European mainland, yet the adjective ‘Balkan’ can imply the opposite o f European. In the region itself the Balkans are always thought to be elsewhere, to the south-east o f wherever one is, until, on the shores o f the Bosphorus, one catches sight o f Asia across the water. In my mother tongue, which until recently was called Serbo-Croat, I too used the word as an expression o f disdain or impotent rage. Yet one’s ' Kuropeanness’, implicit in any anger against ‘Balkan’ behaviour, reflects only in part an adherence to a shared - if perhaps utopian - vision o f an affluent, tolerant Europe to which one might proudly belong. The desire to attribute ‘Balkanness’ to one’s neighbour is, to a much greater degree, a product o f a Europe in which poverty or ignorance breeds bigotry. This Europe is confined neither to the east nor the south. In an age so sensitive to discrimination o f all kinds, a racism which is born not o f colour but o f nuance, the chauvinist narcissism o f minute differences, frequently remains undetected. The idea o f Europeanness is itself som etim es used to express feelings w hich w ould otherw ise be unacceptable, to offer racism a ‘politically correct’ form. Even the most broad-minded o f Western journalists and authors write about European values with the same swaggering assurance that enabled their forebears to assume so confidently that white, Christian civilisation was superior to the cultures it destroyed. It is hardly surprising therefore that each Balkan nation chooses to see itself as aguardian of European values rather than the barbarian at Europe’s gate./The Balkanisation o f the Balkans continues to take place precisely because ‘Balkan’ always refers to someone other than ourselves. This book looks at how the Balkans are seen by outsiders. It examines the process by which a definable Balkan identity gradually emerged in works o f English literature in the nineteenth century, and established itself over the past hundred years. In this context, a focus on British writing is particularly rewarding. The Balkans might seem too far away to be o f consistent interest to American writers, even if a few well-known novels such as Saul Bellow’s The D ean's December - are set in the peninsula. Britain is, one might say, just distant enough. The Balkans are sufficiently ix

x

Preface

close to remain in the field o f vision, yet remote enough to be relatively free of the ‘traditional friendships’ and ‘historical alliances’ which frequently inspire the specific interests in the area o f other European powers. Even more importantly, images produced in British fiction, transformed and trans­ mitted by the British and American entertainment industries through count­ less film s and television program m es, have been dissem inated to an unprecedented and unrivalled degree. The B alkan worlds o f popular im agination are peopled by British creations. Bram Stoker’s Transylvania and Anthony H ope’s Ruritania are arguably the best-known brand names produced in this imaginative take­ over o f the Balkans, which was as important for the booming publishing industry at the turn o f the century, and later for the film industry, as the diamond and gold fields o f South Africa were for imperial trade. Faced with the economic power o f the Western industries o f the imagination, indigenous Balkan produce had as much chance o f competing as the cotton industry in India when its markets were flooded with British manufactures. British ‘narrative colonisation’ o f the Balkans began early in the nineteenth century with Byron as its Columbus; it continues still. As a ‘colonised’ region, the Balkans offer a mirror image to the more traditional fields of post-colonial inquiry with their focus on textual practices in the framework o f the physical exploitation o f an area by a Western power. The take-over o f the intellectual domain, the exploitation o f the raw resources o f history, can be similarly lucrative and - precisely because it often appears frivolous - more insidious in its consequences. Although the physical colonisation o f large parts o f the Balkans by the Ottoman Empire provides a reverse example o f traditional colonial patterns (a portion o f Europe dominated by an Eastern, alien and non-Christian empire), this ‘textual colonisation’ has provided the industries o f the imagination with easy, unchallenged access to raw material. In contrast, while Ottoman rule surpassed in its longevity almost any instance o f Western colonisation, its direct narrative contribution to the way the Balkans are seen and imagined by outsiders is negligible. Historically, British (and later American) economic interests in the Balkans tended to be comparatively small. British imports from the five B alkan states (A lbania, B ulgaria, Greece, Rom ania and Y ugoslavia) amounted, for example, to only 0.66% o f total UK imports in 1929 and 1.22% in 1938; while exports were 1.45% o f the total in 1929 and 1.51% in 1938. Yet it was in the same period that the most abiding images o f the region were created through the indirect colonisation and exploitation o f Balkan settings by the British and American entertainment industries. This process has much more to do with the needs and the pow er o f these industries than with any real interest in the area. Indeed, the Balkans could continue to supply the raw resources - to act as an exotic backdrop in travelogues and tales o f romance, adventure and political intrigue - for so long precisely because, until the 1990s, direct involvement in the region

Preface

xi

by the English-speaking countries was so slight. While British, and later American, rivalry with Russia meant that the Balkans, as an area o f potential Russian expansionism, could not be ignored, there were few economic concerns and no expatriate communities at stake. Their strategic interests were part o f a wider Great Game and not intrinsic. Throughout the decades leading up to the landings at Salonika in the First World War, the Balkans did not claim the bones o f a single British grenadier. When not a theatre o f war, the area seemed to inhabit the misty edges o f perception. ‘Trieste, Sarajevo, Montenegro, S o fia. . . names which conjure up a part o f Europe still exotic, relatively untravelled, a melting pot o f East and West, o f old and new ,’ proclaimed a dust-jacket o f a British travel book published in 1990.' ‘This was a time-capsule world: a dim stage upon which people raged, spilled blood, experienced visions and ecstasies. Yet their expressions remained fixed and distant, like dusty statuary,’ wrote an American traveller in 1993.2 The comparative absence o f direct economic involvement in the Balkans thus perversely supported the influence o f the imagery which originated in the Anglophone countries, helping to shape the way the Balkans continue to be perceived throughout the rest o f the world. The current, predominantly right-wing perception is o f the Balkans as a contagious disease, an infectious sore in the soft underbelly o f Europe, best left to fester in isolation. The opposing, mainly left-wing - but unconsciously neo-colonial - notion is o f Balkan conflicts as revolting departures from the ideal o f cosm o­ politanism which could and should - to everyone’s benefit - be solved by mature and responsible powers wielding a-big stick and a few small carrots. Both are underpinned by the stereotypes examined in this book. The fact that, in the wars in the former Yugoslavia during the 1990s, all the warring factions employed the services o f British and American public relations companies to ‘represent’ them in the West underlines the importance o f at­ tempting to understand the way in which elements o f Western language about the Balkans came to be created in Britain and America. The relevance o f this examination to the wider field o f cultural studies lies, I believe, in the fact that it draws attention to those marginal and ambiguous areas o f the world which have offered refuges to patterns of neo-colonial behaviour no longer acceptable elsewhere. It is possible for writers who consider themselves to be advanced exponents o f European multicultural ideals to write about Albanians, Croats, Serbs, Bulgarians and Romanians with the sort o f generalised, open condescension which would appal them if applied to Somalis or the peoples o f Zaire. If post­ colonial examination has so far, and not unjustly, focused on the Third World, this study contributes to a re-examination o f the changing identity o f the ‘Second W orld’, which defines both the ‘First’ and the ‘Third’. We are all Greek, Shelley wrote in 1821. I wonder if he really wanted to say that we were all Balkan.

acknow ledgem ents

Among those who provided advice, encouragement, or practical assistance in the preparation o f this book are Michael Baron, Thomas Healy and Peter M udford o f Birkbeck College, Leonee Ormond o f K ing’s College, and Wendy Bracewell o f the School o f Slavonic and East European Studies, all from the University o f London; Valentine Cunningham o f Corpus Christi College, and Mary MacRobert o f Lady Margaret Hall, University o f Oxford; M ihaela Irimia o f the University o f Bucharest; Svetozar Ignjacevic and Djordje Trifunovic o f the University o f Belgrade; and Ioannis Kakridis o f the University o f Bonn. I am also indebted to the British Academy which funded much o f my research. I am deeply grateful for the help and information offered by Milos and Nada Bjelogrlic, Neville Braybrooke, Henry Davis, Nikola Djuretic, Milica and Petar Dodic, M argaret Drabble, Aleksa and Zaga Gavrilovic, Elizabeth Goldsworthy, Roderick Goldsworthy, Zivojin Jovanovic, Caroline Juler, Francis King, Joanna Labon, Sarah Posey, David Simpson, Alan Walker, and Aleksej Zoric. My discussions with Philippa Brewster were particularly inspiring. All the remaining errors and omissions are o f course my own. I must also thank Dejan Corovic who took the photograph reproduced on the jacket flap on a bitterly cold January day. Some o f the ideas contained in this book were initially explored in the articles ‘Tennyson and Montenegro’, published by the Tennyson Research Bulletin, and ‘Rebecca West’s Journey to the Balkans’, published by Women: a Cultural Review, as well as in discussions with colleagues from the BBC World Service, including Sorin Matei from the Romanian Section who inter­ viewed me about Olivia M anning’s work. Papers given at conferences and research seminars at Nottingham Trent University, the University o f Sussex and Thames Valley University provided opportunities for invaluable feedback. 1 am grateful to the Society o f Authors as the representative o f the Pro­ vost and Scholars o f King’s College, Cambridge, for their permission to quote extracts from the two unpublished works by E.M. Forster: ‘What Does it Matter? A Morality’; and ‘The Heart o f Bosnia’. My thanks for support are also due to my agent, Faith Evans; to John Nicoll, Gillian Malpass and everyone else at Yale University Press who helped in the production o f this volume; and to Simon Goldsworthy, whose ideas, knowledge o f the Balkans, enthusiasm for the volumes I explored, and generous help over many years, shaped this work. London 1998 xii

The Balkans in 1896 (William

Miller, The Balkans)

A n o t e o n s p e l l in g

Many Balkan names appear in a number o f variants in English sources. 1 use the forms now generally accepted, e.g. Romania rather than Rumania (as used in Olivia M anning’s novels) or Roumania (as in E. M. Forster’s or S acheverell S itw ell’s travelogues), and Yugoslavia (rather than the Jugoslavia o f Evelyn W augh’s writings, without which his ‘Jugs’ would be meaningless). Minor discrepancies in spelling between the main body o f text and the quoted material are unavoidable in such cases.

Chapter One

‘And what should I do in Illyria? ’1 English Literature and the Balkans

Between 1811 and 1814 Britain possessed a small piece o f Illyria. Bought from the Venetians, the Dalmatian island o f Vis remained in British owner­ ship for three years: long enough to build several fortresses whose ruins still dot the rocky Mediterranean landscape. These ruins, and a few neglected tombs o f Georgian naval officers killed in a nearby engagement, are the only traces o f the British Empire in its briefly held, forgotten Balkan outpost. Apart from the Ionian islands (including Corfu), purchased in 1809 and ceded to Greece in 1863, this tiny island off the eastern shore o f the Adriatic, the coast which British writers continued to describe as Illyrian until well into this century, was to remain the only British colony in the Balkans.* As one o f the great powers Britain has possessed, and occasionally exercised, enormous political leverage in the region over the last two centuries. Its cultural and economic influence, however, was negligible in comparison with the Ottoman and the Habsburg Empires which, between them, divided and ruled the Balkans. All the other European great powers, Russia, France, and - more recently - Germany and Italy, at different stages, occupied and governed parts o f the peninsula. In the field o f literature and its by-products in film and television, how­ ever, Britain’s impact on the way the Balkans are seen and imagined through­ out the world far outweighs the achievements o f its rivals. Accounts o f British experiences o f the Balkan world (from those o f Byron to those of Rebecca West and Lawrence Durrell) and, in particular, British imagin­ ings o f it (from those o f Shakespeare to Anthony H ope’s The Prisoner o f Zcnda, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and John Buchan’s and Graham Greene’s adventure stories) helped shape the imaginary geography o f the peninsula to the extent that images created by British writers represent for many people the best known ‘faces’ o f the Balkans. As shared points o f reference,

*

Although Cyprus might be inhabited in part by a Balkan nation, the Greeks, it lies far from the Balkan peninsula.

2

'And what should I do in Illyria? ’

these images continue to be evoked by politicians, journalists, historians, lobbyists and advertisers. This book seeks to explore the way in which one o f the world’s most powerful nations exploited the resources o f the Balkans to supply its literary and entertainment industries. Such ‘imaginative colonisation’, compared to traditional im perialism or econom ic colonialism , appears to be an innocent process: a cultural great power seizes and exploits the resources o f an area, while imposing new frontiers on its mind-map and creating ideas which, reflected back, have the ability to reshape reality. The level at w hich this reshaping can take place ranges from the com paratively insignificant attempts o f the ‘imaginee’ to create and present a recognisable face to the ‘imaginer’ for economic benefit - as in the transformation o f Castle Bran in Romania into ‘Dracula’s Castle’ in spite of its tenuous historical link with the historic Count Dracula - to the more important impact o f pre­ conceived ideas on the processes o f decision-making which determine the extent o f foreign loans and investment, the level of military and humanitarian aid, and the speed at which individual Balkan countries are allowed to join ‘Europe’, NATO or any other international organisation or club. The imaginative colonisation o f the Balkans by British writers is parti­ cularly interesting in that it takes place in an area whose history offers a mirror image o f the types o f colonisation normally studied in the framework o f literature. While volumes o f Orientalist and subaltern studies explore representations o f areas o f Western domination over the Eastern world, the Balkan peninsula provides a unique instance in modern times o f Eastern colonisation o f an area o f Europe. Instead o f descriptions of an ‘exotic’ Other, we encounter perceptions of Balkan identity in an ambivalent oscillation between ‘Europeanness’ and ‘Oriental difference’. Historically, it also coincides with the emergence o f the first popular newspapers, the develop­ ment o f a vast market for the popular novels demanded by an increasingly literate and affluent nation, the consequent growth o f genre fiction, and the origins and development of the film industry. All o f these imposed strains on the sources o f raw materials available to the entertainment industry as a whole. The process o f literary colonisation, in its stages and its consequences, is not unlike real colonisation. It begins with travel writers, explorers and adventurers undertaking reconnaissance missions into an unknown area. They are gradually followed by novelists, playwrights and poets who, in their quest for new plots and settings, rely just as frequently on research through atlases and timetables as on direct experience. By this stage the capacity o f the new land to feed the ever hungry mother country - and to make nabobs o f those with the wits and ruthlessness to exploit it - is well established. Once ‘mapped’, new territories are further appropriated by the writers of popular fiction, who delineate the final shape o f the imaginary map and secure their stakes as surely as European colonists secured newly

'And what should / do in Illyria? ’

3

surveyed parcels o f land in America, Australia or New Zealand. Their need to visit or know the area they describe is, at this stage, relatively remote, and the ‘authenticity’ they aim to achieve is one which fulfils the desires and fantasies o f the reader. At this point they and their collaborators in the film industry can begin the full com m ercial exploitation o f the appro- priated territory. In the context o f this study, precise details o f Balkan history and geogra­ phy are less important than the imaginary or near-imaginary landscapes of the British concepts o f the Balkans. Any attempt to define the boundaries o f the Balkan peninsula shows that, as a specific geographic entity, the Balkans themselves represent a historical construct, a series o f overlapping imagined spaces in which whole countries are defined as ‘Balkan’ in some accounts, but excluded from others. The German geographer August Zeune is usually credited with the invention o f the name for the peninsula,* which was chosen through the common geographic practice o f naming a region after a prominent mountain range, although Zeune’s choice was somewhat arbitrary. The Balkan Moun­ tains, now lying in Bulgaria and known as Stara Planina (Bulgarian for ‘The Old M ountain’), were referred to in antiquity as Haemus. They were neither the most extensive nor the highest mountain system in the peninsula. Even the name itself appears to be a result o f a misunderstanding: the Turkish noun ‘balkan’, denoting a m ountain chain, was assumed by Western travellers to be the name o f this specific range. The ‘Balkan Mountains’, thus tautologically named, lay on the overland route from the Habsburg Empire to the Levant, which, offering relative safety and ease o f travel, came to represent a popular path across the peninsula.* Part o f an attempt by Zeune to divide Europe into nine discrete geo­ graphical areas, the name Balkan was used sporadically at first, but it be­ came widely accepted during the 1870s and 1880s, when it fulfilled a need for a short-hand reference for the new states crystallising in the territory previously known as Turkey in Europe. The Ottoman withdrawal gradually exposed the unmapped foreshore o f the ‘Near East’. (The terms ‘European Turkey’ or ‘the Near East’ variously replaced even older names by which * *

A pparently first m entioned as ‘B alkan’ in his book Gea. Versuch einer Wissenschaftlischen Erdbeschreibung (Berlin, 1809). The Bosnian scholar Omer Hadziselimovic mentions, for example, accounts o f journeys through Bosnia-Herzegovina written by English travellers who crossed it en route to, or from, Constantinople in 1585,1589, 1620, and 1634, and says that the subsequent popularity o f the alternative route through the Balkan moun­ tains resulted in an absence o f any British travel w riting about BosniaI Icrzegovina for the next two centuries and a half, when the rising o f the Chris­ tian population against Turkish rule gave a fresh reason for travellers to visit. See Omer I lad/.iseliniovic, Na vratim a istoka Engleski putnici o Bosni i IIcrcegovlni <xl 16. do 20 vijeka (Sarajevo: Vesclin MaslcSa, 1989), pp. 11 16.

4

‘A nd what should I do in Illyria? ’

portions o f the area had been known, such as, for example, the Greek, Illyrian or Byzantine Peninsula.) Without an easily definable borderline between the peninsula and ‘main­ land Europe’, disagreements about the exact extent o f the Balkans still persist. The area encompassed by the Balkans seems to expand and con­ tract according to changing political boundaries. The older editions o f the Encyclopcedia Britannica, 1910 for example, define the Balkans as en­ compassing ‘Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia-Slavonia, Dobrudja, Greece, Illyria, Macedonia, Montenegro, Novibazar, Servia and Turkey’,2 a definition which excludes most o f present-day Romania, as well as some South Slav areas ruled by the Habsburgs (the Slovene lands and Vojvodina, for example), which came to be defined as Balkan in more recent editions. The Encyclopedia Americana (1991), trying to wrestle with the duality between the ‘political’ and ‘physical’ extent of the Balkans, states: ‘Although European Turkey, including Istanbul (Constantinople) lies geographically within the confines o f the Balkan peninsula, it is now part o f a non-Balkan state, and generally it is not considered part o f the region. Hungary, despite its close links with the Balkans, is similarly considered a non-B alkan state.’3 This m ention o f H ungary - in order to deny its ‘Balkanness’ - reveals the im plicit assumption that Austria, despite its equally close links with the peninsula, would not even be suspected of being Balkan. The reasons for this lack o f consensus about the exact extent o f the Balkans lie only in part in the absence o f geographic features which could serve as dividing lines between the peninsula and the rest o f Europe. A more insidious reason is that inclusion in the Balkans carries with it a range o f unwelcome symbolic meanings. The Oxford English Dictionary offers the figurative application o f the adjective Balkan as ‘with allusions to the relation (often characterised by threatened hostilities to each other or to the rest o f Europe); so in the derivatives Balcanic, Balkanoid, Balkanism’.4 The exam ples o f usage which follow are more illum inating than the carefully phrased definition. They include sentences like ‘Patches o f glaring ‘Westernism’ . . . merely emphasize Belgrade’s fundamental ‘Balkanism’ ’; and expressions such as ‘his swarthy face with its cunning Balkanic eyes’, or ‘Balkanoid principalities o f homicidal atmosphere’.5 Similar usage is encountered in other European languages, including those spoken in the Balkans themselves. In Romanian, the Academia Romana dictionary informs us, ‘Balcanic’ means ‘Tnapoiat [backward], primitiv, necivilizat’.6 The SerboCroat language distinguishes between ‘Balkanac’, a proper noun denoting a person from the Balkan peninsula, and ‘balkanac’, a common noun denoting ‘a crude, primitive m an’, while ‘balkanizam’ refers to ‘insufficient cultural developm ent’.7 The Balkans have also, rather unusually for a toponym, inspired a verb. So, for example, Balkanisieren in ( ierman, hulkunisar in I icnch, halkanizzare

‘A nd what should I do in Illyria? ’

5

in Italian, or to balkanise in English mean ‘to divide into a number o f smaller and often mutually hostile units as was done in the Balkan peninsula in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries’.8 The concept o f Balkanisation is used metaphorically in a variety o f contexts to symbolise a threatening division. The American Professor Harold Bloom accuses, for example, ‘mem­ bers o f the school o f resentment (Marxists, Feminists, Deconstructionists, etc.)’ o f a ‘Balkanisation o f English studies’.9 A senior British official talks about the Balkanisation o f his country’s civil service: ‘The more you balkanise the service and create more agencies, the greater the risk may be that you will import people who may not behave as they might have be­ haved, with the same degree o f propriety and fairness to those whom they serve.” 0 The Balkans are ‘popularly defined by violence, incivility, even barbarism’, R obert M. H ayden and M ilica B akic-H ayden w rite in their article 'Orientalist Variations on the Theme ‘Balkan’ ’, identifying an Orientalist rhetoric which symbolically opposes ‘Balkanness’ to ‘Europeanness’." They point to the Orientalism at work within Europe itself as ‘a discourse which separates Europe ‘proper’ from those parts o f the continent which were under Ottoman (hence Oriental) occupation’, a distinction which was, they suggest, perpetuated at the moment when the ‘ideological Other’ of Communism replaced ‘the symbolic geography o f Eastern inferiority’.12 These constructions o f an eastern Other within Europe are underpinned by an even older division - the separation o f Christendom into the Eastern Orthodox (or Byzantine) and the Western, Roman Catholic rite s-w h ic h divided the Balkan world long before any Ottoman occupation. ‘Byzantine’ nnd ‘Oriental’ are still regurgitated as metaphorical synonyms. Just before taking up the post o f Secretary General o f NATO, the Belgian politician Willy Claes provided an example o f these symbolic mind-maps o f Europe i when he spoke o f (Western) European moves towards integration, including countries ‘like the Baltic States, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia and, let us hope, Croatia’, while noting that in the countries o f Byzantine influence’ (he named Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria and Serbia), ‘communism can root itself more deeply within an Oriental world view ’, as it ‘approaches more closely (dare we say more naturally) the latent mentality o f these areas.’*

*

I’eter Beaum ont, ‘Favourite for NATO Says Despotism Suits S lavs’, The Observer, 25 September 1994, p. 17. Claes’s remarks also indicate how it is acceptable for a public figure in modern Europe to denigrate white, Christian but ‘inferior’ nations in Eastern Europe. He would probably have spoken more guardedly about the culture o f Belgium’s former colony in the Congo. Ironically for an exponent o f the moral virtues o f the Occident, Claes had to resign from NAI'O over serious allegations o f corruption in Belgian politics.

6

‘A nd what should I do in Illyria? ’

When, from the late nineteenth century, the Balkans replaced ‘Turkey in Europe’ (or the apparently oxymoronic term ‘European Turkey’), the peninsula retained its multiple m arginal position. If it has often been seen as insufficiently different to play the role o f an exoticised Oriental Other, it has nevertheless continued to be seen as too ‘polluted’ by this Otherness to be (properly) ‘European’. The symbolic opposition which privileges ‘Euro­ peanness’ over an Orientalised ‘Balkanness’ produces a degree o f ambiguity about the inclusion o f certain countries in the Balkans. The Greeks, for example, rarely define themselves as Balkan, even though Greece is routinely described as a Balkan country by historians, geographers and politicians. At the same time. Western attitudes towards Greece reveal some anxiety in relation to the same question. As an ‘idealised spiritual and intellectual ancestor o f Europe’, a ‘cradle o f civilisation’, but simultaneously a land ‘polluted by the taint o f Turkish culture', Greece remains in an ‘ambiguous suspension between the exotic and the fam iliar'.13 Western journalists often attempt to ‘unmask’ contemporary G re e c e -th u s assuming the existence o f an idealised perception o f the country in the mind o f the re a d e r-a s ‘primitive’ and ‘undisciplined’, a ‘nepotistic fiefdom’ of corrupt politicians.14 Although it is the only country in the Balkans to belong to the European Union, Greece is nevertheless frequently defined by its difference from Europe, its Balkanness. O ff the record hints that the Western members of the EU regret admitting Greece frequently surface in newspaper articles. In such a symbolic position, the Greeks can be seen as doubly alien, for, as M ichael Herzfeld w rites in his A nthropology Through the L ooking Glass,"the ancestral holiness o f the Greeks and the current pollution o f their Turkishness are mutually analogous in that both are Western discourses that exclude Greece from the European structures o f power.’15 Debates about Hungary and its potential inclusion in the Balkans are in some way similar in origin. Hungary was the eastern part o f the quin­ tessential^ ‘Central European’ Austro-Hungarian Empire, but large parts o f it had been subject to the Ottomans for over a century and a half, from the late 1520s to the 1690s. Austria, on the other hand, is defined as Balkan only metaphorically, in reference to the possibility that its European essence might itself be threatened by Oriental influences. (The Turkish sieges o f Vienna in 1529 and 1683 - with camels grazing in the Vienna W oodsdelineate the symbolic northern boundary of the Balkans.) It is in this context that the Austrian Chancellor, Metternich (1773-1859), famously remarked that ‘Asia begins at the Landstrasse’ - the road out o f Vienna to the east. As ‘a European from the Rhineland’, wrote A. J. P. Taylor in The Habsburg Monarchy, he ‘ fe lt that the Habsburg Empire did not belong to E u ro p e’ ."’ *| f i t is true, as some Germans insist, that the B alkans begin in A ustria, then this tiny B avarian tow n in the foothills o f the A lps marks the boundary between tw o w orlds; the point w here in d ex -lin ked pensions fade ....................... ' /lit' lndeovndunl correspondent begun his recent

‘A nd what should / do in Illyria? ’

7

report from the German town o f Lindau.17 A similar idea that Austrianness is ‘tainted’ by the Balkans lies behind the observation that the origins o f Nazism are Balkan. In his book Balkan Ghosts, the American writer Robert Kaplan sees Hitler’s Austrian background (implicitly his ‘Balkanness’) as somehow responsible for his monstrous philosophy. ‘Among the flophouses o f Vienna,’ Kaplan writes, ‘a breeding ground o f ethnic resentments close to the southern Slavic world, Hitler learned how to hate so infectiously’.18 The choice o f words - ‘breeding ground’, ‘infectiously’ - implicitly de­ fines ‘Balkanness’ as a contagious disease.* Accepting such symbolic distinctions between the Balkans and Europe, Balkan nations themselves frequently assert their own place in Europe in an implicit allegation o f their neighbours’ ‘Balkanness’. For example, in his Letter to a Serbian Friend, the Slovene writer Taras Kermauner explains Slovene ‘Europeanness’ thus: ‘The symbolic fact that the rulers o f the Slovenes were Charlemagne, Charles V, and Napoleon is less important. It is more important that we embodied the way o f life that was created in central-western Europe.’19 ‘Europe’ is similarly a historical construct, rather than a geographical description in the historian John Lukacs’ assertion of the essential ‘Europeanness’ o f Transylvania. This, he claims, distinguishes the area from its neighbours, which, even if they are in some cases geographically further west, remain Oriental (or non-European): Transylvania had its high Middle Ages, cathedrals, Cistercians, a whiff o f the Renaissance, its Baroque, its Enlightenment - the historical ages that made Europe . . . that did not exist in Russia or in Rumania, Moldavia, Oltenia, Wallachia, Bessarabia, Bulgaria, Serbia, Macedonia, Albania, Greece, the Ukraine.20 The idea o f the borderline represents one o f the most persistent symbolic images o f a peninsula which, throughout known history, has been defined by major divisions. The Eastern and the Western Roman Empires and their Christian successor Churches, the Islamic and the Christian worlds, the Communist and capitalist, all met and clashed in the Balkans. While the Balkans themselves could be represented as a multitude o f (sometimes tragically overlapping) peripheries, where the cultural ripples created by the great imperial centres outside the peninsula clash to form interesting patterns even as they subside, individual Balkan identities were shaped over the centuries by the idea o f a frontier existence on which they based their own sense o f importance. Various Balkan nations symbolically define themselves as being at a gate, on a bridge, or at a crossroads between different worlds. ‘They live at the cross-roads o f Europe and are the most *

Kaplan also ensures that Central Europe’s most monstrous creation o f modern times, Hitler, can he unburdened on the Balkans. In contrast, no-one would ihiuk o f blaming the hapless Balkans for the triumphs o f A ustria’s composers.

8

‘A nd what should I do in Illyria? ’

resilient race on this earth,’ Queen Victoria’s granddaughter, Queen Marie of Romania, used to say o f her subjects.21 ‘At first we were confused. The East thought that we were West while the West considered us to be the East,’ St Sava (Nemanjic, 1175-1235), the founder o f the Serbian Orthodox Church, wrote in an epistle, adding: Some o f us misunderstood our place in this clash o f currents, so they cried that we belong to neither side, and others that we belong exclusively to one side or the other. But I tell you, Irinej, we are doomed by fate to be the East in the West, and the West in the East, to acknowledge only heavenly Jerusalem beyond us and here on earth - no-one.22 Rather than defining themselves as peripheral, the Balkan nations derive a sense o f centrality from a position at a crossroads, offering themselves as European buffers against the East or the interpreters o f it. ‘True, Greece is quite unlike the rest o f Europe, but herein lies its strength . . . Greece has an invaluable insight into the psychological aspects o f new nationalisms springing up in the nether regions o f Europe,’ Despina Cristodoulu, using images rich in phallic threat, com m ented in The IndependentP The symbolic eastern frontier shifts 300 or 400 miles further west in the political proclamations made by the Slovenes and Croats as they struggled to achieve recognition as independent states in the early 1990s. ‘Independent (and Westernised) Slovenia (and Croatia) could and would act as a ‘cordon sanitaire’ against the eastern tide o f chaos,’ wrote the Slovene Minister of Science,24 while the Croatian president, Franjo Tudjman, asserted: ‘The borders o f Croatia are the borders o f Western Europe.’25 If the Orthodox Christian peoples o f the Balkans are depicted as ‘Eastern’ in relation to Western Europe, they are traditionally portrayed as ‘European’ in comparison to the Islamic world, and described as the upholders o f the Christian European identity, antemurale Christianitatis, ‘the guardians at the gate’. A range o f works, from R. G. D. Laffan’s recently reissued The Serbs. The Guardians at the Gate (1918) to Rebecca W est’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941), reflect this perception.2'1 The ambiguous position at the portals o f that Christendom which ‘Europe’ metonymically claims to represent contains in itself the possibility o f pollution by the Other. Even when portrayed as ‘European’, the Balkans are frequently seen in terms o f their difference from (‘real’) Europe and defined as belonging to the ‘other Europe’ - routinely described as ‘savage Europe’ as recently as 1906.27 The ambiguities related to the ‘Europeanness’ o f the peninsula define Western attitudes towards it. In The Cauldron o f Europe (1925), Harold Spender noted: ‘The Balkans remain an open question at the back door o f Europe: a question bristling with menace; noisy with bombs; prickly with bayonets. Out o f that cauldron came the Great War: from the same pit may yet come an o th er conflict.’J‘ U sin g a s im ila r im age o f a (w e s t-fa c in g ) European hom e in the 1990s, W estern journalists frequently w rote about

'And what should I do in Illyria? ’

9

the Yugoslav conflict which started in 1991 as a war in ‘our own back­ yard’. While a Yugoslav might lament: ‘Sadly what is happening to us today, this horror, this chaos on our soil, in the heart o f Europe . . . this alas is no dream but a living nightmare,’ the New York Times firmly shuts the imaginary gate against the peninsula, without at the same time eliminating the threat, by proclaiming that ‘the blood o f the Balkans is seeping under the European door.’29 A symbolic map o f Europe, in the context of images o f privilege a n d ' inferiority, reveals a system o f discourses o f ‘Otherness’, a sequence o f ‘nesting Orientalisms’, which balkanise European territory by creating a seemingly endless series o f im aginary O thers within its boundaries. W hile an ‘enlightened, democratic West’ defines itself in terms of contrast to a ‘despotic East’, the ‘industrious’, rational cultures o f the North claim a position of superiority over the ‘undisciplined’, passionate cultures o f southern Europe, establishing a kind o f European hierarchy in which the north-west represents the highest and the south-east the lowest symbolic value.30 In terms o f an imagined map o f Europe defined in this way, ‘Britishness’ and ‘Balkanness’ stand at opposing ends o f the hierarchical diagonal. In view o f this contrast, the self-image o f British authors, as well as British projections o f Balkan identity, is particularly interesting. The differing at­ titude towards an idea o f Europe creates another important set of opposi­ tions: while Balkan nations project a strong desire to be seen as European, the values o f ‘Europeanness’ - observed from Britain - are regarded with suspicion by the powerful anti-European strands within British opinion. A particularly British orientalising rhetoric identifies all lands across the En­ glish Channel as a corrupt and undisciplined Other (with Brussels as the heart o f the new ‘Byzantium’ which threatens to swallow the values o f Britishness). The historical development o f this type o f rhetoric, in which the British identity and, in particular, the ‘Englishness’ which frequently defines it, is seen as different from and often symbolically superior to the European one, is very clearly delineated in British fiction with Balkan set­ tings. A study o f late Victorian and Edwardian literature inspired by the Balkans reveals an implicit opposition between Britain and Europe where Europe itself is seen as a threatening Other, an orientalised space o f which the Balkan peninsula could be said to represent merely the most exotic yet paradoxically ‘typical’ - instance. Except for British reinterpretations o f G reek m yths and classical literature, Balkan settings make their first, rare appearances in British literature to signify all-purpose semi-mythical remoteness, an imaginative ‘end o f the known world’, an area distant but still recognisable in many respects, as in Shakespeare’s use o f Illyria in Twelfth Night. The Balkan settings became more firmly delineated and moved into an imaginative

10

‘A nd what should I do in Illyria? ’

focus when poets such as Byron and Shelley rediscovered the Balkans for Romanticism. From the time when, as Marilyn Butler argues, ‘the favourite location o f English poetry in the second decade o f the nineteenth century becomes the Eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East’,31 British writing about the Balkans exerted considerable influence on the perceptions o f the area not only in Britain but throughout the world. The most indelible images o f the Balkans were disseminated through popular literature, the burgeoning o f which represented a late but powerful addition to the Industrial Revolution in which Britain led the world. The authors o f such novels frequently stressed their lack of any direct experience o f or even interest in the area. The impact o f popular genres was spread in the twentieth century by the film and television industries, with their insati­ able requirements for exotic settings. Such moving pictures, with the baton increasingly being passed to the United States, reproduced and transmitted British-made images o f Balkanness through dozens of Ruritanian romances, vampire stories and Orient Express murder mysteries, familiar even to those who would not be able to find any o f the locations on the map o f Europe. In spite o f its all-pervading influence, this body of popular literature has remained unstudied, with a few notable exceptions. The question of why the Balkans should have attracted so many British writers, given Britain’s relatively slight involvement with the area, stays unanswered. Most o f the existing research on British literature with Balkan themes, largely written by English literature scholars from the Balkans, concentrates on individual countries and privileges works o f documentary value, leaving out much better-known imaginary and semi-imaginary locations which offer hybrid but generally more abiding and influential images o f ‘Balkanness’. Works by British writers with direct experience o f the Balkans are scrutinised more readily than those written by authors who chose the area as a setting without knowing much about it. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s descriptions o f travel across the Balkan peninsula are, understandably, seen as more relevant than, for example, Anthony Hope’s descriptions o f an imaginary Balkan principality in Sophy o f Kravonia, or Bram Stoker’s fictitious Land o f the Blue Mountains in The Lady o f the Shroud, despite the fact that Hope and Stoker have been infinitely more influential in shaping the way the Balkans are seen in the West than have any number of scholarly or well-travelled authors. Focusing on historical value also tends to emphasise earlier travel writing and the otherwise forgotten works which are primarily relevant as docu­ ments in the study o f Balkan history.12 More recent scholarship has tended to concentrate on those British writers who were seen to be championing the cause of a particular Balkan country.33 In contrast, the comparative look at Balkan-inspired works undertaken in this book reveals hitherto undiscusscd but im portant sim ilarities between authors: com parisons between Tennyson’s images of Montenegro and Byron’s ideas of Albania or

‘A nd what should I do in Illyria? ’

G reece, for exam ple, tell us more about the im aginative origins o f Tennyson’s sonnet ‘M ontenegro’ than its study in the context o f the rest of Tennyson’s work, to which it bears relatively little resemblance. A comparative examination o f fictional and semi-fictional Balkan settings in British literature also reveals cultural values and changing perceptions o f B ritishness em anating from a confrontation w ith an area w hich traditionally forces Europe to confront its taboos about religion and nationality. The struggle against Ottoman rule in the Balkans, for example, frequently inspired British writers to pose questions about Britain’s own colonial empire, its rivalry with Russia and its attitudes towards Islam. So frequently the theatre o f collision and war, like a tableau vivant o f European history, the Balkans continued to pose the questions o f national sovereignty and self-determination which have been such fundamental themes in postEnlightenment Europe. While this work initially addresses the way the Balkans were seen and imagined by the poets and writers o f Romanticism, perceptions o f the peninsula emerge fully shaped only after a specific Balkan identity came into being, distinct from the Ottoman Empire. The struggle against Ottoman rule, which drew European attention to the peninsula in the first half o f the nineteenth century, posits the region as an imaginary European sphere. For as long as they were ruled by Islamic rulers, the largely Christian Balkan nations were seen as enslaved Europeans. The moment when the newly independent Balkan states are supposed to be joining Europe is, however, also the moment when they are symbolically differentiated from it and a new - ‘B alkan’ - O ther is created. The late nineteenth - and the early twentieth - century British literature inspired by the Balkans is, in this context, as important as the Romantic discovery o f the peninsula, although it is much less frequently examined. After the Second World War, however, perceptions o f specific ‘Balkanness’ were gradually submerged into a new, wider, symbolic division between Western and Eastern Europe. Although some o f the works included in this study, for example, Evelyn Waugh’s Sword o f Honour trilogy, Olivia Manning’s Balkan Trilogy or Lawrence Durrell’s White Eagles over Serbia, were published well after the World War 11, they describe the Balkans either as they were in the pre-Communist era or at the point when Comm­ unism was being introduced. These works continue to offer images o f ‘Balkanness’ rather than perceptions o f life ‘behind the Iron Curtain’ and show the persistence and continuous attractions o f certain types o f Balkan imagery. At the same time, they are in many ways most affected by the position o f multiple marginality which, like the area itself, defines my field o f study. The Balkan themes in the works o f well-known writers such as Rebecca West, Evelyn Waugh or Graham Greene, are marginalised in the study o f their writings in the West, while remaining, for reasons which, uiilil the collapse o f Communism in 1989, were chiefly ideological, largely

12

'And what should / do in Illyria?'

unknown and untranslated in the Balkans. Olivia Manning’s Balkan Tril­ ogy, perhaps the most memorable description o f Romanian life in Western literature, was not translated into Romanian until 1996.34 A selection o f Lawrence D urrell’s comic descriptions o f diplomatic life in Belgrade became available in Serbo-Croat translation only in 1991,35 Evelyn W augh’s accounts o f war-time Yugoslavia, including his Sword o f Honour trilogy and his report on the Catholic Church in Croatia, were published in Zagreb for the first time in 1993 and 1994.36 Rebecca W est’s masterly account of her experiences in Yugoslavia just before the Second World War, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, described by the historian A. J. P. Taylor as ‘a work o f genius’,37 became available in Yugoslavia only in 1989-fo rty eight years after its original publication - in a much abridged translation published jointly by two publishers in Sarajevo and Belgrade. W est’s translator, Nikola Koljevic, an English scholar from Sarajevo, was soon to became the vice-president o f the Bosnian Serb Republic, a position he lost a few months before his suicide in January 1997. His translation o f W est’s work was linguistically irreproachable, but the reasons for cuts in the original text caused much heated debate amid the gathering storm of Yugoslavia’s final disintegration.38 In 1983 the American historian Barbara Jelavich remarked, in the preface to her History o f the Balkans: Although the Balkan peninsula has played a major role in history, the area has been subject to less intensive study than any other European region. To the outside observer, the Balkans appear to be a puzzle o f confusing complexity. A geographic region inhabited by seven major nationalities [sic!], speaking different languages, it has usually impinged on the Western consciousness only when it has become the scene of wars or acts o f violence.39 This statement could easily apply to British literature about the Balkans, a great proportion of which deals with the theme o f war in one way or another. The Balkan nations’ struggle for independence fired the imagination of English poets in the first major wave o f interest in the early nineteenth century, and literary works inspired by the Balkans continued to be parti­ cularly plentiful during and immediately after major crises and wars. The wars o f the Yugoslav secessions in the 1990s have once again produced a wave o f interest in the area which has thrown up a whole series o f new works - from political studies and eyewitness accounts and more or less hastily produced histories o f newly emerging states, to books o f poetry, novels and plays. For the same reason many o f the volumes analysed in this study have been reissued and have been the subject o f renewed interest. T h e Second W o rld W a r represented a new threat to a separate B alkan identity, although, in a poignant reversal o f the nineteenth-century struggle against the O ttom ans, the danger now cam e from W estern Europe in the

A nd what should I do in Illyria? ’

13

shape of the Axis powers. In the years surrounding the war, British literature produced a num ber o f influential writings which reaffirmed the early Romantic ‘recognition’ of the Balkans as ‘European’. In Sacheverell Sitwell’s Roumanian Journey (1938), for example, the peninsula offers the last refuge in which an idealised, aristocratic European past managed to survive into the late 1930s. Patrick Leigh Fermor’s nostalgic descriptions o f the remote palaces o f Hungarian and Romanian aristocrats in Between the Woods and the Water ( 1986), written long after the event, could similarly be seen as a Balkan Brideshead Revisited in which he plays Charles Ryder to many a Balkan Sebastian Flyte. With the Balkans and Britain in a position which, for the first time, seemed to correspond, Rebecca W est’s journey into the peninsula offered an insight into their shared European traditions. While the German bombs were falling over London, West recognised, as she wrote in Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, the true essence o f ‘Europeanness’ in the Balkans. In the 1990s, after the fall o f the Iron Curtain, (Western) Europe feels threatened, it seems, not so much from within as by the ‘hungry m asses’ at its southern and eastern gates. The ship-loads of fleeing Albanians in the Strait o f Otranto provoked comments about the inability o f Greece and Italy to control the frontiers o f Europe efficiently. ‘If Italy were in Schengen the Albanians who have been landing in Brindisi in recent weeks would have an open road to Munich or Hamburg,’ one German official pointed out.40 The new developments in the Balkans - apparent anarchy in Albania, I the break-up o f Yugoslavia, and the fragmentation o f Bosnia-Herzegovina along national lines, at a time when ‘Europe’ increasingly projects its future in terms o f supranational cohesion - have led to a revival o f those older perceptions o f the Balkans as a potentially virulent, threatening Other. These crop up again and again on the pages o f many o f the works examined in this book. The degree to which the area has presented a blank canvas upon which Europe’s political unconscious plays out its taboos and hidden anxieties has become apparent once again. Its hold on the imagination was manifested in the fear, frequently expressed in the Western media in the early 1990s, that if the war in the Balkans were to continue, a new Balkanisation could undo the foundations o f Europe itself. The ghosts of the First World War, reawakened by artillery fire in Sarajevo, made the Balkans the focus o f attention. The imaginings and constructions explored in this book were, yet again, used to explain political realities. Peace, if it eventually achieves a lasting form, will return the peninsula to the Euro­ pean periphery. In literature, the cycle o f oblivion will cover the theatres o f war and replace them with new Illyrias for those travellers who know not what to do.

Chapter Two

Byron’s Children: Literary Perceptions of the Balkans in the Nineteenth Century

Travelling around the edges o f Europe, with Greece as his ultimate desti­ nation, George Gordon, Lord Byron, discovered the Balkans in 1809. ‘All countries are much the same in my eyes,’ he wrote some months later from a frigate in the Dardanelles to Henry Drury, his former tutor at Harrow, apparently already jaded about a part o f the world which was to shape his life and much o f his subsequent work.* He adopted the carefully constructed pose o f indifference which befitted a poet who was to represent, in his life as much as in his verse, the quintessential Romantic hero: ‘I smoke and stare at mountains, and twirl my mustachios very independently, I miss no com forts.’1 Between 1809 and 1811 Byron visited Portugal, Spain, Malta and the western parts o f the Ottoman Empire - where he stayed from late September 1809 to early spring 1811. His itinerary followed the usual path o f travellers from Britain at the time, a route made necessary by the Napoleonic domination o f the continent.2 It was to provide the background for Childe H arold’s Pilgrimage and came to represent an inventory o f favourite Romantic loci amoeni, among which the Balkans were to play a leading role. If, as Mary Louise Pratt argues in Imperial Eyes, the Romantics were ‘certainly known for stationing themselves round Europe’s peripheries the Hellespont, the Alps, the Pyrenees, Italy, Russia, Egypt’,3few other poets o f the period could have been as important as Byron in shaping the poetic discourse which influenced the prevailing perceptions o f many o f these outposts. His vision o f the Balkan peninsula provided the template which subsequent generations o f writers felt obliged to follow or dispute. Although he claimed to be ‘sick o f [his] own country, and not much prepossessed in favour o f any other’,4 Byron was in reality deeply inspired by his journey through the Ottoman Empire. He spent more than a year in *

Henry Joseph Drury (1778-1841). An assistant master at Harrow School, he was Byron’s tutor until they quarrelled. After Byron left Harrow he became very friendly with Drury and wrote some o f his most facetious letters to him. From: Leslie A. Marchand (ed.), lo r d Byron. Selected Letters and Journals (London: Pimlico, 1993), p. 370. (First published in I ‘>82.)

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the southern Balkans and Asia Minor, discovering a world which continued to feature in much o f his work and to which he was famously to return in 1824. ‘Stick to the East’, Byron advised Thomas Moore in May 1813 - a year after the publication and phenomenal success of the first two cantos o f Childe H arold’s Pilgrimage - ‘the Oracle, Stael, told me it was the only poetical policy. The North, South and West have all been exhausted; but from the East, we have nothing but [Southey’s] unsaleables’.5 The East was, for Byron, more than simply a lucrative quarry - it was also, as he w rote in 1816, ‘the greenest island o f [his] im agination’.6 This island, Byron’s ‘Orient’, lay in the southern Balkans, those parts o f today’s Albania, Greece and European Turkey which provide the settings for the first two cantos o f Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. Setting out to visit the classical sites that Greece which inspired his early poetry in The Hours o f Idleness (1807) - Byron discovered that he was equally attracted to the much less known Balkan Greece, a Greece which the former Greek foreign minister Michalis Papaconstantinou described recently in his Diary o f a Politician, when he wrote about his realisation ‘that our Greece is essentially created o f two Greeces - the one in the Mediterranean, the sea one . . . and the other - the Balkan Greece - with the caravan routes which set out from Kozani, Serres, Kor^e, Moskopole or Ioannina, and reached Belgrade, Bucharest, Zemun, Vienna, Budapest ,’7 The choice o f the Balkans - and Greece in particular - as an ‘Oriental’ locale was very rare before Byron. On the peripheries o f the vast Austrian and Ottom an Empires, the Balkan lands began to emerge in Western consciousness through a process o f gradual ‘discovery’ in the second half o f the eighteenth century, and were almost the last region to attract interest in what is sometimes described as the European ‘knowledge-building process’.8 They featured in an increasing number of works o f history, travel accounts and memoirs - for example, Mary Wortley Montagu’s letters from Constantinople, written between 1716 and 1718 and published in 1763,9 w hich included the first descriptions o f Balkan travel w ritten by an Englishwoman, or the Earl o f Craw ford’s Memoirs, published in 1753, containing accounts of, among other things, his involvement in the battle for Belgrade in 1739, where he was wounded.10 Countless classicists’ works continued to offer ‘Greek’ settings, but the process through which northern Europe gradually appropriated the cultural legacy o f the Mediterranean as its ow n" created a mythical Greece. This was as far removed from the ‘real’ one as the images o f the Holy Land in medieval painting are from the real landscapes o f the Middle East. The ‘real’ Greece, in fact, frequently failed to live up to the attractions o f the imaginary one. Disappointed travellers discovered that the poets had bestowed ‘a willow fringe on [lllisus’l naked banks, amber waves on the muddy banks o f Meander, and hanging woods on the bare step o f Delphi’.12 Unlike the educated northern European who was able to read Homer on his - for it was usually a he -

16

Byron's Children

visit to Greece (‘We proposed to read the Iliad and Odyssey in the countries where Achilles fought, where Ulysses travelled, and where Homer sung,’ Robert Wood wrote o f his journey to Greece in 1767),13 the ‘real’, Romaic­ speaking14 Greeks were now seen as barbarians - according to the original definition o f a barbarian as som eone who does not speak the Greek language. Greek history ‘belonged’ to the educated foreign visitor, while the ignorant hosts, now ‘inhabiting the wreck o f their greatness’,15 were, if not ignored, then - unaware o f their own roots - frozen in a kind o f a ‘timeless ethnographic present’.16 Before Childe H arold’s Pilgrimage, ‘real’ Greece (not to mention ‘real’ Albania and countries further north in the Balkans), rarely provided a source o f inspiration for the literature o f the im agination - poetry, fiction and drama. In contrast to the previous generation o f poets, such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge or Robert Southey, about whose ‘unsaleables’ he talked ‘like a Levantine or East India merchant who has tapped a lucrative source o f raw material’,17 Byron offered not only an ‘Orient’ which was much nearer home, but also a real ‘Orient’, a world he had experienced at first hand. In the decades which preceded Childe Harold, popular, Gothic novelists could still find their exotic locations closer to Britain. Highly coloured representations o f Roman Catholic Europe were still popular in the second half o f the eighteenth century - usually featuring an imagined M editerr­ anean and Latin Other. Italy offered settings for a range o f novels, from Horace W alpole’s The Castle o f Otranto (1764) to Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries ofU dolpho (1794) and The Italian (1797), while Spain provided the background for o th e rs -m o s t notably Matthew Lew is’s The M onk (1796). However, to the writers o f orientalist tales, in search o f that ‘freefloating Orient’ which possessed, in Edward Said’s description, a ‘chame­ leonlike quality’,18 o f the type offered by William Beckford in Vathek{ 1786) or Thomas M oore in Lalla Rookh (1 8 1 7 )- t h e ‘Near East’ could have seemed too near and too familiar. Arabia, Persia or Kashm ir offered landscapes unburdened by familiar classicist topography. Byron’s international fame, which rested as much on his lifestyle - in particular on his legendary support for the cause o f Greek independence and his death at Missolonghi - as on his work, made him by far the most important figure in the Romantic discovery o f the Balkans in English literature. Even today he is probably better known for his famous portrait in Balkan costume, and in Greece as the name o f countless hostelries, than for his increasingly unread verse. Byron’s significance as a Romantic icon a British lord dressed in a Greek costume surrounded by Greek insurgents, as he appears in nineteenth-century paintings by Ludovico Lipparini and countless others —inspired even those who would have been scandalised by his life and opposed to his politics and the ideas he expressed in much o f his verse. For, as Robert Escarpit remarked, ‘on a parlé de Byron beaucoup plus qu'on ne l’a lu .’1'' Long after his death, Byron’s icon was appropriated

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by conservative writers such as Anthony Hope or John Buchan, who created and dispatched Byronic heroes into the Balkans, even though their notions o f Britishness would have been very different from the radical views of Byron as expressed, for example, in his address to Britannia in ‘The Curse of Minerva’: Look to the East, where Ganges’ swarthy race Shall shake your tyrant empire to its base; Lo! there Rebellion rears her ghastly head, And glares the Nemesis o f native dead; Till Indus rolls a deep purpureal flood And claims his long arrear o f northern blood. So may ye perish! Pallas, when she gave You free-born rights, forbade ye to enslave.20 In relation to the Balkans, the use o f Byron as a symbol o f struggle against Ottoman rule has obscured the contradictions and complexities in his poetic representation o f this part o f the world. Byron’s writings, in the popular perception, are frequently reduced to a few famous stanzas which, taken out o f context, can appear jingoistic. His verse continues to be used as a rallying cry. Polish workers on strike in Gdansk in 1980 attached the famous quotation from The Giaour {in an equally famous Polish translation by the Romantic poet Adam Mickiewicz) For Freedom’s battle once begun, Bequeath’d by bleeding Sire to Son, Though baffled oft is ever won. - to the gate o f the Lenin Shipyard, but with the ‘unpleasant word bleeding carefully omitted’.21 Historians o f the Balkans frequently quote the famous ‘hymn to Greece’ from the third canto o f Don Juan (‘The isles o f Greece, the isles o f Greece!’),22 but the stanzas before it, in which Byron casts an ironical look at the role o f the poet - deconstructing the pathos o f his own paean - seem to be, by comparison, all but forgotten: Thus, usually, when he was ask’d to sing, He gave the different nations something national; ’Twas all the same to him - ‘God save the king’, Or ‘C’a if a', according to the fashion all; His muse made increment o f any thing, From the high lyric down to the low rational: If Pindar sang horse-races, what should hinder H im self from being as pliable as Pindar?23 A closer look at Byron’s writing about the Balkans reveals, in effect, some o f the polarities in his Weltanschauung. He claims to be a jaded traveller, bored by the sight o f new places, yet he describes the Balkan lands in vivid detail in both his letters and his poetry. Travelling through

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the peninsula, he is appalled by Turkish tyranny yet fascinated by the Turks and flattered by their hospitality. A man who wrote ‘I have seen mankind in various countries and find them equally despicable, if anything the balance is rather in favour o f the Turks,’24 was, paradoxically, a few days before his death, proclaimed an enemy o f the Ottoman Empire by the Sultan, b ecau se o f his pro-G reek activ ities.25 At the same tim e, his private correspondence records both a deep disdain for the Greeks and an unflagg­ ing belief in the righteousness o f their cause. In one o f his early poems written in Greece, ‘The Maid o f Athens’, which describes his longing for the beautiful Teresa Macri,* the 12-year-old daughter o f the British consul in Athens, the 22-year-old Byron establishes - in Athens and in Istanbul the two metaphoric poles which would influence and colour his poetic vision o f the Balkan peninsula (‘Though 1 fly to Istambol / Athens holds my heart and soul’) . 26 Byron’s first impressions o f the Balkans illustrate the rival literary attractions o f the two worlds which blended in the peninsula. Travelling from Malta, in late September 1809, he reached the Ottoman pashalik o f Albania and the court o f its ruler, Ali Pasha, in Tepelena (a southern Albanian town Byron referred to as ‘Tepaleen’).* ‘With the exception o f M ajor Leake, officially resident at Joannina, no other Englishmen have ever advanced beyond the capital into the interior,’ he asserted in the notes to cantos 1 and II o f Childe Harold's Pilgrimage.21 In Tepelena, where a human arm hanging from a tree greeted him and his travelling companion, John Cam Hobhouse,* as they entered the city (‘all that remained o f a Greek patriot called E vtinnio’),28 Byron discovered an exotic, colourful world, which, he claimed, reminded him o f the Highlands o f Scotland. The parallel between

*

*

Byron mentions Teresa in his letter to Henry Drury, quoted above: ‘I almost forgot to tell you that I am dying o f love for three Greek Girls at Athens, sisters . . . Teresa, Mariana and Katinka, are the names o f these divinities all o f them under 15.’ Teresa Macri (or Makri) - is also referred to as Theodora M akri in C. M. W oodhouse, The Philhellenes (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1969). W oodhouse writes that, after the publication o f Byron’s poem, British travellers to Athens would frequently make a point o f reporting on her looks: the Revd T. S. Hughes noted a ‘surprising deterioration, considering that the Maid o f Athens was only three years older than when she and Byron parted’. The diplomat John Turner reported on her condition in 1812, and H. W. W illiams provided updated information in 1816. Ali Pasha (Byron spells it as Pacha) (1741-1822). The despotic ruler o f the pashalik o f Janina which covered parts o f modern Greece and Albania; known for his cruelty. John Cam Hobhouse (1786-1869), a politician and a close friend o f Lord Byron. His book, A Journey through Albania and Other Provinces o f Turkey in Europe and Asia, to Constantinople, during the Years ItiOV and ItilO (London: J. Cawthorn, 1813) describes the same journey which inspired Childe H arold’s

I’llgrlmagt,

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Scotland and the Balkans, frequently reiterated in the subsequent writings analysed in this study, reflects an ambiguous perception o f Balkan identity which, like Walter Scott’s construction o f Scotland’s, is simultaneously familiar and distant. As the following excerpt from Byron’s correspondence demonstrates, the exoticism o f the Balkan chorus scenes, reflected in its mixture o f unfamiliar nationalities and strange costumes, blends with the sense of recognition and o f déjà vu: 1 shall never forget the singular scene on entering Tepaleen at five in the afternoon as the Sun was going down, it brought to my recollection (with some change o f dress however) Scott’s description o f Branksome castle in his lay, & the feudal system. - The Albanians in their dresses (the most magnificent in the world, consisting o f a long white kilt, gold worked cloak, crimson velvet gold laced jacket & waistcoat, silver mounted pistols & daggers, ) the Tartars with their high caps, the Turks in their vast pelisses & turbans, the soldiers & black slaves with the horses, the former stretched in groupes in an immense open gallery in front o f the palace, the latter placed in a kind o f a cloister below it, two hundred steeds ready caparisoned to move in a moment, couriers entering or passing out with dispatches, the kettle drums beating, boys calling the hour from the minaret o f the mosque, altogether, with the singular appearance o f the building itself, formed a new & delightful spectacle to a stranger.29 The scene, described here in a letter to Byron’s mother, is also conveyed in a series o f vivid images in Childe H arold’s Pilgrimage, in which Harold encounters the ‘wild A lbanian’, next to the ‘crim son-scarfed men o f M acedon’, the Delhi with his ‘crooked glaive’, the ‘lively, supple Greek’, ‘swarthy N ubia’s mutilated son’ and the ‘bearded Turk’ in an exotic, vivid lableau, framed by the ‘glittering minarets’ o f Tepaleen.30 Byron described the Albanian lands in a series o f Romantic images which, in a way much emulated in later writings with Balkan settings, draw parallels between the wild, mountainous landscape and the people who populate it (‘Land o f Albania! let me bend mine eyes / On thee, thou rugged nurse o f savage m en!’ ).31 Mountainous Albania is described as a dangerous, enigmatic but beautiful land (‘a shore unknown which all admire, but many dread to view ’) - in which Harold finds himself, for the first time, in a truly unknown territory as he bids ‘to Christian tongues a long adieu’.32 Describing Albania, I lyron him self entered new poetic territory. Writing about a land hitherto iindescribed in English verse, he created images which still influence the I liitish perception o f Albania as the last truly unknown fastness in the Balkans: ... and, as the clouds along them break, Disclose the dwelling o f the mountaineer: Here roams the wolf, the eagle whets his beak, B irds, beasts o f prey, and w ild e r men appear, A n d gathering storms around convulse the closing year.33

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Byron occasionally resorts to classical imagery in order to bring the Albanian lands closer to his British audience. Albania is addressed, for example, as the land ‘where Iskander [Alexander o f Macedon] rose’. The poet adds a cautious note which points to Gibbon as his source: in a mild foretaste o f future Balkan historiographic disputes, Byron wonders whether the Albanian hero Iskander (Skenderbeg, a leader o f the rebellion against T urkish rule in 1443) could really be considered ‘a countrym an o f A lexander’.34 However, Childe Harold’s journey south, through Greekinhabited lands, evolves from ajourney o f discovery into one o f melancholy classicist recognition, which offers a Virgilian sic transit in a sequence o f oxymorons: ‘Fair Greece! sad relic o f departed worth! / Immortal, though no more! though fallen, great!’35 Attracted by the beauty and the mystique o f the Oriental, Ottoman-ruled Balkan world, with its mixture o f little-known peoples and tribes, Byron is nevertheless haunted by the Hellenic culture on whose ruins it was built. What makes even the most elaborately ornate Orientalist verse in his ‘Turkish tales’ differ from the Orientalist poetry written by Moore or Coleridge is the constant, elegiac presence o f the classical world in his lavish, exoticised settings. White columns glow in the moonlight over the minarets, and cypresses stand sadly by ‘the gleaming turret o f the gay kiosk’.36 In atypical Byronic description, Greece hovers, almost vampiric, in an oxymoronic state between life and death: ’Tis Greece - but living Greece no more! So coldly sweet, so deadly fair, We start, for soul is wanting there. Hers is the loveliness in death, That parts not quite with parting breath; But beauty with that fearful bloom, That hue which haunts it to the tomb.37 The ancient glory o f Athens represents for Byron the foundation o f Europe­ anness now tragically exposed and vulnerable, engulfed by an Islamic world, a ‘defenceless urn’,38 eternally ‘glimmering through the dream o f things that w ere’.39 The Giaour provides a good example o f the way in which Byron is both seduced by and uneasy with his Oriental subject. It opens with an elaborate description o f an orientalised Athens, fragrant with blossom and incense, pulsating with gentle music and nightingale song an Eastern Arcadia (‘These Edens o f the Eastern w ave’). The poem then turns into a lament for the lost glory o f Greece and, finally and rather abruptly, into a rallying call for a revolution: These scenes, their story not unknown. Arise and make again your own; Snatch from the ashes o f your sires

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The embers o f their former fires; And he who in the strife expires Will add to theirs a name o f fear, That Tyranny shall quake to hear.40 Elsewhere, as in The Bride ofAbydos, for example, the exoticism o f this orientalised Greece (the land o f‘cypress and myrtle’, ‘cedar and vine’, ‘where the citron and olive are fairest o f fruit, / and the voice o f the nightingale never is m ute’, and ‘where the virgins are soft as the roses they twine’) is almost too self-consciously elaborate - a parody o f itself, o f a kind w hich subsequently might have prompted Byron’s own mockery in Don Juan: As they were plodding on their winding way Through orange bowers, and jasm ine, and so forth: (O f which 1 might have a good deal to say, There being no such profusion in the North O f oriental plants, ‘et cetera,’ But that o f late your scribblers think it worth Their while to rear whole hotbeds in their works Because one poet travell’d ’mongst the Turks.)41 The experience o f travel ‘ ’mongst the Turks’, led Byron to be, in a sense, as ‘objective’ in his descriptions o f them ( i see not much difference between ourselves & the Turks, save that we have foreskins and they none, that they have long dresses and we short, and that we talk much and they little’),42 as he was in his writing about the Greeks: ‘I like the Greeks, who are plausible rascals, with all the Turkish vices w ithout their c o u ra g e .However some are brave, and all are beautiful, very much resembling the busts o f Alcibiades, the women not quite so handsome.’43 Meanwhile, some o f his philhellene contem poraries, like Shelley, who never visited the Ottoman Empire, tended to represent the Greek struggle for independence in terms o f a grand Manichean struggle between good and evil. In Hellas (1821), dedicated to Prince Alexander Mavrocordato, the first Greek Prime Minister, who had been taught English by Mary Shelley in Pisa in exchange for Greek lessons, Shelley depicts the Ottoman court like a council-chamber o f evil spirits. D aood The Janizars Clamour for pay. M ahmud Go! Bid them pay themselves With Christian blood! Are there no Grecian virgins Whose shrieks and spasms and tears they may enjoy? No infidel children to impale on spears?44

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Standing against this evil army drunk with ‘the lust o f blood’, Greece is depicted as an abstract, eternal principle o f goodness. Temples and citadels might decay, writes Shelley, But Greece and her foundations are Built below the tide o f war, Based on the crystalline sea O f thought and its eternity.45 In his ‘legitimising’ details - the attempts to give his poetic drama local and historical c o lo u r-S h e lle y ’s grasp o f Balkan history and geography reveals itself as understandably uncertain. (Hellas is, the poet claims in the preface, ‘a mere improvise’ inspired by ‘intense sympathy’ with the Greek cause.)46 Shelley’s messenger who, for example, observes the ‘battle o f Bucharest’ - the Ottoman advance against the revolt in the Romanian principality o f Wallachia in 1821 - from a fort on the Danube (some thirty miles away!), witnesses the ‘light Wallachians, the Arnaut, Servian and Albanian allies’ fleeing before the Ottoman artillery. The Serbs (or Servians), the Albanians and the Arnauts (another name for the Albanians), whose unlikely participation in this particular battle is not normally recorded in historical accounts, are mentioned, one feels, simply to add a touch o f exotic appeal to Hellas. References to ‘obscure’, far-flung corners o f the Ottoman Empire occasionally serve a similar function in Byron’s ‘Turkish’ tales, such as when he mentions that Abdallah, in The Bride o f Abydos, is ‘remembered yet in Bosniac song’ - this being the only reference to Bosnia in his poetry.47 These references illustrate, nevertheless, a growing - if still relatively vague - awareness o f the multitude of different nationalities living under Ottoman rule in the Balkans. The first decades o f the nineteenth century were dom inated by national revolts which - starting with the Serbian uprising in 1804 - gradually carved out a series o f new nation-states in the region - a process which, historians have traditionally assumed (until the creation o f the new Balkan states since 1991), ended with the independence o f Albania in 1912. ‘If nation states are widely conceded to be ‘new’ and ‘historical’, the nations to which they give political expression always loom out o f an immemorial past,’ writes Benedict Anderson in Imagined Communities, in an attempt to explain the importance o f the perception o f cultural roots as ancient and deep.4“ In their quest for the ‘immemorial’ distinctiveness and uniqueness which forges the sense o f national unity and justifies the formation o f a nation-state, national movements turn to folklore, rural beliefs and customs, and to tribal mythopoeia. The age of nation-building in Europe was, Anderson points out, the ‘golden age o f lexicographers, grammarians, philologists and litterateurs’,4" all o f whom contributed to the process o f building specific

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national boundaries. At the same time, the ‘European imperialist preference for ‘genuine’ Malays, Gurkhas, and Hausas over ‘half-breeds’, ‘semi­ educated n ativ es’, ‘w o g s’ and the lik e ’ - a s discussed in Im agined Communities - has its equivalent in the nineteenth-century Europe-wide interest in the rural and tribal, rather than urban, areas o f the Balkans. The Greek, Serbian or Albanian villagers remained pure and unpolluted while the cities were ‘debased’ by what Byron described as the Ottoman ‘shackles o f four cen tu ries’.50 The genuine article, the m ountain peoples o f the Balkans, ‘the martial races’, akin to their fellow highlanders in Scotland or British India, seemed more attractive as a poetic subject than the more prosperous inhabitants o f the lowlands who ineptly aped the West. A growth o f interest in Balkan folklore throughout Europe could be said to begin with Abbé Alberto Fortis’s Viaggio in Dalmazia (1774), translated into English in 1778,51 which recorded the ‘arts, manners and customs o f the inhabitants’, and included - with an Italian translationthe text o f a popular South Slav ballad ‘H asanaginica’ ( ‘H asan-Aga’s W ife’). This ballad soon acquired a pan-European fame: it was translated by Goethe into German in 1777, and by Prosper Mérimée and Gérard de Nerval (among some sixteen other translators) into French.52 A manuscript o f W alter S cott’s translation o f the poem into English, entitled ‘The Lamentation o f the Faithful Wife o f Asan A ga’, and dating most probably from between 1794 and 1799, was discovered in Edinburgh in 1924.” Like Fortis, in the course o f his travels in the Balkans Byron attempted translations o f folk poetry from Romaic (‘I enter thy garden o f roses . . . ’) and Turkish (‘The chain I gave’). In the spirit o f a true nineteenth-century folklorist, ‘as a specimen o f the Albanian or Amaout dialect’,54 Byron recorded two popular choral songs, with English translations, in the notes to Childe H arold’s Pilgrimage. He also included lines from ‘different Albinese songs’ in the main body o f the text (‘as far as I was able to make them out by the exposition o f the Albinese in Romaic and Italian’).55 Indigenous Balkan scholars were soon to join foreign travellers in the effort to record popular poetry. When the first collections o f Serbian folk poetry recorded by the Serbian philologist Vuk Stefanovic-Karadzic (17871864) began to appear from 1814 onwards, they instantly inspired great interest in Europe. In Germany Jakob Grimm ( 1785-1863) wrote that Serbian poetry incorporates the aesthetic values o f East and West alike, and compared it in importance to Homer’s. Karadzic’s collections were translated into major European languages. In Britain, selections from Serbian ‘mins­ trelsy’, as it was frequently described, in another parallel with Scotland and The M instrelsy o f the Scottish Border compiled by Scott, appeared in a number o f different translations, including, in 1827, those o f John Bowring ( 1792-1872), who was a prodigious linguist and the secretary o f the London ( ireek Committee (of which Byron him self was a member) - the forerunner o f the Balkan committees which were to proliferate over the next hundred

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years.56 Serbian poetry inspired a new fashion in exotic poetry in Europe, as free translations, pastiches, and poetic attempts to give verse the ‘ethnic look’ appeared in most major European literatures. Prosper Merimee’s La Guzla, a ‘pasticcio o f popular Serbian poetry’ published in 1827, which inspired some sixteen poems by Alexander Pushkin in Russia, was widely reviewed and provided a basis for some imitations in Britain.57 A number o f these ‘pasticcios’ described the leader o f the first Serbian revolt in 1804, George Petrovich (Djordje Petrovic) - known as Karageorge, or Black George, who was fast becoming a legend in Europe. Among others, Pushkin wrote his ‘Song o f Black George’ (‘Pesnya o Georgii Chernom ’) in 1835. Balzac’s hero Georges Marest from the novel Un Debut d a m la vie, com pleted in 1842, talks about the life o f his grandfather CzerniGeorges who went to war with the Porte.58 (In reality, Karageorge was the founder o f the dynasty which was to rule Serbia - intermittently - and then Yugoslavia, until 1941.) In an earlier British attempt, the Reverend George Croly (1780-1860), the poet and novelist, describes in his ballad ‘Czerni G eorge’, w ritten in the m anner o f Serbian epic poetry, the death o f Karageorge. In the prose introduction to his poem, Croly depicts George as an exotic, Oriental hero: His appearance was striking and singular. He was boldly formed, and above the general stature. But the extraordinary length o f his physio­ gnomy, his sunken eyes, and his bald forehead, bound with a single black tress o f hair, gave him a look rather Asiatic than European. It was his custom to sit in silence for hours together; he could neither read nor write, but he was a great warrior, and, for the time, a deliverer o f his country.5,) In ('ro ly ’s ballad, George (‘No Moslem he; his brow is bare / Save one wild tress o f raven hair, / Like a black serpent deeply bound, / Where once sat Servia’s golden round’) is caught and led to execution by the Turks in an imaginary palace square in Belgrade. On the scaffold, C roly’s hero re­ calls the day when he ‘stood in a sovereign Belgrade’. His lips are still smiling as the axe falls and the pikeman carries his bloody head away, (('ro ly ’s version o f Karageorge’s death is apocryphal. Karageorge was, in fact, killed in July 1817 at the command o f the Serbian ruler, Prince Milos ( )brenovic, who was still nominally subservient to the Porte, and was seek­ ing to placate the Sultan. MiloS Obrenovic’s descendants were to form the rival Serbian dynasty until they were assassinated in 1903.) In a manner not dissimilar to Shelley’s Hellas, Croly’s ‘Czerni G eorge’ depicts the struggle o f the Christian Serbs against their Muslim rulers through a sequence o f m ythical, heroic images which seek to com ­ pensate for the lack of specific detail with a great deal o f blood and heavy symbolism:

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Then, like the iron in the forge, Blazed thy dark visage, Czerni George! He knew that trumpet’s Turkish wail, His guide through many a forest vale, When, scattering like the hunted deer, The Moslem felt his early spear; He heard it when the Servian targe Broke out o f Delhi’s desperate charge, And o ’er the flight his scimitar Was like the flashing o f a star; That day, his courser to the knee Was bathed in blood and Servia free!60 The support for the small Balkan nations rebelling against Ottoman rule which inspired writers like Byron and Shelley was far from unanimous. T ravelling in Byron’s footsteps, off the coast o f Albania, the young Benjamin Disraeli considered ‘joining the Turkish army as volunteer in the Albanian w ar’.61 Only nine years after Byron’s visit to Janina, young Disraeli saw the city in ruins. ‘Once one o f the most prosperous and brilliant o f cities in the Turkish dom inions’ now lay destroyed by the Albanians, after ‘the massacre o f their chiefs by the grand vizier’.62 ‘Redschid had suppressed the Albanian rebellion with a duplicity remarkable even for a Turk,’ Jane Ridley writes, describing Disraeli’s meeting with the vizier in The Young D israeli: ‘Yet Disraeli was not repelled; on the contrary, when he wrote to Benjamin Austen o f ‘the delight o f being made much o f by a man who was daily decapitating half the province’, he meant what he said.’63 In his novel Contarini Fleming (1832), which, like Byron’s Childe Harold, contains many episodes from Disraeli’s own letters,64 Contarini fights with the Turks against the Albanian revolt: Had it been in the power o f the Porte to reinforce at this moment its able and faithful servant [Redschid Pasha, the Ottoman vizier], it is probable that the authority o f the Sultan would have been permanently con­ solidated in these countries. As it is, the fin est regions o f Europe are still the prey o f civil war, in too many instances excited by foreign powers for their miserable purposes.65 The gradual decline o f Ottoman power in the eighteenth century had, in fact, encouraged the remaining European great powers to develop opposing interests in ‘the finest regions o f Europe’. The Russian Empress Catherine the Great is alleged to have had ‘wider plans embracing nothing less than the destruction o f the Ottoman Empire and the partition o f its European territories between Russia and Austria’.66 Her ‘Greek Project’ involved the restoration o f a Byzantine Empire, with its capital in Constantinople,

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under Russian protection. Britain, to whom the idea that the Russians might threaten the waterways o f the eastern Mediterranean by controlling the sea route from the Black Sea was clearly unacceptable, wanted to keep the ‘Sick Man on the Bosphorus’ on a life-support system for as long as possible. In 1823 Byron wrote: ‘Greece now faces three c o u rs e s -to win her liberty, to become a Colony o f the sovereigns o f Europe, or to become a Turkish province.’67 Both he and Shelley were deeply suspicious o f great power involvement in the cause o f Greek independence. Shelley’s Hellas expressed a mistrust o f all imperial designs (‘Austria, Russia, England, / And that tame serpent, that poor shadow, France, / Cry peace, and that means death when monarchs speak’). When Shelley, in his preface to Hellas, exclaimed, famously, that ‘We are all Greeks’, he was not speaking only o f the cultural heritage all Europeans share, but also of the oppression under which they all laboured. ‘The English permit their own oppressors to act according to their natural sympathy with the Turkish tyrant,’ Shelley wrote, adding, in a paragraph which was suppressed by his publisher and not published until 1892: Should the English people ever become free, they will reflect upon the part which those who presume to represent their will have played in the great drama o f the revival of liberty, with feelings which it would become them to anticipate. This is the age o f the war o f the oppressed against the oppressors . . . 68 His epic poem entitled The Revolt o f Islam, published in 1818 - in which the French Revolution is transposed to a mythical Constantinople - the Golden City on the edge o f Asia ‘bounded by misty mountains, wide and vast’6'' shows the way in which, for Shelley, Ottoman oppression in the Balkans represented only one aspect o f universal tyranny. Both poets, however, were particularly suspicious o f Russian designs, and expressed their fears about these designs with a considerable degree o f Russophobia. For Byron, Orthodox Christian Russians were no different to Muslims. ‘The half barbaric M oscow’s minarets / Gleam in the sun, but ’tis a sun that sets’, he writes in ‘The Age o f Bronze’. Later on in the same poem he explains that Greece is better off under the Turks than it would be under the Russians: But this is well: Greeks only should free Greece, Not the barbarian, with his mask o f peace . . . Better still serve the haughty Mussulman, Than sw ell the Cossaque’ s p ro w lin g caravan; B etter still toil for masters, than aw ait. T h e slave o f slaves, before a Russian gate.7“

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In Hellas, Shelley similarly describes Russia’s cunning designs over Greece. In the seraglio in Constantinople, Hassan advises Mahmud: Fear not the Russian: The tiger leagues not with the stag at bay Against the hunter. - Cunning, base, and cruel, He crouches, watching till the spoil be won, And must be paid for his reserve in blood. After the war is fought, yield the sleek Russian That which thou canst not keep, his deserved portion O f blood...71 As a reflection o f the great powers’ rivalry in Balkan independence movements, during the 1830s Greek public life was still dominated by the three political factions o f the revolutionary p e rio d -th e British, French and Russian parties. The British Ambassador to Athens, Sir Edmund Lyons, wrote in 1841: ‘A Greece truly independent is an absurdity, Greece is Russian or she is English; and since she must not be Russian, it is necessary that she is English.’72 Although Britain had few direct interests within the Balkans, the region was perceived as important to the wider struggle between the great powers. In particular, rivalry between Russia and Britain represented one o f the most important factors in the chain o f political crises which marked the Eastern Question and which dominated much o f the diplomatic life o f the nineteenth century. ‘At least from the 1830s onwards the powers chiefly concerned in the N ear Eastern Affairs were Britain and Russia,’ argues M. S. Anderson in his study o f the Eastern Question: ‘To them alone the Near East seemed o f first-class importance throughout most o f the nineteenth century. They alone were consistently active there during the last hundred years o f the Eastern Question.’73 ‘British fears o f Russia in the Near East were always exaggerated, even unreal,’ Anderson argues. Russia made a major contribution to the inde­ pendence o f every major Balkan state except Albania, yet ‘for all this she received a most inadequate reward in terms o f political support’ - once independent, Anderson points out, the new Balkan governments tended to follow their own interests.74 The Eastern Question is usually considered to have been first posed by the Russo-Turkish Treaty signed in the Bulgarian village o f Kutchuk-Kainardji in July 1774. Among other things, this treaty granted Russia an ill-defined power to make representations to the Porte on behalf o f the Orthodox Church, as well as ‘those who serve it’. From the perspective o f Britain, Russia’s major rival in the east, the difference between a desire to protect Russia’s fellow Orthodox Christians and expansionism would have appeared negligible. R ussia’s claim to exercise the right o f protection over the

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Orthodox subjects o f the Sultan tended to be seen, rightly or wrongly, as opposed to Britain’s own interests in the eastern Mediterranean. Russian involvement in the Orthodox-populated Danubian principalities (presentday Romania) represented one o f the major causes o f the Crimean War of 1854-6, in which the allied forces o f Britain, France, Piedmont-Sardinia and the Ottoman Empire attacked Russia. Their success led to a recognition o f the Ottoman Empire as a member o f the European Concert. Its collapse and potential partition had, for the moment, been postponed. The two decades after the Crimean War represented a period o f compara­ tive quiet in the Balkans, in the face o f the continuing erosion of Ottoman power. During this time, the Sublime Porte received continuous financial support from Britain to undertake reforms, although few were ever seriously attempted. The differing ambitions and illusions o f the great powers on the ground were summed up in a satirical piece published by Punch at the height o f the new crisis which broke out in the Near East in the 1870s. This piece, entitled ‘The Eastern Question of the Future’, states that, in the Russian view, by 1880 the Russian ruler will be crowned ‘Czar o f all the Russias, Greece and both the Turkeys’. The British believe that ‘the Balkan peoples will enjoy cheap omnibuses and penny ice-creams, and the Sultan will establish a Turkish House o f Lords and a Constantinople underground railway* . . . As for the Turks themselves, the future holds loans, loans, and more loans, to let them make war on everybody’.75 The reopening o f the Eastern Question in the 1870s was provoked by fresh revolts in the Balkans and a wave o f Turkish atrocities. The uprising among the Serbian population o f Herzegovina, which started in the summer o f 1875 and spread into Bosnia, received support from the ruler o f neigh­ bouring Montenegro, Prince Nicholas, who declared war against Turkey in July 1876, bringing both a new engagement with the Ottoman Empire and potential Russian involvement (the ties between Montenegro and Russia were exceptionally strong) close to Austria-Hungary’s southern frontier. At the same time, a large Bulgarian uprising in April 1876 led to the particularly bloody massacre o f between 30,000 and (according to Bulgarian sources) 100,000 civilians. This was m ainly perpetrated by Turkish irregulars, the so-called bashi-bazouks, whose name entered European languages as synonymous with pillage and brutality. While stories o f rape and torture shocked Europe, Britain was officially seeking to play down the scale o f Turkish atrocities. In his famous poem ‘Kroket v Vinzore’ (‘Croquet at W indsor’), which was translated from a French version by the novelist Henry James for The Nation in October 1876, the Russian writer Ivan Turgenev depicted Queen Victoria playing croquet with Bulgarian heads instead o f balls.76 In a letter to W. D. Howells, James commented: ‘Yes, I *

In 1875 Constantinople had gained and still has an underground railway (then English owned), serving the former European commercial district ofPera.

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couldn’t help translating those . . . verses o f Turgenieff, though I don’t share the Russian eagerness for war.’77 Benjamin Disraeli and William Gladstone represented the two poles o f the public debate about possible British reactions to this new chapter o f the Eastern Question. ‘Disraeli tended to regard Turks and Christians as pawns in an exciting struggle which was being waged between Great Britain and Russia for a dominant position in the M editerranean,’ a biographer o f Gladstone has commented.78 Disraeli, who saw earlier uprisings o f Greeks and Albanians against the Turks as ‘a provincial, rather miserable throwback to barbarism ’, tended to dism iss the Bulgarian atrocities as grossly exaggerated and to react ‘with particular distaste against the committees and meetings which took the opposite line in London and all over the country’.7<' (Gladstone had served as commissioner extraordinaire in the Ionian islands in 1858-9 and had been instrumental in their transfer to Greece.) The Punch cartoon published on the 5 August 1876 shows the Turks butchering Bulgarian women and children. Britannia appeals to Disraeli to take action, but he will not do so as he cannot find any mention o f atrocities in the official reports.80 At the same time, as Gladstone’s biog­ rapher records, Gladstone, deriving his chief support from intellectuals, Nonconformists, and hosts o f upright, God-fearing men and women many o f whom had only recently been enfranchised, took his stand squarely on the moral issue. In that age his resolute insistence on that issue made his ultimate return to power inevitable. His greatest service, however, was his appre­ ciation o f the truth that the choice confronting Great Britain did not lie between support o f Russia and support o f Turkey. It lay between a continuance o f Turkish misrule, and the adoption o f the principle of national self-government in the Balkans. Gladstone constantly pointed out that the Balkan Christians were not seeking alliance with Russia, but delivery from oppression. He argued that, if Disraeli had his way, all the Christian peoples o f the Near East would be driven into the arms o f Russia.81 On 6 September 1876 Gladstone published his famous pamphlet, Bulgarian Horrors and the Question o f the E ast}1 It ‘spread like a fire’, John Morley wrote in The Life o f William Ewart Gladstone in 1906: ‘within three or four days o f its first appearance forty thousand copies had gone.’83 By the end o f September 200,000 had been sold. The pamphlet was also instantly translated into Russian and published, in a huge print run, in St Petersburg.84 On 9 September, Gladstone spoke to his constituents at a great open-air meeting at Blackheath, in pouring rain. He called upon the Russians to drive the Turks out o f Bulgaria:

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I, for one, for the purposes o f justice, am ready as an individual to give the right hand o f friendship to Russia when her objects are just and righteous, and to say, in the name o f God, ‘Go on and prosper!’85 Demonstrations in support o f the Bulgarian cause were held throughout Britain, while public opinion continued to be bitterly divided. Richard William Church (1815-90), Dean o f St Paul’s, noted in December 1876 that ‘everybody was very strange with everybody about Turks and Russians: I think 1 never remember such an awkward time for meeting people (until you know you are on the same side) except at the height o f the Tractarian row.’86 The divisions were threatening to ‘balkanise’ British political parties: Lord Salisbury, Lord Derby, and Lord Carnarvon all sympathized more than Disraeli did with the aspirations o f the Christian peoples in the Balkans . . . On the Liberal side, Lord Granville and Lord Hartington both considered that Gladstone was being much too unguarded in his encouragement o f Russia . . . Lord Hartington told Lord Granville (18 December, 1876) that if Gladstone went much further, ‘nothing can p re ­ vent a break-up o f the Party ’.87 Dozens o f pamphlets published between 1875 and 1877 testify to the exceptionally far-reaching character o f this debate, which, perhaps with only the precedent o f the news o f the Greek uprising in the 1820s, first brought the intricacies o f the Balkan situation into the drawing-rooms and parlours o f Britain. The crisis nurtured an exceptional generation of journal­ ists and foreign correspondents who together pioneered the techniques of popular newspaper coverage o f a foreign policy issue. W. T. Stead, who, as the editor o f the Northern Echo, came to prominence as one o f the leading supporters o f Gladstone's Bulgarian campaign, was later to inaugurate the ‘new jou rn alism ’ as the editor o f the Pall M all G azette* The future archaeologist and discoverer o f the Palace o f Minos at Knossos, Arthur Evans, wrote for The M anchester Guardian and published several books on Bosnia-Herzegovina during the insurrection.88 W. J. Stillman o f The Times wrote an important eye-witness account o f the same insurrection,89 while the ‘boys’ Dumas’ - the novelist G. A. Henty - reported from the Balkans for the Standard. It was through this debate that the wider British public was able to acquire ideas o f the Balkans which were to feed the popular literature produced by future generations o f writers. The idea o f a vast, but rather amorphous, sea o f Christians ruled by the Turks (Serbs, *

Stead initiated many o f the unconventional methods o f news-gathering which bccame much more common in the twentieth century. On one occasion he spent three months in prison for his unorthodox attempts to expose the existence o f white slavery in Britain. He lost his life on the Titanic, on his way to a peace conference in New York. See Tlw Dictionary of National Hlofiraphy l'JI2 1921 (Oxford, London: Oxford University Press, 1927), pp. 507 X,

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B ulgarians and R om anians - on account o f their re lig io n - h a d been regularly referred to as Greeks) was, in the 1870s, being replaced by more sharply focused national Balkan stereotypes. (Here I define the ‘stereotype’, following the French philosopher Daniel-Henri Pageaux, as a minimal quantity o f information which expresses collective knowledge about a particular O ther.) ‘Suffering’ Bulgarians, ‘w ild’ A lbanians, ‘m artial’ Servians and ‘proud, brave’ Montenegrins, were beginning to appear in the pages o f Punch. If the awareness o f the different Balkan nationalities was new, the adjectives used to describe them continued to be essent­ ially Romantic. The proliferation o f British writing about the Balkans at the time o f this crisis is remarkable. A detailed, but probably not exhaustive, bibliography lists only eighteen titles devoted to the Balkans or the wider Eastern Question published in Britain during 1875, but there were 116 in 1876 and 129 in 1877.90 Rather cacophonous attempts to ‘explain’ the Balkans played an important part in the creation o f an enduring perception o f the area as somehow much more complex than any other in Europe. Among many authors who joined the debate, H. A. Munro-Butler-Johnstone, MP, warned, in his 1875 pamphlet about the Eastern Question, that Britain had 30,000,000 ‘Mahommedan fellow subjects in India’ who might become disaffected if it gave support to Balkan Christians.''1 He argued that Turkey’s integrity was o f vital importance to Britain. In another pamphlet entitled The Turks: Their Character, Manners and Institutions, published in 1876, he attempted to convey the com plexities o f the Balkan situation. D escribing the Herzegovinian uprising as an insurrection ‘in a highland district inhabited by wild mountaineers’ o f a kind which ‘taxed severely the resources of even the m ightiest em pires’,1'2 M unro-Butler-Johnstone explained that Bosnia and Herzegovina had the misfortune ‘to be surrounded not on one or two, but on four sides by countries the one more eager than the other to ferment and encourage insurrection’. Within it, not only are the Greek [i.e. the Serb] and the Mussulman arranged in opposite camps, but there is also a large and, if you will, fanatical Catholic minority, hating the ‘Orthodox’ with religious fervour, and seeking support against their encroachments by alliance with the Mussulman.93 Many authors attempted to dispute the wisdom o f Gladstone’s plea for humanitarian help in the Balkans. The future Poet Laureate Alfred Austin (1835-1913) published three pamphlets: Tory Horrors; or, the Question o f the Hour and Russia before Europe in 1876,94 and E ngland’s Policy and Peril in 1877.95 Austin argued that, in fact, Russian ambition was to blame for the Bulgarian massacres. He was deeply suspicious o f Russia and claimed that, in any case, ‘a week o f Bulgarian horrors, even at their worst, is a small matter compared with a century o f Russian horrors and Polish horrors.’

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Many o f the participants in the debate chose to remain anonymous. A ‘Consul o f one o f the Great Powers’, an ‘Indian Civil Officer’, a ‘Russian General’, an ‘Englishman’, a ‘London Physician’, an ‘Old Diplomatist’ and an ‘English Liberal’ were among them.96 Inevitably, 1876 also saw the publication o f a number o f poetical and satirical treatments o f the Eastern Question, including Old Nabob Pickles, the Naughty Turk and His Little Slave Selina Servia by ‘R.A.L.’, The D e vil’s Visit to Bulgaria and Other Lands by ‘Com us’, and Mrs Britannia's East-W indSymptoms, Treatment a n d P rev io u s M e d ic a l H istory. By H er C h e m is t’s U n rec o g n ized Apprentice.''1 Some publications, such as The Complete War Guide with a Sketch Map and the Fields o f Operations, attempted to assuage the public thirst for enlightenment, which was considerable: accounts o f Balkan history frequently went through several editions during the crisis.1’8 Others, such as Outrages in Bulgaria. The Latest Authentic Details. Horrible Scenes at Batak, tried to satisfy a growing thirst for gory detail in a proto-tabloid style." William Gladstone’s was undoubtedly the most prominent voice o f sup­ port for the rebelling Christian populations o f the Balkans. Early in 1877, the historian J. R. Green (1837-83) recorded a meeting with Gladstone and other writers: I wish you could have seen with what a glow he spoke o f the Monte­ negrins and their struggle for freedom; how he called on us who wrote history to do what we could o f that long fight for liberty!100 In May 1877, Gladstone spoke on M ontenegro’s behalf in the House o f Commons. ‘Such a sense o f solitary struggle I never remember,’ he noted in his diary record o f the session, ‘At last I rose on the main question nearly in despair as to the result; but resolved at least not to fail through want o f effort.’101 He started his address at around seven in the evening and spoke for two and a half hours. Closing his speech, Gladstone looked ‘like an inspired m an’. His praise for the Montenegrins and his plea for the Bulgarians were made, some listeners claimed, with ‘the most thrilling deliverance that could ever be conceived’.102 Gladstone pointed out that the populations o f Balkan countries will ultimately determine ‘their abiding condition’ them ­ selves: A portion o f those unhappy people are still as yet making an effort to retrieve what they have lost so long but have not ceased to love and to desire. I speak o f those in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Another portion - a band o f heroes such as the world has rarely seen - stand on the rocks o f Montenegro, and are ready now, as they have ever been during the 400 years o f their exile from their fertile plains, to sweep down from their fastnesses and meet the Turks at any odds for the reestablishment o f justice and peace in those countries. Another portion still, the 5,000,000

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o f Bulgarians, cowed and beaten down to the ground, hardly venturing to look upwards, even to their Father in heaven, have extended their hands to you; they have sent you their petition, they have prayed for your help and protection. They have told you that they do not seek alliance with Russia, or with any foreign power, but that they seek to be delivered from an intolerable burden o f woe and shame. That burden o f woe and s h a m e - th e greatest that exists on G od’s e a r t h - i s the one that we thought united Europe was about to remove.103 As Byron can be said to be, in many ways, the poet o f Balkan independence movements in the early part o f the nineteenth century, so in mid-century the poems o f Alfred Tennyson, and in particular his ‘Charge o f the Light Brigade’ (1855), provide the poetic symbols o f the Crimean conflict, even if the practical concerns in the war against Russia were, in Tennyson’s case, very different from those governing Byron’s involvement in Greece. By the 1870s, ‘sensitive o f his relative poverty now that he had two sons,’ Patrick Waddington remarks, Tennyson ‘was chiefly concerned that war with Russia could reduce his profits both from writing and from railway shares, ‘for books are nearly as sensitive as funds’.’104 Youthful poetry about the Napoleonic invasion o f Russia offers evi­ dence o f Tennyson’s rather abstract and exotic imaginings o f the country (‘As Moscow burst upon the raptured eye / Her proud Pavilions and her mingled trees / And pomp o f Oriental palaces’ ),105 but his early verse does not as yet reveal the full extent of his dislike o f Russia. This becomes apparent in T ennyson’s later poems about Poland which refer to the ‘overgrown Barbarian in the East’ and the ‘icy-hearted M uscovite’.106 In the poem entitled ‘Hail Briton’, the Russian Tsar rules ‘a savage land where meet / The coarse extremes o f Power and Fear’.107 The feeling o f what was, in effect, R ussophobia, was expressed more blatantly when, in conversation with the poet William Allingham (1824-1889), Tennyson exclaimed: ‘I can’t agree with you about Russia, you damned Irishman! I’ve hated Russia ever since 1 was born, and I’ll hate her till I die.’108 In view o f such attitudes it might appear surprising that Tennyson’s only work devoted entirely to a Balkan theme is a sonnet which glorifies Russia’s closest ally in the Balkans, the mountain principality of Montenegro, which had famously, over the centuries, repelled Ottoman attempts at subjugation. ‘M ontenegro’, the poem which Tennyson, according to his son Hallam, ‘always put first among his sonnets,’109 was published in May 1877, on the front page o f the review, The Nineteenth Century. It was very popular with Tennyson’s readers and much anthologised throughout the 1880s. As the only sonnet Tennyson selected for Samuel Waddington’s English Sonnets by Living Writers (1881), it was reprinted in Hall Caine’s Sonnets o f Three Centuries (1882 ) and in William Sharp’s Sonnets o f this Century (\ 886 )."°

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Tennyson’s poetic support for Montenegro did not pass unnoticed in the Balkans. The first o f many translations o f his sonnet into Serbian was published in Novi Sad (a town now in Serbia and then in Austria-Hungary and which was one o f the main centres o f Serbian intellectual life in the nineteenth century) in a dispatch from a Montenegrin battlefield published in the same month as that in which the poem appeared in Britain. The first translator o f ‘M ontenegro’ - the Serbian writer Ljubomir Nenadovic (with the help o f The Times correspondent W. J. Stillman) - was him self a vol­ unteer in the war which inspired Tennyson. The actual impulse for the composition o f ‘Montenegro’ came through Tennyson’s friendship with William Gladstone. The two did not otherwise share many political views. ‘Gladstone is personally my friend, but politically, I hate him like the devil,’ Tennyson is reported to have remarked more than once.1" Tennyson’s sonnet was written in March 1877 and published in May, accom panied by a long article about M ontenegrin history written by Gladstone. Montenegro was, Gladstone complained, a name ‘perhaps less familiar to the European public than that o f Monaco, and little more than that o f San M arino’ - and yet it would have gained immortal fame ‘had there been a Scott to learn and tell the marvels o f its history, or a Byron to spend and be spent on its b e h a lf." 2 ‘I hope that an interpreter between M ontenegro and the world has at length been found in my friend Mr T en nyson,’ G ladstone wrote, before offering, as a ‘com m entary’ to Tennyson’s text, a brief outline o f Montenegrin history. Taking on the role o f Montenegro’s Byron, with Gladstone’s encourage­ ment (he referred to ‘Montenegro’ in a note to Gladstone as ‘that sonnet of which you were the inspirer’) m and possibly even at his direct request, Tennyson offered what is basically a Romantic vision o f the Balkan world. Montenegro, a ‘rough rock-throne o f freedom’, is depicted as an impassable mountain kingdom populated by invincible heroes. Similarly, B yron’s Albania is a ‘dwelling o f the mountaineer’, where ‘gathering storms around convulse the closing year’." 4 ‘Land o f Albania! let me bend mine eyes / On thee, thou rugged nurse o f savage men!’ writes Byron in Childe H arold’s Pilgrimage. Tennyson addresses Montenegro (‘Black M ountain’) by its Slav name, Crna Gora: Great Tsernogora! never since thine own Black ridges drew the cloud and brake the storm Has breathed a race o f mightier m ountaineers."5 Although the accompanying article written by Gladstone offers a wealth o f historical detail about Montenegro, Tennyson opts instead fora less specific, symbolic set o f images o f the country. Like Byron’s Albanians, Monte­ negrins arc, indirectly, compared to eagles. ‘They rose to where their sovran eagle sails,’ Tennyson writes in the opening line o f the sonnet, transforming the royal symbol o f Montenegro into a symbol o f national character. The

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Turks a r e - a s they were in Shelley’s verse, for example - represented metonymically by the personified emblem o f their faith (‘And red with blood the Crescent reels from fight’). In Tennyson’s vision o f Montenegro, Homeric ideals o f war and poetry strengthen the image o f it as an exposed cliff-rock o f Christian faith (‘warriors beating back the swarm / O f Turkish Islam for five hundred years’). Some o f the poetic symbols used in Tennyson’s sonnet are encountered in Serbian Romantic representations o f Montenegro, which are themselves rooted in Serbian epic poetry. The description o f Montenegro by its own Prince-Bishop, Petar II Petrovic-N jegos (1813-51) in his epic Gorski Vijenac {The Mountain Wreath), published in 1847, although more elaborate, offers the template for Tennyson’s images. Thus Njegos writes: Those who escaped before the Turkish sword, those who did not blaspheme at the True faith, those who refused to be thrown into chains, took refuge here in these lofty mountains to shed their blood together and to die, heroically to keep the sacred oath, their lovely name and their holy freedom .116 Tennyson has: They rose to where their sovran eagle sails, They kept their faith, their freedom, on the height, Chaste, frugal, savage, arm ’d by day and night Against the Turk; whose inroad nowhere scales Their headlong passes, but his footstep fails.117 T ennyson’s image o f M ontenegro as a ‘rough rock-throne o f freedom ’ and Njegos’s description o f it as a ‘lofty nest o f heroic freedom’118 are variants o f the same locus communis o f the usual Serbian epic represent­ ations o f the country. Even if Tennyson had not read one o f the collections o f ‘Serbian minstrelsy’ in English, he was undoubtedly well aware o f the contents o f Gladstone’s ‘commentary’ while he was working on his sonnet. Gladstone’s sources for his sketch o f Montenegrin history were themselves largely German translations o f Slavonic material containing ample refer­ ences to the symbolic and poetic importance o f Montenegro.* Tennyson’s preference for a symbolic rather than directly historical rep­ resentation o f Montenegro (of the kind which he chose as a 23-year-old for the descriptions o f Polish heroism in his sonnet ‘Written on the Outbreak *

It is possible that, writing about Montenegrin participation in the struggle against the Ottomans, T ennyson recalled his brief involvement with the abortive Spanish uprising against the royal regim e forty-seven years before. See V esna G oldsw orthy, ‘Tennyson and M ontenegro’, Tennyson Research Bulletin vol. 7, no I, November 1997 (Lincoln: The Tennyson Society).

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o f the Polish Insurrection’ in 1832), might well have been a result o f his political unease with some aspects o f the subject with which he was dealing. His attitudes towards Russian political interests in the Near East were not substantially different from his views during the Crimean War. In fact, as Patrick Waddington points out, between the writing o f his poem in March and its appearance in May, Russia had officially entered the Balkan war: As the months passed, fear o f Russian control in the Near East began to outweigh disgust at Turkish atrocities even in many liberal English minds. Tennyson became disenchanted with Gladstone’s continuing stand against the Porte and moved towards (though by no means so far as) the extreme pro-Turkish position adopted by Swinburne in his Ballad o f Bulgarie. In March 1878 Tennyson published his moving but fiercely patriotic poem The Revenge: A Ballad o f the Fleet, in which he tacitly backed Disraeli’s determination to stop Russia from closing off the Black Sea."9 A fiercely maintained anti-Russian position had inspired Algernon Charles Swinburne to join the debate about the Eastern Question. Like Tennyson, he hated Russia, but then, as one acquaintance observed, ‘Swinburne never disliked a n y th in g -h e always hated or loathed it.’120 His Russophobe feelings frequently find expression in his poetry. In ‘Rizpah’, for example, he refers to ‘The rotten corpse-light o f the Russian star / That lights towards hell his bondslaves and their Czar’.121 In ‘Russia: An O de’, the parallel for Russia is found only in the darkest circle o f Dante’s Hell: Dante, led by love’s and hate’s accordant spell Down the deepest and the loathliest ways o f hell, Where beyond the brook o f blood the rain was fire, Where the scalps were masked with dung more deep than mire, Saw not, where the filth was foulest, and the night Darkest, depths whose fiends could match the M uscovite.122 Swinburne was also hostile to Gladstone, whom he called ‘G ladsniff and ‘Mr Sadstone’. Gladstone’s plea on behalf o f Bulgarians in his Bulgarian Horrors and the Question o f the East would have amused rather than moved Swinburne. ‘The very word ‘Bulgarian’ amused him greatly as a cognate o f ‘bugger’, ’* writes Patrick Waddington: As early as 1871 he said that leading organs o f the press had ‘proved their kinship to the most sanguinary tribe o f Bulgarians’ by ignoring his Songs o f the Sierras. The phrase ‘sanguinary Bulgarian’ then became *

The O xford English Dictionary, Second Edition (1989), describes the origin o f ‘hugger’, from French bougre, and Latin Bulgarus, Bulgarian, as ‘a name given to a sect o f heretics who came from Bulgaria in (he 11 th c . , afterwards to other ‘herctics’ (to whom abominable practices were ascribed), also to usurers.’

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for him a standard term o f abuse, a facetious euphemism for ‘bloody bugger’. It was perhaps not surprising that he should have difficulty in taking real Bulgarians seriously. His attention was first drawn to the Bulgarian issue, characteristically, by a circumstance that he found more derisory than otherwise. A man called (as the poet styled him) ‘Sadick Bey’ was raping hundreds o f girls - girls, note, and not boys; but in Bulgarian usage, no doubt (the poet imagined), ‘girl’ was a periphrasis for ‘boy’. This was at the beginning o f 1876.123 While reports o f mutilation, rape, torture and murder covered the front pages o f the British daily papers, Swinburne ‘showed not the slightest com passion’ - instead, ‘he used the current term inology - ‘Bulgarian atrocity’, and the like - only to characterise some literary misdeed or other o f the Contemporary Review. ’124 Towards the end o f 1876, Swinburne published a pamphlet which he entitled Note o f an English Republican Against the Muscovite Crusade.l25 This pamphlet represented an attack as much on the Russian politics o f the day as on Thomas Carlyle. It is, by Swinburne’s standards, a tamely written piece. Unusually for him, he refrained from making any puns with the Bulgarian name, or indeed with the name o f Carlyle whom he called ‘St Thomas Cloacinus’ and ‘T. Coprostom’, the ‘ancient enemy’ and ‘venerable Philobulgar’ elsew here.126 Carlyle was only one o f many prominent British figures who lent their voices in support o f the Bulgarian cause in the course o f 1876 - Charles Darwin, Anthony Trollope, Robert Browning and William Morris were among the others. On 28 November 1876, Carlyle’s letter on the Eastern Question, addressed to George Howard, was published by The Times. ‘In the first place, then for 50 years back my clear belief about the Russians has been that they are a good and even noble element in Europe,’ argued Carlyle, claiming that ‘to undertake a war against Russia on behalf o f the T u rk . . . would be nothing short o f insanity.’127 He lends his support, instead, to something very different - the ‘immediate and summary expulsion of the Turk from Europe’: The peaceful Mongol inhabitants would, o f course, be left in peace, and treated with perfect equity, and even friendly consideration; but the governing Turk, with all his Pashas and Bashi Bazouks, should at once be ordered to disappear from Europe and never to return.128 In reply, Swinburne protested that the Turks are no worse than other oppressors around the world. ‘Their Bashi Bazouks are shamefully and incredibly maligned if they have earned no right to claim fellowship with the torturers, the hangmen, and the women-whippers o f Hungary, o f Poland and o f Jamaica,’ he wrote, asking him self about the real reason why Carlyle, otherwise an illustrious enemy o f all freedom, had chosen to raise his voice in support o f this particular cause. What stirred him is not his love o f

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Christianity - claim ed Swinburne - for he is ‘the w orshipper o f every gallows but o n e - a n d that one —the cross o f Christ’.129 Carlyle did not elect to protest about cruelties committed in England and Jamaica by ‘the English Bashi Bazouks’, but he invites people, instead, ‘to gather grapes o f Russian thorns or figs o f Panslavistic thistles’,130 because, as Swinburne argued, he is fighting a battle in Russia’s name. The ‘Muscovite crusade’ has ‘Alexander o f Russia for its Godfrey o f Bouillon, and Thomas Carlyle for its Peter the Hermit’. The Russians, on whose behalf Carlyle dared to speak, are Swinburne’s bêtes noires - ‘the Muscovite beelzebub, the prince o f devils o f despotism’: We will invite no Czar to deliver us or any man on earth by the memory o f Peter the murderer o f his son, o f Catherine, the murderess o f her husband, o f Alexander who was crowned and anointed by the grace and consecration o f hands which had murdered his father.131 With this forceful attack on the Russian royal family, Swinburne concludes his Note o f an English Republican, which the Athenaeum described as ‘an earnest, impassioned remonstrance with Mr Carlyle on the subject o f his recently proclaimed admiration for Russia’ in its issue o f 23 December 1876.132 In the same month, Swinburne wrote (but failed to publish) his ironic ‘ballad o f chivalry’ - an attack on yet another set o f ‘Muscovite crusaders’ - this time in a pseudo-medieval style. Its full title is, in the final version, ‘The Quest o f Sir Bright de Bromwicham, Knight Templar: A Ballad o f Bulgaria. Sang on the Feast o f Notre Dame de Bon Marché, by a Perishing Savoyard’. The poem was composed between 8 December 1876, when Swinburne wrote to Theodore Watts-Dunton (1832-1914), ‘I would give anything by the by for the hand o f a great caricaturist at this moment, that I might draw that gallant crusader, the loyal Knight Sir John de Bright (whose very name makes one ‘drop into poetry’, as you see, unawares),’133 and 11 December, when he recorded, in a letter to the critic John Churton Collins ( 1848— 1908): ‘I have sent (but this is a dead secret which I confined as yet to no soul alive) a ballad o f Chivalry to the Pall M all Gazette without my name.’134 Swinburne described the subject o f his ballad as ‘ ‘The Quest o f Sir Bright de Brum m agem ’ against the heathen dogs who worship Mahomet and Termagaunt, and pollute the Holy Sepulchre o f his (Sir B .’s) Blessed Lord.’135 The ballad was not published until 1893 when it was privately printed, in twenty-five copies only, by E. W. Gosse and T. J. Wise, and it was not included in collections o f Swinburne’s poetry until 1964.136 ‘Sir John de Bright’, the target o f Swinburne’s satirical ballad, was John B r ig h t-th e leading figure o f the so-called M anchester School and a member o f the Society o f Friends, or Quakers, which ‘enjoyed influence in Britain beyond all proportion to their numerical importance, not just in the matter o f free trade but also . . . in the matter o f war and peace’.137

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Bright had been fiercely opposed to the Crimean War, and had led the socalled peace party {Punch dubbed the Quakers the ‘internal Russians’).138 Although a pacifist, Bright nevertheless supported Gladstone’s stand on Bulgaria. With Carlyle, he was one o f the most prominent participants in a big conference held at St Jam es’s Hall on 8 December, which was convened by, among others, Swinburne’s close friend, the artist Edward Burne-Jones, and where Gladstone spoke in support o f the Balkan Christians for an hour and a half. ‘The Ballad o f Bulgarie . . . sung on the feast o f Notre Dame de Bon M arché’ (a jibe at the Free Trade campaign), is supposedly composed by ‘a perishing Savoyard’, an allusion to the fact that Bright, while now defending the Bulgarian cause, once said that Savoy might perish - a detail Swinburne also mentions in his Note o f an English Republican. The targets o f the ballad’s satire are again the ‘philobulgars’, as Swinburne called them, rather than the Bulgarians themselves - although the poet’s decision to refer to the country as ‘Bulgarie’ keeps those cognatic references Swinburne was so amused by very much in the reader’s mind. John Bright is described as a ‘Knight Tem plar’, an order ostensibly suppressed for the alleged practice o f sodomy: No lance in hand for other land Sir Bright would ever take; For wicked works, save those o f the Turks, No head o f man would break; But that Bulgarie should not be free, This made his high heart quake.139 Bright isjoined in his Bulgarian crusade by ‘Sir William the Wise’ (Gladstone), and finally by ‘Sir Thom as’ (Carlyle): Then out spake old Sir Thomas the bold A Chelsea knight was h e ; . . . Lo, I will stand at thy quaking hand And smite the Turk for thee!140 Swinburne goes on to parody the three m en’s political attitudes and public proclamations. Sir John finds it difficult to abandon his ‘Bromwicham bride’ - his ‘fair lady’ o f Free Trade - in order to fight for the Bulgarian cause, but ‘Wise William’ points out: ‘And methinks it were vulgar to cheat a poor Bulgar / With offers o f help in vain.’141 Swinburne was unsuccessful in his attempts to get the poem published. In February 1877 he sent a copy to Sir Charles Dilke, a prominent Liberal MP who, in January, had spoken to his constituents in Chelsea about the Eastern Question. In his speech, which was, as he records in his Memoirs, ‘anti-Russian’ and ‘to some extent anti-Gladstonian’,142 Dilke attacked John Bright in terms very similar to those o f ‘The Ballad o f Bulgarie’ for having

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proposed ‘with the truculence characteristic o f a Quaker . . . a crusade for the liberation o f the Mount o f Olives from the Infidel’.143 Swinburne returned again to Russian themes in the 1880s, although Bulgaria, having been granted autonomy by the Treaty o f Berlin in 1878, now received no more than a passing reference. His sonnet ‘The Russ and the Bulgar’, for example, was rewritten several times. The title was changed into ‘The Russ and the Frenchman’, and all references to Bulgaria gradually omitted.144 As always, whenever Swinburne wrote about the Balkans, Russia was his main target for attack. ‘The Ballad o f Bulgarie’, which is not about ‘Bulgarie’ at all, but rather about the prominent ‘Balkan crusaders’ in British public life, is a good example o f the way in which works allegedly dealing with Balkan themes frequently say much more about facets o f British political and intellectual history. The most influential literary constructions o f the Balkans in the first half o f the nineteenth century were born out o f the interaction o f classicist philhellenism (a product o f the British educational system) and the late 1700s fashion for Oriental exoticism. The main ‘Balkan’ poets of this period - Byron and S h e lle y -v ie w the Balkan struggle, against the background o f the French Revolution, as an emancipatory struggle against tyranny, a European rather than a Balkan cause. In the second half o f the century, that perspective gradually changes. After the Crimean W a r - a s the potential for Great Power conflict in the region came to be understood more widely - individual perceptions of the Balkans began to be determined by differing attitudes towards the wider European power play. This period is marked by a proliferation o f ‘documentary’ writing about the Balkans. Histories, studies, travelogues and journalism focusing on the Balkans are strongly reminiscent o f the focus on the Middle East in this century. One American writer has pointed out: The Balkans were the original Third World, long before the Western media coined the term. In this mountainous peninsula bordering the Middle East, newspaper correspondents filed the first twentieth century accounts o f mud-streaked refugee inarches and produced the first books o f gonzo journalism and travel writing, in an age when Africa and Asia were still a bit too far afield. Whatever happened in Beirut or elsewhere happened first, long ago, in the Balkans.145 In literary terms, there is nothing to match the popularity and influence o f Byron’s verse until - in a very different context - Bram Stoker changed the way in which people imagined the Balkans in the 1890s. A Victorian poet who encountered the ideals o f Byron and Shelley in his formative years might have felt that it was ‘politically correct’ to continue to raise one’s voice against tyranny in Byronic fashion, as Tennyson sought to do through his involvement in the Spanish uprising in the 1830s and his support

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for Montenegro in the 1870s. In the later decades o f the century, he might have chosen, like the republican Swinburne, to rail instead against the apparent corruption o f these ideals. The considerable accumulation o f knowledge about the Balkans did not diminish the attractions of the mythical Byronic creation. While the political face o f the peninsula might have al­ tered since Byron first set foot on the coast o f Illyria, the literary Balkans continued to accommodate, much as in Childe H arold’s Pilgrimage, both the imagined ‘sins’ o f the Orient - its lust, corruption and cruelty - and the ‘purity’ o f the Occident, in its idyllic Homeric cradle.

C h a p te r T hree

The Balkans in Popular Fiction

The impact o f B yron’s death in Missolonghi on British imaginings o f the Balkans was profound and long-lasting. The Victorians were all too aware as G ladstone’s encouragem ent o f Tennyson to take up the cause o f M ontenegro dem onstrates - o f the im portance o f Byronic figures in championing the cause o f small Balkan nations. Represented as almost Christ-like in the pictorial and sculptural representations o f his final ‘sac­ rifice’ for Greece, Byron helped establish a special sense o f mission for individual Britons in the Balkans. The mythical warrior and saviour was transformed, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, into a B oy's Own hero who sym bolised B ritain’s superior sense o f justice, unencumbered by the awkward implications o f Byron’s anti-colonialism and radicalism. B yron’s example was also directly emulated by some writers, such as the popular novelist Allen Upward (1863-1926), a philhellene who volunteered for the losing side in the Greco-Turkish war o f 1897, or the novelist Joyce Cary (1888-1957) who joined the Montenegrins in their struggle against Turkey in the Balkan wars o f 1912-13 (and found him self doing hum anitarian work in a way w hich points to the noncombatant role o f volunteers in recent wars in the Balkans). Between the 1870s, when the renewed wave o f international activity aimed at resolving the Eastern Question brought the Balkans into the limelight o f public attention, and the outbreak o f the First World War, the region remained one o f the most consistent and major causes o f dispute between the great powers. The gradual disintegration o f the Ottoman Empire and the formation o f new, independent states in Romania, Greece, Serbia and Bulgaria, the last three o f which had open ambitions to acquire land slill under Ottoman rule, kept attention focused on the southern and eastern B alkans.1 The northern parts o f the peninsula ruled by the Habsburgs witnessed the growth o f national feeling, accelerated by the aftermath o f the 1848 revolution in Hungary. The gradual strengthening o f the South Slav movement in Croatia, part o f the kingdom o f Hungary, was in part a reaction to attempts at Magyarisation and was mirrored by the growth of Romanian nationalism in 1lungarian-ruled Transylvania. In 1878, following

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a large-scale revolt against Turkish rule, Austria-Hungary occupied the Ottoman provinces o f Bosnia-Herzegovina and the neighbouring Sanjak o f Novi Pazar. All these events created a patchwork o f crises and local conflicts which kept the peninsula in the public eye and reaffirmed the reputation for complexity and instability with which the term ‘Balkan’ now came to be inseparably associated. This focus on the Balkans, and an increasing awareness o f the diversity o f this part o f Europe as the Ottoman Empire retreated, gave the area a mystique which attracted many writers o f popular fiction, who moved eastw ards and southwards as they prospected for new sources o f raw material. Locations in the newly united states o f Italy or Germany had lost their exotic appeal, and popular literature needed sites unspoilt by indus­ trialisation. Amid the general embourgeoisement which now made most o f Europe appear too dull for romance, only the Balkans seemed to escape the ‘intrusion o f civilised monotony’, as H. H. Munro (Saki), who discovered the peninsula as a foreign correspondent o f the Morning Post, explained in one o f his short stories.2 In its search for an ‘unspoilt’ locale, popular fiction transmitted an essentially Romantic perception o f Balkan ‘Other­ ness’. Expanding domestic markets encouraged the development o f a variety o f fictional genres which in turn contributed to establish the different stereotypes still used to describe the Balkan peninsula and its peoples.

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The flood o f historical studies and political analyses which followed G ladstone’s Bulgarian agitation, often advancing m utually exclusive solutions to the ‘Balkan conundrum’, helped establish the stereotypical perception that the Balkans were dauntingly complex. This paved the way for the appearance in fictional form o f a Byronic British saviour figure who could offer an image o f attractive simplicity and therefore a beguiling way out for those who, troubled by events in the Balkans, sought ready solutions to the problems o f the region. At the turn o f this century, popular literature was to take this myth a step further - from a warrior and a military leader, a champion o f the underdog, the Byronic hero progressed naturally towards occupying a Balkan throne. The emergence o f new kingdoms in the south-eastern corner o f Europe drew attention to far-away lands o f which the British public hitherto knew little. The newly established courts and royal families offered an easily com prehensible yet glam orous set o f icons. In the Balkan lands, the introduction o f a monarchy was seen as a way o f securing ‘Europeanisation’ and European support. While Serbia had two o f its own royal families,* *

Until the final triumph o fth e Karageorgevich dynasty in 1903, Karageorge’s

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and Montenegro had moved from the theocratic rule o f a Prince-Bishop to a secular, hereditary monarchy (drawn from the same tribe),* other Balkan countries considered candidates from around Europe - m ainly from Germany whose many ‘redundant’ but eligible princes had good European connections. Before Queen Marie o f Romania (1875-1938), a grand­ daughter o f Queen Victoria, there were no British royal figures in the Balkans, although the new royal houses had family ties with the British monarchy. The first Prince o f Bulgaria, Alexander Battenberg, for example, was related to the British royal family. His British relations, including his brother who was an admiral and the father o f Lord Louis Mountbatten, later translated their German name into English. Although they had little in common with their Balkan subjects, the new royals frequently sported outward emblems o f ‘Balkanness’. In their tailored uniforms and Paris-made dresses, the designs o f which were based on Balkan national costumes, these members o f Western Europe’s minor royalty created the ‘exotic’ images o f Balkan monarchies which covered the front pages o f turn-of-the-century Western newspapers. In Britain, popular imagination was fired by some o f the more unusual candidates for Balkan thrones. For example, the Albanian throne was offered twice to Aubrey Herbert, who inspired John Buchan’s Sandy Arbuthnot in Greenmantle, as well as to the cricketer C. B. Fry. Herbert claimed not to have enough money to take up the offer. Knowing the poverty o f the country, he apparently did not expect to raise enough income from taxes.3 In 1914 the Albanian throne was taken up for six months by a 31-year-old German army captain and minor princeling, William von Wied, who spent most of his reign moored offshore in a German gunboat (he was known in Britain at the time as Willie the Weed). The life o f the newly established European courts inspired a number o f popular novelists. Dynastic disputes, morganatic marriages and the well publicised scandals which filled the newspaper columns could hardly fail to attract attention at a time when romances with royal themes already represented popular reading material. Novels about Balkan royalty offered the writer a possibility o f exploiting many o f the romantic strands which characterised these escapist plots. Exotic locations, love and adventure, as well as high politics and war, were refracted through personal stories which showed that kings and queens suffered and had the same longings as ordinary people. Although in reality few British men and women were to be found among the new Balkan monarchies, the very possibility o f such a

*

descendants alternated with members o f the Obrenovic dynasty, descended from MiloS Obrenovic. (The current claimant to the Yugoslav throne belongs to the Karageorgevich dynasty.) Until 1852, M ontenegro’s celibate Prince-Bishop, who also served as head o f the country’s Orthodox Church, was selected from among the young men o f the NjeguSi tribe.

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thing happening encouraged popular novelists to invent new Balkan lands so that the throne might be offered to Britons. A vogue for novels, plays and operettas set in imaginary kingdoms was sparked in 1894 by Anthony Hope’s novel o f confused identity, The Prisoner ofZenda. Its instant and enormous popularity is indicative o f the widespread thirst for a royal adventure o f this kind. Soon after its publication, The Prisoner o fZ enda became one o f the best-selling novels o f its time. Even before its fame was boosted by numerous theatre productions in Europe and America, and by film adaptations (the best-known o f which are the romantic Hollywood versions, directed by John Cromwell in 1937 and Richard Thorpe in 1952, and the 1979 farce, directed by Richard Quine, with Peter Sellers in the title role), the novel sold hundreds o f thousands o f copies. During Anthony Hope’s lifetime (he died in 1933), The Prisoner o f Z enda becam e a prim er in schools as far apart as A m erica, Egypt and Japan. The story o f R udolf R asendyll’s ascent to the throne o f Ruritania exploited a well-used plot based on mistaken identity and identical doubles ancient devices o f comedy - but the setting and the protagonists were original. ‘I think that the two variants which struck the popular fancy in my little book were royalty and red hair,’ wrote Hope modestly, 'the former is always a safe card to play, and its combination with the latter had a touch o f novelty.’4 The Prisoner ofZenda tells the simple story o f the scion o f a minor aristocratic family, Rudolf Rasendyll, who bears an uncanny physical resemblance to the King o f Ruritania, which enables him to help the troubled dynasty by impersonating the King in a moment o f national crisis. Indeed, the Englishman shows him self to be able not only to perform royal duties without much preparation and with greater aplomb than the real monarch, but also turns out to be a more successful suitor o f Princess Flavia, whose hand he gallantly relinquishes to the real King at the end o f the novel. In a convention often used in comedy or opera, Flavia remains rather implausibly ignorant o f the fact that her Ruritanian fiancé has been replaced by an Englishman. Although some contemporary surveys o f English literature claim that The Prisoner ofZenda is set in an imaginary land in south-eastern Europe,5 Ruritania was not imagined as a Balkan land at all. Anthony Hope thought o f his theme by accident: His thoughts were running, as they often did, on some new scheme o f adventure, love or politics, in some new, undiscoverable country like Aureataland or Glottenberg; Ruritania was the name which leaped into his head. And as he walked he chanced to pass two men who bore an extraordinary resemblance to each other . . . A resemblance like that, a story o f confused identity set in a picturesque romantic setting might,

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though the idea was familiar enough in fiction, still perhaps be made the basis o f a tale.6 The reader o f The Prisoner o f Zenda is given to understand that the spoken language o f Ruritania is German (Rudolf boasts that he had been to a German university and speaks German ‘as readily and perfectly as English’)7 and most o f the Ruritanian characters have German-sounding name, for example, Fritz von Tarlenheim, Rupert Hentzau or Colonel Sapt. Even the name o f the country’s capital city, Strelsau, sounds Germanic. Rudolf travels to Ruritania via Dresden, and leaving this eastern German city by train in the morning, he reaches Zenda, a ‘small town fifty miles from the capital, and about ten from the frontier’,8 in the evening. On another occasion, in a hurry, he decides to ride to Ruritania from Dresden, claiming that, through the forest, he can reach it in a day. Although Hope does not provide any directions, on the basis o f these details it would be possible to calculate the approximate distance from Dresden to Ruritania: it could hardly be further south-east than Bohemia. Ruritania is, we must imagine, somewhere in Europe, in a part we are not too familiar with. Like Bram Stoker’s Transylvania in Dracula, a novel which appeared only three years later, it is a land ‘beyond the forest’. If Hope had conceived Ruritania as a Germanic principality, one o f those ‘small princedom s’, which used to make, as H. H. Munro wrote, ‘incon­ spicuous freckles on the map o f Europe’,9 it nevertheless became one of (he most widely used symbols o f the archetypal Balkan land. ‘Michael Portillo is hailed in Ruritania’, proclaims the title o f Anne Applebaum ’s article about the former British Defence Secretary’s visit to Slovenia, Romania, Bulgaria and M acedonia in 1996. The Evening Standard's political commentator described this visit to ‘Ruritania’ in a style strongly reminiscent o f Anthony H ope’s writing. Such an approach seems acceptable in writing about the Balkans, even if a political comment about, say, Africa, inspired by Rider Haggard’s novels, might raise protesting voices: Up and down the red carpets he walks, Her M ajesty’s aircraft just behind him, the Macedonian defence minister just beside him, the M acedonian soldiers in front o f him, looking very much like extras from a de luxe production o f the Nutcracker suite. Finally he stops, and stands to attention: for a few, heart-rending moments, a slightly shrill version o f God Save The Queen echoes out across the airfield, and into the hills beyond . . . I w o uld say he has a genuine talent for R uritanian diplo m acy, or indeed any dip lo m a cy . T h e D efence Secretary was very good, for exam p le, at answ ering long and garbled questions from B ulgarian journalists, even w hen the translation was uncertain and the room w as very hot. A n earsp littin g group o f fo lk m usicians d id n ’ t prevent him from chattering a w ay w illi his R om anian counterpart d uring a m ulti-course slate dinner

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in Bucharest. While in Macedonia, Mr Portillo oohed and aahed convin­ cingly, while being shown a collection o f bronze to o ls - th e work of Macedonian neolithic hunter-gatherers.10 Like Hope’s Ruritania, Henri M eilhac’s play L ’A ttaché d ’ambassade, the source o f another set o f images frequently used in relation to the Balkans, was subject to geographic transference. First produced at the Théâtre de Vaudeville in Paris in 1861, the play was initially set in the Parisian embassy o f the German principality o f Birkenfeld, but in Franz Lehâr’s much better known adaptation, the operetta Die Lustige Witwe (The M erry Widow), Birkenfeld becomes Pontevedro, a comic evocation of Montenegro disguised so thinly that its première caused a demonstration by Montenegrin students in Vienna." Hope’s Ruritania firmly established itself as a reference for the elaborate state ceremony and pomp and circumstance associated with traditions of dubious provenance. The term gained new currency after the fall o f Communism in 1989, with the attempts o f some East European states to ‘return’ to what they perceived to be their pre-Communist traditions. ‘New Ruritania in Search o f the West’ was thus the title o f a newspaper article about ‘political kitsch’ in newly independent Croatia, whose president, a British journalist wrote, in ‘his dazzling white suit, gold braid and medals, surrounded by a chorus o f red-uniformed courtiers . .. appears more like a Ruritanian generalissimo than a modern European leader’.12 Expressions such as ‘Ruritanian goings-on’, ‘Ruritanian dealings’, ‘pure Ruritania’ and so on, are used as a shorthand reference for ‘Balkan’ attempts to assert a ‘European’ past, even i f ‘Ruritania’ itself benignly evokes the imagined lost innocence which preceded the mass slaughter of this century. The fact that Ruritania, as a matter o f secondary transference, came to establish itself in the popular imagination as a Balkan land is probably related to the goings-on among Balkan dynasties which filled the columns o f the popular press around the time when Hope’s novel appeared. Gossip colum nists were kept busy with the forced abdication o f A lexander Battenberg o f Bulgaria in 1886; the picturesque character o f the Romanian Queen Elisabeth who wrote poetry under the pseudonym Carmen Sylva and wore ‘diaphanous white dresses, her hair cascading over her shoulders’ ;13 and the scandalous personal life o f the Serbian King Milan, which compelled his wife Natalija to leave the country in 1887, taking the heir to the throne with her to Biarritz. King Milan’s dalliances on his visits to Western Europe allegedly inspired Terence Rattigan’s play The Sleeping Prince,''' and later the film The Prince and the Showgirl, directed in 1957 by Laurence Olivier, starring Marilyn M onroe and with Olivier as the Regent o f ‘Carpathia’. In contrast, the newly unified and industrialised Germany had ceased to be the collection o f small, picturesque fiefdoms which inspired the original

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Ruritania, and the R uritanians were looking to the Balkans for their new abodes. The newly liberated Balkan lands, with their mostly German dynasties, took over the romantic role o f the former German-ruled Central European principalities in novels dealing with romantic duels, courtly love affairs and palace intrigues. While the Balkans remained distant and unfamiliar enough to be a suitable backdrop for romantic adventure, courtly life in the imaginary Balkan principalities is depicted as decidedly Germanic. The exotic ‘Balkan’ identity o f these novels is therefore as much a product o f European ‘Otherness’, as perceived from the British side o f the Channel, as it is a creation o f the even more exotic, ‘oriental’, Ottoman heritage. In accordance with historical fact, many o f the fictional royal characters in the im aginary Balkan principalities are Germ an. King A lexis’ wife. Countess Ellenburg, in Anthony Hope’s Sophy o f Kravonia ( 1906),15 King Otto Georg in S. C. Grier’s novel An Uncrowned King (1896),16 and Queen Ernestine in Grier’s A Crowned Queen (1898)17 (the first two novels o f a quartet depicting the imaginary Kingdom o f Thracia), are German, as are the numerous courtiers and aristocrats who populate imaginary Balkan castles and palaces. Only occasionally - as in the later novel by Marguerite Bryant and G. H. McAnally, The Chronicles o f a Great Prince, published in 1925 and set in the imaginary Balkan state o f Romanzia, with the Prince o f Orense, Paul d ’Arenzano, as the main h e r o - a r e the rulers Italian inspired.18 One o f the aristocratic characters in this novel is the Duke of Avala who bears, perhaps coincidentally, the name o f a mountain near Belgrade.* In setting their novel in an Italianate version o f Ruritania, Bryant and McAnally look back to an earlier era in popular fiction - the Romantic ‘gothick’ novels which could exploit the then still exotic locations on the Italian and the Iberian peninsulas. The im aginary royal houses described in popular fiction about the Balkans normally represent a rather picturesque mixture o f Balkan passions and strict Germanic protocol. Courtly phrases in German are uttered by gallant soldiers in colourful uniforms inspired by Balkan folk costumes. Images o f this kind, quintessentially Ruritanian though they may appear, are in fact rather closer to the world o f H ope’s explicitly ‘Balkan’ but much less successful later novel about Kravonia, as well as the writings o f his followers and imitators. In fact, the popular stereotypical images o f Ruritania were created not so much by Hope’s writing as by the film and theatrical adaptations o f The Prisoner ofZenda. The book itself relies much more on action and plot than on description. After The Prisoner ofZenda, Anthony Hope wrote two more novels set in Ruritania. Rupert o f Hentzau, *

Avala has been, since 1922, the site o f Serbia’s memorial to the Unknown Warrior, which may explain how the authors came across the name.

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written in January 1895 (first serialised, then published as a whole in 1898), tells o f Rudolf Rassendyll’s further adventures in Ruritania: this time Rudolf risks his life to obtain Princess Flavia’s stolen love letter which was addressed to him, thereby saving her honour in the eyes o f the King. Hope’s last Ruritanian romance, the most unusual and, commercially, the least successful o f the three, The Heart o f Princess Osra (1896), delves further into Ruritania’s past, and represents not so much a novel as a pure fairy tale, which, although lacking any concrete historical context, claims to be set in the 1730s. In it, the beautiful princess Osra, from the same Ruritanian dynasty depicted in the first two novels, breaks many an unfortunate m an’s heart (including those o f a silversmith’s apprentice, a miller and even a highwayman), and finally falls in love with a poor student who turns out to be the ‘Grand Duke o f Mittenheim’. On the publication o f this novel, as in many other reviews, the Manchester Guardian spoke flatteringly o f Hope’s genius: The word is not too strong for a writer whose work, while kept within marked and modest limits, is yet so perfect o f its kind. Its distinction, as we take it, lies first in a very pure and simple narrative English; and secondly in a happy blending o f romantic ideals with modern humour and scepticism.19 For the contem porary reader, it should be said, scepticism is in scant evidence in this Ruritanian fantasy. In spite o f lavish critical praise Hope began to suspect that he had exhausted both the commercial and the creative possibilities o f Ruritania. M oving on to create yet another imaginary kingdom, he placed it this time explicitly in the Balkans, calling it with perhaps unintentional humour Kravonia (meaning, in Bulgarian and Serbo-Croatian, the ‘Land o f Cows’).* Sophy o f Kravonia, which appeared in 1906, tells the story o f Sophy Grouch, an Essex servant girl whose face bears a rather unusual birthmark in the shape o f a red star. This red star, which shines when Sophy is excited or angry, leads H ope’s heroine through a series o f metamorphoses. Losing none o f her original naïveté and purity, Sophy becomes first Mademoiselle de Gruche in Paris, then Baroness Dobrava in Kravonia’s capital Slavna and, finally and briefly, the Queen o f Kravonia. At the end o f the novel, as the sovereign o f this small Balkan kingdom, the Essex girl leads a regiment from the mountainous region o f Volseni - loyal to the last, in keeping with the Romantic idea o f heroic mountaineers - in a brave attempt to defend the honour o f her murdered husband, King Sergius Stefanovics. In his Ruritanian novels, Hope treated the setting as almost incidental, providing only the barest detail needed to set a plausible stage for adventure. *

Hope might also have had in mind resonances o f the word ‘cravat’, the type o f nccktic originating in Croatia (from German ‘Krawat’, i.e. ‘C roat’).

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The Ruritanian cities o f Strelsau and Zenda are not really ‘site specific’ at all. Stripped down to their barest fairy-tale functions, they are no more connected to a particular region than are the locations in Cinderella. In the case o f Kravonia, however, Hope attempts to give a more precise topo­ graphy and a more specific feel to his imaginary kingdom. The book even provides a map o f the capital city on which Hope specifies S lavna’s geographical position on the River ‘Krath’, even if the city seems to consist o f only two streets named, not very imaginatively, the ‘Boulevard’ and the ‘Street o f the Fountain’, and offering little evidence o f research or a desire for ‘Balkan’ colour. (In a more recently created Balkan land, Evarchia, the setting o f Brigid Brophy’s novel Palace Without Chairs, the capital city, with its ‘Grand Boulevard’ and its ‘Ring Boulevard’, is imagined in a similarly sparse way. On the other hand, Malcolm Bradbury provides an intricate map, a detailed tourist guide and even a dictionary for the travellers to his Balkan republic o f Slaka.20) In his map o f the imaginary city o f Slavna, Hope depicts a strongly fortified town with an enormous square in its centre, the cathedral at one end and a large army barracks at the other. Without its Slavonic-sounding name, Slavna could represent any small capital on mainland Europe. Hope conjured up Kravonia without taking any obvious interest in the Balkans. In fact he visited the peninsula for the first time only in 1933, on a trip to Greece which took place a few months before his death. The images he offers therefore provide an indication o f the way an English person would have imagined the Balkans at the turn of the century. The main element of the cityscape intended to give Slavna its ‘Balkan’ flavour is Suleiman’s tower, a relic o f Turkish rule. In order to place Slavna more firmly in the Balkans, Hope also throws in some cheerful cartoon-like observations on the to w n ’s architecture and its citizens. The city is, he w rites, ‘not unpicturesque’: Time and the hand o f man (the people are a colour loving race) have given many tints, soft and bright, to the roofs, gables and walls o f the old quarter in the north town, over which Suleiman’s tower broods with an antique impressiveness. Behind the pleasant residences which border on the southern boulevard lie handsome streets o f commercial buildings and shops, these last glowing with diversified and gaudy colours . . . Through this square [of St Michael] and the streets leading to it from west and east there now runs an excellent service o f electric cars; but at the date with which we are concerned, a crazy fiacre or a crazier omnibus was the only public means o f conveyance. Not a few good private equipages were, however, to be seen, for the Kravonians have been from old lovers o f horses.21 K ra v o n ia is, I lope adds, a ‘ rich pastoral and agricultural co u n try’ w hich ‘ transacts a respectable export trade in hides and tim b e r’ .21 In another

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‘Balkan’ reference, on the occasion when Sophy Grouch is given an honorary appointment at the court, we learn that her annual salary is to be 10,000 paras. This was, as Hope may have known, a Serbian currency unit at the time. By inserting odd details o f this kind into his narrative, he presumably hoped to give his fictitious kingdom a greater degree o f ‘Balkan’ authen­ ticity, even if such information is completely redundant in terms o f plot development. Hope’s intended Slav identity for Kravonia is reflected mainly in his characters’ Slav names. Even those which are invented, are (to an English ear) Slav-sounding. Some Kravonians thus bear genuine (Serbian) names, for example, Stefanovics or Lukovich, while others have names which Hope probably invented, including Rastatz, Zerkovich, Vassip, Mistitch, Strekoff or Stenovics. Similarly, Kravonian topography is obviously meant to sound Slav. The name o f the capital city, Slavna, means ‘glorious’ in Serbo-Croat and Bulgarian, although this might be a coincidental result of a combination o f the words Slav (which may also have inspired Malcolm Bradbury’s Slaka) and Plevna (Pleven), a Bulgarian town well known in H ope’s time as the battlefield on which Russian and Romanian troops defeated the Ottomans after a long siege in 1878.* Kravonia represents a backdrop for the plot (Hope used to call his nov­ els o f this kind yarns) which, if not particularly Balkan in historical terms, is nevertheless very characteristic o f the royal romance with such a setting. It involves an English person who, owing to a set o f unusual circumstances, ascends the throne o f an imaginary Balkan kingdom. Although more intricately plotted than the Ruritanian novels, Sophy o f Kravonia failed to match the glamour and popular success o f Hope’s Ruritanian yarns. Many o f its readers apparently disliked Sophy’s unusual birthmark. Her gender and her humble background, although not commented on, might also have played a part in the novel’s lack o f success. Ruritanian adventures normally involved British aristocrats, or at least people o f gentle birth, better suited to the requirements o f both a Byronic role in the Balkans and life at court. Hope’s biographer, Charles Mallet, suggests another possible reason: by this time, ‘the creator o f Ruritania had already found so many imitators, that, when he again set out for those romantic kingdoms, his journeys could not have seemed so original as they once had been.’23 In the first decade o f this century the fiction inspired by Balkan royalty and politics was, in fact, reaching its zenith. From the fairy-tale simplicity o f Anthony Hope’s The Prisoner o f Zenda, the genre gradually evolved into novels with num erous characters, intricate settings and com plex *

Nowadays known as Pleven, but commemorated as Plevna in a number o f British street names o f the period, e.g. in Stamford Hill, the Isle o f Dogs and Hdmonton in London. Other streets commemorate its defender, Osman.

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political intrigues, drawing more and more closely upon Balkan-inspired political detail. Genre definitions reflect this move, as instead o f ‘yarns’ and ‘rom ances’, works now claimed to be ‘political rom ances’, ‘semihistorical’ and ‘historical rom ances’, or ‘true romances’. One o f the writers who followed in Anthony Hope’s footsteps was the best-selling Hilda Gregg (1868-1933), who wrote as Sydney C. Grier. Between 1894 and 1925, she published roughly a novel a year, with telling titles such as His Excellency's English Governess, Peace With Honour, The Prince o f the Captivity, The Great Proconsul, The Heir, A Royal Marriage and The Princess’s Tragedy. Grier published her first novel, In Furthest Ind, in 1894, the year which saw the publication o f The Prisoner o f Zenda. It seems very likely that H ope’s enormous success inspired her to write a similar novel herself. In her second novel, An Uncrowned King: A Romance o f High Politics, published in 1896, Grier turned to the Balkans for inspiration for her story o f an English aristocrat, Viscount Usk, Lord Caerleon. It was to be one o f her more successful books. Carleon is offered the crown o f the Kingdom o f Thracia (Grier uses the Latin name o f the eastern Balkan region o f Thrace for her imaginary land), by the Prime Minister, Monsieur Milos Drakovics. With his younger brother Cyril, Caerleon travels to the Balkans to decide whether to accept the offer. Before even reaching Thracia he manages to fall in love with an exotically named Russo-Irish girl, Nadia Mikhailovna O ’Malachy. Nadia, who bears many similarities to the devout Varenka o f Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (the connection is emphasised by the fact that N adia’s aunt, Princess Soudaroff, owns a yacht called Anna Karenina), is an ardent convert to evangelical Protestantism with a rather unusual family background. Her Roman Catholic father, ‘a fugitive Irish rebel o f 1848’,24 and her Orthodox (‘Scythian’) mother are, in fact, ‘well-known’ spies.* By pretending to seek a cure in one Balkan spa town or another, the couple gathers information and conspires on behalf o f Scythia, a powerful country with its capital in St Pavelsburg and an Orthodox emperor, easily re­ cognisable as Russia. (As with Thracia, Grier uses a historical Latin name for this imaginary great power.) Caerleon - or ‘Carlino’, as he becomes known in the Balkans - initially accepts the offer o f a throne. After a great deal o f peripeteia, involving, among other things, a number o f unsuccessful Thracian attempts to marry him to various young princesses, failed assassination bids and plots to prevent his coronation (including one in which the Thracian cathedral is burnt down just before the ceremony), a Scythian-sponsored coup finally brings a dénouement in the form o f Caerleon’s capture, after which the * One of the characters in Sumnjivo lice (The Suspect, 1888), a comedy by Serbia’s best-known playwright, Branislav NuSic, actually carries a business card with his profession (‘the district spy’) printed on it. In Serbia - he claims - he can find many more informers that way. Grier’s paradox is more likely to be unintentional.

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English lord, deposited at Malta, decides that a Balkan crown is not for him. He abandons the Thracian throne and marries Nadia, choosing to return to his estate and his parliam entary duties in Britain. His only expressed regret is that the temperance legislation he introduced in Thracia is bound not to remain in force for long! With two successful editions o f An Uncrowned King in the year after publication, it is hardly surprising that Grier soon decided to return to the Balkans. In A C row ned Queen\ The Romance o f a M inister o f State, published in 1898, she picks up the Thracian story, this time following the destiny o f Caerleon’s more adventurous younger brother Cyril, who remains in Thracia as an adviser to the Crown. The plot o f A Crowned Queen is, if anything, more complicated than that o f An Uncrowned King. It involves an intricate political power-play between Cyril and the Thracian Prime Minister Drakovics, with numerous intrigues spun by royal families from the neighbouring states. Central to the story, however, is the gradual develop­ ment o f a love affair between Cyril and the recently widowed Queen Ernestine o f ‘Sw artzw ald-M olzau’. The Queen and Cyril are thrown (literally) into each other’s arms in the second part o f the novel, when they are forced to elope and hide in the Thracian mountains in order to prevent a Scythian-sponsored plot by the Thracian Church leaders to convert the heir to the throne, young Prince Michael, to Orthodoxy. Although, under­ standably, most Thracians back the idea that the future king should belong to the same Church as his subjects (and in reality m ost o f the newly established Balkan monarchs converted to Orthodoxy), Cyril and the Queen regard this move as unthinkable. Grier’s novel portrays Orthodox Christ­ ianity as a primitive, barbaric religion, and Prince M ichael’s continuing loyalty to German Protestantism is shown to be preferable to a Balkan crown. The final instalments, The Kings o f the East: A Romance o f the Near Future (1900) and The Prince o f the Captivity. The Epilogue to a Romance (1902), continue Grier’s complex plot by involving the younger generation o f the Usk family in Balkan politics. The Kings o f the East extends its imaginary world to the Middle East to encompass clandestine Zionist activities in the Ottoman territories, while in The Prince o f the Captivity, young Usk - reflecting the changing spirit o f the era - falls in love with an American millionairess (‘The good American girl regards it as her mission these days to shore up the tottering British coronet with her dollars’).25 The cover o f the first edition o f The Prince o f the Captivity depicts the kingdom o f Thracia, under the Usk crown, as encompassing present-day Bosnia-Herzegovina, Montenegro, Albania, Bulgaria, parts o f Serbia and Romania, and northern Greece. In terms of plot, Grier’s Balkan novels are incomparably more complicated than Hope’s yarns. Elements o f Bulgarian history seem to have inspired the creation o f the Thracian kingdom, just as the Roman province o f Thracia, whose name Grier borrowed for her fictitious land, encompassed large

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parts o f present-day Bulgaria. Before the throne is offered to Caerleon, Grier’s Thracia is ruled by a royal house which is under such strong Scythian influence that all o f the highest posts in the country are filled by Scythians. Popular disaffection with this state o f affairs provokes a revolution and forces the abdication o f the ruling king. Historically, after 1878, Russia exerted a strong influence on Bulgaria, mainly through the army. The Bulgarian minister o f war, and all officers above the rank o f captain, were Russian (a situation described in G. B. Shaw’s^ rm s and the Man, discussed in the next chapter). This state o f affairs obtained until 1885 when, against Russian wishes, Bulgaria announced its unification with the neighbouring province o f Eastern Rumelia. In a subsequent army-sponsored plot, the Bulgarian Prince Alexander Battenberg was forced to sign his abdication and (after being practically kidnapped) escorted out o f the country. This military coup had little popular backing and was soon followed by a counter­ revolution whose leader, the politician Stefan Stambolov, invited the prince to return. This time, however, Alexander made the mistake o f showing subservience to Russia and, as a result o f popular pressure, was forced to abdicate again. The events were described in great detail in a historical novel by John Lawrence Lambe, By Com m and o f the Prince: A True Romance (1901). Lambe’s novel was, the Manchester Courier wrote, ‘as en th ra llin g as one o f the rom ances o f M r A nthony H o p e’, w hile representing, according to the Daily News, ‘a real and important contribution to the history o f the Balkan principalities’.26 Bulgaria’s break with Russia, writes Barbara Jelavich in her History o f the Balkans, marked a significant alteration in the balance o f power in the peninsula and the Black Sea region. The shift won the enthusiastic approval not only o f Great Britain, but also o f Austria-Hungary. Nevertheless, the Bulgarian leaders had a great deal o f difficulty in finding another prince. No power had officially recognized the new situation or wished to defy Russia openly on the issue. Finally, Ferdinand o f Saxe-Coburg accepted the office and became prince in August 1887.27 Some o f this turbulence finds distant echoes in Grier’s account o f Thracian history. In her portrayal o f the role o f the Thracian Prime Minister, Milos Drakovics (the ‘Kossuth o f the Balkans’), we recognise certain similarities with Stambolov (known as the ‘Balkan Bismarck’). The Bulgarian political leader was, in fact, brutally murdered by Macedonians in 1895, a year before G rier’s novel was published. It should be said, however, that similar patri­ archal, ‘father o f the nation’ figures also appear in other novels about fictitious Balkan kingdoms. They are typically westernised and Westerneducated, but also ‘oriental’, threatening and authoritarian. Examples include Hope’s General Stenovics, President o f the Council o f Ministers in Kravonia; Milosch Lazaricz in Moesia, from Dorothea Gerard’s The Red-Hot Crown;2* John Buchan’s Karolides in The Thirty-nine Steps and

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the Herzoslovakian Count Stylptitch (‘The Grand Old Man o f the Balkans. The Greatest Statesman o f Modern Times. The biggest villain unhung’), from Agatha Christie’s novel The Secret o f Chimneys.2'’ All o f them repre­ sent the real power behind the throne, the unseen force whose support the British hero has to win or conquer. While Bulgarian politics represented the main source o f inspiration for Grier, her imaginary Thracia also includes elements from other Balkan lands. Many o f the names she uses are Serbian: Danilovics, Mirkovics, Milenovics, and Pavlovics represent but a few examples; the ‘cs’ spelling o f the name-endings suggests - as with other British novelists o f the era that these names would have reached the authors through Hungarian sources. The Thracian Prime Minister, Milos Drakovics, bears the Christian name made famous by Milos Obilic, the knight glorified by Serbian epic poetry, who assassinated the Ottoman Sultan Murad at the Battle o f Kosovo in 1389, as well as by Milos Obrenovic, who ruled Serbia between 1815 and 1839. Interestingly, Dorothea Gerard chooses the same first name for her politician Milosch Lazaricz (here the surname Lazaricz might have been inspired by Prince Lazar, who commanded the Serbs in the same battle) in The Red-Hot Crown, analysed later in this chapter. Serbian epic p o etry , available in num erous English translations, seem s to have represented a source for the names o f many Balkan characters. Thus Gerard also has a General Brankovicz, probably named after another feudal lord, Vuk Brankovic, the Judas figure o f Serbian medieval epics, and, much later, a character called Brankovitch appears among the officials in Eric Ambler’s 1951 novel Judgement on Deltchev, set in an unnamed Communist state inspired by Bulgaria.30 If epic poetry offered one source o f suitable names for Balkan characters (the equivalent o f writing a novel set in modern G reece and nam ing the characters O dysseus, A chilles and H ector), newspapers seem to have offered another. Grier’s chief o f police Lyof Paschics, for exam ple, bears (with a first name which is an English transcription o f the Russian pronunciation o f the name Lev, that is, Leo — as, for example, in Tolstoy’s first name), the family surname o f Nikola Pasic, one o f Serbia’s most prominent politicians at the time o f the novel’s publication and later the country’s Prime Minister. Similar combinations o f relatively obvious sources, with a liberal dose o f linguistic invention, are used for the imaginary Balkan topography. Here, as with Hope’s name for Kravonia’s capital, Slavna, it is often possible only to guess the likely inspiration. The name o f G rier’s Thracian capital, Bellaviste, might have been inspired by the English name for the Serbian capital, Belgrade. Dorothea G erard’s Djakowar probably represents a variant German spelling o f Djakovo, a city in Croatia.* A number o f towns, *

Gladstone, among others, corresponded with the internationally known Roman Catholic Bishop o f Djakovo, Josif Strosmajcr.

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like G rier’s Kerajevo or Gerard’s Demlin and Lish, represent minimally altered names o f existing Balkan settlements - Sarajevo, Zemlin (the German name for Zemun, on the banks o f the Danube in Serbia) and NiS in south­ ern Serbia. In addition, many o f the toponyms encountered in these novels are, as mentioned earlier, actual Latin names for provinces and towns. Austria appears as Pannonia, and in the neighbourhood o f Thracia we find Moesia (Serbia), Dardania (covering parts o f Bulgaria and Greece) and Magnagraecia. Other toponyms are similarly (and probably deliberately) unimaginative. With its capital in Czarigrad (the city o f the Czars - the Slavonic name for Constantinople) and a Grand ‘Signior’ for a ruler, the land o f Roum - itself the Ottoman name for Europe - obviously represents the Ottoman Empire.* If Bulgaria’s history provided inspiration, Grier’s Thracians seem in character closer to Romanians. Like the Romanians, although largely surrounded by Slavs, her Thracians are a Latin nation, and therefore allegedly - ‘truly European’. The stereotype o f Slavs as a non-European, Asian people, commonly expressed in contemporary British writing about Russia, appears in the words Grier attributes to the Thracian Prime Minister, Drakovics: ‘Thracia is the nation o f the future in Eastern Europe. We are the only truly European race south o f the Carpathians. The Moesians are Slavs, the Dardanians half Roumis. Our blood is chiefly Latin, with a large Teutonic admixture. Our very language is far more nearly akin to the Italian than to the Slavonic.’ ‘And yet your own name is Slavonic?’ suggested Usk. ‘Most o f our names are, just as in religion we belong to the Orthodox church. It is the result o f our isolation, hemmed as we are by Slav races. But our aspirations are wholly Western, and the national hatred o f Scythia, our Great Slav neighbour, is perfect passion.’ ‘That was the cause o f your revolution, w asn’t it?’ asked Usk. ‘We are generally rather misty about your politics here, I am afraid, but that seems to have penetrated into most people’s minds.’31 By the time she started working on the sequel, A Crowned Queen, Grier seems to have forgotten about this animosity towards Scythia among the Thracians. In her second Balkan novel Scythia has wide popular support, and the Thracian Church is dominated by Scythians. It would be a mistake to look for historical accuracy or consistency in Grier’s romances. In spite o f a much greater wealth o f historical and geo­ graphical detail, they still have the fairy-tale unreality characteristic o f Anthony Hope’s yarns. Grier’s imaginary landscapes with Germanic castles *

Roum, the Turkish name for Europe, derived from the mime o f the Roman Empire.

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sitting on top o f high mountains are more akin to something from the pages o f the brothers Grimm than to any Balkan reality, and her attempts at giving Thracia local colour rely mainly - like H ope’s - on vague descriptions o f the Thracian peasantry: As they walked on, they gained a closer view o f the Thracians, a body o f tall, lithe, dark-skinned men, tall and footsore, wearing ragged clothes that had once been gaily coloured, shirts that had once been white, and great leather boots. They slackened their pace as they approached the strangers, and one man, who seemed to be the leader o f the party, addressed Nadia in broken German.12 Such descriptions o f Balkan peasantry are a ubiquitous feature o f these escapist romances. Peasants normally represent little more than cardboard cut-outs, an element o f the scenery which contributes to local colour. They are both defined by and limited to an exotic, gaudily coloured costume worn as the emblem o f their Balkanness. Such costumes are also frequently worn by fictional Balkan monarchs, particularly at the moment when they are about to capture an English heart. The mixture o f ‘European’ manners and an alien appearance seems to act as an aphrodisiac. When, for the first time, Sophy Grouch set eyes on Sergius Stefanovics, Hope writes: He wore a costum e strange to her eyes - a black sheepskin cap, a sheepskin tunic, leather breeches, and high unpolished boots - a rough plain dress; yet a broad red ribbon crossed it, and a star glittered on the breast; the only weapon was a short, curved scimitar. It was the ancient costume o f the Bailiff o f Volseni, the head o f that clan o f shepherds who pastured their flocks on the uplands. The Prince o f Slavna held the venerable office, and had been to court in the dress appropriate to it.33 In Grier’s novel A Crowned Queen, Queen Ernestine appears wearing an equally luxurious version o f a fanciful Balkan costume: Excitement had given her a brighter colour than usual, and her slight form showed to advantage in the velvet pelisse with hanging sleeves, opening in front over a silken under-dress, with which the faithful Anna had provided her. Her chestnut hair hung in long braids from under a velvet cap studded with gold coins.34 Just as Sergius Stefanovics wore the costume o f a clan o f upland shepherds, G rier’s Queen is forced to wear Thracian national costume in order to seek refuge in the city o f Mikhailoslav, the home o f the old Prince Mirkovics and his proud mountain clans. This points to another characteristic inherited from the Romantic vision o f the Balkans in that many o f the imaginary kingdoms seem to include a far-away isolated corner - a Ruritania within Ruritania - peopled by noble and honourable ‘clansm en’, preferably mountaineers, who remain loyal to

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their monarchs even when the more opportunistic people in the cities of the plains are ready to abandon them. In Sophy o f Kravonia, for example, Hope’s proud mountaineers remain devoted to their Queen Sophy when the civil war splits the country. ‘If Sophy had bidden them, they would have streamed down on Slavna that night in one o f those fierce raids in which their forefathers o f the Middle Ages had loved to swoop on the plain.’35 In Lawrence Durrell’s diplomatic sketches, discussed in the chapter devoted to comic fiction, this kind o f imagery has descended into farce, with the capital changing hands weekly. Although the equation between the cities o f the plain and corruption predates Romanticism (Sodom and Gomorrah are much earlier examples o f such perceptions), the Romantic longing for pre-industrial, unpolluted landscapes would have reinforced the idea o f the mountain as a ‘pure’ and indeed ‘holy’ place - the privileged site o f revelation - and created the perception o f mountaineers as naturally ‘noble’. The historical prototypes o f the brave Balkan mountaineers are, o f course, the Montenegrins, as described by Tennyson or Gladstone in the works analysed in the previous chapter. Such is the power o f the Montenegrin legend that even the 1997 edition o f the Times Guide to the Peoples o f Europe described them as ‘a strong, wiry, mountain people and, unlike the Serbs, conspicuously tali’, adding that ‘M ontenegrins are renowned as fig h ters’ (other nations are depicted in straightforw ard political and historical rather than poetic terms).36 Grier’s portrait o f Prince Mirkovics (itself a Montenegrin name), seated on the raised terrace before his house surrounded by the older members o f his clan, ‘smoking, drinking coffee and talking’ as he watches ‘the evolutions o f his mounted retainers, who were going through a primitive form of drill, such as had no doubt preceded the operations against Roum in the war o f independence’,37 brings to mind descriptions o f Prince (later King) Nicholas o f Montenegro from the British travel literature and histories available at the turn o f the century - including, for example, William Denton’s Montenegro: its People and their History (1877). Prince Nicholas, whose father was Prince Mirko - described by Denton as ‘Grand Voivode Mirko . . . the very beau-idéal o f Montenegrin chivalry’38 - might easily have inspired Grier’s portrayal of Prince Mirkovics. Emmet B. Ford’s article, ‘Montenegro in the Eyes o f the English Travellers 1840-1914’ refers to a whole range of similar descriptions o f Montenegrins. Major Percy E. Henderson, Tate o f the Indian A rm y’, in his book entitled An English Officer in the Balkans (1909) writes, for example, that ‘the land is yet unspoilt by civilisation; it is free from social evil, and contains neither thieves, nor money-lenders, and is not yet darkened by the shadow o f the Israelite.’39 A lth o u g h G rie r’ s novels generally display greater attention to historical detail than A n th o n y H o p e ’ s, this does not necessarily mean that they are

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more interesting to read. Hope’s narrator in The Prisoner ofZenda expresses a determination to steer ‘between the Scylla o f dullness and the Charybdis o f indiscretion’, confining him self‘strictly to the underground drama which was being played beneath the surface o f Ruritanian politics’.40 With their plots much more important than the setting, Hope’s yarns usually involve a relatively simple story, a comparatively small number of characters and the barest minimum o f historical background. Grier’s Thracia is painted on a wider and much more detailed canvas, with literally dozens o f characters involving not one but several royal families, politicians, army officers, bishops, and a whole host o f faithful and less faithful servants. O ffering a greater wealth o f detail, Grier also reveals deep-seated personal prejudices. She never wastes an opportunity to expose the primitive ‘oriental’ fanaticism o f the Orthodox hierarchy in Thracia and, in an echo o f Byron’s ‘half-barbaric Moscow’s minarets’ which perhaps owes much to her low-churchmanship,41 views Orthodox Christianity as an exotic and barbaric religion. Among several Orthodox bishops mentioned in the plot, the only positive character is Andreas, who is generally very unpopular among the clergy: and more especially among the less educated and more fanatic portion o f them, owing to his liberal views, which were evidenced not only by his attempt to protect the persecuted Jews in his diocese, but also by his refusal to curse the emissaries o f an English society who had been discovered selling bibles in Kerajevo.42 Seeking to expose the anti-Jewish attitudes o f the Thracians in the episode involving the pogrom in Kerajevo, Grier reveals her distaste for both sides in the unhappy affair. The Thracians are depicted as the ‘lowest rabble o f the tow n’, their ‘bloodstained weapons contrasted painfully with the gay stuffs and embroideries with which some o f them were decorated’.43 The expelled Jews, with the ‘long black kaftans and greasy ringlets o f the men, the fuzzy wigs and occasional gleaming jewels of the wom en’, are hardly described with the kind of sympathy one might expect for victims o f horrific persecution. In a scene following the pogrom, they are too scared o f Cyril to offer him hospitality in their forest hide-out. The Englishman gallantly opines: N one knew better than he that among the Jews, as among people o f other nationalities, good and bad are mixed together, and it was, to say the least, unlikely that every member o f this banished community should be o f the former description.44 If Grier remains equivocal in her portrayal o f the Jews in the pogrom scenes, her shadowy financier, Chevalier Goldberg, whom Cyril meets in Vienna in order to borrow some money for the Thracian election campaign, represents an anti-Semitic caricature. In a telling gesture, Cyril introduces

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himself to Goldberg as ‘I/ory White, Esq., o f Lowburn, Homeshire, England’. Throughout their conversation, Chevalier Goldberg’s comments are recorded in phrases such as: ‘1 siid if you hed defoted yourself to de high finence instead o ff politics, yoi would be wordy to belonk to de N ation.’45* In fact, like Balkan peasants, Grier’s Jewish characters seem intended to add exotic dimensioi to these ‘cosmopolitan’ novels which are written with an unflagging con/iction o f British superiority and no great feelings o f sympathy for any ‘continentals’, least o f all the Balkan peoples. The picturesque mixtures ofnations and races, the dramatic, often bloody events that constitute her plos - kidnappings, murders, coups d ’etat, and the endless ‘B alkan’ teetering on the brink o f a major war, are meant to contribute to the exotic excitement o f Grier’s imaginary world. They remain no m ore than a blazing backdrop to her royal romances - the only element o f her novel with any emotional depth. The Balkan settings )f Hope’s and Grier’s romances are, in this context, relevant only in so far a they offer a suitable locale for the plots which, on one hand, exploit the glamour o f royalty through their Cinderella-like m essage that any Britiih person - a relatively unknown British peer, an Essex maid - can be closen to rule a Balkan country, while on the other breaking the sexual ard other taboos associated with representations o f royal figures. This comlination o f wish-fulfilment and transgression proved enduringly popular, as the number o f H ope’s and Grier’s successors and imitators demonstrates An interesting combination o f similar influences is found in F. O. H. Nash’s juvenile novel, Kattie o f the Balkans (1931),46 which intertwines Hope’s idea o f ‘doubles’ with G rier’s dramatic kid­ napping plots. It is a sory o f 13-year-old Kattie, a boarder at St Cecilia School in the fictitious Cranstone-on-Sea, who is - in fact - Ekaterina Ilieff, a daughter o f ‘Rudolf the Fifth’, a deposed ruler o f ‘Silaria’, a country loosely based on Bulga-ia. A bungled kidnapping, in which Kattie’s friend Bunnie (also known as Priscilla Cooter, a fearless Girl Guide) ends up in the Silarian capital D nvna instead o f her royal friend, ultimately leads to Kattie’s reinstatement on the Silarian throne as Ekaterina the Second. Novels o f this kind continued to exploit the rather unroyal treatment o f Balkan monarchs. In H03, the real life and spectacularly brutal murder of the Serbian King and Queen which was given massive, highly graphic news­ paper coverage in the West, was to break the ultimate royal taboo. This produced a wave o f novels which cashed in on the frisson o f horror produced by the regicide. Most ofthese novels, from Nellie Blissett’s Bindweed {1904) to Agatha Christie’s The Secret o f Chimneys (1925) - as the analysis o f some o f the more popular examples will endeavour to show - promised much more than they delivered. The dust-jackets shouted ‘regicide’, but instead *

T he E nglish gentlem an, G rier im plies, is cap ah lc o f an y th in g . O nly disinclination holds Mm back from commercial triumph.

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o f the gory and horrific details this implied, popular authors continued to deliver old-fashioned Ruritanian romance. A romantic love story represents the most important aspect o f Dorothea Gerard’s ‘semi-historical’ novel The Red-Hot Crown, defined as a ‘political rom ance’ and published in 1909. Its imaginary setting, the kingdom o f M oesia (the name o f a Roman province roughly equivalent to present-day Serbia) bears many direct historical connections with Serbia. It is evident that the writer had a much closer personal knowledge o f the Balkans than the other creators o f im aginary Balkan kingdom s in popular English literature. D orothea G erard (1855-1915), who was born in Lanarkshire and educated at a convent in the Austrian town o f Graz, married, in 1886, Julius Longard de Longgarde, an officer in the Austro-Hungarian army.47 Her elder sister Jane Emily (1849-1905), also a writer, was married to an officer in the same army, Chevalier Miecislas de Laszowski. Both sisters spent considerable periods o f their lives in the remoter outposts o f the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Jane Emily lived in Galicia (now in southern Poland) and then in Transylvania (now part of Romania) and died in Vienna. Her ‘Transylvanian Superstitions’, published in the Nineteenth Century in 1885 and subsequently expanded into a two-volume memoir of Transylvania, The Land Beyond the Forest (1888), was - as described in the analysis o f Dracula later in this chapter - one o f the main sources for Bram Stoker’s novel. Dorothea started her married life in Galicia and then moved to the Austrian capital. The sisters wrote many novels whose intricate romantic plots were informed by their experiences o f Eastern Europe and the Austrian nobility. They collaborated on four titles and occasionally included each other’s characters in their individual works. The Saturday Review, referring to one o f their joint efforts signed ‘E. D. Gerard’, called them ‘one o f the most fascinating o f our lady novelists’. While, in addition to fiction, Emily wrote a great deal o f autobiographical prose and literary criticism, Dorothea was more prolific as a novelist. Nearly forty novels listed in her bibliography reflect in their titles a mixture of romance and a typically Victorian preoccupation with personal morality (A Forgotten Sin, A Spotless Reputation, Etelka's Vow, Holy Matrimony, The Eternal Woman, etc.). The Red-Hot Crown was loosely inspired by the assassination o f the King and Queen o f Serbia, which had taken place in Belgrade in 1903. King Alexander Obrenovic, never particularly popular with the Serbs, caused a scandal by marrying Draga Masin, an officer’s widow. Draga, who had previously been the King’s mistress, was lady-inwaiting to Alexander’s mother, was nine years older than Alexander, and had a reputation deemed scandalous by the patriarchal standards o f Serbian society. Her personal status did not improve when, after her marriage to Alexander, her numerous relations became involved in Serbian public

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affairs, confirming in the eyes o f Alexander’s subjects his weakness both as a m an and as a ruler. A clandestine organisation named the Black Hand, w hich involved m ore than a hundred arm y officers, carried out the assassination o f the King, the Queen, their Minister o f War and the Q ueen’s two brothers at what is now the Old Palace in central Belgrade in June 1903.* Having been hunted down and killed in a wardrobe, the bodies o f the King and Queen were thrown through the palace window onto the street. The event caused profound shock in Europe. H. H. Munro (Saki), who was in Sofia, the capital o f neighbouring Bulgaria, in 1903 - as the correspondent o f the M orning P o s t- took the evening train to Belgrade on the day o f the assassination, ‘looking out at station after station across the Serbian lowlands for signs o f lamentation . . . There were none. There was not even evidence o f any unusual stirring.’48 Saki wandered through the streets o f Belgrade to the Royal Palace, seeing, as he recorded in his dispatch published in the M orning Post on 13 June 1903, Serbian soldiers from whose helmets ‘the cockades bearing the initial A were torn and replaced by sprigs o f roses.’ He commented: History will concern itself with the yea and the nay o f the fallen dynasty, with its hapless marriages and its coups d ’état, and sentiment will be busy with the contemplation o f its vicissitudes and its fatal catastrophe. Here, face to face with tragedy, it behoves neither to blame nor to pity. The issue was a domestic one, and lay between the Servian people and the Servian ruling family. But above all other reflections stands the horror o f that final loneliness in the dark Palace, when amid the crashing uproar o f forced-in doors the hunted couple sought in room after room for succour or safety and found only desertion and enemies.49 In Britain, which broke off diplomatic relations with Serbia, insisting that the officers responsible for the assassination be dismissed from the army (although on the outbreak o f the First World War, only eleven years later, the virtues and valour o f the Serbs were to be extolled by the British), the regicide inspired a number o f stories, novels and plays. They range from the historical novel Bindweed, written by Nellie Blissett in the year after the assassination, to works more or less loosely inspired by the same events, such as Saki’s own play The Death-Trap, set in the fictitious state o f Kedaria and describing an attempt to poison the Kedarian Prince Dimitri, or Agatha Christie’s novel The Secret o f Chimneys, in which a clandestine

The Black Hand remained an active force in Serbia’s political and military life, playing a key role in the conspiracy w hich led to A rchduke Ferdinand’s assassination in 1914. It was finally eliminated by the rival, royal-led White I land: a good example o f how Halknn reality lent itself to the development o f talcs o f intrigue.

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Herzoslovakian organisation, the Red Hand, is involved in the murder of several crowned heads.50 Dorothea Gerard’s romance, The Red-Hot Crown, describes the assass­ ination o f King Hilarion and Queen Febronia in the imaginary Balkan kingdom o f Moesia. In her preface to The Red-Hot Crown, Gerard stresses: In case - as is probable - points o f resemblance should be discovered between the ‘plot’ o f this story and certain modern political events, it is as well to point out that - while unable to deny its source o f inspiration The Red-Hot Crown not only calls itself, but is a political romance, laying no claim whatever to historical exactitude or to correctness o f personal nature.51 Although it begins with regicide, Gerard’s novel primarily concerns itself with an exotic love story. Unlike Hope’s and Grier’s novels, The Red-Hot Crown has no English ‘king’, but with an English-educated and Anglophile young prince as the main hero, England still plays an overwhelmingly im portant part in the story. Prince Marzian is, in a sense, a substitute Englishman, as can be witnessed in his reaction to the assassination of Hilarion and Febronia: M arzian broke o ff with another visible shudder. It was his English education which was at work now, raising his blood in indignation at the absence o f ‘fair play’, and reducing him for the moment to a condition o f frank disgust. Prince Bazyl, who had not enjoyed the advantages, or disadvantages, o f that education, and in whom the Moesian was therefore less adulterated by Western elements, seemed better able, now that he had recovered from the first shock o f horror, to take a dispassionate view o f the case.52 While focusing on a brief Moesian interlude in M arzian’s life, Gerard’s novel in fact begins and ends in England. It opens in London, in an artist’s studio in which Prince Bazyl Kornelowitz, exiled from his native Moesia, spends his time sculpting busts o f great Moesian heroes o f the past. Bazyl’s young son Marzian reads a newspaper article about Moesia and his angry com m ent instantly reveals the elements o f Serbian history in G erard’s creation: I am just a Moesian; and to see our country made a mess by an adventurer is more than I can stand. What can that harebrained Hilarion be thinking o f - he and his famous Queen Febronia! Even to marry her was a treason to the nation.53 Marzian goes on to express his bitterness about the unforgivable extra­ vagance o f Febronia, who is here - for greater emphasis - depicted as a former governess rather than the ex-lady-in-waiting o f historical reality, while Moesian peasants are starving and ‘the army going to wreck’. His

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father, a scion o f the exiled Kornelowitz dynasty, would be able to do much more for Moesia, Marzian believes. The position outlined in the opening scenes o f The Red-Hot Crown mirrors, in essence, the situation in Serbia, where two native dynasties the O brenovics and the K arageorgevichs - com peted for power. The K arageorgevichs rem ained in exile until 1903, when, follow ing the assassination o f Alexander Obrenovic, King Peter Karageorgevich returned to Belgrade. In The Red-Hot Crown, the assassination o f Hilarion and Febronia by conspirators from within the M oesian army is sim ilarly followed by an invitation to Bazyl Kornelowitz to take over the throne of the Balkan kingdom. However, similarities with Serbian history more or less stop at the moment when, early on in the novel, Bazyl and Marzian reach the capital o f Moesia, Djakowar. At that point, Gerard’s novel largely abandons the world o f Balkan politics in favour o f a romantic story about M arzian’s love for Yella, a modest daughter o f a proud and honest army officer forced to retire because o f his opposition to regicide. By giving central space in this allegedly political romance to a love story, Gerard follows earlier popular romantic novelists in delivering rather less than the novel promises. Hope’s narrator in The Prisoner o f Zenda, Rudolf Rassendyll, similarly excites the imagination by claiming that the secrets he learned in Ruritania ‘might prove o f interest to the statesmen o f Europe’,54 but the ‘dram a’ he reveals beneath the surface o f Ruritanian politics centres on the somewhat unfortunate fact that he fell in love with a princess while impersonating her fiancé. In the romances set in imaginary Balkan kingdoms, the fictional Balkan monarchs share the ambiguous narrative roles o f princes and princesses in a fairy tale. They add the glamour o f monarchy to otherwise simple love stories, while, paradoxically, being able to behave like any ordinary person. They escape their palaces at will, meet their subjects unrecognised, and disguise themselves to play the most unlikely roles. The fairy-tale simplicity o f travel and the accessibility o f the royal palaces undermine these novels’ ambitious claims to historicity and political complexity. In a similar way, their attempt to create a ‘Balkan’ locale, particularly in the case o f Hope’s Kravonia and Grier’s Thracia, is backed by very little in terms o f any specific descriptions. The cities are all pretty and picturesque (the latter adjective is typically used to construe almost single-handedly a colourful ‘Balkan’ backdrop), the mountains high, the lakes sparkling, the forests thick, the villages usually simply ‘little’. For the writers o f romances, the Balkans remained one o f the few parts o f Europe which could still successfully function as the fairy-tale land ‘beyond the seven mountains and the seven seas’, the ‘unspoilt’, pre-industrial, Romantic landscape. Dorothea Gerard’s work sticks somewhat more closely to its alleged geographical framework. Most countries in her story, with the exception o f England which appears under its own name and the Ottoman Empire

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which hides under the thin disguise of ‘Sultania’, are named after big rivers, in a sequence o f riparian metonymies: Austria appears as Danubia (after the river Danube), Russia as Moscovia (after the river and the city o f Moscow), Romania as Mlavia (after the M lava river in eastern Serbia?) and Bosnia-Herzegovina is Drynia (the River Drina runs along much o f its border with Serbia). The position o f the M oesian capital, Djakowar, corresponds to that o f Belgrade at the time. The border between Serbia and Austria-Hungary was on the Danube, and Grier’s Moesian Djakowar faces the Danubian Demlin, just as the Serbian capital Belgrade faced the Austro-Hungarian city o f Zemlin (now Zemun) across the River Sava, at its confluence with the Danube. Foreshadowing the conflict between Austria and Serbia which was to cause the First World War, Gerard writes: His eyes darkened as he gazed, for that was Demlin, the most advanced post o f Danubia, crouching beside the w ater’s edge as though for a spring, her many windows struck just now by the setting sun, glaring like so many eyes at her hereditary foe across the water, the white o f her walls as conspicuous in this light as though she were showing her teeth at Djakowar, who showed hers back again - or as many as she possessed. With only the breadth o f the river between them the two cities lay and m easured each other - near neighbours and official friends - so f a r - y e t each with the mouths o f its cannons carefully directed to the opposite bank. Would the day ever come when these would boom across in something beyond salutes? That was what Marzian asked him self as he gazed.55 Such a day, o f course, came in the summer o f 1914, five years after the publication o f Gerard’s novel, when the first shots o f the Great War were fired by Austrian river monitors towards Belgrade. The Red-Hot Crown offers an interesting alternative history to the origins o f the First World War. Writing in 1909, Gerard is clearly aware o f the smouldering crises and possible flashpoints between Austria-Hungary and the kingdom o f Serbia, although, in spite o f her somewhat patronising sympathy for the small Balkan nations, as an Austrian officer’s wife she cannot conceive o f the possibility that such a conflict could bring down the Habsburg Empire. Her novel can be read as a pro-Austrian alternative scenario to the real crisis o f 1914. In The Red-Hot Crown, the complex issue o f the Austrian annexation o f Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1908 features in the plot. The crisis which smoulders in the neighbouring province o f ‘Drynia’ (i.e. BosniaHerzegovina) is introduced as a dramatic backdrop to Marzian and Y ella’s romance. While the young prince rows along the river: his eyes strayed more than once resentfully across the wide bank, which was no longer Moesian, since the frontier o f the mightiest o f Moesian neighbours - the proud Danubia - marched with the river. It was she who held in her clutches the rich province o f Drynia, which, although

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nominally still a portion o f the decrepit state o f Sultania, had been under her care for thirty years past, Europe having been naïve enough to give her mandate o f occupation. Unjust, as well as naïve, since, granted that the condition o f D rynia had cried for reform s, where find a more accredited reformer than Moesia, under whose sceptre, in the country’s era o f glory, Drynia had actually stood, whose inhabitants were brothers in blood, speakers in the same tongue and bearers o f the same traditions.56 The excerpt describes, with relative accuracy, the situation in BosniaH erzegovina, which, follow ing the revolt o f its then largely Serbian population in 1875, was ruled by Austria-Hungary, although still nominally part o f the Ottoman Empire. At the Congress o f Berlin in June 1878, in order to balance Russia’s influence in newly autonomous Bulgaria, AustriaH ungary receiv ed the right to occupy and ad m in ister B osnia and Herzegovina.57 Thirty years later, in 1908, Austria outmanoeuvred Russia and formally annexed the territories. Writing in the immediate aftermath o f the annexation crisis which turned out to be one o f the great diplomatic milestones which marked the road to war in 1914, Gerard scripts the story o f a future Austrian (‘Danubian’) success. The pro-Moesian feelings in Drynia do not prevent Danubia from acting decisively in the aftermath o f the annexation: The days that followed were golden days for all the journalists o f Europe. Danubia’s coup had proved a bomb. Not that any o f the ‘Powers’, now showering invectives upon the head o f the annexing empire, wanted Drynia for itself, but that the dog-in-the-manger policy is among the most ancient traditions o f diplomacy.58 Danubia, that is, Austria-Hungary, to which Gerard refers as ‘a mighty but somewhat sleepy monarchy o f an almost grandmotherly type’,59 is, she writes, verbally attacked by other great powers for being the ‘chum o f the bully of Europe’, the land o f ‘Alem ania’.60 The European powers foster Moesian indignation for their own political aims. Among the loudest is ‘Moscovia’ (Russia), ‘the traditional patron and traditional betrayer of small Eastern states’: Golden days were these for the journalists. Barely could the columns o f a normal daily hold the rich store o f news - whether authentic or not w as o f little consequence - w hich the hum m ing w ires brought. Assertions and contradictions held about equal balance. There was going to be a Peace Conference; there was not going to be anything o f the sort; it was going to be held in London, in Madrid, in Timbuctoo. Danubia was ready to hand back Drynia with apologies. Danubia was sitting upon Drynia like a tiger upon its prey. A Danubian infantry regiment had entered Moesia disguised as shepherds; twenty Moesian spies had been arrested on Danubian ground; thirty Danubian deserters had swum across the river from Demlin to Djukowar.61

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In Gerard’s account, in spite o f all protestations, the great powers stand by as the Danubian army advances through the Moesian capital, forcing the Moesians to withdraw south to Krassotyn and Lish - the Serbian towns o f Kragujevac and N i l (Historically, during the Austrian and German push south in 1914-15, Nis became Serbia’s temporary capital.) After a fortnight’s campaign, the ‘troublesome Moesia’ disappears from the map o f Europe to everyone’s pleasure. Even the heir to the Moesian throne finds consolation in such an outcome - no longer the future king, he is able to marry Yella and return to his beloved England: Far away, in an English home, Prince Marzian Komelowitz, an exile once more, will always carry in his heart the wound o f his country’s fate; but it is a wound upon which lies the balm o f love, for to him the loss o f a throne had not been without compensations.62* Agatha Christie’s novel The Secret o f Chimneys, published in 1925, relies upon a similar mixture o f romance and semi-fictitious Balkan history. The regicide in Christie’s imaginary land o f Herzoslovakia, which sets in motion the train o f events leading to a dénouement in Lord Caterham’s country seat at Chimneys, is obviously inspired by the events o f 1903 in Serbia. The assassinated Queen becomes, in Christie’s novel, ‘some little guttersnipe o f a music-hall artiste in Paris - not even suitable for a morganatic alliance’ : But Nicholas had a frightful crush on her, and she was all out for being a queen. Sounds fantastic, but they managed it somehow. Called her the Countess Popoffsky, or something, and pretended that she had Romanoff blood in her veins. Nicholas married her in the cathedral at Ekarest with a couple o f unwilling archbishops to do the job, and she was crowned as Queen Varaga. Nicholas squared his m inisters. . . but he forgot to reckon w ith the populace. They are very aristocratic and reactionary in Herzoslovakia. They like their kings and queens to be the genuine ar­ ticle. There were mutterings and discontent and the usual ruthless sup­ pressions, and the final uprising which stormed the palace, murdered the King and Queen, and proclaimed a republic.63 Christie’s story o f regicide involves the Comrades o f the Red Hand, a direct reference to the Black Hand organisation which plotted the assassination o f the royal couple in Serbia. Starting from the assassination o f Nicholas and Varaga, Christie develops a sinister international web o f conspiracy and theft which has very little to do with Balkan history. The plot finally becomes a Ruritanian story in reverse, when Anthony Cade, until that *

O f course, in contrast to G erard’s idealised Austrophile version, the real-life attempt to swallow Serbia in 1914 was to cause Austria-Hungary to choke to death. Nonetheless her novel evinces the thinking which made Vienna believe that 8 short campaign would solve the South Slav problem.

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moment the perfect English gentleman, reveals him self (in a picturesque mixture o f Slav and Germanic names) to be Nicholas Alexander Sergius Ferdinand Obolovitch, the heir to the Herzoslovakian throne. Like other ‘Ruritanian’ yams, Christie’s detective story ends romantically with the marriage o f the Herzoslovakian ruler and Victoria Revel, the beautiful widow o f an English diplomat. ‘It is not, like Anthony Hope’s The Prisoner ofZenda, an adventure-romance but a comedy adventure, which is perhaps a new category,’ writes Charles Osborne in The Life and Crimes o f Agatha Christie, acknowledging Christie’s debt to ‘the Ruritanian world . . . for its plot is concerned with political events in the fictitious small Balkan state o f Herzoslovakia, the character o f whose people appears to be o f an almost Montenegran fierceness ’.64 In the novels o f Hope, Grier and Gerard, the Balkans are shown as particularly suitable for this kind o f escapism because, however far-away and exotic the fictitious lands are portrayed as being, they still represent a recognisably European part o f the world. (‘One hears o f a few fellows who have been made kings in the Cannibal Islands, or Central Africa; but it is not often that one gets the chance o f a properly organised European kingdom. It is not half a bad idea,’ concludes Cyril in An Uncrowned King.)bS Thus, while almost any kind o f assassination plot or coup d'état can be plausibly staged in such a place (‘People in England expect that sort o f thing from the Balkans. I don’t know why they should but they do,’ explains Anthony Cade),66the pairing o f a Balkan prince or princess with an English person - in spite o f an occasional anachronistic protestation - does not seem to break contemporary racial or religious taboos. In fact, the novels show English men and women to be ideal partners for Balkan monarchs: The B aron retreated a step or tw o. D ism ay overspread his countenance. ‘Something wrong I knew there would be,’ he boomed. ‘Merciful God in heaven! He has married a black woman in Africa!’ ‘Come, come, it’s not so bad as all that,’ said Anthony laughing. ‘She’s white enough - white all through, bless her.’ ‘Good. A respectable morganatic affair it can be, then.’ ‘Not a bit o f it. She’s to play Queen to my King. It’s no use shaking your head. She’s fully qualified for the post. She’s the daughter o f an English peer who dates back to the time o f the Conqueror. It’s very fashionable just now for royalties to marry into the aristocracy - and she knows something o f Herzoslovakia.’67 It should be stressed, however, that the fictitious Balkan monarchs (Sergius Stefanovics, Marzian Kornelowitz, Nicholas Obolovitch, Paul d'Arenzano, etc.) are frequently portrayed as substitute English gentlemen. With an English education or, if that is lacking, at least an English tutor (in Bryant and M cAnally’s The ( 'hronlcles o f a Great Prince, I lenry Carfax is

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‘responsible for the building up o f the character o f Paul d ’Arenzano’),68 they embody the ‘English’ notions o f chivalry and fair play, and they are Christians. Christie’s Nicholas Obolovitch is, for example, portrayed as much less alien among the British than the (British) City financier, Herman Isaacstein. An anti-Semitic stereotype o f a Jewish financier, like Grier’s Chevalier Goldberg, Isaacstein may dress like a perfect gentleman, but he remains recognisably ‘different’: There was one other person in the room, a big man sitting in a chair by the fireplace. He was dressed in very correct English shooting clothes which nevertheless sat strangely upon him. He had a fat yellow face, and black eyes, as impenetrable as those o f a cobra. There was a generous curve to the big nose and power in the square lines o f the vast jaw .69* ‘Familiarly outlandish’, in H. H. M unro’s phrase, Balkan kingdoms thus held a double attraction for English writers o f escapist fiction: like the colonies, they offered exotic, ‘blazing’ colours, but, unlike them, they promised both power and romantic love. It is love, it should be said, on English terms: an English hero may be thrown, like Caerleon, Cyril or Rudolf, into the depths o f passion and risk life for Kravonia, Thracia or Ruritania, but he still preserves a sense o f superiority, ‘an Englishman’s wonder’, at the way Balkan countries manage their affairs. Popular novels set in fictitious Balkan kingdoms contrast ‘Englishness’ and ‘Europeanness’, as well as ‘Englishness’ and ‘Balkanness’. To be English means to be superior to both, as ‘Balkanness’ is shown to be only the most extreme, often childish, form o f European ‘O therness’. Thus, even the lowliest English gentleman is generally better at performing royal duties than other Europeans, and, as Anthony Hope shows, better even than those w ho were born into non-English royal families. English aristocratic credentials are superior to those o f the Europeans, as, among others, Grier’s Thracian Prime Minister reluctantly asserts: ‘It is the boast o f you English nobles that you are on a level with any o f the princely houses on the Continent that are not absolutely royal,’ said M. Drakovics, ‘and you are far richer.’70 The main advantage o f wearing a Balkan crown for young Marzian Kornelowitz in Gerard’s The Red-Hot Crown lies in the fact that he ‘should be able to claim comradeship even with King Edward’.71 In G rier’s novel An Uncrowned King, Viscount Usk is warned that, as a King o f Thracia, he ‘w on’t any longer be a British peer, poor, perhaps, but universally looked up to - but an adventurer, - a filibuster, in fact’.72 In the depictions o f the European continent as an alien place, the main characteristic which distinguishes Balkan characters from other Europeans *

One might contrast Isaacstein’s failure to pass him self o ff as English with the success o f John B uchan’s Indian Army officers in assuming Arab identities.

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is a sort o f congenital fanaticism to which even the gentlest o f characters is prone. In Gerard’s The Red-Hot Crown, the ‘wide, reproachful eyes’ o f that most romantic o f heroines, Yella, display, on occasion, ‘a gleam o f that fanaticism to which Moesian patriotism is apt to rise’.73 Gerard writes: For in those flower-like blue eyes there was not only innocence and candour written, there were also possibilities o f passion of which patriotic fanaticism might be only one form, and beneath that blossom-white skin there flowed the blood o f generations o f warriors who had lived their lives upon battlefields and wooed their wives sometimes at the point o f the sword. The descendants o f such men have not, as a rule, got milk and water in their veins.74 A typical citizen o f Agatha Christie’s Herzoslovakia (‘Capital Ekarest [a nod away from Serbia towards Bucharest]. Population, chiefly brigands. Hobby, assassinating kings and having revolutions’),75 Boris Anchoukoff, with his ‘high Slavonic cheekbones, and dreamy fanatic eyes’76 represents in many ways a stereotypical Balkan figure from such popular romances, a ‘human bloodhound’ from a ‘race o f brigands’, a ‘pure-bred Herzoslovakian’.77 The persistence o f this stereotype - and the fact that writing about the Balkans is a free-for-all, with no inhibitions about political correctness, is shown in a recent editorial comment in the Evening Standard (London) which - following the news that Albania was to hold a referendum on the restoration o f the monarchy - suggested that: Lord Archer or Mrs Camilla Parker-Bowles could be persuaded to take on the Albanian job . . . And if some bearded, wild-eyed, bomb throwing Balkan anarchist brought their reign to a premature end - well, that is a blow that we, like their subjects, would have to bear with fortitude.78 One o f the most persistent inherent ambiguities in the popular descriptions o f the Balkans is the tension between the idea o f the centrality o f the region and that o f its total marginality in the world o f European politics. Balkan wars are thus represented as both irrelevant to - and potentially fatal for Europe. Balkan nations might be manipulated by the great powers but always strive in their turn to ‘involve’ larger countries in their trifling conflicts. In this, imaginary Balkan regimes are shown as inherently devious and manipulative, and thus untrustworthy, even if their British monarchs always behave in an honourable, uncalculating way, as they attempt to ‘save Europe’, mainly by doing nothing more than marrying a princess. Royal affaires de coeur, while central to these novels, are never sufficient p er se, revealing that underneath a thinning carapace o f nostalgia the dynastic principle w as already in decay. T heir im aginary political consequences legitimise the ‘political’ or ‘historical’ themes with which the authors seek to add weight to their plots.

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Many o f the novels set in imaginary Balkan lands describe fictitious crises which lead Europe to the very brink o f war so that it can be saved by the stories’ British heroes. In S. C. Grier’s An Uncrowned King, the ‘peace o f Europe’ hangs on an Englishman’s decision on whether or not to accept the crown o f Thracia.79 Later in the same novel, the prince o f neighbouring Dardania is warned that a European war would be caused by his marriage to an unsuitable candidate,80 and on yet another occasion ‘the peace of Europe’ is ‘hanging upon the caprice o f a b o y ’.81 In the sequel, A Crowned Queen, possible revolution in Thracia ‘would mean almost certainly the outbreak o f a European w ar’.82 Towards the end o f this novel, the Queen o f Thracia is advised to renege on her promise to marry her son to another Balkan princess. Her advisor, an English lord, tells her: ‘Lay the blame on Europe, tell her that you object to the honour o f being one o f the causes of the Great War - but send for your son at once.’83 The state o f affairs in Gerard’s Moesia is such that ‘it is bound to end either in anarchy or in a European w ar.’84 The stability o f the world could only be preserved if, Gerard writes, this ‘turbulent little country was blotted out o f the map o f Europe’.85 Although, ironically, Gerard’s 1909 recipe for European peace looks similar to the historic cause o f the First World War, her fear that the ‘Great W ar’ might ignite in the Balkans was confirmed by the events o f 1914. By the last decades o f the nineteenth century it was widely perceived that even an apparently minor incident could precipitate a major war. In 1893 a group o f British naval and military experts produced a document entitled The Great War o f 189-: A Forecast, in an attempt to assess England’s position in the event o f a European war. According to this document, ‘the Great War o f 189-’: erupts in a remote Balkan village with the attempted assassination o f a Bulgarian prince by a Russian spy disguised as a priest. The Serbs, having been thrashed by the Bulgarians in 1885, seize this opportunity to provoke a border incident, only to be surprised by a lightning attack by the Austrians, who occupy Belgrade. Outraged by this violation o f Serbian sovereignty, the Tsar lands troops in Bulgaria and demands the evacuation o f Belgrade.86 In a set o f alliances which differs from the historical ones o f 1914, England joins the war alongside Germany, Austria, Belgium and Bulgaria, and against France, Russia and Serbia. The Great War o f 189-, the German translation o f which was a best­ seller appearing in five editions in the year o f publication, reflects the belief o f its authors in the Admiralty and the War Office that a large-scale war would probably occur in the near future, a fear which popular novelists exploited in order to raise the dramatic tension underpinning their fictitious political intrigues.*7 In its identification o f the Balkans as the tinderbox o f

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Europe, the document may have inspired some o f the many novels set in imaginary Balkan kingdoms which hoped to cash in on the enormous popularity o f The Prisoner ofZenda, which itself appeared in April 1894, less than a year after The Great War o f 189-, (The same month saw the premiere o f a theatre play set amidst a Balkan war, George Bernard Shaw’s Arms and the Man, which will be discussed in the next chapter.) The earliest o f these novels, dating from before Germany started the naval race with Britain which created ‘another constant o f Edwardian Europe: AngloGerman rivalry’,88 continued to portray the Germans sympathetically. The portrayal o f the Balkans as the ‘powder-keg’ o f Europe, which adds superficial relevance to the royal rom ances, contradicts their authors’ repeated assertions o f Balkan marginality, according to which the wars in the region, seen by a ‘superior’ British observer, are no more than risible local squabbles. For example, Dunstanbury, one o f the characters o f Anthony Hope’s Sophy o f Kravonia, reaches the Balkans at the end o f his journey through Europe, just as a civil war is flaring up because o f an inter-dynastic stru g g le. B efore learning that the Q ueen o f K ravonia is E nglish, Dunstanbury listens to an account o f the war: with an amused, rather contemptuous indifference - with an Englishman’s wonder why other countries cannot manage their affairs better, and something o f a traveller’s pleasure at coming in for a bit o f such vivid, almost blazing ‘local colour’ in the course o f his journey. But whether Alexis reigned, or Sergius, mattered nothing to him, and, in his opinion, very little to anybody else.89 In Hope’s vision o f a war that adds ‘blazing’ colour to the landscape there is some nostalgic longing for the world described by a Romantic writer like Byron, who was able to be at the same time a traveller and a warrior. Alongside numerous references to the possibility that the Balkan Question might be dragging the great powers into a violent confrontation, English writers expressed almost as often a poignantly naïve belief that the wars in the Balkans were the last Europe was going to see. The romances set in imaginary Balkan kingdoms represent an attempt to offer a vision o f complex Balkan history through the prism o f a simple love story. They act as reinterpretations o f Byronic myth, even if the British characters do not abandon their country with B yron’s spleen and contempt for its narrow-mindedness but with the ‘natural’ British desire to uphold the cause o f peace and justice in the world. Arcadian visions o f peasant Balkan societies with their quaint monarchies are a backdrop against which these novels play out the tensions between the Romantic idea o f war as both glamorous and remote - a Balkan ‘Little Game’, between two super­ powers, Britain and Russia, to set against the ‘Great Gam e’ being played for India and late Victorian anxieties about the imminence o f a greatpower c onflict.

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The need to invent Balkan kingdoms as a locale in which to re-enact neuroses and desires still exists in English literature. This is borne out not only by a number o f new versions o f The Prisoner ofZenda (such as David Stuart David’s Sherlock Holmes and the Hentzau Affair, published in 1991), but also by the appearance o f new lands, such as Terence R attigan’s ‘Carpathia’, Brigid Brophy’s ‘Evarchia’, or Malcolm Bradbury’s ‘Slaka’. B radbury’s Rates o f Exchange (1983), offers a late twentieth-century rewriting o f the Ruritanian story. Angus Petworth, an unknown linguist from a Bradford college, arrives in the Balkan capital o f Slaka on a British Council lecture tour. He discovers that he is an important guest o f the Ministry o f Culture, and is given an (attractive female) official guide and a black limousine. His lectures are followed closely by a whole host o f academicians, politicians and spies, who believe that he is in fact another, much more important Dr Petworth. Climbing an academic version o f the Ruritanian throne, Dr Petworth has an affair with the country’s leading m agic realist novelist Katya Princip (presumably named after Gavrilo Princip, the young Bosnian Serb who assassinated the Archduke Ferdinand in 1914). She was, as Bradbury recently revealed, inspired by Blaga Dimitrova, one o f the leading Bulgarian dissident writers, and, after the demise o f Communism, the vice-president o f Bulgaria.90 Katya Princip’s exciting sexual encounter with Dr Petworth can be seen as a modern version o f the R udolf Rassendyll story, involving as it does im personation, misapprehension and sexual wish-fulfilment through a ‘Ruritanian’ love affair. The Balkan wars o f the 1990s, meanwhile, have inspired some British authors to imagine new Balkan lands (Robert Llewellyn created a wartorn ‘Selovnia’ in his play Blue Helmet,91 and David Edgar set his Pentecost in an unnamed, but Bulgarian-speaking, country)92 and inhibited others. In Hellugala, John Fowles’s attempt to send up John Le Carre’s novels through a fictional country based on the former Yugoslavia, was overtaken by the conflict in the 1990s. Fowles decided to abandon the project.93

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Probably the most commonly used words o f Balkan origin in the English language - ‘bugger’, ‘balkanisation’ and ‘vam pire’* - all reflect, in a sense, the fear o f the Other, the threat o f possible invasion and corruption. If the etymology o f ‘buggery’ reveals the projection o f the medieval fear o f religious heresy onto sexual taboos, the taboos implicit in the later creation o f vampires are similar. The three terms reflect the dread o f insidious and more worryingly - compliant ‘pollution’ of Western Europe by the Balkans, for only by mutual consent can the weaker corrupt the strong. The idea o f the Balkans as a threat to the European status quo was established well before the assassination o f the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914, which has itself endowed references to Sarajevo with resonances o f Armageddon. In The Danger Zone o f Europe (1911), Charles Woods observed: ‘In the past, history has proved that the Near East has been both the scene and the reason for war after war. For a variety o f reasons this quarter o f the universe is still a continual source o f danger to the peace o f the w orld.’95 As the expanding network o f foreign corres­ pondents and the growth o f newspaper coverage from the Balkans began to m ake it appear m uch closer to hom e, the peninsula becam e the background against which popular writers projected the anxieties brought about by the greater speed o f travel and the increasing fears o f invasion and war. ‘Denn die Todten reiten schnell’ (‘For the dead travel fast’): in Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula, one o f Jonathan Harker’s fellow passengers utters these words at the moment when the Transylvanian Count appears before their coach on the Borgo Pass. The same line is quoted in Stoker’s short story ‘Dracula’s Guest’, this time as an inscription on the tomb o f Countess Dollingen o f Gratz, for some reason ‘graven in great Russian letters’. The line is a quotation from the Romantic Kunstballade ‘Leonore’ by Gottfried August Bürger (1747-94), somewhat altered by Stoker.96 The poem describes Leonore, a young woman waiting for her bridegroom Wilhelm, not know­ ing that he has been killed in battle. Wilhelm takes Leonore away one night, uttering the famous ‘vampiric’ line, ‘Wir satteln nicht um Mittelnacht’ (‘We do not saddle till midnight’), and repeating three times in different contexts that ‘the dead travel fast’. Bürger’s poem was very popular among the British Romantic poets. Shelley was apparently fond o f reciting it to blood­ curdling effect. Quoted by Bram Stoker in his two works about Count Dracula, Bürger’s verse points to a close connection between Stoker’s writing and the themes o f the Romantic Gothic genre, while hinting, on a metaphorical level, at the late Victorian anxieties which influenced the creation o f Dracula. If * For the etymology o f‘bugger’ see note on page 36. The word vampire reached the English language, via French and Hungarian, from the Slav languages of the Balkans. Commonly used in Bulgarian and Serbo-Croat, the word is, according to some etymologists, derived from the Turkish word über, witch.

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royal romances with Balkan settings transformed and transmitted romantic ideas o f the Byronic w arrior traveller well into this century, the late nineteenth-century preoccupation with the Balkans rejuvenated another popular Romantic genre - the Gothic story. The Gothic is itself, as in John Polidori’s work The Vampyre (1819)-w h o s e hero, Lord Ruthven, was modelled on Byron - frequently a darker expression o f the Byronic myth. (Polidori’s work was for a long time attributed to Byron and was even referred to by Goethe as ‘the best thing Byron had written’.)97 The desire to escape the dullness o f civilised life (which, as Freud argues in his Civilisation and its Discontents, is a neurotic by-product o f the development o f a civilised society) and immerse oneself in the ‘unspoilt’ world o f other peoples - a more primitive and more cruel world - is accompanied by a fantasy o f threat and a fear o f being ‘sucked in’ and losing one’s identity. If romances represent the sublimation o f Eros, Gothic stories re-enact the appeal o f Thanatos: the mixture o f attraction and fear which represents the death-wish. Launched in 1764 with Horace Walpole’s novel The Castle o f Otranto, which was described by its author as a translation o f a work printed in Naples in 1529, the genre continued to rely on his formula. The plots are usually set in an exotic, but, in most cases, familiar and recognisably European location. The interplay between the remove and ‘recognition’ makes Gothic horror effective, for, as Edmund Burke argued in A Philo­ sophical Enquiry into the Origin o f Our Ideas o f the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), ‘when danger or pain press too nearly, they are incapable o f giving any delight and are simply terrible; but at certain distances . . . they are delightful.’98 The Gothic story frequently begins in medias res, transporting the reader directly and matter-of-factly to the chosen setting. Carmilla, written by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu and first published in the Dark Blue magazine between December 1871 and March 1872, is a story o f female vampirism which, according to one literary historian, is ‘generally considered to be the finest vampire story o f the century’.99 It begins with: ‘In Styria, we, though by no means magnificent people, inhabit a castle, or schloss.’100 The quoted opening offers an illustration o f the way in which Le Fanu, like other authors o f Gothic narratives, blends the exotic and the familiar. The narrator, Laura, and her father, are ‘ordinary’ (English) people, yet they inhabit a lonely, moated Schloss. Like much modern science fiction, the Gothic plot requires a setting which is sufficiently close to the reader to appear threatening, while nevertheless being alien enough to house all the exotic paraphernalia -th e castles, the convents, the caverns, the dark for­ ests at midnight, the mysterious villains and the howling spectres.101 In a parallel to the gradual move o f the royal romance south-eastwards across Europe, the Gothic genre, having to linger on the margins o f the familiar, gradually makes a transition from Roman Catholic Europe into

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the Balkans. As his location, Le Fanu chooses Styria, a part o f the Habsburg Empire in his time, and now divided between Austria (as Steiermark) and Slovenia (as Stajerska). Styria occupies, geographically, a central position between the early Gothic locales in Southern Europe - such as Italy, Spain or, somewhat later, Greece* - and more recent sites in the Balkans, and in particular Transylvania, which - through Stoker’s novel and its cinematic adaptations - became the best-known o f all vampiric homelands.* Typically, because o f the need for a dichotomy between the familiar and the exotic, Gothic locations are on the edges o f a particular geographical area, in its remote corners and on its borderlands. Le Fanu chooses Austria (familiar territory), but goes to its southern frontier in search o f an exoticsounding location. A gateway to the Balkans, Styria was a relatively poor and sparsely populated region. Stoker’s Transylvania similarly represented what was in his time one o f the easternm ost outposts o f the AustroHungarian Empire. The gradual Gothic move towards a Balkan setting is a by-product o f the greater interest in the peninsula outlined in the previous chapter and, at the same time, o f the greater knowledge o f places in Italy and Spain, which would have made them too fam iliar to function as successful Gothic locales. If, as some literary historians assert, Stoker found his inspiration for the pseudo-documentary structure o f Dracula in Wilkie Collins’s influential novel The Woman in White (1860), then the trans­ formation o f Collins’s Italian Count Fosco into the Transylvanian Count Dracula reflects a successful quest for new Gothic quarries in the Balkans. The greater prominence o f the Balkans, as different parts o f the region achieved their moments o f fame due to crises, uprisings and local conflicts which accompanied the disintegration o f the Ottoman Empire, was, as I have pointed out, accompanied by an increasing awareness o f Balkan complexity. With the creation o f new independent states, the Balkans were ‘welcomed’ into Europe while at the same time being described as different from it. In their quest for authenticity, the Romantic poets saw, in the Balkans, Europe in its cradle, a ‘genuine’, unspoilt Europe, yet, as Sara Mills points out in Discourses o f Difference, this temporal positing (in which nations are described as feudal, medieval, or as children) can itself be inter­ preted as a strategy o f distancing.102 The focus on the study o f the folklore and customs o f the Balkans in the nineteenth century created a sense o f Italy features, for example, in Horace W alpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) and Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries ofUdolpho (1794) and The Italian (1797); Spain in M atthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796); Greece in John Polidori’s The Vampyre{ 1819). * In European literature, the lands which today comprise Romania feature in a number o f Gothic narratives. The Carpathian Mountains are, for example, the setting o f Alexandre Dumas’s The Pale Faced Lady ( 1848), o f The Mysterious Stranger (I860), written by an anonym ous writer, as well as the story o f Elisabeth B&thory in one o f the sources for Dracula, Sabine Haring-Gould’s

The Hook ofWtre-Wolvts,

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specific Balkan identity through the construction o f its difference from Europe. An interest in popular Balkan superstitions, reflected in the fact that the word vampire represents an extremely rare case in English o f a loan from a Balkan language, inspired many scholarly studies. These early works o f European anthropology and ethnography helped define the Balkan Other, offering a transfusion o f fresh blood to the increasingly moribund Gothic genre, exactly a century after its Romantic heyday between 1796 and 1806 when, according to some studies, it comprised one third o f all novels published in Britain.103 The gradual move o f the chosen Gothic locale eastwards into the Balkans was not unique to British literature. The French novelist Charles Nodier (1780-1844) set his Smarma ou les Démons de la nuit (1821) in Thessaly, while Prosper M érimée’s pasticcios in La G uzla( 1827) described vampiric aristocrats in Illyria (lands along the eastern shore o f the Adriatic). A later author, Paul Féval (1817-84), also set his novel La Ville-Vampire (1875) which includes Ann Radcliffe and the Duke o f Wellington among its predominantly British cast - in Illyria, but Féval’s vampire city Sélène lies several hundred miles further north-east, in the Balkan hinterland, on the mythical wild plains near Belgrade (‘lasauvage campagne de Belgrade’).104 Féval’s vampires speak Serbian, which is supposed to be, according to this author, their usual language. It is interesting to note that this French novel in many aspects a parody o f Ann Radcliffe’s M ysteries o f Udolpho — prefigures Dracula’’s polarities, with the British cast as victims and the representatives o f a small Balkan nation (the Serbs in this case) as the pursuers. Among the volumes which Bram Stoker used as background for his extensive preparatory study for Dracula, there are historical and travel accounts, such as William W ilkinson’s Account o f the Principalities o f Wallachia and M oldavia (1820); ‘M agyarland’: being the Narrative o f our Travels through the Highlands and Lowlands o f Hungary by ‘A Fellow o f the Carpathian Society’ (1881); and E. C. Johnson’s On the Track o f the Crescent: Erratic Notes from Piraeus to Pesth (1885).105 At the same time, the list o f sources for Dracula, kept among Stoker’s research notes at the Rosenbach Museum in Philadelphia, contains a number o f works about popular beliefs in the Balkans, including the Reverend Sabine BaringG ould’s (1834-1924) The Book o f Were-Wolves (1865), Emily Gerard’s article ‘Transylvanian Supersititions’ (1885), and a collection entitled The Folk-Tales o f the Magyars (1889), by the Reverend W. Henry Jones and Lewis L. Kropf.106 This research, over the seven years which preceded the publication o f Dracula, gradually led Stoker to abandon his initial idea o f emulating Le Fanu by setting his story in Styria. Instead, he chose the borderlands o f Transylvania (now part o f Romania). Characteristically for a Gothic writer, Stoker pinpointed a relatively remote region and then set

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his story in the remotest part o f it: Transylvania’s north-eastern Carpathian mountain border with Bukovina and Moldavia. Echoing the fairy-tale lands ‘beyond the seven seas and the seven mountains’, the Latin etymology o f the name Transylvania - the ‘land beyond the forest’ - and the Saxon name for it o f Siebenbürgen (‘Seven Cities’) seem to contribute to its suitability for the role o f a dystopian Nowhere-land, a hidden valley where, instead o f the extended youth o f Shangri-La, one encounters the restless eternity o f undeath. Samuel Butler’s imaginary Erewhon was, similarly, a ‘land beyond the mountains’.107 Stoker’s choice o f Transylvania was inspired by Emily G erard’s article ‘Transylvanian Superstitions’, published in the Nineteenth Century in 1885, but discovered by Stoker at some point between March 1890 and February 1892.108 The lives o f the Gerard sisters - their upbringing in Scotland, their education at a Tyrolean convent, and their husbands’ postings to the farflung corners o f the Habsburg Empire - could themselves have inspired a Gothic narrative. Emily Gerard’s husband, Chevalier Miecislas de Laszowski, was briefly posted to Transylvania, where he commanded a cavalry bri­ gade composed o f two hussar regiments at Hermanstadt and Kronstadt (now Sibiu and Brasov, in the foothills of the Carpathians, two o f the seven former Saxon towns). Gerard, as Christopher Frayling notes in his study Vampyres, ‘had little or no interest in politics and society, but was evidently fascinated in a superior kind o f way by strange folktales, the stranger the better’.109 She describes Transylvania as the last European refuge o f the uncanny: Transylvania might well be termed the land o f superstition, for nowhere else does this curious crooked plant o f delusion flourish as persistently and in such bewildering variety. It would almost seem as though the whole species o f demons, pixies, witches, and hobgoblins, driven from the rest o f Europe by the wand o f science, had taken refuge within this mountain rampart, well aware that there they would find secure lurking places, whence they might defy their persecutors yet aw hile.110 Emily Gerard defines Transylvania as the last European ‘refuge’ o f super­ stitions before the advancement o f science. From the opening pages o f Dracula, Stoker uses similar imagery to give his reader a sense o f the ac­ tual presence o f the supernatural. ‘1 read that every known superstition in the world is gathered into the horseshoe o f the Carpathians, as if it were the centre o f some sort o f imaginative whirlpool, ’ Jonathan Harker notes in his d ia ry ."1 The images o f the ‘horseshoe’ and the ‘w hirlpool’ suggest the irresistible, magnetic pull o f the Carpathian Mountains. The area is, Stoker also notes, ‘the whirlpool o f the European races’." 2 His Transylvania is not the periphery o f Europe but the continent’s omphalos. Studies of Dracula have dem onstrated that m any o f G e ra rd ’ s descrip­ tions o f ‘T ra n s ylva n ia n superstitions' found th eir w ay into S to ker’s novel.

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alongside the beliefs and legends gathered in Sabine Baring-Gould’s Book o f W ere-Wolves.m The direct connection with the latter is easily estab­ lished when Stoker uses, for example, Baring-Gould’s misspelling (vlkoslak) o f the Serbian word for were-wolf, vukodlak. Baring-Gould claims (incor­ rectly) that ‘the Serbs connect the vampire and the w ere-w olf together and call them by one name vlkoslak, ’114 and Stoker’s hero Harker overhears the peasants whisper the words vrolok and vlkoslak - ‘both o f which mean the same thing, one being Slovak and the other Servian for something that is either were-w olf or vam pire’.115 Like his hero Jonathan Harker, who, before leaving Britain, visits the British Museum where he does some research ‘among the books and maps in the library regarding Transylvania’," 6 Stoker used a large number o f historical sources on Transylvania in his novel.117 In the course o f his preparatory study he came across descriptions o f the historical Dracula, Vlad TePe§> ar,d abandoned his initial idea o f calling his hero Count W ampyr.118 Both in detail and in overall structure, the opening chapters o f Dracula are organised as a typical Balkan travel narrative o f the second half o f the nineteenth century. The book starts with the locus communis o f such literature, a ‘farewell to the known world’ (that is, Western Europe): ‘Left Munich at 8.35p.m. on 1st May, arriving at Vienna early next morn­ ing; should have arrived at 6.46, but train was an hour late.’" 9 Jonathan Harker steals a last glimpse of the West at the Szechenyi Bridge in Budapest. This description acquires particular symbolism if we know, as Stoker might have known, that the bridge - with its very British appearance - was de­ signed at the instigation o f the Anglophile Count Szechenyi by the British architect William Tierney Clarke, who built the original Hammersmith Bridge in London, the first suspension bridge, in 1827: ‘The impression I had was that we were leaving the West and entering the East; the most Western o f splendid bridges over the Danube, which is here o f noble width and depth, took us among the traditions o f Turkish rule.’120* Jonathan Harker’s entrance into the ‘Eastern’ world could never, in reality, have been so abrupt. Stoker creates an impression that the oriental world is almost sucking Harker in, as Munich, Vienna and Budapest flash by. While he gradually loses control over everything else, Harker desperately clings to the (very Victorian) obsession with train timetables, even as time itself appears to dissolve around him: ‘It seems to me that the further East you go the more unpunctual are the trains. What ought they to be in China?’121 A contrasting attitude towards time is supposed to be a differentia specifica between the East and the West. This is a recurrent theme both in Romantic literature which perceives the East as a ‘free’, ahistorical (timeless) realm o f exotic pleasure, and in later writing which privileges Western ‘time­ *

O f course the Turks had controlled both sides o f the Danube, ruling both Buda and Pest until their expulsion in the late seventeenth century.

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keeping’ by equating it with modernity and progress. Train travel, which symbolises that progress, imposes occidental time on the Orient. Harker’s exasperation with the lack o f regard for time is thus a reaction typical o f the Victorian traveller in the Balkans. While the Romantic traveller would have had no particular reason to hurry, the Victorian (male) traveller frequently visited the region on business - as a jo urnalist, scientist, politician, army officer or - in Harker’s case - as a solicitor sent to conclude a property deal. The conventions o f Victorian travel narrative are followed not only in Stoker’s attempt to adhere to real time (he made extensive use o f timetables to calculate the length o f each segment o f Harker’s journey), but also in his desire to convey the sense o f place with the didacticism o f a Victorian travel writer. In an attempt to present itself as a factual account o f a Balkan journey, Dracula offers detailed descriptions o f means o f transport, road conditions and accommodation. Harker travels through real places and stays in hotels and inns whose names Stoker extracted from contemporary Baedeker guides to the Balkans. His journal (and it is important to note that he keeps a journal, with its connotations o f exactness and purpose­ fulness, rather than a diary) describes, in a pseudo-ethnographic way, the costumes, cooking and customs o f the Transylvanians. It provides the nec­ essary historical background and ‘explains’ the national composition o f T ransylvania. At the same time, the imaginary landscape o f the Carpathians, with its wild desolation has, in Stoker’s descriptions, an air o f unreality about it. It is much more detailed than the indeterminate landscapes o f the imaginary Balkan lands o f political romances, even as it depicts scenery which, like a Caspar Friedrich painting, reveals primarily the mood o f the observer. Stoker attributed many more ‘Gothic’ cliffs, crags and ravines to the Carpathians and fewer trees - than they possess in reality: Beyond the green swelling hills o f the Mittel Land rose mighty slopes o f forest up to the lofty steeps o f the Carpathians themselves. Right and left o f us they towered, with the afternoon sun falling full upon them and bringing out all the glorious colours o f this beautiful range, deep blue and purple in the shadows o f the peaks, green and brown where grass and rock mingled, and an endless perspective o f jagged rock and pointed crags, till these were themselves lost in the distance, where the snowy peaks rose grandly. Here and there seemed mighty rifts in the mountains, through which, as the sun began to sink, we saw now and again the white gleam o f falling water. One o f my companions touched my arm as we swept round the base o f a hill and opened up the lofty, snow-covered peak o f a mountain, which seemed, as we wound on our serpentine way to be right before us> ‘Look! Isten s/.ekl’ - ‘G od’s sea t!’ - a n d he crossed him self reverently,m

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The way in which Stoker uses real Balkan topography to create an imagi­ nary landscape is reflected in the way he treats Balkan history. He borrows and builds on many sources, not all o f them dealing with the Balkans, in order to piece together an exotic historical amalgam. Thus, apart from his travelling companion - a Hungarian, judging by the language in which the words ‘G od’s Seat’ (apparently an actual toponym) are uttered - Stoker’s hero also encounters a variety o f other nationalities in the Transylvanian ‘whirlpool o f nations’. In 1900, Baedeker’s A ustria volume estimated that there were 1,395,000 Romanians, 765,000 Hungarians, 222,000 Saxons, 88,000 Gipsies, 26,000 Jews and 8,400 Armenians living in Transylvania. There were also smaller numbers o f ‘Slovaks, Ruthenians, Bulgarians, Servians and G reeks’.123 In the light o f these statistics, Jonathan Harker seems to encounter an improbable number o f Serbs, Slovaks and ‘Czeks’ (i.e. Czechs), and relatively few Romanians and Hungarians on his Carpathian journey. ‘Here and there we passed Czseks and Slovaks, all in picturesque attire, but 1 noticed that goitre was painfully prevalent,’ Harker’s journal records, offering a typical example o f the way Stoker toys with the conven­ tions o f the travel narrative.124 Imaginary Czechs and Slovaks in ‘pictur­ esque attire’ create the sense o f an exotic location, while the observation about the prevalence o f thyroid problems in the area gives the narrative a typically Victorian, quasi-scientific quality. Stoker’s playfulness with elements o f Balkan history is nowhere more apparent than in the construction o f the central character o f his novel, Count Dracula himself. The ‘real’ Dracula, Vlad " fe p e § -o r Vlad the Im p a le rwas born in 1431, in Hungarian-administered Transylvania, and he ruled in neighbouring Wallachia, which was an Ottoman vassal principality. Vlad’s ruthlessness as a ruler, as well as his successes on the battlefield against the Turks, entered Romanian folk tradition. He died in 1476 and was buried in a monastery on Lake Snagov near Bucharest. ‘Not surprisingly, the castles o f Voyvode Dracula are to be found where he ruled,’ Clive Latherdale notes in The Origins o f Dracula, explaining that Bram Stoker, ‘realising that Hungary and its provinces were more steeped in vampire lore, chose to relocate Castle Dracula further north, close to the remote Borgo Pass which connects Transylvania with Moldavia’.125 In modern times, Dracula’s Castle has found a new, suitably Gothic location near the city o f Bra§ov. The edifice many tourists in Romania visit as Castle Dracula has little real con­ nection with him. It is in fact known as Castle Bran, and one o f its most recent inhabitants was British - Queen Victoria’s granddaughter. Queen Marie o f Romania. When Stoker moved him from Wallachia to T ransylvania, Count Dracula acquired, along with a more Western-sounding aristocratic title, a more controversial Hungarian ancestry. Dracula describes him self as ‘Szekely’, a Szeckler: We Szekelys have a right to be proud, for in our veins flows the blood o f

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many races who fought as the lion fights . . . And when the Hungarian flood swept eastward, the Szekelys were claimed as kindred by the victorious Magyars, and to us for centuries was trusted the guarding o f the frontier o f Turkeyland.126 Like the Serbs who, until recently, inhabited the region o f Krajina in Croatia, the Szecklers were frontiersmen, or Grenzers. They defended the AustroHungarian frontiers with Turkey in return for land and a degree o f au­ tonomy in the regions known as the Military Frontiers. Closely related to the Hungarians, the Szecklers spoke the Hungarian language and belonged to the same Churches. In her book about Transylvania, The Land Beyond the Forest (1888), Emily Gerard recorded that they were ‘fond o f describ­ ing themselves as being descended from the H un’, and Stoker’s Count Dracula boasts accordingly that the blood o f Attila flows in his veins.127 As with his references to ‘Czecks’, Slovaks and Serbs, Stoker probably calcu­ lated that a Szeckler identity, hardly known in Britain, would make his vampire count even more exotic. Details o f Dracula’s origin are, anyway, never particularly precise, even when they are given the guise o f accuracy. They are geared to creating an exotic, alien background, while preserving the essentially European identity of the Count. When Dracula talks, for example, about ‘that great shame o f my nation’ - ‘the shame o f Cassova’, Stoker presumably had in mind the Battle o f Kosovo o f 1389 , in which the Turks defeated the Serbs, rather than the somewhat less well-known second Turkish defeat on the same site in 1448, at the hands o f the Christian forces united under the command o f John Hunyadi, ‘a Romanian in Hungarian Service who was the governor o f Transylvania’, a battle in which D racula’s kith and kin were more closely involved.128 Either way, ‘Cassova’ is for the w riter ju st another evocative toponym. Earlier, Dracula mentions, portraying the heroic traditions o f the Szecklers, attempted invasions of their land by ‘the Magyar, the Lombard, the Avar’ and ‘the Bulgar’.129 His long speech is, in a sense, a pastiche of familiarly ‘complex’ Balkan historio­ graphy, its melancholy conclusion that history itself is now no more than a tale interrupted by a cock crow: ‘Blood is too precious a thing in these days o f dishonourable peace; and the glories o f the great races are as a tale that is told.’130 Recent reinterpretations o f Stoker’s story (such as, for example, Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 film, Bram Stoker's Dracula) concentrate much more on the Count’s background and the reasons for his malediction than Stoker ever did. For him, Dracula’s vampirism was uncomplicated in the sense that it is an evil, satanic pow er w hich should be destroyed. In new interpretations, which focus much more than Stoker did on the causes o f Dracula’s fate, his sacrifice for the Christian cause in the struggle against the Turks acquires distorted echoes o f Christ’s own sacrifice. Dracula’s consumption o f human blood as a conditio sine qua non o f eternal life

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becomes an inversion o f the act o f Christian communion. Intriguingly, Dracula appeared at a time when, as a result o f the Tractarian movement and the Roman Catholic revival, the doctrine o f transubstantiation was treated with renewed seriousness in England. The use o f a cross as an antivam piric talisman may also be connected to the stress placed on it in Tractarian worship, as opposed to its earlier repudiation by many Anglicans who belonged to the same Protestant, evangelical traditions as, for example, S.C. Grier. Certainly Dracula and Tractarianism were, in their particular fields, responsible for key manifestations o f the Victorian Gothic revival. (H ow far D racula’s arrival in W hitby - o f all places - played on the resonances o f the Synod o f Whitby, and its role in ensuring that the Christianisation o f England took an invasive R o m a n -o r ‘European’ rather than a Celtic form, or on Whitby’s role as the source o f jet, the ornam ent o f Victorian mourning, has not, so far as I am aware, been explored.) From Stoker’s negative hero, Dracula is gradually transformed into a misunderstood modern anti-hero. Recent analyses o f Dracula in the Balkans concentrate on the idea o f the Count’s demonisation and its multiple meanings. Dracula is seen as a metaphor for the Balkan condition and for the Western rejection o f Balkan Europeanness as ‘impure’,131 or alternatively, for a British (that is, Puritan) rejection o f passion.132 From a British standpoint, Dracula is threatening precisely because he is European. Recent analyses point out that Stoker’s novel represents a narrative o f reverse colonisation. In his article on Dracula published in Victorian Studies, Stephen Arata argues, for example, that ‘in the marauding, invasive Other, British culture sees its own imperial practices mirrored back in monstrous forms.’133 Dracula can thus be placed in the context o f narratives o f imperial decline —from Rider Haggard’s equally supernatural (not to mention similarly morbid and necrophiliac) novel She, to the dozens o f invasion novels written in the last years o f the nineteenth century. Dracula’s supernatural invasion of Whitby is followed by the rapid advance o f his alien force on London. As an invader, Count Dracula is particularly threatening because he is trying (with some success) to make him self invisible among the English. On his visit to England, he wishes to avoid being, as he says, paraphrasing M oses’ son Gershon (Exodus 2: 22), ‘a stranger in the strange land’: I am content if I am like the rest, so that no man stops if he sees me, or pause in his speaking if he hear my words, to say ‘Ha, ha! A stranger!’ 1 have been so long master that I would be master still - or at least that none other should be master o f m e.134 Attempting to be ‘like the rest’, Dracula keeps some rather unexpected volumes in his library in the Carpathians. It resembles nothing so much as the reference section o f a club library in Pall Mall. It contains a London directory, the ‘Red’ and ‘Blue’ books, Whitaker’s Almanack, the Army and

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Navy Lists, and even, as Jonathan Harker notes with some pleasure, the Law List. Preparing for his visit to England, Dracula studies these books in detail. In this respect he could be said to be Jonathan Harker’s Balkan D oppelgänger: he even reads Bradshaw and studies B ritish railw ay timetables. Through these books, as he tells Harker, he has ‘come to know your great England; and to know her is to love her’.135 However, Dracula’s acquisition o f knowledge about England is seen as invasive and dangerous a form o f reverse colonisation which can be equated to his threat to ‘colonise’ the English body through vampiric practice. In Discourses o f Difference, Sara Mills argues that ‘most travel writing presents a clear notion o f the difference between the British as a race, o f whom the narrator is a representative, and the nation which inhabits the country which is being described’.136 The outward form o f the travel narrative in Dracula is deconstructed at the m om ent when the clear distinctions between the observer and the observed are blurred. Count Dracula’s study reflects Jonathan Harker’s activity in the Reading Room o f the British Museum: ‘knowing’ the English ultimately gives Dracula the power to ‘colonise’ them. The realisation that Dracula can appear much more threatening because o f his ‘Europeanness’ rather than because o f his difference from his victims and pursuers has led to a gradual alteration in the construction o f his physical appearance. While Stoker’s Dracula resembles medieval woodcuts o f Vlad Xepe§ (massive, bushy eyebrows meeting above the nose, a mane o f long hair, his mouth hidden behind a drooping moustache, his chin broad and strong - all hardly in keeping with his desired invisibility on the streets of London),137 in cinematic and theatrical adaptations Dracula becomes a thin and delicate creature with reddish, sensual lips. His shiny hair is combed back, he never has a moustache and generally bears little resemblance to Stoker’s hirsute creation. Whereas Stoker’s Count was almost a were-wolf, with hair growing between his fingers, the twentieth-century D racula’s hands are pale and smooth, and, with their red pointed nails, seductive and feminine. Instead o f a medieval, orientalised Otherness, he assumes the face o f a European ‘Other’ o f threatening sexuality: in his eternal opera cloak this D racula resem bles m ost o f all an archetypal fm -d e -siecle European decadent, a delicate, slimmed-down Oscar Wilde. The threatening conflation o f ‘sameness’ and ‘difference’ (typical o f many Western literary representations o f the Balkans) ultimately means that Dracula must not simply be killed but completely destroyed by the united representatives o f the West - an Englishman, a Dutchman, and an American (although this may also reflect the inability o f a weakened Britain to accomplish the task on its own). Their mission to restore order in the Balkans represents a (subconscious?) fictional expression o f the attempts in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries by the Western powers to impose peace on the peninsula. A lew years aller the publication o f Dracula

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the great powers sought to bury the problem o f Macedonia with the socalled Murszteg agreement, according to which the gendarmerie was to be run by an Italian commander with five senior officers under him, each representing one o f the great powers. Similar attempts followed elsewhere in the B alkans, including the appointm ent o f the Dutch to run the gendarmerie in newly independent Albania. In the multinational bid to destroy Dracula, as Harker’s kukri (symbolic o f British imperial power) ‘shears through the throat’, and Quincey M orris’s bowie-knife (the weapon o f American pioneers) plunges ‘in the heart’, ‘the whole body crumbles into d u s t.’ 138 E ven b efo re the m o m en t o f his d e a th , D ra c u la is depersonalised: he becomes ‘the throat’, ‘the heart’, ‘the body’. Twelve years after Dracula, with The Lady o f the Shroud (1909), Stoker returned to Balkan themes. This novel is set in the Land o f the Blue M ountains, based on the kingdom o f Montenegro (‘Black M ountain’). Stoker’s toponyms are either invented Slav-sounding names (Plazac, Gadaar and similar ones) or slight variations o f Montenegrin place-names (for example, the monastery o f ‘Astrag’ instead o f Ostrog, ‘Ispazar’ instead o f Virpazar, or ‘Bajana’ instead o f Bojana). Personal names and titles are mostly Montenegrin, and the language spoken in the country is ‘Balkan’. Accounts o f Montenegrin history are used liberally in order to recreate the Blue M ountains’ heroic past: As you perhaps know, the gallant little nation in the Land o f the Blue Mountains has had a strange history. For more than a thousand years ever since its settlement after the disaster o f Rossoro [i.e. Kosovo] - it had m aintained its national independence under several form s o f Governm ent.139 Stoker’s Land o f the Blue Mountains and its ‘fierce, hardy mountaineers’ are threatened both by the great powers and by the neighbours - ‘Albania, Dalmatia, Herzegovina, Servia, Bulgaria’. Salvation unexpectedly comes in the shape o f an English explorer named Rupert Sent Leger. Through an incredibly complex set o f circumstances - Stoker’s method o f combining correspondence, documents, newspaper articles and journals here really gets out o f hand - Rupert inherits the freehold o f a castle in the Blue Mountains. Settling there temporarily, he falls in love with Teuta (the name o f an Illyrian goddess, and the ‘Lady o f the Shroud’ o f the title), who impersonates a vampire for reasons which turn out to be political. Teuta is, as is gradually revealed, the daughter o f the local ruler, Voivode Vissarion. (Voivode is a Serbian aristocratic and military title.) Rupert secretly marries her, although at that stage he is not sure whether she is dead or alive. (As a man o f his times, Stoker seems more comfortable writing about death than sex, even if they sometimes blur together.) Teuta is kidnapped by the Turks and later saved by Sent Leger. Her father suffers the same fate but Rupert

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this time flies an aeroplane to extract him from prison - in what must be one o f the earliest air-rescue scenes in British literature. This complex plot has a happy ending. Rupert becomes the ruler o f the little principality, where he establishes a successful radium-mining industry, boosts the export trade with Europe and trains army units both for service at sea and the ‘airship service’.140 As if these achievements were not sufficient, he also manages to solve the ‘Balkan Question’ by establishing a federation o f Balkan countries under the name ‘Balka’. This includes all o f the southern Balkan states and involves Austria ‘giving up Dalmatia, Istria and Sclavonia as well as part o f Croatia and the Hungarian Banat’.141 The coronation o f Rupert and Teuta with the crown o f ‘Balka’, followed by a vast aero-show, provides an appropriate finale to the story. Stoker concludes that ‘henceforth no nation with an eye for either defence or attack can hope for success without the mastery o f the air.’142 The idea o f ‘federal’ solutions to Balkan problems was to become a com m on refrain among politicians and diplomats during much o f this century. In an echo o f Stoker’s vision o f ‘Balka’, Adem Demaqi, the leader o f the Parliamentary Party o f Kosovo - the second largest Albanian party in this Serbian province - proposed in 1997 a confederation o f Kosovo, Serbia and Montenegro to be called ‘Balkania’.143 However Stoker’s novel, whose utopian visions o f the Balkans under British paternal guidance might well have been scripted by Anthony Hope, fails both as an escapist romance o f The Prisoner o f Zenda type and as a Gothic tale. With science fiction struggling to emerge from its Gothic chrysalis, the novel is too complex and far too preoccupied with technology and progress to function as a romance, which requires a simple narrative with a basically feudal and relatively sanitised fairy-tale version o f Balkan reality. (Science fiction and Stoker-inspired Gothic finally came together, of course, in the transsexual Transylvania o f the Rocky Horror Picture Show.) At the same time, the Gothic tension is ultimately undone both by the rational explanation of vampiric appearances and, more importantly, by the underlying discourse o f a benevolent British superiority in the Balkans, which is suitable for a romance but does not enable Stoker to rebuild the Gothic threat which made Dracula successful. In spite o f its obvious differences from the Ruritanian romance, the Balkan Gothic ultimately relies on the existence o f the same pre-industrial, feudal world for its settings. Hope’s, Grier’s and Christie’s Ruritanian yarns depend on the continuance o f the monarchic principle, even as they infiltrate royal circles with a variety o f British commoners. The offshoot o f the dying European aristocracy, Count Dracula is ultimately defeated by the united forces o f the Western (and white Anglo-Saxon Protestant) bourgeoisie, an international group o f assorted ‘professionals’, using superior technology. (Stoker’s fascination with the use o f phonographs, shorthand and blood transfusions in Dracula although blood groups seemed to be inter­

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changeable - makes the early appearance o f air-power in The Lady o f the Shroud appear less surprising.) In this context, the Balkan Gothic re-enacts the triumph o f Victorian rationalism over Romanticism, even as it depends on the Romantic Weltanshauung for its survival. Paradoxically, as Britain offers one o f the few corners o f Europe in which elements o f the feudal order continue to exist, popular writers, film-makers and photo-journalists on both sides o f the Atlantic now frequently turn to it as a reservation for the sort o f Transylvanian counts and Ruritanian princesses who litter the pages o f the Tatler and Harpers & Queen. B alkan S ettings o f the Spy N ovel Ah! The familiar luxury o f England! Why was one such a fool, to trade it against the chances o f a nameless grave in an Asiatic swamp or on a Bosnian m ountain?144 The expansion in the markets for popular literature at the turn o f the cen­ tury led to an ever greater diversification o f genres. The romantic adven­ ture story - in Balkan settings as well as in far-flung imperial locations and the new popularity o f the Gothic novel prepared the ground for the development o f the twentieth-century spy narrative. The amateur spy o f the early espionage narratives by writers such as Dornford Yates, John Buchan and H. C. McNeile (‘Sapper’) was a ‘clubland hero’.145 He had more in common with Rudolf Rassendyll and his crowned compatriots or the brave solicitor Jonathan H a rk e r- in his attempt to save the British way o f life from the evil enemy than with the later, melancholy losers in the novels written by Eric Ambler and Graham Greene, who were on many occasions barely able to save their own lives. The confined Balkan stage also suited the cosy personal character o f these early examples o f the genre which are markedly different from the chillier atmosphere of more recent spy fiction, distinguished as it is by characters who are agents o f remote, bureaucratic superpowers. The connection between the early espionage narratives and the original Gothic fantasy lies, as John Cawelti and Bruce Rosenberg argue in The Spy Story, in the way in which the heroic spy re­ enacts, like the innocent hero(ine) o f the Gothic story, ‘the nightmare o f involvement, discovery and realisation that he is trapped and must play out the game to its end’.146 With The Thirty-nine Steps (1915), John Buchan ‘created the first major version o f the twentieth-century spy story’ by synthesising ‘nineteenthcentury traditions of adventure with the theme of international espionage’,147 drawing upon the motifs o f conspiracy and the (most commonly German) threat to Britain as developed in the invasion novel - another genre developed in the second half o f the nineteenth century and exemplified in a range o f works, from George Chesney’s The Battle o f Dorking (1871) to

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Erskine Childers’s The Riddle o f the Sands (1903). Like subsequent Buchan novels, The Thirty-nine Steps owes much to Romanticist perceptions o f landscape and human nature. Buchan’s hero, the South African Richard Hannay, is more at home in the wilderness of Scotland (a Walter Scott-like vision o f a ‘wild district’, where his ‘veldcraft would be o f some use’)148 than in the urban settings o f the British capital. Hannay becomes so sick o f London after living in it for only three months that he contemplates any means o f escape. (‘The weather made me liverish, the talk o f the ordinary Englishman made me sick, 1 couldn’t get enough exercise, and the amusements o f London seemed as flat as soda-water that has been standing in the sun.’)149 He suffers from a Byronic feeling o f almost debilitating spleen and like Byron, contemplates a cure in the Balkans. In the opening scenes o f The Thirty-nine Steps, reading an article about Balkan politics in his club (‘rather a pot-house which took in colonial mem­ bers’),150he wonders if he might find a means of escape by getting ajob in Albania: 1 had a long drink, and read the evening papers. They were full o f the row in the Near East, and there was an article about Karolides, the Greek Premier . . . From all accounts he seemed the one big man in the show; and he played a straight game too, which was more than could be said for most o f them. 1 gather that they hated him pretty blackly in Berlin and Vienna, but that we were going to stick by him, and one paper said that he was the only barrier between Europe and Armageddon. I re­ member wondering if I could get a job in those parts. It struck me that Albania was the sort o f place that might keep a man from yaw ning.151 The opening lines o f The Thirty-nine Steps delineate the Romanticinspired constructions o f ‘Balkanness’ and ‘Britishness’ which are very sim ilar to those encountered in the popular royal romances. The great powers’ involvement with different small countries in the Balkans brings Europe to the brink o f Armageddon. The British, naturally, back the man who, unlike most Balkan politicians, ‘plays a straight gam e’, and Hannay weighs his chances o f an escape to Albania - the savage and beautiful land o f Byronic myth. Completing The Thirty-nine Steps in the winter o f 1914 - the first year o f the First World War which, as so many had predicted, had started in the Balkans - Buchan was doubtless inspired by the figure o f the Greek Prime Minister Elefterios Venizelos (1864-1942), who - in contrast to the Greek royal family with their pro-German sym pathies - supported the Allied cause. When, in October 1915 (the m onth The Thirty-nine Steps was published), the Allies landed four divisions at Salonika, they had the approval o f Venizelos, but not o f King Constantine I o f Greece, who was the brother-in-law o f the Kaiser and was officially neutral. The Thirty-nine Steps describes a German-sponsored plot to kill the Greek Prime Minister Constantine Karolides on his visit to Britain. ‘They can’t get him in his

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own land,’ Buchan writes, ‘for he has a body guard o f Epirots that would skin their grandmothers.’152 (The kilted Hellenic royal guards, the Evzones, obviously becom e K arolides’ fierce but faithful ‘E pirots’, from the mountains o f Epirus, in another variation upon the Romantic representations o f the mountain peoples o f the Balkans.) Attempting to save Karolides, Richard Hannay is, in fact, protecting Britain from German invasion: Karolides’ death would set the Balkans by the ears, and then Vienna would chip in with an ultimatum. Russia wouldn’t like that, and there would be high words. But Berlin would play the peacemaker, and pour oil on the waters, till suddenly she would find a good cause for a quarrel, pick it up, and in five hours let fly at us. That was the idea, and a pretty good one too. Honey and fair speeches, and then a stroke in the dark. While we were talking about the good will and good intentions o f Germany our coast would be silently ringed with mines, and submarines would be waiting for every battleship.153 In spite o f the war, The Thirty-nine Steps sold 25,000 copies between its publication in October and the end o f 1915.154 The novel remains popular largely because o f the Alfred Hitchcock’s adaptation o f The Thirty-nine Steps (the first o f the three versions o f the film made in Great Britain), filmed in 1934 when, as John Buchan’s son records, ‘the Foreign Office let it be known to film-makers that hostile representations o f Germany were, for the time being, highly undesirable.’155This particular version o f the film never actually identifies the enemy and avoids any explicit mention o f war. While Balkan politics and great-power rivalries over Greece in the run­ up to the First World War are central to the plot o f The Thirty-nine Steps, its drama unfolds in the Scottish countryside, making the novel reminiscent o f the invasion-phobia novels o f George Chesney or William Le Qiieux, jn which the invaders similarly chose the most unlikely British backwaters. (Stoker’s choice o f Whitby for Dracula’s disembarkation point in Britain is comparable, although, ironically, Whitby became one o f the first places to be attacked by the Germans in Britain in the First World War.) Greenmantle, published in 1916, re-enacts more closely the Romantic narrative o f travel and adventure in the Balkans —even if the political intrigue finally centres on eastern Turkey. Germany, plotting to encourage the Islamic feelings o f the Turks and win their support against Britain through a false prophet, is again the villainous power. The ultimate prize in the game is, this time, India, as Buchan’s Sir Walter Bullivant explains: There is a dry wind blowing through the East, and the parched grasses wait the spark. And the wind is blowing towards the Indian border. Whence comes that wind think you?156 In 1910 John Buchan and his wife travelled to Constantinople on the Orient Express. The route o f their journey is partly re-enacted on the pages

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o f Greenmantle, although Buchan’s Balkan landscapes are Romanticised and imprecise. In Germany, Hannay is horrified by his discovery o f a ‘feminine side’ in von Stumm, the German officer whose trap he escapes. Buchan hints at homosexuality in the enemy ranks: At first sight, you would have said it was a wom an’s drawing-room. But it w asn’t. I soon saw the difference. There had never been a w om an’s hand in that place. It was the room o f a man who had a passion for frippery, who had a perverted taste for soft, delicate things. It was the complement to his bluff brutality. I began to see the queer other side to my host, that evil side which gossip had spoken o f as not unknown in the German army. The room seemed a horribly unwholesome place, and 1 was more than ever afraid o f Stumm .157 Following in the footsteps o f the conspiracy, Hannay and his Dutch friend Peter Pienaar eventually reach the Balkans. In Belgrade, the Germans are busily repairing the railway bridge on the Danube. (Austria finally required German support to take Belgrade in 1915.) ‘It was a clear, cold, blue day, and as one looked south one saw ridge after ridge o f snowy hills,’ Buchan writes.158 Even if this romantic scene is vague in terms o f the landscape it describes, the general layout o f the city, with its ‘battered riverside streets’ and the upper town, where Hannay overhears English Red Cross nurses ‘in the custody o f Austrian soldiers’, is correct. Hannay’s musings during his walk through the Serbian capital reflect British attitudes towards the Serbs who, against all expectations, repelled the much stronger Austrian army for over a year, and even went on the offensive in Habsburg territory. (Belgrade fell early in December 1914 and was quickly retaken before falling into Austrian hands again.) Hannay contemplates a role as saviour o f the small Balkan people: I thought o f the gallant people whose capital this had been, how three times they had flung the Austrians back over the Danube, and then had only been beaten by the black treachery o f their so-called allies [the Bulgarians - unnamed]. Somehow that morning in Belgrade gave both Peter and me a new purpose in our task. It was our business to put a spoke in the wheel o f this monstrous bloody Juggernaut that was crushing the life out o f the little heroic nations.159 Their next stop-over, after Belgrade, is Rustchuk - the Bulgarian town of Ruse - one o f the major ports on the Danube, where Hannay’s boat ‘kept swinging all day well out in the turbid river’.160* Even as the journey becomes ‘mortally slow ’, few descriptive passages and few details are *

Ruse was the birth-plaec o f the Nobel Prize Winner Elias Canetti, who would have been 11 in early 1916, when I lannay’s boat was supposed to have passed through.

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offered until their arrival in Constantinople. There, instead o f the expected Romanticised oriental paradise (‘a sort o f fairyland Eastern city, all white marble and blue water, and stately Turks in surplices, and veiled houris, and roses, and nightingales’),161 Hannay encounters a muddy, ramshackle town, now ‘deorientalised’ as the capital o f an enemy power: It was a drizzling day, with a south-east wind blowing, and the streets were long troughs o f mud. The first part I struck looked like a dingy colonial suburb - wooden houses and corrugated iron roofs, and endless dirty, sallow children. There was a cemetery, I remember, with Turks’ caps stuck at the head o f each grave. Then we got into narrow steep streets which descended into a kind o f big canal. I saw what I took to be mosques and minarets, and they were as impressive as factory chimneys.162 While Buchan superficially attempts to demythologise the oriental enemy in this passage, most o f Greenmantle in fact exploits the lure o f the exotic. The place-names o f the Balkans and Asia Minor flash before the eyes o f the reader who, while being given few descriptions, is obviously meant to conjure up the threatening but attractive landscapes o f the novel. If, in the character o f Richard Hannay, Buchan creates one particular type o f gentleman spy - a sunburnt hero o f the great colonial outdoors (‘I rolled up my sleeves, and there was a forearm which might have been a blacksm ith’s, sunburnt and rough with old scars.’) ,163 who becom es involved in espionage only in order to protect the British way o f life, Sandy Arbuthnot embodies the appeal o f the exotic adventure which comes much closer to the Byronic fantasy - to the dream, as Cawelti and Rosenberg write: o f casting o ff the burden o f identity like a suit o f old clothes and letting o neself be swallowed up in the m ysterious spiritual world o f alien peoples, the desire to escape from the dull routines o f civilised life into a more primitive and daring world, the search for a crusade to deepen and intensify the sense o f life, to get away from the orderly and civilised patterns o f British life which seem so constrained and restrictive.164 Sandy Arbuthnot is in spirit a descendant o f Byron and a contemporary o f T. E. Lawrence, and, like Rudolf Rassendy 11 o f The Prisoner ofZ enda, a younger son o f an aristocratic family. Educated at Eton and New College, Oxford, and ‘a captain in the Tweeddale Yeomanry’, he is, Buchan writes, an embodiment o f the Wandering Scot, o f whom one might hear from the ‘lean brown men from the ends o f the earth’: Better still, you will hear o f him at little forgotten fishing ports where the Albanian m ountains dip to the Adriatic. If you struck a M ecca pilgrimage the odds are you would meet a dozen o f Sandy’s friends in it. In shepherds’ huts in the Caucasus you will find bits o f his cast off clothing, for he has a knack o f shedding garments as he goes. In the

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caravanserais o f Bokhara and Samarkand he is known, and there are shikaris in the Pamirs who still speak o f him round their fires.165 Sandy, ‘the blood-brother o f every Albanian bandit’,166 so eccentric that the Arabs think him mad, is a very British hero, yet, with his ‘lean high­ boned face and a pair o f brown eyes, like a pretty girl’s’,167 physically androgynous, quite unlike the macho Hannay. (One can nevertheless con­ trast Sandy Arbuthnot’s wholesomeness with von Stumm’s perverted taste for soft, delicate things - the evil side of the German army. It was perhaps fortunate that Hannay rather than Arbuthnot fell into von Stumm’s clutches.) Saudy is only one o f a heroic breed which includes the agents in Persia and Mesopotamia, ‘mostly young officers o f the Indian arm y’ who ‘carry their lives in their hands’: ‘now and then one disappears, and the sewers o f Baghdad might tell a tale.’168 Like young Harry Bullivant who ‘had been working between Mosul and the Persian frontier as a muleteer’ before reappearing with ten bullet holes in his body and a knife slash on his forehead,169* Sandy Arbuthnot is an outwardly protean character, able to transform h im self com pletely ‘to the pitch o f gen iu s’, and becom e indistinguishable am ong the natives anywhere, even, in the dramatic final episode o f Greenmantle, as an Islamic prophet before the fleeing Turkish troops at Erzerum. If German attempts to impersonate the British in The Thirty-nine Steps represent hubris (they stand out, paradoxically, because o f their all too perfect English and their impeccably English clothes), the absolute mastery o f disguise in Greenmantle is a sign o f British superiority, a differentia specifica o f Britishness: We call ourselves insular, but the truth is that we are the only race on earth that can produce men capable o f getting inside the skin o f remote peoples. Perhaps the Scots are better than the English, but w e’re all a thousand per cent better than anybody else.170 An ambivalence between the feelings o f absolute superiority in relation to the O rient and a desire to immerse oneself in it (through transethnic behaviour and ‘crossdressing’ to adopt the garb o f the weaker nation) - to disappear in the East - is a quintessentially Byronic paradigm. The historic character o f Aubrey Herbert, the British honorary attaché in Constantinople at the turn o f the century who inspired Buchan to create Sandy Arbuthnot, followed in Byron’s footsteps and explored Macedonia with, as Margaret FitzHerbert writes in The Man Who Was Greenmantle, ‘a wild Albanian highlander named K azim ’ as his bodyguard.171 In a letter to his mother *

Fortunately Harry managed to gasp a crucial clue before expiring. His father tells the story with enormous sang-froid. (‘W hat a great fellow! What was his nam e?’ I asked. Sir W alter did not answer at once. He was looking out o f the window. ‘His name,’ he said at last, ‘was Harry Bullivant. He was my son. Clod rest his brave soul!'),

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(like Byron who wrote to his in a similar vein) Herbert remarks: ‘I am getting more anti-Turkish every day though I like the Turks themselves immensely.’172 In an interesting reference to the reach o f the British popular literature discussed in this chapter, Herbert reports that his friend Damad Ferid Pasha, a brother-in-law o f the Sultan, was ‘well read in Victor Hugo, Shakespeare, and Anthony Hope’.173 (Sultan Abdul Hamid h im self‘had a passion for Sherlock Holmes stories, all o f which were translated into Turkish by his express orders’.)174 Throughout the first half o f the twentieth century, up to the Second World War, as Cawelti and Rosenberg’s study o f the spy novel mentions, ‘the Balkans was the area o f greatest intrigue, the Mediterranean a close sec­ ond.’175 In the 1920s John Buchan, like other popular authors who tended to reuse the same source o f raw material, returned to the Balkans, this time crossing deeper into the territory o f Ruritanian romance claimed by Anthony Hope. In 1925, Buchan published two adventures o f the heroic Scotsman Dickson McCunn, entitled Castle Gay and The House o f the Four Winds, which deal with the politics o f the imaginary Balkan state o f Evallonia. One o f Buchan’s characters, the journalist Thomas Carlyle Craw, is a strong supporter o f the monarchy in Evallonia. ‘To Evallonian monarchists the name o f Craw became what that o f Palmerston was once to Italy and Gladstone to Bulgaria,’ Buchan writes, adding that: the mildness o f his published portrait did not damp them; they remem­ bered that the great Cavour had looked like Mr Pickwick. A cigar, a begonia, a new scent, and a fashionable hotel in the Evallonian capital were named in his honour.176* C raw ’s imprisonment by Evallonian republicans, and the adventures o f B uchan’s Scottish characters in the fictional cities o f Krovolin and Medina, where they seek to reinstate Prince John on the Evallonian throne, bear a direct resemblance to Hope’s Ruritanian romances. Ultimately, the political conspiracies o f the imaginary Balkan kingdom, whose aristocrats are rather prone to wearing heavy tweed including knickerbockers, already seemed somewhat outdated and failed to recreate the tensions o f The Thirty-nine Steps and Greenmantle. Instead o f depicting the Balkans as the backdrop to a struggle between good and evil which decides the future o f Europe, Castle Gay and The House o f the Four Winds describe the peninsula as an exotic, anachronistic periphery. *

The Times correspondent in Bulgaria in the early years o f this century, James Bourchier, a former master at Eton, strongly championed the Bulgarian cause, helping to set up the system o f alliances which made the first Balkan war o f 1912 possible. He was depicted, in national costume, on a Bulgarian postage stamp and is buried at Bulgaria’s most famous monastery, Rila. Buchan was doubtless aware o f this in creating the character o f Craw.

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The Balkan political crises are depicted as a potential powder-keg in the great-power rivalry in a rather belated example o f a Buchan-inspired heroic spy novel, Lawrence Durrell’s White Eagles Over Serbia. O f the four books published by Lawrence Durrell in 1957 - Justine, White Eagles Over Serbia, Bitter Lemons and Esprit de Corps - White Eagles Over Serbia received perhaps the least critical attention. It drew on Durrell’s unhappy experiences as press attaché in the British Embassy in Belgrade, where he spent three years between 1949 and 1952 - and which inspired, even m ore directly, his comic stories about diplomatic life in the Balkans, analysed in the next chapter. White Eagles Over Serbia was conceived, as the w riter him self adm itted, as a way o f m aking ‘some dough’ at a tim e w hen he was contem plating his resignation from the Foreign O ffice.177 Initially, how­ ever, it failed to find a publisher. ‘Much later I showed itto Faber,’ Lawrence Durrell remembered, “ A juvenile’ they shouted in high pitched tone.’178 At Faber’s suggestion, the novel was published as an adventure story for adolescents and, on the literary pages, reviewed largely in sections devoted to children’s books. The Times Literary Supplem ent review observed, however, that the novel ‘stands alone for its fine writing and almost total unsuitability for the young’.17g Noting that it ‘will baffle many adolescents by its style alone’, and that, because o f numerous violent scenes, ‘many parents might object to the book in the hands o f young people’, the reviewer concludes, ‘adults will admire it for its economy and poetic pictures o f the Serbian uplands.’180 In the same article, The Times Literary Supplement reviewer attempted to classify adventure novels in terms o f the connections between genre, gender and the choice o f location: Stories o f adventure in foreign lands fall noticeably in tw o categories. The boys’ books, with hair-raising escapes from guns and snakes, go far afield and stress the remaining wilderness left in the world. The sto­ ries mainly for girls concentrate on Europe and have the message that we all are - more or less - sisters.181 The Balkans, at the symbolic crossroads between East and West, can and do accommodate both the ‘boys’ books’ (and Buchan offers some o f the best examples o f this ‘homocentric’ view o f the world) and ‘girls’ stories’ (for example, Kattie o f the Balkans). Many Balkan novels, the romantic royal adventures perhaps most notably so, disrupt this type o f pigeon-holing. Durrell’s White Eagles Over Serbia is otherwise unmistakably a ‘boys’ book’. The New Yorker's reviewer pointed out that it represents ‘John Buchan brought up to date by - o f all people - a symbolist poet, mandarin novelist and journalistic dandy’.182 In his study on Durrell, G. S. Fraser chooses to define the novel as ‘a tribute to John Buchan, DurrelPs favourite boyhood auth or’ . Fraser's description is probably m ore apt, fo r the book represents in no sense an updating o f John B uchan's w o rk , except in purely

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chronological terms, dealing as it does with an event in the aftermath o f the second World War. White Eagles Over Serbia is, essentially, an un­ ashamedly entertaining variation on the themes familiar to the readers o f Greenmantle. It is a deliberately old-fashioned novel in which Durrell ex­ ploits a well-established genre, staying within the limits o f the territory m apped out by B uchan’s exaggeratedly m asculine spies, w ithout any apparent desire to subvert or satirise the genre. The hero o f Durrell’s story is -u n lik e Buchan’s Richard H a n n a y -a ‘professional spy’ by the name o f Methuen (his first name is not revealed), serving in the Special Operations Q Branch, an organisation with its head­ quarters in an ‘anonymous square in the shadows o f Seven Dials’. Colonel Methuen lives in his club when in London, but is, in fact, rarely in Britain at all. At the beginning o f the novel he is just back from four months in the jungles o f Malaya, ‘starved for the sound o f his own language’183and looking forward to a fortnight’s fishing in Ireland, although it is not entirely clear that a fishing holiday is the best way to remedy linguistic starvation (again, like Hannay, he is a character who feels trapped by urban surroundings). By page 2, it is, o f course, perfectly clear that nothing will ever come o f these plans when Dombey, the Head o f SOq, a man with ‘an air o f reflective sobriety’, asks: ‘How far would it be if one walked from Belgrade to Salonika?’184* Methuen apparently dislikes the idea o f leaving his homeland so soon, contrasting its idyllic beauty with the dangers o f adventure abroad: The scent o f honeysuckle came in at the open windows, and he could hear the soft whisper o f rain in the leaves outside the window-sill. Ah! The familiar luxury o f England! Why was one such a fool, to trade it against the chances o f a nameless grave in an Asiatic swamp or on a Bosnian mountain?185 In spite o f his better judgement, he is, predictably, lured into yet another journey on behalf o f the ‘Awkward Shop’, as the SOq is known by its employees. Like atypical Buchan hero, Methuen is, we learn in the course o f the novel, a man o f many talents - a ‘practised shikari' ,186 a bachelor in his late forties who was a ‘rock climber o f promise’187 in his youth and, last but not least, a man able to speak Serbo-Croat so well that he can pass for a Serb in the villages o f Serbia. Only once during his entire journey is he challenged on this - and then he claims that his mother was a Serb and his father a Slovene.188* Like Sandy Arbuthnot o f Greenmantle, a ‘bloodbrother to every kind o f Albanian bandit’,189 who travels to Cairo as a King’s Messenger and then ‘disappears’ by making himself indistinguishable

* *

‘W alked’ hints at the yarn to come, but presumably the distance is similar regardless o f the method o f transport. The novel is silent on whether he had managed to perform similar linguistic I'cals in the Malayan jungle.

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from any Arab, Colonel Methuen has chameleon-like qualities. Once again, although the arriviste Balkan nations can never quite appear European, the English can effortlessly appear Balkan - if they wish: their protean power is a reflection o f superiority rather than base cunning. Methuen arrives in Belgrade as Mr Jobson, an accountant who is supposed to look into the finances o f the British Embassy. After a few days in the capital, he is secretly dropped off by the Embassy post-car in the middle of nowhere, on the road between Belgrade and Skopje, wearing Serbian peas­ ant costume, and carrying - somewhat improbably for a peasant in Com­ munist Y u g o s la v ia -a fishing-rod, a compass, a gun, a book of Serbian epic poetry and a copy ofThoreau’s Walden. Something ‘very big is brewing’ in south-western Serbia, in the ‘old Turkish Sanjak of Novi Pazar’. This largely Muslim area, which was divided between Serbia and Montenegro after the First Balkan War o f 1912, lies alongside BosniaHerzegovina, and had been occupied by the Austrians between 1878 and 1908 when it became a forward point on the Habsburgs’ abortive V iennaSalonika railway scheme. In the West, it functioned earlier in this century as a symbol o f an obscure, mysterious location, the back o f beyond, a ‘Tim buktu’ o f its time, its strange-sounding name evocative o f eastern bazaars. A verse popular at the beginning o f the century ran: ‘If you don’t know my address, / Write to the Orient Express / In the Sanjak ofNovi Pazar.’ In Saki’s short story ‘The Lost Sanjak’, the hero, who poses as ‘some sort o f second-hand authority on Balkan affairs’ is asked ‘with diabolical sud­ denness’ about ‘the whereabouts o f Novibazar’ before being exposed as a fraud.190 Like Macedonia, Bosnia-Herzegovina or Transylvania, the Sanjak is one o f those ‘Balkans in miniature’, potential flashpoints which are, be­ cause o f their ‘exotic’ ethnic mixture, particularly attractive as fictional settings. Exploiting this appeal, Durrell’s hero, Methuen, has the task o f uncovering the secret o f the goings-on in the Sanjak - a dangerous mission which had already led to the death o f his predecessor in the field, Anson. The narrative centres around a Serbian royalist organisation called the ‘White Eagles’* which is trying to smuggle large amounts o f gold out o f the country in order to help restore the monarchy in Yugoslavia. The gold had originally disappeared from the Yugoslav National Bank at the outbreak o f war with Germany in 1941, and was hidden in the Serbian countryside. However, the White Eagles’ carefully planned operation fails after a long march through the Sanjak, at the moment when the mule-teams carrying a cargo o f gold coins approach the end o f their journey in the Montenegrin mountains, and the royalists run into a carefully prepared Communist trap. In a note to Alan Thomas, Durrell claims that the story is ‘founded on a true recital’.191 There certainly were reports that a large proportion o f the *

The name is taken from one o f the most distinguished Serbian military awards, (lie Order o f the White Eagle, established by King Milan Obrenovid in 1882.

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contents o f the National Bank was taken from Belgrade before the German advance at the beginning o f the Second World War, and a portion allegedly remained hidden in Ostrog, an Orthodox monastery in western Montenegro, w hile another part was purportedly hidden in the forests around the mountain o f Durmitor (the backdrop for the dénouement in DurrelPs story). Although, according to these reports, much o f the gold was recovered by the Communists, stories o f lost gold bars fuelled the imagination o f many Serbs in the immediate aftermath o f the war, and Durrell might well have come across some details through his work in the British Embassy in Belgrade. The author’s grip o f chronology in White Eagles Over Serbia is rela­ tively shaky. The very first page o f the novel places the story in ‘an after­ noon in June’. Some time later, Methuen recalls that his previous visit to Y ugoslavia took place in 1953, which would locate the novel (first published in 1957) in the mid-1950s at the earliest. This does not quite tie in with the ending o f the story, where Durrell writes about the news o f the ‘Tito-Stalin split’, which is supposed to have happened four months after M ethuen’s return to London. Since the rift took place in June 1948, this would contradict Durrell’s dating o f M ethuen’s trip to Serbia and place the beginning o f the story in the early spring o f 1948. There are fewer discrep­ ancies when it comes to geographical detail, although Durrell’s grip o f Balkan place-names is not always very certain (he writes about ‘Lunbliana’ instead o f Ljubljana, for example). He was, in reality, greatly depressed by his daily encounter with the poverty and drabness o f existence in post-war Belgrade. By his own admission, the experience made him ‘firmly reac­ tionary and Tory’.192 Not long after he had taken up his posting in Belgrade, he wrote to Theodore Stephanides: ‘Conditions are rather gloomy here almost mid-war conditions, overcrowding, poverty: As for Communism my dear Theodore a short visit here is enough to make one decide that Capitalism is worth fighting for. Black as it may be, with all its bloodstains, it is less gloomy and arid and hopeless than this inert and ghastly police state.’193 Complaining o f claustrophobia, and with flagging spirits, Durrell admitted to having found only one pleasure in his job - that o f ‘aiding and abetting this blockheaded people to demolish their own ideological Palace o f Pleasures’.194 His complaints to Stephanides went on unabated. Some months later, he warned: ‘You must think o f me as someone who is serving a 3 year sentence in Pentonville.’195 Durrell’s views on the Communistinduced colourlessness and claustrophobia emerge in his descriptions o f Belgrade in White Eagles Over Serbia: They dined in one o f the only three eating-places available to foreigners: for almost every restaurant in Belgrade had been turned into a canteen where the ragged and half-starved proletariat queued up for its ration o f ill cooked food. Around them in the gloomy ill-lit Majestic Hotel sat the sleek and shaven members o f the police and the party, and the fat sleepy members o f the intelligentsia the artists and writers who had given in.

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An air o f desperate, shiftless boredom reigned over everything . . . They walked out into the main square o f the town together and Methuen smelt the curious stale sm ell that the Y ugoslav public seem ed to carry everywhere with them: sour sunflower-oil and rancid kaimak* It hurt him to see how shabby and frightened everyone looked.196 The level o f political indoctrination in Belgrade is such that even a perfor­ mance o f Fidelio at the local opera house is preceded by a speech about its dialectical significance. If Durrell depicts Yugoslav Communism with a degree o f exaggeration, the novel is also a subtle (and historically accurate) portrayal o f the ambivalent attitude o f the British establishment towards the royalist cause in Yugoslavia. ‘Our people admired and loved England. They cannot believe that England is helping these Communists,’ complains Vida, a daughter o f a Yugoslav royalist general whom Methuen had first known during the war in southern Italy, as she accuses England o f putting Tito in power in Yugoslavia.197 (The character o f Vida was, according to reports I have heard in Belgrade, inspired by a Yugoslav actress whose friendship with Durrell was largely to blame for his wife Eve’s nervous breakdown and sudden departure for England, a development usually at­ tributed to the strains o f life in a Communist country.) Durrell was obvi­ ously aware o f the historical intricacies behind Britain’s moves in the course o f the Second World War, when support was switched from the Royalist (or Chetnik) forces to the Communists as the latter were judged to be more effective in their fight against the Germans. In the late 1940s Tito was - in spite o f reneging on the promises to maintain a democratic system which he had made to the British government - again being backed by Britain as someone who dared to oppose Stalin. Thus the British would not have been particularly inclined to help an attempted royalist takeover o f the kind described in White Eagles Over Serbia. In this context, Durrell’s hero is sent to find out about the aims o f the royalist plot, but is under strict orders not to become involved in any o f their actions, as this might lead to British involvement in Balkan affairs at an inopportune moment. Although Lawrence Durrell is a shade more sympathetic towards the royalist plotters than their Communist pursuers, White Eagles Over Serbia is not a typical genre novel in the sense that it does not really divide the opposing sides in the conflict into heroes and villains. The novel describes Serbia as a vast playground for an experienced British intelligence officer. Methuen spends a large share o f his time in the mountains on his own, exploring the woods, hunting and fishing, and setting up his lodgings in a cave he remembers from his earlier fishing expeditions in Serbia. Tellingly,

*

A type o f clotted cream made in the Balkans, often salted but compared by some nineteenth-century British travellers to the unsalted equivalent in Devon and Cornwall.

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during this time Methuen’s main companion is his copy o f Walden - another boys’ book about self-sufficiency in the wilderness. In his correspondence, Durrell complained about the great plains stretch­ ing away interminably to the north, ‘to some final oblivion’, adding: ‘But the hills are west and south - and how one longs for them in Belgrade.’198 He disliked anything that was vaguely northern about the Balkans, talked about ‘sinking slowly into the frozen mush o f a Central European winter’,199and became happier as soon as he approached the Mediterranean and, in par­ ticular, Greece. After a camping holiday along the Danube, he recorded: fine landscape, noble, copious - but not my style o f thing - too much of it for one thing. And the sky is thick as an eggshell. Sleepy, flat, lush land stocked with geese, pigs and sleepy peasants. Hans Andersen goosegirl landscape. How suddenly it all changes when you come to the Vardar Valley and quicken into Greece. Base rock. Olives, wild flowers, sweet limestone with hidden rivers rolling underground. Me for Greece!200 Although his movements in Yugoslavia were very restricted, it was his brief journeys through the interior which inspired him most. In the autumn o f 1949 he drove to Sarajevo and described the experience in a number o f letters to his friends and in a poem entitled ‘Sarajevo’, first published in The Times Literary Supplement in January 1951. ‘Sarajevo’ depicts a city which, with ‘white minarets twisted up like sugar’, resembles an oriental fantasy by Byron or a watercolour by Edward Lear. Sarajevo is a town where time does not flow - ‘a village, like an instinct left to rust / composed around the echo o f a pistol-shot’ - in which Durrell could manage, for a brief moment, to ignore the drabness o f Communism.201 In October 1949 Durrell drove a jeep through southern Serbia and Macedonia en route to Salonika on an official trip. He repeated this journey when he took a sixweek camping holiday in Greece in the early summer o f 1952. Southern Serbia, with the first echoes o f Durrell’s beloved eastern Mediterranean world, inspired images very different from his gloomy descriptions o f Belgrade. White Eagles Over Serbia is probably at its most memorable in D urrell’s evocations o f the Serbian landscape, caught with extraordinary precision and beauty. He captures most strikingly the mountain landscapes o f the Sumadija, a hundred or so miles south o f Belgrade, which he would have known from his journey westwards to Sarajevo and southwards to Greece. From M ethuen’s first recollections o f the Serbian lands (‘A vague image was rising in the back o f his mind o f high flushed mountains, crested with firs, and resonant with the vibration o f icy waters flowing southwards and westwards’ - although the vagueness sits uneasily with his ability to pass as a native)202 to the detailed and poetic evocations o f scenery, such as the following description o f the valley o f the Ibar River: I le him self was rather astonished by the accuracy o f his memory, for in his enchanted valley nothing seemed to have changed. In the silence the

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river ran on with its gentle rattle o f water stirring pebbles - a pearly shadow o f sound against which the songs o f the birds rose bright and poignant on the moist air. The hedges were thick with a variety o f flowers, and his quick eye detected the presence o f old friends, yellow snap­ dragon, sky-blue flax. Here the hills ran away in a series o f verdant undulations to where, softly painted against the sky, the tow ering mountains o f central Serbia rose, lilac and green and red; and in all this lovely country there were no signs o f life, no mule-teams raising dust, no bands o f armed men watching from the woods. It baffled him to imagine how Anson could have got him self into trouble here, the going was so easy, the points o f visibility so many, the cover so good.203 Durrell’s sense o f place is always more captivating than his attempts to convey historical and political detail. An interviewer once asked him about the way he used autobiographical elements in his novels. ‘There is hardly a snatch o f autobiography,’ Durrell replied, ‘most o f the autobiography is in places and scenes and am biances\2M If D urrell’s landscapes are caught with precision and beauty, his Balkan characters are, with perhaps the single exception o f Vida, no more than sketches o f exoticised stereotypes. His Serbs seem more inspired by Buchan’s ‘natives’ o f various kinds than by any real experiences, without the exaggerated flam boyance w hich m akes B uchan’s characters so memorable. The leader o f the royalist conspiracy, Black Peter - a distant descendant o f the R om anticist portrayals o f B lack G eorge, that is, Karageorge, the leader o f the Serb rebellion against the Ottomans in 1804, analysed in the previous chapter - was educated in Belgrade and Vienna, and fought with the Chetniks in the Second World War. Durrell describes the Chetniks as ‘the ill-fated Royalist band o f General M ihaelovic’,* which was ‘abandoned to its fate by the Allies’.205 Black Peter is, as a Yugoslav literary historian remarked, a ‘Rasputin-like figure’.206 ‘The steep back to his head, the unswept shock o f his hair, and the black beard proclaimed him a Serb. He had cruel dark eyes set very close together and huge hands in which he was trying to crack a w alnut.’207 Rather improbably, he is dressed in a ‘dirty Russian tunic and trousers tucked into the tops o f his dirty boots’, and is accompanied at all times by an old man, whose ‘clumsily shaven head’, with ‘a long dangling elf-lock at the crown’, reveals him to be an Arnaut (that is, an Albanian) from Kosmet (Kosovo), with whom Black Peter occasionally, and somewhat improbably, converses in Bulgarian.* Black Peter’s servant, Branko, is a ‘savage-lookingone-eyed m an’, who walks * *

The Royalist Chetnik leader, General Draza Mihailovid, deserted by the allies and executed by the Communists in 1946. Presumably the Bulgarian is an additional ‘exotic’ ingredient, as it is hard to think o f a plausible reason for their use of this third language, which is easily intelligible to speakers o f Serbian mul therefore unsuitable as a sccret code.

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into a room ‘touching his forelock and caressing the butt o f a revolver’.208 Most o f the peasants are gormless and ignorant, and thus hardly deserving o f British backing. Unlike Buchan’s heroic spies, Methuen is not in Serbia to com bat any super-villain but merely to make sure that the ‘shaggy ruffians’, for whose ‘lost cause’ he has no more than occasional pangs o f sympathy, do not make any moves which might endanger the East-W est balance o f power and give the Soviet Union a pretext to invade Yugoslavia. Balkan intrigues are, once again, threatening the stability o f Europe. M ethuen’s tasks are, relatively speaking, more modest than Richard Hannay’s. Infiltrating a group o f defeated and disorganised peasants in the mountains o f Serbia hardly begins to compare with Hannay’s protean range o f roles on his transcontinental journey through enemy territory. Methuen is, nonetheless, an anachronistic incarnation o f a gentleman spy, just as much as Durrell’s ‘homage to Buchan’ is itself an anachronism. Compared to the new breed o f urbane Cold War intelligence gatherers who were to dominate the post-war spy thriller, M ethuen’s adventure in the Serbian countryside is redolent o f Boy-Scout activities. Durrell’s references to the Soviet threat and his descriptions o f the drabness o f the Communist-ruled Belgrade only partly disguise the Ruritanian landscapes o f M ethuen’s Balkan playground. Trying to evoke the spirit o f the Balkans, White Eagles Over Serbia is perhaps chiefly interesting precisely because its lack o f originality is so striking when compared to Durrell’s best works. That he should choose to write about the Balkans in a deliberately ‘repro’ format, for which he hardly needed any experience o f the area, and with possible financial gain so firmly in his mind, reveals a recognition o f the profitability o f the type o f imaginative colonisation through which the literary ‘Balkans’ continued to be ruthlessly exploited. On the O rien t E xpress R oute In the forty-two years between the publication o f Stoker’s Dracula and the beginning o f the Second World War, the genres through which British popular literature explored the encounter between the Western world and the East continued to diversify, incorporating new realities alongside the well-tested templates. Having successfully quarried the Balkans as a source o f raw material for royal romances, Gothic novels and spy fiction, British writers returned to the peninsula in the Orient Express narratives o f the 1930s. Graham Greene’s Stamboul Train, published in 1932, was among the first novels to use the famous train as a setting. It was followed by works such as Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express (1934), Ethel Lina W hite’s The Wheel Spins (1936), Cecil Roberts’s Victoria FourThirty (1937) and Eric Am bler’s The Mask o f Dimitrios (1939). The Orient Express genre thus belongs largely to the 1930s, and indeed the literature o f the decade was, as Valentine Cunningham comments in British Writers

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and the Thirties, marked by trains and travel: The big international trains were implicit with incident, with political intrigues, strange meetings, sexual plottings, providing an opportuneful montage (to use Greene’s metaphor) o f the international scene through which they passed but also (like ships) as usefully enclosed as a vicarage drawing-room and thus ripe for all sorts o f strange deaths and smart detective work.209 After the Second World War, a new division o f Europe by the Iron Curtain shifted the favoured loci o f popular writing further north. The Orient Express diagonal which connected London, Paris and Istanbul in pre-war murder mysteries and spy fiction was now replaced by the W ashington-LondonBerlin-M oscow line and the Balkans were, for the time being, marginalised. The Orient Express journey itself became a melancholy shadow o f its former glory, a sidetrack reminder o f the great age o f the European railways, as described in Ian Fleming’s From Russia with Love (1957): Under the arc lights, the long-chassied German locomotive panted quietly with the laboured breath o f a dragon dying o f asthma. Each heavy breath seemed certain to be the la s t. . . The Orient Express was the only live train in the ugly, cheaply architectured burrow that is Istanbul’s main station. The trains on the other lines were engineless and unattended waiting for tomorrow. Only track no. 3, and its platform, throbbed with the tragic poetry o f departure.210 Although the most famous examples o f the genre were written by British writers, the Orient Express novel was popular throughout Western Europe and in America. La Madone des sleepings {The M adonna o f the Sleeping Cars), written by the French novelist Maurice Dekobra and published in 1927 was, in fact, as E. H. Cookridge remarks in Orient Express. The Life and Times o f the W orld’s M ost Famous Train, the first o f many novels to exploit the luxurious train, with its mix o f travellers and its still exciting route, for a ‘well tried formula o f romance, intrigue and terror’.211 ‘The railways were the most popular means o f travel at the time, and involved a sense o f community with the fellow passengers and casual encounters with strangers that today’s isolation in private cars excludes,’ Norman Sherry comments in his biography o f Graham Greene.212 In its pre-Second World War form, train travel seemed, in fact, particularly well suited to its use as a plot device. The compartmentalised railway cars and the enforced intimacy o f wagon-lits on long-distance journeys created a sense o f closeness with a small group o f fellow passengers absent from many o f today’s trains, the open spaces o f which, modelled on aeroplanes and buses rather than horsedrawn carriages, provide a greater degree o f anonymity. Paradoxically, the openness o f space brings with it a convention o f isolation, an imaginary private enclosure for the individual traveller.

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As a narrative device, traditional train travel offered the possibility o f connecting a relatively small group o f haphazardly selected characters in a self-contained world for days on end, interweaving their destinies through a particular event. Initially, the fictional train was no more than a simple narrative backdrop which provided a suitable frame for the story. Tolstoy’s train in the Kreutzer Sonata, for example, is a late nineteenth-century equivalent to the Tuscan villa in Boccaccio’s Decameron, with the added advantages o f social mixing and anonymity enabling passengers to admit their darkest secrets as if they were in the confessional. In the popular novels o f the 1930s, however, the train became more than just a convenient setting. The glamour and apparent dangers o f railway travel came to be foregrounded and central to the story. The Orient Express, which made its first journey in 1883, and which was - in the 1920s - advertised as ‘the Magic Carpet o f the East’, influenced popular perceptions o f glamour and luxury in the first decades o f the century to a degree which can be compared to the inspirational effect o f cruise liners upon the Art Deco era. In an age when travel through the Balkans ceased to be a pastim e o f the lonely B yronic hero and cam e to be experienced by numerous wealthy and not necessarily adventurous tourists, the Orient Express linked the Romantic imaginings o f a journey to the ‘mysterious East’ with the opulence o f the industrialised West, by moving a ‘W estern’ setting (a sort o f tinned Occident) into the turbulent and potentially hostile surroundings o f south-eastern Europe. In A gatha Christie’s novel, for example, the train resembles nothing so much as an elegant country house on the move. As early as 1908, the French poet Valery Larbaud (1881-1957) described the mystery and the allure o f the Orient Express in his much anthologised poem ‘O de’ by contrasting the luxurious appearance o f the train with the lonely Balkan landscapes through which it passed. Larbaud rejoiced in the slim locomotives, the leather and lacquer o f the expensive railway-cars with their exotic names in expensive gold lettering. This symbol o f Western opulence is taken, on its way to Istanbul, through the unknown, seemingly distant Balkan lands (‘les solitudes montagnards de la Serbie, / Et, plus loin, a travers la Bulgarie pleine des roses’).213 Although the mention o f the Orient Express can even now conjure up images o f luxury travel, in the 1 9 3 0 s-w h e n the train entered English literature - the days o f its greatest glory had already passed. In his autobiographical novel, Orient Express, Gregor von Rezzori remarks that ‘already by then the train o f the crowned and uncrowned Balkan princes and adventurers o f both sexes had long become the favoured means o f transport for bourgeois tim ber m erchants.’214 If M aurice D ekobra’s La Madone des sleepings, which ‘ran through edition after edition’ during the thirty years after its publication in 1927, offered its readers ‘in the throes o f depression and facing the ominous inevitability o f w a r. . . the fascination

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o f seeing the last survivors o f European aristocracy clash with the sinister secret agents o f the Soviet Union, fortuitously brought face-to-face by the O rient E xpress’,215 Graham Greene found, in the already frayed and somewhat seedy train, stuck in the Balkan snow-storm on the eve o f an attempted revolution, the recognisable contours o f the melancholy post­ imperial landscape o f his fiction. The cinema, rather than literature, inspired Stamboul Train. Green started writing the novel in 1931 hoping that ‘with luck [it] might be made into a film .’216 The film industry - whose history was from the very beginning connected to the railways (Louis Lumiere’s The Arrival o f a Train at a Country Station (1895) was one o f the first films ever made) - saw in train travel during the inter-war years an efficient way o f filming exotic stories on a low budget. Train films, like novels, were in effect studio-bound ‘chamber pieces’ in which the geographical settings fleeted by in name only, while audiences were expected to provide their own stereotypes and imaginings o f the locale which lay beyond the occasional glimpse o f a steam-bound railway platform. The genre was very popular during the Depression. Greene wrote that ‘before he completed the book, Marlene Dietrich had appeared in Shanghai Express, the English had made Rome Express, and even the Russians had produced their railway film Turksib. ’2I7 Unsurprisingly therefore, very much as he hoped, Greene succeeded in selling his own story to Twentieth Century Fox in 1933. A couple o f years later, he had a chance to see the film version o f his work, entitled Orient Express, in Tenerife - on his way to Liberia. Advertising material warned the audiences not to expect another Shanghai Express (‘The real Orient express runs across Europe from Belgium to Constantinople. Therefore, you will go wrong if you interpret the word ‘Orient’ to indicate something o f a Chinese or Japanese nature.’ )218 In 1962, almost thirty years after the original filming, the BBC produced a new version o f Stamboul Train. Other Orient Express stories were similarly made into popular films, some in several versions - Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express and Ethel Lina W hite’s The Wheel Spins (the story which provided the basis for Alfred Hitchcock’s film The Lady Vanishes) represent the most famous examples. A number o f the devices used by Graham Greene in his Stamboul Train came to be established as conventions o f the Orient Express novel. The sections o f his book are named after the particular stops on the Orient Express route (Ostend, Cologne, Vienna, Subotica, Constantinople). The plot, as in subsequent O rient Express novels, focuses on the Balkan peninsula, which came to feature as something o f a ‘Bermuda Triangle’ on the train’s route. On a train journey across Europe, the Balkans preserved that mystique with which they were invested in Anthony Hope’s or Bram Stoker’s novels. It is there that the unexpected always happens and the train and its passengers are at their most vulnerable. Unexpected snowstorms and delays (Greene and Christie both use this device) bring possible

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infiltrations through which the self-enclosed segment o f the Western world that is the Express comes under threat from the ‘B alkan’ Other. It is interesting to note, in this context, that Graham Greene’s earliest experience o f film was connected to an imaginary Balkan land, as created in Anthony H ope’s Sophy o f Kravonia. Norman Sherry explains: He recalls seeing Sophy o f Kravonia, his first film, at the age o f twelve and retaining ‘an enchanting vision o f a flapping riding habit, an imperious switch, mountains, rebel guns rumbling across the keys o f a single Brighton piano up the pass’.219 Greene’s direct experience o f the real Balkans was, like Buchan’s and H ope’s, practically non-existent. He had spent ‘only twenty-four hours in Constantinople, in 1930, in the course o f an Hellenic cruise’.220 Yet while his previous novel, Rumour at Nightfall, deliberately tried to obscure the imaginary Spanish setting with ‘the heavy folds o f Conrad-conditioned prose’, he wanted the backdrops o f Stamboul Train to be ‘realistic and contemporary’.221 The first leg o f the fictional journey on the Orient Express was reproduced in greater detail as Greene wrote from personal experience (he managed somehow, in spite o f his dire financial situation, to find the money to travel as far as Cologne). The impressions o f his brief visit to Istanbul in 1930, combined with his study o f guidebooks such as H. G. Dwight’s Constantinople: Settings & Traits, helped him in the writing o f the last chapter o f Stamboul Train.222 For the central part o f his journey, according to his own testimony, he relied on his record collection for inspiration. The French composer Arthur Honegger (1892-1955) and his symphonic movement Pacific 231 (1924) (named after the name-plate on locomotives drawing heavy, high-speed trains) were a substitute for real travel through the Balkans: As I couldn’t take a train to Istanbul the best I could do was to buy a record o f Honegger’s Pacific 231 which I hoped, when 1 played it daily, would take me far enough away from my thatched cottage, a Pekinese dog who suffered from hysteria, some barren apple trees, a muddy lane and a row o f Cos lettuces.223 As is so often the case in popular British literature with Balkan settings, the Balkan section - the very section o f the journey which is the focus of the novel - is wholly imaginary. ‘It would be wrong for the reader to have any confidence in my report when he reaches the Yugoslav frontier in S u b o tica,’ G reene notes, adding that when, som e decades later, he succeeded in making the full journey to Istanbul, ‘it was night when I arrived at Subotica and I was too sleepy to check details o f my almost forgotten narrative.’224 It is hardly surprising that Greene’s description o f Subotica, (a ‘small, muddy station’ with a ‘row o f sheds’ instead o f station buildings,22' and a

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single hotel ‘which smelt o f dried plants and insect powder’)226 would not sound familiar to those who know the fine Sezession and neo-baroque architecture o f this old Austro-Hungarian city. For Graham Greene, the archetypal ‘Balkan’ setting seems to combine mud, snow and backwardness with a pervading sense o f danger: ‘Is this Subotica?’ Myatt shouted, as a few mud cottages plunged at them through the storm, and the driver nodded and waved his hand forward. A small child ran out into the middle o f the road and the car swerved to avoid it; a chicken squawked and handfuls o f grey feathers were flung up into the snow. An old woman ran out o f a cottage and shouted after them. ‘W hat’s she saying?’ The driver grinned over his shoulder: ‘Dirty Jew .’227 The hero o f this novel, Dr Czinner, an exiled revolutionary who, with a dose o f death-wish, returns to Belgrade on the Orient Express, is not fully ‘Balkan’: his Hungarian father abandoned his homeland in order to work first in Split and then in Belgrade as a shoemaker.* The inheritance of Hungarian blood represents for Czinner ‘the breath o f a larger culture b low ing down the dark stinking B alkan a lle y s'.21* C zinner’s father continued to think o f Hungary with nostalgia even though he was better o ff in Yugoslavia: ‘It was as if an Athenian slave become a freed man in barbarian lands regretted a little the statuary, the poetry, the philosophy o f a culture in which he had had no share.’229 Although Greene claimed to have relied on his imagination, conditioned by the music o f Honegger, for the Balkan section o f Stamboul Train, and refused, during a much later visit to Yugoslavia, to explain the reasons for his choice o f a central character and setting for the novel, a closer look at Part IV o f his narrative, entitled ‘Subotica’, suggests nevertheless that some more specific research into those aspects intended to provide ‘local colour’ to Greene’s story must have taken place. He mentions the Moscow Hotel and K ruger’s beergarden in B elgrade,230 as well as the ‘K alim agdan’ (Kalemegdan) park - a green blotch on the Baedeker map which Czinner burns in his railway compartment as he reaches the Yugoslav border.231 The local Serbian spirit (rakija) is described as ‘the heavy plum wine’,232 and the national currency, the ‘dina’ (that is, dinar), features heavily in haggling.233 A number o f characters bear Serbian names (Lukitch, Ninitch, *

His unusual career m ove might also reflect a degree o f misunderstanding o f the Hungarian difference from their Slav neighbours, not unusual in Britain. In a recent account o f his own Orient Express journey, Sir Bernard Ingham, once Margaret Thatcher’s Press Secretary, talks about ‘getting o f f the train in Budapest at 10 o ’clock at night and being greeted by all these Slavs gawping at you in your dinner jacket it was like stepping back in time to the 1920s!’(Rosanna Greenstreet, ‘In Budapest. On the Rails with Sir Bernard Ingham’, 20/20 (June-July 1997) p. 59)

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Petkovitch, Alexitch), while others are obviously meant to sound ‘Balkan’ (Hartep, Kamnetz, Vuskovitch). The historical background to the story, C zin n er’s revolutionary plot and the establishm ent o f martial law in B elgrade, is largely a product o f G reene’s im agination, even if the declaration o f emergency rule by King Alexander of Y ugoslavia on 6 January 1929 (which lasted until Alexander’s assassination in Marseilles in 1934) might have helped to trigger Greene’s narrative. Dr Czinner represents, in many ways, a threatening Balkan figure who through his ‘W esternness’ (in exile he teaches at a minor English public school in Birchington-on-Sea) leads other characters into an ultimately fatal involvement within the dark labyrinths o f a corrupt Balkan state, but he is neither the hero nor the villain in Greene’s story. While he admitted, like Lawrence Durrell, having been an admirer o f Buchan’s fiction (Buchan was his ‘boyhood hero’),234Greene does not depict an easily defined struggle between good and evil. His characters, with all their blunders and guilt, recreate little o f the heroic melodrama which characterises earlier popular literature, even as they travel through the same Balkan landscapes. Stamboul Train marks the move from the very British, superior set o f heroes o f earlier popular fiction towards the film noir, the twilight world o f some o f the mid-century’s popular prose, populated by characters o f dubious Britishness (a Jewish currant salesman, a Hungarian-Serb Communist exile turned boarding-school teacher) and o f even more dubious courage. Instead o f the pastoral Balkans o f the royal romances and the war-torn but still chivalrous world o f the heroic spy, Greene’s Balkan landscape resembles the settings o f his other novels much more than any other fictional Balkan locale, consisting as it does o f seedy urban settings and a few images of rural desolation. For Greene, the Balkans are a backcloth against which he projects the death-throes o f an already ‘polluted’ Empire. Agatha Christie’s novel Murder on the Orient Express, published in 1934, two years after Greene’s book, still divides its world clearly between the ‘civilised’ passengers (on board the Orient Express) and the barbaric Balkans which are to be excluded at all cost. Her train, as in Greene’s novel, runs into a snowdrift, this time ‘between Vincovi [that is, Vinkovci] and Brod’.235* ‘One o f those Balkan things. What can you expect?’ complains one character.236 When the murder is committed, the Orient Express pas­ sengers - an assortment o f Europeans and Americans - are united in their attempt to prevent any possibility o f police investigation: ‘Passing through most countries we have the police o f that country on the train. But in Yugoslavia - no. You comprehend?’237 The reason for keeping the Yugoslav police out is, it appears, the likelihood that they would create an ‘unrea­ sonable’ fuss about the murder: *

The towns are in eastern Croatia, then part o f Yugoslavia.

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There must be some rescue work in progress . . . They are so slow in these countries . . . it is hours before anyone thinks o f doing anything. And the police in these countries, they will be most trying to deal with puffed up with importance, touchy, on their dignity. They will make a grand affair o f all this. It is not often that such a case comes their way. It will be in all the newspapers.238 Unlike Graham Greene, Agatha Christie travelled many times along the train route she describes, accom panying her first husband, C olonel Archibald Christie, to and from the Middle East. While her train timetables are more precise, there is even less sense o f the ‘real’ Balkan world in her novel than in Greene’s, in spite o f her greater concrete experience. The main purpose o f Poirot’s investigation into the murder o f the American, Ratchett, is, after all, to keep ‘the Balkans’ out o f the train. The Balkan landscape is obscured - instead o f Yugoslavia Christie tellingly depicts only the whiteness o f the snow-encased window panes - and even the initial, precise setting (the town o f Vinkovci, a railway junction with local resonances similar to those o f Betjeman’s Slough in Britain, also features in G reene’s novel) soon dissolves into generalised and condescending references to ‘these people’ and ‘these countries’.239 The symbolic threat o f the Balkans is similar to that posed by the peninsula in Graham Greene’s novel, and the Orient Express train provides an opportunity to exploit the fear o f entrapment in a primitive, dangerous world. While it features a similarly picturesque selection o f cosm opolitan travellers on board the Orient Express, Cecil Roberts’s novel Victoria FourThirty, published in 1937, finds its theme in a range o f travellers’ lifestories. The Orient Express journey becomes the single thin thread which connects a series o f disparate narratives. The Balkan section o f the journey not quite as central to this amorphous narrative as it is to Stamboul Train or M urder on the Orient Express - is nevertheless described in particular detail. One episode o f Victoria Four-Thirty is taken from Balkan history. The description o f Prince Paul ‘o f Slavonia’ (a province in eastern Croatia which was then part o f Yugoslavia), known as ‘Prince Sixpenny’, travelling from his English public school to take up the throne vacated by the assassination o f his father, the ‘Slavonian’ King Peter, has a number of parallels with the story o f the young Prince Peter o f Yugoslavia and his destiny after the assassination o f his father, King Alexander, in 1934.240 Unlike Greene and Christie, Roberts offers a number o f detailed de­ scriptions o f Balkan cities as the train passes - not quite along its standard route - through Belgrade, N is and Salonika. Nonetheless, his novel is similar to Stamboul Train and Murder on the Orient Express in presenting the Balkans as a dangerous, anarchic place. (‘The Balkans are scarcely fit for a woman to travel in’;241 ‘Poor devil - it just proves that anything can happen in the Balkans’;242 ‘Daddy, are you quite safe in the Balkans? They

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are always shooting someone, aren’t they?’243 are typical o f the kind o f comments Roberts’ characters make.) The last o f the major pre-war Orient Express narratives, Eric Am bler’s novel The M ask o f Dimitrios, published in 1939 and filmed in 1944,* is both the most complex example o f the genre and the one which is most thoroughly immersed in the Balkan locales. Ambler includes some very precise topography in his descriptions o f a range o f Balkan cities, from Istanbul through Sofia and Edirne to Belgrade (‘You will like Belgrade!’ Mr Peters continued happily; ‘such a beautiful city. The views from the Terazija [Terazije] and the Kalemegdam [Kalemegdan]! Magnificent! And you must certainly go out to Avala.’)244 The sense o f Balkan location is achieved yet again through imagination and research. When I asked him in 1996 about his personal experience o f the Balkans, Ambler explained that he had never visited the area, although he considered it relevant to add that he knew quite a bit about Byzantine history. ‘A lady once told me that my description o f the m ortuary in Istanbul is rem arkably accu rate,’ he commented, ‘although I never even knew it existed.’245 The M ask o f Dimitrios is set in the cities on the Orient Express route, rather than on the train itself, although the train’s staff are involved in the drug-trafficking between the Balkans and the West which forms a key element in the plot. Ambler uses the Express’s route to provide a series of staging-points for the career o f the novel’s main character, Dimitrios Makropoulos. Born in Salonika in 1889, a fig-packer turned criminal who started his career in Smyrna (Izmir) in what is today Turkey, Dimitrios gradually makes his way northwards through the Balkans into Western Europe. He finds him self in Edirne after the expulsion o f Greeks from Sm yrna in the 1920s, and later becomes involved with the attem pted assassination o f the Bulgarian Prime M inister Stam bolisky in Sofia. (Alexander Stambolisky was killed in a right-wing coup in 1923.)* Dimitrios

*

*

‘I didn’t think that anyone could possibly make a film o f it,’ Eric Ambler said recently, adding that Warner Brothers made $600,000 out o f the project, and that he felt sick when he first saw the picture during the war. (Eric Ambler interviewed by Philip French, 24 N ovem ber 1996, the Guardian interview, at the National Film Theatre, 40th London Film Festival.) A n u nsu ccessful attack on his life had also been staged earlier in 1923. Stam bolisky w as finally killed on 9 June 1923 in a particularly bloody way. ‘His ears were sliced o ff before his Macedonian captors cut o ff the hands that had signed the N ish agreement [an agreement betw een the Bulgarian and Yugoslav governments which Macedonian irredentists within Bulgaria regarded as a betrayal o f their cause]. Finally he w as decapitated and his head taken to Sofia in a tin box.’ (R.J. Crampton, A Short History o f Modern Bulgaria (Cam­ bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 98). His nineteenth-century pre­ decessor Stam bolov also had his hand sliced o f f by M acedonians in a Sofia street attack and later died o f his injuries.

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subsequently steals an im portant naval docum ent from B elgrade, is indirectly implicated in an attack against a Yugoslav politician in Zagreb, and finally establishes a successful drug-trafficking operation between Sofia and Paris, ‘w ith the help o f a sleeping-car attendant on the O rient Express’.246 A drug addict himself, Ambler’s Dimitrios represents - through his numerous metamorphoses - a variant upon the same metaphoric Balkan threat o f the kind embodied by Greene’s Dr Czinner, whose ‘W esternness’ ultimately threatens his fellow passengers. Like Dr Czinner, but even more like Count Dracula, Dimitrios is ultimately both a dangerous Balkan enemy and a tragic victim o f his protean ability to assume a ‘European’ face. He is drowned in the Bosphorus in 1938: This putty-coloured" bulk was the end o f an Odyssey. Dimitrios had returned at last to the country whence he had set out so many years before. So many years. Europe in labour had through its pain seen for an instant a new glory, and then had collapsed to welter again in the agonies o f war and fear. Governments had risen and fallen; men and women had worked, had starved, had made speeches, had fought, had been tortured, had died. Hope had come and gone, a fugitive in the scented bosom o f illusion. Men had learned to sniff in the heady dream - stuff o f the soul - and wait impassively while the lathes turned the guns for their destruction. And through those years Dimitrios had lived and breathed and come to terms with his strange gods. He had been a dangerous man. Now, in the loneliness o f death, he was pitiable.247 As in Dracula, it is an Englishman - this time Charles Latimer, a lecturer in political economy at a minor English university and a writer o f romans policiers - who discovers the real face o f Dimitrios in death. The changing mask o f the Dimitrios in the novel’s title metaphorically represents the mask o f the Balkans as they appear in popular British fiction. It is a region which is impenetrable and complex (the mass o f toponyms and historical detail in some novels is intended to mystify, to demonstrate impenetrability rather than to elucidate), potentially threatening and, in its chaos, destabilising in relation to the European order. The typical Balkan villain or anti-hero, from Dracula to Dimitrios, is always assuming a European ‘m ask’ in an attempt to be accepted or assimilated. Yet, finally, he is also particularly as he is regularly defeated by the W est’s reason and superior technology - pitiable, both in the threat he represents and in his pathetic longing to step outside the realm o f ‘Otherness’ to which he is confined. In the context o f popular literature, after the heroic narratives o f the turn o f the century with their dashing gentlemen adventurers steeped in the ethos o f honour and superior Britishness, Orient Express novels offer an insight into the developing anxieties o f empire. Both in film and in literuture, the Orient Express genre offers images o f an urban, cosmopolitan world, but

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one which can all too easily turn into a nightmare for the British (and American) traveller. Instead o f actively seeking adventure - like Buchan’s Richard Hannay - the Orient Express traveller cannot wait to return home. He is no longer even a proper gentleman. Hitchcock’s characters in The Lady Vanishes, or Greene’s Jewish currant salesman, are all too ready to abandon others to their destiny for the sake o f self-preservation. As a b ack d ro p to the O rien t E xpress story, the B alkan p en in su la is a claustrophobic site. The neurosis o f being trapped - o f never being able to pull out o f the Balkans - which has shaped much o f the W est’s political practice in the post-Communist era, finds here its early fictional forerunners.

Chapter Four

War and Diplomacy in the New Ruritania: Comic Visions of the Balkans

Dragoman (to the Traveller). - The Pasha congratulates your Excellency. Traveller. - A bout B oughton-Soldborough? The deuce he does! - but 1 want to get at his views in relation to the present state o f the Ottoman empire. Tell him the Houses o f Parliament have met, and that there has been a speech from the Throne pledging England to maintain the integrity o f the Sultan’s dominions. Dragoman (to the Pasha). - This branch o f Mudcombe, this possible policeman o f Bedfordshire, informs your Highness that in England the talking houses have met, and that the integrity o f the Sultan’s dominions has been assured for ever and ever by a speech from the velvet chair. Pasha. - Wonderful chair! Wonderful houses! - whirr! whirr! all by wheels; - whiz! whiz! all by steam! - wonderful chair! wonderful houses! wonderful people! - whirr! whirr! all by wheels! -w hiz! whiz! all by steam! Traveller (to the Dragoman). - What does the Pasha mean by that whizzing? he does not mean to say, does he, that our Government will ever abandon their pledges to the Sultan? Dragoman. - No, your excellency, but he says the English talk by wheels and by steam .1 As a ‘champion o f the underdog’ and a symbol o f individual British in­ volvement with the Balkans, the Byronic hero dominated different genres o f popular literature throughout the hundred years after B yron’s death in Missolonghi. His comic counterpart, the pathetic would-be Byron, unwanted at home, unhappy with the way Britain was going and mercilessly exploited in the Balkans, made his appearance in Evelyn W augh’s Unconditional Surrender in 1961. However, the first comic depictions o f the Balkans themselves began to appear much earlier. Comic writing inherently assumes

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a greater degree o f familiarity with the area it represents, as it depends on a certain level o f shared knowledge about a particular Other for its effect. In this context, one o f the seminal works o f British travel writing in the nineteenth century, A.W. Kinglake’s Eothen (1844), was already able to play with an apparently well-established set o f stereotypes in its description o f British encounters with the Ottoman rulers in the Near East, as debunked in the above-quoted excerpt from an imagined conversation between the O ttom an Pasha o f Belgrade and his English visitor, an unsuccessful ‘candidate for Boughton-Soldborough at the last election’.2 The appearance in the first half o f the nineteenth century o f ‘tourist guides’ covering the Balkans and other parts o f the Ottoman Empire, such as A Handbook for Travellers in Turkey published in 1840,3 reflects the growth o f interest in the area. However, it is only with the gradual erosion o f Ottoman rule that one can encounter fictional comedy which reflects a new awareness o f a separate Balkan identity. One o f the earlier works o f this kind, Charles Lever’s short story ‘What I Did at Belgrade’ (1868), examined in the section o f this chapter devoted to British diplomatic (mis)adventures, reveals still hazy notions o f Balkan outlandishness. In Shaw’s Arms and the M an( 1894), such ideas were already giving way to the patronising representations o f infantile, bickering Balkan nations, playing at statehood, diplomacy and war, which dominate most o f the twentieth century works examined in this chapter. B ernard S h aw ’s B ulgaria The first o f George Bernard Shaw’s Plays Pleasant, and one o f the bestknown comic representations of Balkan life in British literature. Arms and the Man was first performed at the Avenue Theatre in London on 21 April 1894, before an audience which included Oscar Wilde, George Moore, Sidney Webb and W. B. Yeats.4 The best-sellers of that year, Anthony Hope’s Prisoner o fZ en d a and William Le Queux’s The Great War in 1897 - as well as the success o f George du Maurier’s Trilby which was being serialised in Harper's M a g a zin e - show the popularity o f fantasies exploiting the attractions and threats of an exoticised Other in the last decade o f the century. Shaw’s Arms and the M a n - which deconstructs a stereotypical military melodrama in order to subvert Romantic ideals o f heroism - must have benefited in popularity from its ‘strange’ Bulgarian setting and its colourful costumes. This was an attraction Shaw was well aware o f as he made, on his own admission, ‘the most absurd alteration in detail for the sake o f local color, which, however, is amusing and will intensify the extravagance o f the play & will give it realism at the same tim e.’5 The degree o f ‘authenticity’ in Arms and the M an, he boasted, was such as to ‘have given rise to the impression that I have actually been in Bulgaria’.6

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Shaw’s efforts to achieve a quasi-realistic, ‘authentic’ setting contradict his oft-repeated claims about the irrelevance o f the locale for this particular play and its concerns. He began writing Arms and the Man late in 1893, noting in his diary entry for 26 Novem ber that he ‘spent the evening beginning a new play - a romantic one’,7 yet, ambiguously, he was soon aspiring to be anti-rom antic in his message. In addition to this initial ambiguity. Arms and the M an, in the four months between its conception and its première, was to undergo at least two dislocations. The initial draft, entitled/f//av and the Balkans, had ‘no geography’ - ‘the names o f the places were left blank and the characters simply called the Father, the Daughter, the heroic Lover, the Stranger and so on.’8 Shaw asked Sidney Webb for advice on a ‘suitable w ar’ for his plot, although his original title suggests that he must already have thought o f the confrontation o f the two mentalities which feature in the final version o f the play. Webb, having spent ‘about two minutes in a rapid survey o f every war that has ever been waged’, suggested the Serbo-Bulgarian war o f 1885-6. This conflict took place after the union between Bulgaria and Eastern Rumelia (the latter was an autonomous province comprising the south-eastern part o f present-day Bulgaria), against Russian wishes, led Russia to withdraw its officers from the B u lg arian arm y, leaving B ulgaria w eakened in the face o f an opportunistic Serbian attack. The B ulgarians nevertheless defied all expectations by defeating the Serbs at the battle o f Slivnitsa on 17-9 Novem ber 1885. (Shaw ’s play describes the Bulgarian pursuit o f the defeated Serbian soldiers after this battle.) Bulgaria then invaded Serbia and after a 48 hour conflict between opposing armies o f 40,000 men each, the Bulgarians achieved a further victory at the battle o f Pirot on 26-27 November. The eventual inter­ vention o f Austria in January saved Serbia from further humiliation, the status quo being restored with the signing o f the Treaty o f Bucharest on 3 March 1886.9 Having chosen his war, and with a copy o f the Annual Register and a railway map o f the Balkan peninsula before him, Shaw filled in the blanks in his play, ‘making all the actions take place in Servia in the house o f a Servian fam ily’.10 On 17 March 1894 (just over a month before the first performance in London), he took the play to the Russian nihilist Stepniak, ‘who terrified me by inviting the admiral o f the Bulgarian fleet to assist. . . B uthefortunatelyturnedouttobeaR ussian.’11 Shaw’s adviser was Admiral Serebryekov, ‘who had commanded the Danube flotilla for the Bulgarians before, being suspected o f nihilist sympathies, he escaped to England and became a farm er’.12 As a result o f the social and historical information provided by Serebryekov, Shaw decided that the play, as set in Serbia, was ‘impossible from-beginning to end’ and resolved to shin the action to B u lg aria .

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Although Shaw did not intend to create an escapist romance in the mould o f The Prisoner ofZenda, the Balkans, as depicted in Arm s and the Man, with ‘oriental and gorgeous’ furnishings, picturesque costumes, and the snow-covered peaks o f the Balkan mountains visible from the small town ‘near the Dragoman pass’ in which the play is set, nevertheless recreate images and settings described in popular romances. Shaw’s Bulgaria can be seen as another imaginary ‘Ruritanian’ s ta te - a n aspect o f the play which was greatly emphasised, to Shaw ’s distress, by Oscar Strauss’s operetta, The Chocolate Soldier, directly based on Arms and the Man and premiered in 1908. Shaw referred to it as a ‘degradation o f a decent comedy into a dirty farce’.11 Bulgaria, as depicted in Arms and the Man, is a country which hovers uneasily between the luxurious Orient and cheap, imitative ‘W esternness’. Shaw’s stage directions show a world whose Homeric innocence is already polluted by Western imports and pretensions: Through an open window with a little balcony a peak o f the Balkans, wonderfully white and beautiful in the starlit snow, seems quite close at hand, though it is really miles away. The interior o f the room is not like anything to be seen in the West o f Europe, it is half rich Bulgarian, half cheap V iennese. . . The counterpane and hangings o f the bed, the window curtains, the little carpet, and all the ornamental textile fabrics in the room are oriental and gorgeous, the paper on the walls is occidental and paltry.14 Alongside their oriental heritage, a childish aspiration to imitate ‘the W est’ and appear ‘civilised’ marks Shaw’s Bulgarian characters and his idea o f ‘Balkanness’. Like children, and unlike the play’s Swiss anti-hero, the Bulgarians o f Arm s and the M an achieve comic effects by being unconsciously funny rather than witty. If Shaw’s images o f Bulgaria are poeticised in a typical ‘Ruritanian’ style, his Bulgarians are rather more ridiculous than the ‘picturesque’ Balkan characters o f popular literature. Catherine Petkoff, for example, is a woman ‘who might be a very splendid specimen o f the wife o f a mountain farmer, but is determined to be a V iennese lady, and to that end wears a fashionable tea gown on all occasions’.15 She boasts that the family position is ‘almost historical: we can go back for twenty years’.16* Major Petkoff, the man who ‘holds the highest command o f any Bulgarian’ in the Bulgarian arm y,17 suspects that his wife suffers frequent sore throats because she washes her neck every day - an ‘unnatural’ and ‘unhealthy’ habit imported from England: It all comes from the English: their climate makes them so dirty that they have to be perpetually washing themselves. Look at my father! He *

See also the exchange: ‘RA1NA: You do not yet know in whose house you are. I am a Petkoff. THE MAN: A pet w hat?’ on p. 31.

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never had a bath in his life; and he lived to be ninety-eight, the healthiest man in Bulgaria. I don’t mind a good wash once a week to keep up my position; but once a day is carrying the thing to a ridiculous extrem e.18 ‘Bulgarians o f really good standing - people in our position,’ their daughter R aina boasts proudly, ‘wash their hands nearly every d ay .’10 M ajor P etkoff s library is another example o f the pathetic attempts by Shaw’s Bulgarians to emulate the ‘civilised’ world. It is ‘not much o f a library’, with its single shelf o f coffee-stained, old, paper-covered novels and a small kitchen table ‘much the worse for wear, fitted as a writing table with an old canister full o f pens’,20 yet it is, Raina Petkoff boasts to Captain Bluntschli, ‘the only library in Bulgaria’,21 and a sign which should make the Swiss soldier understand that he is among ‘civilised people’ who ‘go to Bucharest every year for the opera season’.22 Shaw was forced to defend his portrayal o f Bulgarians (and one can only guess how many details o f this kind come from the Russian admiral and how many are a product o f Shaw ’s imagination) on at least two occasions. In his 1898 ‘Preface to Plays Pleasant’ he noted: One strongly Liberal critic, the late Moy Thomas, who had, in the teeth o f a chorus o f dissent, declared when Arms and the Man was produced, that I had struck a wanton blow at the cause o f liberty in the Balkan Peninsula by mentioning that it was not a matter o f course for a Bulgarian in 1885 to wash his hands every day. He no doubt saw soon afterwards the squabble, reported all through Europe, between Stam bouloff and an eminent lady o f the Bulgarian court who took exception to his neglect o f his fingernails.23 In 1924, Shaw expressed regret that his play ‘has wounded the sus­ ceptibilities o f Bulgarian students in Berlin and Vienna’, but attributed their anger to the lack o f a sense o f humour, adding that ‘when the Bulgarian students, with my sincerely friendly assistance, have developed a sense of humor there will be no more trouble.’24 If Bulgarian attempts to ‘Europeanise’ themselves are mostly ridiculed, their very ‘Europeanisation’ has resulted, Arms and the Man argues, in some negative consequences for which Europe alone is to be blamed. By accepting the values created by European Romanticism, the Bulgarians develop, Shaw argues, a wrong-headed sense o f heroism, as a product of the ‘general onslaught o f idealism’ which is ‘only a flattering name for romance in politics and m orals’.25 ‘Perhaps we only had our heroic ideas because we are so fond o f reading Byron and Pushkin,’ Raina Petkoff remarks, ‘Real life is so seldom like that!’26 T h e negative effects o f this R om antic influence are p articu larly eviden t in S h a w ’ s description o f M a jo r Sergius S a ra n o ff, ‘ a ta ll ro m a n tic a lly hand som e m an w ith the physical h a rd ih o o d , the hig h s p irit, and the susceptible im ag ination o f an untam ed m ountain c h ie fta in ’ .27 L ik e R aina,

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with her Viennese tea-gowns, he is for Shaw the worst possible hybrid - a barbarian who suffers from spleen, a noble savage who has read Byron. Shaw explains that this ‘Ruritanian’ character ‘would not be out o f place in a Parisian salon’: shewing that the clever imaginative barbarian has an acute critical faculty which has been thrown into intense activity by the arrival o f western civilization in the Balkans. The result is precisely what the advent of nine­ teenth-century thought first produced in England: to wit, Byronism. By brooding on the perpetual failure, not only of others, but o f himself, to live up to his ideals; by his consequent cynical scom for humanity . . . he has acquired the half tragic, half ironic air . . . by which Childe Harold fasci­ nated the grandmothers o f his English contemporaries.28 Later in the play, Major Petkoff similarly blames the West for the conflicts in the Balkans: ‘We shouldnt have been able to begin fighting if these foreigners hadnt shewn us how to do it: we knew nothing about it; and neither did the Serbs.’29 This claim sits uncomfortably with the explanation Catherine Petkoff gives to Captain Bluntschli: ‘You are a foreigner: you do not feel our national animosities as we do. We still hate the Serbs: the effect o f the peace on my husband has been to make him feel like a lion baulked o f his prey.’30 A Swiss mercenary who joins the Serbs simply because they are ‘closer on the way from Switzerland’, Captain Bluntschli sees heroism in war as the ultimate fiction: instances o f brave conduct, he explains, are usually attributable to foolishness. The play’s doubly happy ending, with Sergius and Louka and Bluntschli and Raina about to be married, undermines Bluntschli’s position o f superior cynicism and brings the play back to the level o f the melodrama which it had set out to undo. A jaded warrior, once in love Bluntschli reveals him self to be a hopeless romantic after all. ‘A vagabond, am an who has spoiled all his chances in life through an incurably romantic disposition’, he proposes to take his bride to the bourgeois paradise o f Switzerland, where he possesses ‘six hundred pairs o f sheets and blankets, with two thousand four hundred eider-down quilts . . . ten thousand knives and forks, and the same quantity o f dessert spoons . . . three hundred ser­ vants . . . six palatial establishments . . . two livery stables . . . a tea gardens, and a private house’.31 Interestingly, in view o f his expressed disdain for w ar heroes, B luntschli now boasts o f possessing ‘four m edals for distinguished services. . . the rank o f an officer and the standing o f a gentle­ m an’!32

Saki’s Lost Sanjak If Shaw uses the Balkans in his not entirely successful attempt to undermine (lie Romantic approach to war, H. 11. Munro (Saki) describes the peninsula

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as the last corner o f Europe to preserve romance and excitement, precisely because o f its wars. Unlike Shaw, Saki had gained first-hand knowledge o f the Balkans as a reporter for the Morning Post during the Macedonian crisis in the first years o f this century. The Macedonian lands, ruled by the Ottomans until 1912 and a micro­ cosm o f all the complexities o f the Balkans, the ethnic composition o f which inspired the French word macedoine (m eaning a mixed salad), became a centre o f unrest when the rival Balkan nationalities established organisations operating within M acedonia. The Internal M acedonian Revolutionary Organisation (IMRO), which had close connections with Bulgaria, was founded in Salonika in 1893 with the aim o f preparing a Macedonian rebellion. The rebellion finally erupted in August 1903: The two-month uprising cost the lives o f 4,694 civilians and 994 IMRO guerrillas. Estimates put the total number o f women and girls raped by the Turks at over 3,000 . . . A correspondent for the London Daily News at the scene, A. G. Hales, wrote in the October 21, 1903 edition: ‘I will try and tell this story coldly, calmly, dispassionately . . . one must tone the horrors down, for in their nakedness they are unprintable . . . ’ Public protests ensued against the Turkish Sultanate throughout Great Britain and the West.33 Saki departed for the southern Balkans in late 1902, almost a year before the uprising. Skirmishes and terror were already rife and the area was a dangerous place for a Westerner to work. An American missionary. Miss Ellen Stone, had recently been kidnapped by a group led by Yane Sandansky and ‘released only after the Turkish governm ent paid a ransom o f $70,000’.34 Saki’s first dispatches from the Balkans dealt with the ‘Albanian effervescence’ in Vucitm and Mitrovica (now in the Yugoslav province o f Kosovo).35 He reported, ‘with a sneer’ - as his biographer notes - ‘that the Albanian would never stand up to cannon fire but preferred to tear up the railway tracks between his lookout post and the town o f M itrovitza’.36 In October 1902 Saki reported from Salonika, dismissing rumours o f an imminent insurrection in Macedonia. He showed little sympathy for rebel bands fighting for independence from Ottom an Turkey. ‘An artificial element, he called it, inspired by Sofia and only working to provoke a massacre that would draw in the Great Powers’.37 He spent much o f the rest o f 1902 in Serbia and Bulgaria - where he joined the Union Club in Sofia as a visiting member. His letters to his sister describe his encounters with Bulgarian politicians: ‘I have voluminous discussions in French with some o f the leaders in the Bulgarian parliament; I don’t mean to say the discussions take place there; mercifully neither can criticise the other’s accent.’38

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Under the byline ‘From Our Special Correspondent’ Saki described the sittings o f the picturesque Bulgarian parliament, the Sobranie (a name which has also lent itself to a brand o f cigarettes): With a view, possibly, to the requirements o f the Greater Bulgaria o f a future day, the seating accommodation had been allotted on a scale which gives plenty o f elbow room. In leisurely fashion the members drift into their places, some clad in irreproachable model, many in primitive and uncompromising peasant garb, and one political group affecting a red fez gear. The Ministerial Bench is enlivened by the uniform o f the Minister o f War and further diversified by the brown tweed coat o f M. Ludskanoff, the maligned man at the moment.39 During 1903 Saki travelled through Bulgaria and Macedonia with H. N. Brailsford, then o f the Manchester Guardian, and an Austrian journalist. He described a visit to Skopje, still called by its Turkish name Uskub (and today the capital o f the Former Yugoslav Republic o f Macedonia), in a letter to his sister: This is the most delightfully outlandish and primitive place I have ever dared to hope for. Rustchuk was elegant and up-to-date in comparison. The only hotel in the place is full; I am in the other. A small ragged boy swooped on my things and marched before me like a pillar o f dust, while two blind beggars came behind with suggestions o f charitable performances on my part. Then I was walked upstairs and offered the alternative o f sharing a bedroom with a Turk or a nicer bedroom with two Turks.40 After leaving Skopje, Saki filed a series o f reports from Salonika, where bombings and skirmishes were becoming more and more frequent. In one report he describes, for example, how his luncheon in a restaurant opposite the Hotel d ’Angleterre had been interrupted: On getting into the street 1 saw a young Bulgar lying in the roadway outside the telegraph office, apparently not quite dead, but no one venturing very close to his body in fear o f the possible explosion o f a bomb. In another minute several soldiers had run in and extinguished any spark o f life that might have been in him, and an officer with difficulty thrust them aside and searched the body for explosives. A bomb and two bars o f dynamite were found on him.41 Saki still believed, somewhat naively, that the Turks would be able to pacify the situation. On 15 May 1903, his report in the M orning Post suggests a solution which, in the words o f his biographer, ‘sounded as though Aunt Augusta would have made the perfect Vali’:

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If a perm anent beating tribunal, armed with sticks o f appreciable thickness, was set up to chastise without mercy or favour all Bashi Bazouks or citizens guilty o f breaking or attempting to break the peace, and if a general confiscation o f weapons was carried into practice, both the desire and the means for disturbance would be restricted within manageable limits.42 By June 1903 his views had changed and he was advocating a division of Macedonia, in spite o f the difficulties such a move might create in an area where the population o f ‘inconveniently m any’ districts represents ‘an ethnographic medley which must have suggested the culinary term o f a ‘blending o f fruits” : M y suggestion is the creation o f smaller political districts, carved out as skilfully as possible with no particular standard o f size but simply with the view o f making each district as exclusively a one-race unit as could be contrived.43 Saki’s journalistic career in the Balkans ended with a major scoop followed by an important failure. On 10 June, following the regicide in Serbia he was, as I described earlier, one o f the very few Western journalists to reach Belgrade on the same day and report on the immediate aftermath. His instincts (or his contacts) failed him in Macedonia. On 31 July 1903, thinking that the long-awaited uprising was not going to take place, Saki filed his last report to the M orning Post and headed back to London. On 2 August the insurrection began. These dramatic events, and the picturesque Balkan world Saki described in his journalism, provided relatively little inspiration for his literary output. During the Balkan Wars o f 1912-13, he wrote the only two o f his short stories to have explicitly Balkan themes - ‘The Purple o f the Balkan Kings’ and ‘The Cupboard o f the Yesterdays’. Both appeared in the posthumously published collection, The Toys o f Peace, in 1923. The two main characters o f ‘The Cupboard o f the Y esterdays’, the Wanderer and the Merchant, discuss the nature o f war in an unspecified setting which could easily be a train com partment. ‘W ar is a cruelly destructive thing,’ the W anderer sighs, and the M erchant is all too ready to agree. He bemoans ‘the loss o f life and limb, the desolated hom esteads’, when the W anderer interrupts: ‘I w asn’t thinking o f anything o f the sort’, said the Wanderer; ‘I was thinking o f the tendency that modern war has to destroy and banish the very elements o f picturesqueness and excitement that are its chief excuse and charm. It is like a fire that flares up brilliantly for a while and then leaves everything blacker and bleaker than before. Alter every important war in South-East Europe in recent times there has been a shrinking o f

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the area o f chronically disturbed territory, a stiffening o f frontier lines, an intrusion o f civilised monotony.’44 If ‘civilised m onotony’ pervaded the Balkans, the W anderer implies, Eu­ rope would be completely robbed o f that ‘vivid, almost blazing local colour’ which Hope wrote about in his description o f the war in Kravonia. War, as the Wanderer explains, brings colour and excitement, but after it everything is ‘blacker and bleaker than before’. Saki’s story, with its rejection o f Europeanisation and urban values, offers a link between his comic vision o f the Balkans and the earlier Romantic tradition. The W anderer is a quintessentially Romantic figure, expressing as he does a Byronic longing for the time when the traveller could easily become a warrior. One cannot truly encounter life if one has not seen death, and the Balkans - even more truly than in Byron’s day - are the last corner o f Europe to offer an oppor­ tunity for this: The Balkans have long been the last surviving shred o f happy huntingground for the adventurous, a playground for passions that are fast becoming atrophied for want o f exercise. In old bygone days we had the wars in the Low Countries always at our doors, as it were. There was no need to go far afield into malaria-stricken wilds if one wanted a life o f boot and saddle and licence to kill and be killed. Those who wished to see life had a decent opportunity for seeing death at the same time.45* The W anderer expresses his line o f argument in this story much more convincingly than the Merchant, and the reader is left in little doubt that his ideas are closer to the writer’s own point o f view. In August 1914, as he enlisted to join the army, the 43-year-old Saki said to a friend, without apparent irony: ‘And I have always looked forward to the romance o f a European war.’46 The nostalgia-filled view o f the ‘old-time happy-go-lucky w ars’ (the very view Shaw attem pts to satirise through his C aptain Bluntschli), colours Saki’s descriptions o f the Balkans much more notice­ ably than his actual experience o f seedy hotels and bomb explosions in M acedonia a decade beforehand. In an article published in the M orning Post on 23 April 1915 and entitled ‘The Old Lore’, Saki concluded: Nearly every red-blooded human boy has had war, in some shape or form, for his first love; if his blood had remained red and he has kept some o f his boyishness in after life, that first love will never be forgotten . .. Then there was the slow unfolding o f the long romance o f the actual war, particularly o f European war, ghastly, devastating, heartrending in its effect, and yet somehow captivating to the imagination.47 *

Ironically Saki him self was to die fighting for the ‘Low Countries’, when he was killed as a member o f the British Expeditionary Force on the Western Front in the First World War.

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For Saki’s Wanderer —whose imagination is similarly captivated by the devastating romance o f war - the Balkan lands have an appeal ‘that you find nowhere else in Europe, the charm o f uncertainty and landslide and the little dramatic happenings that make all the difference between the ordinary and the desirable’.48 The Wanderer professes (somewhat prema­ turely in view o f the turbulent history o f the peninsula in this century) that the Balkan lands will soon lose their allure: But the old atmosphere will have changed, the glamour will have gone; the dust o f formality and bureaucratic neatness will slowly settle down over the tim e-honoured landmarks; the Sanjak o f Novi Bazar, the M uersteg Agreement, the Komitadje bands, the Vilayet o f Adrianople, all those familiar outlandish names and things and places, that we have known for so long as part and parcel o f the Balkan Question, will have passed away into the cupboard o f yesterdays, as completely as the Hansa league and the wars o f the Guises.49 The oxymoron o f ‘familiar outlandishness’ which Saki uses to describe Balkan place-names encapsulates the attractions o f the Balkans as a setting for romance, for those imaginary lands whose borders are, to borrow the description o f Malcolm Bradbury’s Slaka, ‘sometimes here, often further north and sometimes not at all’.50 The peninsula is European and close by, and yet mysterious and intractable: It seemed a magical region, with its mountain passes and frozen rivers and grim battlefields, its drifting snows, and prowling wolves; there was a great stretch o f water which bore the sinister but engaging name o f the Black Sea - nothing that I ever learned before or after in a geography lesson made the same impression on me as that strange-named inland sea, and 1 don’t think its magic has ever faded out o f my imagination.51 The essentially Romantic Otherness o f the Balkans is, in Saki’s fiction, encapsulated in strange names, synonymous for him with the poetry o f war which fires the imagination o f ‘every human boy’ from his childhood. (‘And what shall we have to hand down to our children? Think o f what their news from the Balkans will be in the course o f another ten to fifteen years,’ the W anderer complains.)52 In Saki’s stories, children understand the Balkans in a way many adults cannot. In the story entitled ‘The Toys o f Peace’, the two children receive a ‘Siege o f Adrianople’* toy set, already *

During the First Balkan War o f 1912-13, the Siege o f Adrianople (modern Edirne) pitted a Bulgarian besieging army against the Ottoman garrison. Fol­ lowing the intervention o f the Serbs in support o f their feilow-Slavs Adrianople finally fell, only to be regained by the Turks in the Second Balkan War o f 1913. Marked, by massed infantry attacks against barbed wire and machine guns, the Siege in many ways presaged the deadlier conllict on the Western I in... . 1914 IS

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knowing ‘all the uniforms and flags and even the names o f the respective com m anders’.53 ‘When I heard them one day using what seemed to be the most objectionable language,’ their mother complains, ‘they said it was Bulgarian words o f command.’54 The children hotly debate the respective advantages o f Albanian soldiery and a Somali camel corps (a far fetched element for a toy set representing the Balkan Wars): ‘The Albanians have got jolly uniforms and they fight all day long, and all night too, when there’s a moon, but the country’s rocky, so they’ve got no cavalry.’55 The implicit equation between the Albanians and children, reminiscent o f Shaw ’s treatment o f Bulgarians and Durrell’s later descriptions o f Serbs and ‘Vulgarians’, is a strategy o f marginalisation. Similar perceptions o f Balkan wars as children’s affairs occasionally underpinned the arguments o f both the interventionists and the non-interventionists among Western politicians in the wars o f the 1990s (those who wanted to go in and ‘sort Bosnia out’ as well as those who were in favour o f ‘letting them fight to exhaustion’), revealing the persistence o f this particular approach to the Balkans. While ‘The Cupboard o f the Yesterdays’ laments the passing o f the romantic era in Europe with the ‘last w ars’ to be fought in the Balkan peninsula, Saki’s story ‘The Purple o f the Balkan Kings’ represents an ironical look at a Viennese ‘cafe-warrior’ Luitpold Wolkenstein who, over the pages o f his daily newspaper and ‘the cup o f cream-topped coffee and attendant glass o f water’ muses over the dramatic developments during the First Balkan War o f 1912. Sitting ‘under the dust-coated stuffed eagle, that had once been a living soaring bird on the Styrian m ountains’, Wolkenstein is an obvious symbol o f the decaying Habsburg Empire.56 He considers him self ‘the critical appraiser and arbiter o f the military and national powers o f the small countries that fringed the Dual Monarchy on its Danube border’, in spite o f the fact that he had ‘never travelled further eastw ard than T em esv ar’,* and never encountered ‘anything m ore potentially desperate than a hare or partridge’.57 He jibes at ‘the ambitions o f Balkan kinglets and their peoples’ in the face o f the ‘Great Powers even more imposing in their Teutonic rendering - Die Grossm achte’ but is finally forced to face up to the reality o f the newly united Balkan lands at the moment when Turkey loses Macedonia. ‘The Great Powers cannot overlook the fact,’ Saki concludes, ‘that a people that has tasted victory will not itself be driven back again within its former limits.’ Through W olkenstein’s reaction, Saki metaphorically outlines a new balance o f power in Europe: Luitpold Wolkenstein drank his coffee, but the flavour had somehow *

Temesvar (Timisoara) is today in the south-west corner o f Rom ania and is, in fact, further to the east than Bosnia, the Sanjak o f N ovi Pazar or Albania. I lowcver, as a long-established part o f the Habsburg Empire it was clearly not perceived as oriental.

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gone out o f it. His world, his pompous, imposing dictating world, had suddenly rolled up into narrower dimensions. The big purses and the big threats had been pushed unceremoniously on one side; a force that he could not fathom, could not comprehend, had made itself rudely felt.58 ‘The Purple o f the Balkan Kings’ and ‘The Cupboard o f the Yesterdays’ deal with real places and real events, even if they offer a highly romanticised picture o f the Balkan world. In his short play The Death-Trap, Saki creates Kedaria, an imaginary Balkan state with a capital in Tzem (‘Black’), and uses the conventions o f popular romance to create a story about an attempt against the life o f Dimitri, ‘the reigning prince o f Kedaria’.59 The main characters are the ‘officers o f the Kranitzki regiment o f Guards’ who plot to poison the Prince.60 With ‘Prince Karl’, a rival pretender to the throne, and ‘the A ndrieff regim ent’ - which remains loyal to Prince Dimitri - the play is a dramatised variant o f ‘Ruritanian’ stories about imaginary Balkan monarchies. Although it describes an attempted regicide, it bears little connection with Saki’s experiences in Belgrade after the assassination o f King Alexander Obrenovic in 1903. Kedaria is described in a romanticised and highly stylised Ruritanian vein: Look out o f the window at the fairyland o f mountains with the forest running up and down all over it. You can just see Grodvitz where I shot all last autumn, up there on the left, and far away beyond it all is Vienna. Were you ever in Vienna, Stronetz?51 The Death-Trap and the two short stories inspired by the Balkan wars like Shaw’sv4/ms and the Man - recreate many o f the Romantic perceptions o f the Balkans as refracted through the prism o f popular literature. While Balkan politics and the Balkan world are central only to these three works, Saki frequently refers to the Balkans in his other short stories. In some, Balkan names and Balkan topography are points o f reference which simply lend a down-at-heel exoticism to his stories: She probably thought Kaikobad was an unfashionable German spa, where you’d meet matrimonial bargain-hunters and emergency Servian kings.62 ‘You’ve told me stories about grand-dukes and lion tamers and financiers’ widows and a post-master in Herzegovina,’ said the Baroness.63 It was generally rather a relief when she was displaced by Jack, who was nine years old, and talked exclusively about the Balkan War without throwing any fresh light on its political or military history.64 O th e r stories o ffe r m ore developed representations o f the ‘ex o tic is m ’ o f the B alkans and their peoples, frequently in hum orous juxtapositions: There are only tw o classes that rea lly can’t help taking life seriously -

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schoolgirls o f thirteen and the Hohenzollems; they might be exempt. Albanians come under another heading; they take life wherever they get the opportunity. The one Albanian that 1 was ever on speaking terms with was rather a decadent example. He was a Christian and a grocer, and 1 don’t fancy he had ever killed anybody.65

Laploshka said nothing, but his eyes bulged a little and his cheeks took on the mottled hues o f an ethnographical map o f the Balkan peninsula. That same day, at sundown, he died.66 The ‘exotic’ Balkan areas perform a very similar function - as symbols o f obscurity - in the story entitled ‘The Lost Sanjak’. Its main character wishes to prove both his innocence in a m urder case and his real identity by answering some test questions before the prosecution. As he had ‘posed locally as some sort o f second hand authority on Balkan affairs’, in the midst o f a cross-examination touching on a range o f rather mundane topics, he is asked - ‘with diabolical suddenness’ - if he could ‘tell the Court the whereabouts o f N ovibazar’: 1 felt the question to be a crucial one; something told me that the answer was St. Petersburg or Baker Street. 1 hesitated, looked helplessly round the sea o f tensely expectant faces, pulled m yself together and chose Baker Street. And then I knew everything was lost. The prosecution had no difficulty in demonstrating that an individual, even moderately versed in the affairs o f the Near East, could never have so unceremoniously dislocated Novibazar from its accustomed corner on the map.67 In Saki’s descriptions o f the comic encounter between ‘Englishness’ and ‘Balkanness’, the two identities are often ideally suited to each other. Both are seen as eccentric, non-conformist, even in some stories as anti-bourgeois, in that both reject the petty rules and regulations o f the so-called ‘civilised w orld’. English people involved with any aspect o f the Balkans are all too easily, and often with comic consequences, prone to developing ‘Balkan’ passions. A story entitled ‘The Oversight’ describes two guests at Lady Prowche’s dinner party. These two gentlemen, ‘moderate, liberal, Evan­ gelical, mildly opposed to female suffrage’, end up having a heated argu­ ment at the dinner table: It has been awful. Hyaenas could not have behaved with greater sav­ agery. Sir Richard said so, and he has been in the countries where hyaenas live, so he ought to know. They actually came to blows!68 *My dear, we were fools not to have thought o f it,’ complains the hostess to a friend: ‘One o f them was Pro-Greek and the other Pro-Bulgar.’69 These two hyaenas are not quite typical, for, according to Saki, the infectious power o f Balkan nationalism seems to strike British women much more

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frequently than British men. In ‘Reginald on W orries’, Reginald’s aunt spends an entire disturbing summer in ‘a Balkan state o f m ind’ about the treatment o f Jews in Romania.70 In his play The Watched Pot, Hortensia B aw el, ‘one o f the most trying women in the West o f England. . . quarrelled with the M acedonian policy o f every successive government’.71 Such susceptibility to Balkan passions among British women - expressed in a way which suggests the Othernness, the incomprehensible mind-set o f both - is in evidence in comic writing about the Balkans by British authors analysed later in this chapter. In David Footman’s novel Pig and Pepper (1936), the story o f a young British diplomat set in the imaginary Balkan kingdom o f Vuchinia, one o f the most colourful characters is Miss Fraser, or rather, Colonel F r a s e r - ‘one o f those middle aged spinsters who go about adopting small countries’ - who on ‘a legendary occasion in the spring o f 1915’ burst in upon the assembled Vuchinian cabinet ‘and told them that Austria-Hungary must be destroyed; the voice that did not perhaps launch a thousand ships (Vuchinia has no navy) but which sent three thousand peasants to their deaths between Lake Ohrid and the swamps of the Dobrudja.’72 (The character o f Colonel Fraser was probably inspired by Captain Flora Sandes, an English woman who became a Serbian army officer in 1916 and served in an all-male regiment, provoking ‘an intrigu­ ing debate about the appropriate role for women at the front and in posi­ tions o f ‘masculine’ authority’, as well as attracting the title o f the ‘Serbian Joan o f A rc’ in the British press.73 Another writer with diplomatic experi­ ence in the Balkans, Lawrence Durrell, alleges, in his Antrobus stories, that it is usually women (typically a diplomat’s relation, a young niece or an elderly aunt on her first visit to the Balkans), who are liable to be carried away by Balkan passions. E. M . F o rste r’s P assage to ‘T he H eart o f B o sn ia’ Among the many ‘Ruritanian’ lands created in the first years o f this century, one o f the most unusual is E. M. Forster’s imaginary state o f Pottibakia, the setting o f his vividly erotic, unpublished short story, ‘What Does it Matter? A M orality’.74 Pottibakia is a small European country with ‘an unknown warrior, a national salvo, commemorative postage stamps, a characteristic peasantry’, whose ‘capital city could easily be mistaken for Bucharest or Warsaw’.75 Forster’s story centres around an episode in which Pottibakia’s philandering President, bearing the Germanic-sounding name o f Dr Bonifaz Schpiltz, falls for ‘an incredibly good looking m ounted gendarm e’, the unmistakably Balkan 18-year old Mirko Bolnovitch, ‘a model o f Pottibakian m anhood’.76 Their first sexual encounter takes place in a villa on Lake ‘Lago’, belonging to Schpilt/.’s mistress, the erotically Latin-sounding Madame Sonia Rodoconduco, when Mirko ‘undresses for the president’ and they m ount a trapeze to exercise together:

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The science o f the barrack room, the passions o f the stables, the primitive instincts o f the peasantry, the accident o f the parallel bars and Dr Schplitz’s [sic!] quaint p h y siq u e -a ll combined into something quite out o f the way, and just as it did so the door opened and Madame Rodoconduco came into the room followed by the Bessarabian minister.77 * Although Mirko had, it emerges subsequently, been ordered by the head o f the police, Count Waghraghren, to set up and trap the president, he decides not to pursue the case: ‘I am a peasant, and we peasants never think a little fun matters.’78 In support o f the sexual broad-mindedness o f Pottibakia’s peasantry, Forster explains the origins o f the national proverb poking doesn 't count. At the Last Judgement, according to a legend, the long line of Pottibakians cheered when they heard that ‘poking doesn’t count.’79 If the story begins as a cheerful homo-erotic fantasy, the emotional and sexual frustrations which underlie the almost prelapsarian innocence of Forster’s Ruritanian idyll emerge towards the end. ‘What Does It M atter?’ turns, in effect, into an allegorical plea for sexual tolerance. The President’s wife, Charlotte, his mistress, Sonia, and his lover Mirko, jointly sign a manifesto urging sexual toleration (‘what does it matter?’), addressed to fellow Pottibakians: ‘Fellow citizens! Since all o f you are interested in the private lives o f the great, we desire to inform you that we have all three of us had carnal intercourse with the president o f the republic.’80 Instead o f exposure and public scandal, the trap set up by the head o f the Pottibakian police results in a new openness and, ultimately, greater happiness for ev­ eryone. ‘T here seem , how ever, to have been three stages: first the Pottibakians were ashamed o f doing what they liked, then they were ag­ gressive over it, and now they do as they like,’ Forster concludes. ‘What Does It M atter?’ was probably written at the same time as the series o f erotic short stories Forster began after Howard's End (1910). These were ‘deliberately facetious and frivolous’ and he ‘did not regard [them] as literature’, writing, as he admitted, not to express but to excite himself.81 Although not o f great literary interest, the story reflects the degree to which British writers could use Ruritanian fantasies as a way o f subverting a variety o f taboos and satisfying hidden desires. Just as Hope’s Rudolf Rassendyll finds in Ruritania an ideal opportunity for wish-fulfilment for the younger son o f an aristocratic family - the ‘estate to rule’ which would have eluded him at home - so Forster creates a dream, through the sexually ‘innocent’ Pottibakian peasantry, o f a world in which homosexuality can be treated freely and openly as ‘harmless fun’. Similar homo-erotic fantasies are present, although not so openly, in Forster’s play ‘The Heart o f Bosnia’, begun in the summer o f 1911 but *

Bessarabia, formerly part of Romania, was annexed by the Soviet Union - an event described in Olivia Manning's Balkan Trilogy - and today forms the independent state of Moldova.

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never performed. The play is set in the (imaginary) British Consulate in Bosnia, and follows the dramatic events in the aftermath o f a ball organised by the Consul and his wife, Mr and Mrs Stevens, at which - unknown to each other —two Bosnian heroes, Mirko and Nicolai, both fall in love with the C onsul’s flirtatious daughter, Fanny. Mr Stevens, who displays, from the very beginning o f the play, a degree o f respect - if not quite under­ standing - for ‘Bosnian’ culture (‘To know men o f another race [is] almost impossible; so dissimilar to ours are their customs and perhaps so superior,’ he comments),82 is horrified at the idea that his daughter might continue to play a cat-and-mouse game with the two men. He expresses his fears to his wife: You ask whether the Bosnians are chivalrous. They are, but in a deeper sense than you suppose. Chivalry is a double-edged sword, my dear, and men who give much naturally expect much. In England, in Europe, in the cosmopolitan towns that you might mistake for the world, men give little and expect little. But here, the people are not yet Europeanised, not sophisticated, not - not disillusioned. I do not understand them nor profess to, but they are serious; that I know for certain. Reject their love at once and we are safe. Accept their love, and perhaps we are still safe. But play with their love and we court unimaginable disasters.83 Fanny boasts that she had steered her way through two London and two Parisian seasons and had ‘eight men on their knees to her’. She chooses neither to heed her father’s advice that in Europe ‘life is a matter o f steering’ while in Bosnia it is ‘a run before the hurricane’, nor to listen to her mother’s warning against ‘that unknown quantity - the heart o f Bosnia’. Believing, interestingly, that her father is him self ‘an oriental at heart’, and that therefore she could treat him as such and lie to him ‘without compunction’,84 Fanny courts the inevitable disaster by encouraging both Bosnians. Nicolai asks Mr Stevens for permission to protect the house while the Consul is pursuing his diplomatic business at the town hall. ‘I will protect this house till death,’ he says, as, ‘drawing a knife from his belt he lays it naked on the table.’85 Left alone with Nicolai, Fanny breaks local taboos yet again, by playing with his knife, in spite o f his pleas to put it down ‘because it is a m an’s knife’.86 She ridicules his romantic expressions o f love (‘What could I say? Who am I, shut up in a stony valley with a few cattle and trees? How can I talk to you who know all the world?’),87 and is finally disappointed when, in response to her insistent questioning, he swears that he had never killed a man: ‘I did not expect such an answer from a Bosnian.’88 While Nicolai disappoints Fanny by his apparent tameness, he reveals his essential otherness when, as she continues to play with his knife, she cuts herself. ‘It

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is my agony - give it back to me. It is my blood. I felt it spring,’ he says as he seizes her hand and thrusts it under his shirt.89 * Fanny’s outrage at this ‘barbarity’ is followed by flirtatious reconcilia­ tion. As Nicolai offers her his heart (‘the heart o f Bosnia’), Mirko - ‘wilder than Nicolai and a little older’ - interrupts. As Fanny escapes, the two men still do not realise that they are in love with the same person. They joke about a blood-feud over a cow stolen by M irko’s grandfather from N icolai’s family, finally resolved by their friendship, and - as they agree to get mar­ ried on the same day - Mirko rubs the blade o f his knife against that o f Nicolai so ‘that a little o f Fanny’s blood is transferred’.90 As the realisation that they must be in love with the same woman dawns on them, Mirko pleads: ‘Take her before she comes between us, Nicolai, O Soul o f my Soul. Before anger and death are kindled, take h e r - b e happy.’91 As Nicolai holds him in his arms and Mrs Stevens enters, Mirko realises that he loves Fanny too much to surrender her. The blood-feud reopened, he walks three times around the Stevens’s table ‘once for the Father, once for the Son and once for the Holy Ghost’.92 At this dramatic moment, Fanny re-enters the room, determined to intervene, and manages to convince both men to hand over their knives to her, while threatening to punish them: ‘Bosnians have a bad reputation for quarrelling, and I mean to be firm .’91 Left alone in the room with Mirko, Nicolai stretches out his hands to embrace him, but, realising that both his friendship and his country are tainted by the affair (‘Our country - 1 have offered her its lakes and stars and her image will pollute them, her breath will taint the winds that blow in our mountains . . . I was mad and offered her Bosnia.’),94 he is overcome by growing and uncontrollable anger. In the climactic final scenes the two men exchange ‘the kiss o f blood’ and strike at Fanny’s door with all their force. The native servants refuse to intervene in spite o f Mrs Stevens’s screams: ‘We are sorry for you who did not know our custom, but we can do nothing. They will come out in a minute, then they will go to the mountains and we will bury her.’95 As Mrs Stevens implores her husband to do something (‘Telegraph for troops - this is neutral ground - we have a case for w a r - th e British consulate!’), her husband replies: ‘My dear, we have a case, but she is dead.’96 With its Ruritanian campness, its obvious homo-eroticism and high melodrama, ‘The Heart o f Bosnia’ was unlikely to be a success. Golds­ worthy Lowes Dickinson, ‘who was shown a copy, did not like it, nor did anyone else so far as one can discover,’ Forster’s biographer notes, adding: ‘And indeed, though in a quaint way it looks forward to A Passage to India, there is not much to be said in its favour.’97 The play shows, more clearly *

Forster substituted ‘It is my blood’ with ‘It is my agony’ in the first sentence. The original repetition would have made the unusual claim even more emphatic.

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than the uninhibited private fantasy o f ‘W hat Does It M atter?’, the frustrations implicit in Forster’s inability to write about love other than in its heterosexual form. Indeed, as he ran into problems writing ‘The Heart o f Bosnia’, his diary records his ‘weariness o f the only subject that I both can and may treat - the love o f men for women & vice versa’.98 Although it deals, superficially, with ‘the love o f men for wom en’, ex­ amining the breaking o f taboos in heterosexual but cross-racial love - like A Passage to India - ‘The Heart o f Bosnia’ finds in a shared desire for the same woman an outlet for the repressed homosexual attraction between Mirko and Nicolai. The homo-eroticism o f the p la y - th e male kissing, embracing, and the sharing o f Fanny’s blood, is made acceptable by the difference in societal codes. Forster’s Bosnia is definitely not European, as Mr Stevens is at pain to point out to his daughter (‘Scenery - clothes gestures - cries - all unknown, unknown . . . Just so with the p eo p lesimple, but we have not the key to their simplicity - severed from us through no wish o f theirs, deep, passionate, serious, but we do not know when the passion will bubble up, under what sky.’)99 In this ‘innocent’ culture, unselfconscious male bonding thrives. If the play cannot but be coy in its treatment o f Mirko and Nicolai, the taboos o f cross-racial heterosexual love are broken in a way which points to the deeper transgressions alleged in A Passage to India. Both ‘The Heart o f Bosnia’ and A Passage to India use the culture clash and the taboos o f miscegenation in an implicit analogy with homosexuality. The ambiguous relationship o f Mirko and Nicolai makes this connection abundantly clear. Without much knowledge o f the Balkans, Forster chose Bosnia, his bi­ ographer assum es, because it ‘had been much in the news in recent years.’100 His depiction o f the location (‘Mountains o f grey and yellow with red mountains behind them, a torrent that fills suddenly under a cloudless sky.’)101 is no more precise than Shaw’s in Arms and the M an, and his Bosnian characters speak a grandiloquent, poetic - almost Homeric - language, stilted in its formality and rich in scarcely comprehensible meta­ phors. This is supposed to emphasise their essential difference from the British, just as, in A Passage to India, A ziz’s love o f elaborate verse was to set him apart from the sahibs. When he wrote ‘The Heart o f Bosnia’, Forster was in love with Syed Ross Masood, the grandson o f the founder o f the Muslim Anglo-Oriental College in India (the ‘Muslim Eton’), Syed Ahmed Khan.102 He probably found in the Balkans - neither oriental nor quite European in his eyes - an apt locale for an ‘acceptable’ breaking o f taboos. With their medieval code o f chivalry and their emphatic Christianity, Nicolai and Mirko are the children o f an earlier European era, yet their tribal codes, their blood feuds and their fatalism mark them at the same time as oriental. The comic aspects o f Forster’s play, with its light-hearted stereotyping o f the Bosnians, and Fanny’s treatment o f Balkan men as children (children like the Balkans -

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retain a mixture o f similarity and difference: we recognise ourselves in them even as we subordinate them) rather than as possible lovers, make ‘The Heart o f Bosnia’ a preparatory stage for the exploration o f themes which were to be fully developed in A Passage to India, with its serious treatment o f trans-cultural and cross-racial attraction. The Balkans were therefore a testing-ground for the taboos o f the Raj, rather than a genuine source o f inspiration. Forster’s first visit to the peninsula was much later, in 1930, on a trip to Rom ania where he was the guest o f the First Secretary at the British Legation in Bucharest, his friend Sir Alec Randall. Randall took him on ‘immensely romantic expeditions in the sub-Carpathians, lunching in the woods upon trout, and sheep’s cheese packed in pine-bark’.103 Forster’s private correspondence contains vivid, unpunctuated evocations o f the Romanian landscape: The scenery, the gorgeous rough costumes, the peasants and workmen sprawling in the brilliant sun, the wolves bears and boars lurking to pounce upon them from the beeches birches larches and spruces and to dapple with their rich gore their couches o f pansies and thym e.104 Forster’s encounter with the ‘real’ Balkans, however, inspired only the briefest literary recollection, ‘The Eyes o f Sibiu’, published in the Spectator in June 1932. It is an article about the Transylvanian town with its steep sloping roofs and their unusual ‘elongated eye-shaped openings’, which plays with the idea that this old, German-populated walled city, also known as Hermanstadt, is the place to which, according to the legend, the Pied Piper led the children o f Hamelin: ‘History, stranger than poetry, had brought them half across Europe without the help o f a tunnel and had planted them out to resist the eastern invaders.’105 The fairy-tale depiction o f Sibiu concludes in an uneasy realisation that Transylvania was not a meltingpot, but a mosaic, a land composed o f ‘splinters’ o f different nationalities: The Germans in Transylvania are said to be more German than they are in Germany; the Hungarians there claim to be the original Hungarians; the Roumanians there despise the Roumanians o f the Old Kingdom. It is a country o f mosaic, not o f delicate shadings; the races are splintered and composed in their charming surroundings uneasily. Only in their architecture does one find rest.106 L aw rence D urrell and His P redecessors: B ritish D iplom ats in the B alkans The tradition o f vaguely autobiographical accounts o f British diplomatic life in the Balkans began soon after the establishment o f independent states in (he region, with the work o f the prolific Victorian novelist Charles Lever

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(1806-73). Lever was, from 1858 to 1867, the British consul in La Spezia, Italy, and afterwards held the post o f consul in Trieste until 1871, when he was succeeded by Sir Richard Burton (1821-90), who translated most o f the Arabian Nights in the Adriatic port city. Lever’s short story, ‘What I Did at Belgrade’, published in Blackw ood’s Magazine in January 1868 under the pseudonym Bob Consindine, describes the adventures o f a young, happy-go-lucky Englishman who, forced to spend some time abroad be­ cause o f large debts caused by racing bets, joins a diplomat friend on a mission to Belgrade, where he helps him to ‘master the Servian question, whatever that is’.107 The diplomatic and intelligence work takes the young hero to a ‘species o f ‘pensionat’ kept by ‘an old Albanian lady, where all that Belgrade contained o f wit, brilliancy, and ability, was accustomed to dine every day’.108 The ‘pensionat’ is a wildly exotic place and its description is spiced with unfamiliar names and outlandish details. Its patrons wear ‘glittering dresses and exotic weapons’, and include ‘an Albanian with a scarlet vest braided with gold’, ‘fierce-eyed, wild looking H ungarians’, ‘dream y visaged T urks’, and characters as outlandish as Prince Carl Dolgoruki, ‘a large man with a cicatrix on his cheek’, a Mexican general commanding a group o f banditti in Patras, and ‘Prince John Schiska of Bulgaria’ in ‘a tall cap o f Astracan’, ‘dressed in a green attila with silverfrogs’ and carrying a bouquet o f ‘pink camelias that come from Jassy’. The Belgrade setting o f the story is depicted with similarly extravagant flights o f imagination: It was some distance off in the suburb that the house stood. The ap­ proach lay through a thickly planted vineyard, dotted here and there with olive and mulberry trees, from which we came out on a species o f lawn, beautifully green and level, from which rose an enormous build­ ing, broken by towers and minarets and bastions in a way that left one uncertain whether it was a church or a fortress. It had been an ancient Greek convent at one time, purchased by the Servian government for a barrack, and latterly disused. It was now let out in tenements - Madame N arratochie having secured the central portion, being that which contained the finest rooms and the chapel, whose walls boasted frescoes by a famed artist o f Padua.109 If Lever’s vision o f Belgrade involves outlandish flights o f imagination and a lack o f any direct knowledge o f the place, more recent fiction by British diplomats with extensive experience o f the area reveals a similar inclination to describe the essentially continental climate o f the central Balkans as ‘M editerranean’. Olive trees thus grow much closer to Belgrade than they do in reality, not only in Lever’s story, but also - as noted in the previous chapter - in Lawrence Durrell’s White Eagles Over Serbia. They grow with equal improbability on the slopes above Sarajevo in a short story, ‘The Last Day o f Summer’, wrillen by Douglas Hurd in the period

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when, as the British Foreign Secretary, he went on frequent visits to the Bosnian capital."0 Lever’s p l o t - i n which young Consindine falls in love with Katinka, the beautiful granddaughter o f M adame Narratochie, and com pletely neglects his ta s k -o ffe rs the basic comic te m p la te -a ‘Ruritanian’ idyll turning s o u r-w h ic h is mirrored in a number o f later comic accounts of British diplomatic activities in the Balkans. Some sixty years after Lever, David Footman (1895-1983), ‘the Somerset Maugham o f the Balkans’, " 1 published a series o f short stories and a novel which deal with the same basic theme as Lever’s story. After fighting in the First World War, for which he received the Military Cross, David Foot­ man went to New College, Oxford, and then served with the Levant Con­ sular Service in Egypt and Yugoslavia until 1929. From 1935 to 1953 he worked for MI6, before becoming a fellow o f St Antony’s College, Ox­ ford. His diplomatic experiences in Yugoslavia provided the background for Balkan Holiday (1935), a humorous account o f a four-week journey through Albania and Yugoslavia; a collection o f short stories, Half-Way East (1935); and the novels Pig and Pepper (1936) and Pemberton (1943), all set in Vuchinia, an imaginary Balkan republic with a capital called Tsernigrad. Half-Way East offers a collection o f short stories about British expatriate circles in Vuchinia, narrated by a young British diplomat, Mills. In the novel Pig and Pepper Mills is posted to Tsernigrad after some years o f service in Syria: I was profoundly relieved to find that my transfer, when it did come through, was for Tsernigrad, the capital o f Vuchinia, twelve hours from Budapest and eighteen from Vienna, as near to the heart o f Europe as the limits o f HM Levant Consular Service will allow. I felt I was going to live in a proper town, am ong Europeans, right away from that atmosphere o f sand-tlies and sullen resentment and ill-used mangy dogs that I had come to associate with the East. I set out all agog with anticipation."2 It is not difficult to recognise Yugoslavia behind Footman’s descriptions. In Serbo-Croat, Vuchinia means, roughly, ‘the Land o f W olves’, a counter­ part to Hope’s ‘Land o f Cows’, Kravonia. ‘Tsernigrad’, meaning Black City in Serbo-Croat, represents a comic twin o f the Yugoslav capital Belgrade, whose Serbo-Croat name, Beograd, means ‘White City’. Like Belgrade, which lies on the confluence o f the River Sava with the Danube, T sernigrad ‘sprawls over three hills at the confluence o f Danube and Bina’, with ‘the great Danube plain stretching out towards Hungary’ to the north.113 Imagi­ nary Vuchinia is, however, positioned somewhere in the heart o f the Balkan peninsula, ‘surrounded on every side by brutal Serbs, treacherous Ruma­ nians and malignant Bulgarians’.114

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Like the young diplom at o f Charles Lever’s story, ‘What I Did at Belgrade’, Footman’s hero has very little involvement with the business of diplomacy. He spends most o f his time falling in and out o f love with Vuchinian girls and the wives o f British diplomats and expatriates, getting into and extricating him self from liaisons with an assortment o f Czech, Russian, Hungarian and Austrian cabaret girls, and, last but not least, be­ friending a picturesque assortm ent o f Vuchinians by drinking copious amounts o f alcohol with them. British diplomacy in Vuchinia consists largely o f attempting to do nothing whatsoever. The Levant Consular Service is represented as a hopelessly complex bureaucracy. Its parent organisation, the Foreign Office, is itself depicted as an ‘oriental’ establishment, frightened o f anything vaguely ‘po­ litical’, inefficient and riddled with absurd procedure: Outside Turkey there is probably no other government department in Europe where the officials receive a large proportion o f their emoluments at least two years in arrears; but that is what happens in the Levant Consular Service. An officer’s pay depends largely on the difference in local prices o f incongruous commodities such as rhubarb and washing soda between 1914 and now. Every year the harassed consul receives a long and formidable questionnaire, whereupon he must go out and ask the oldest inhabitant what was the price o f beetroot in 1914. When this has been done, and guesses had been made at the prices o f such items as the oldest inhabitant has forgotten, the consul works out the coefficient o f the 1914 prices in piastres per oke as compared with present prices in douros .. . per kilogram. The completed questionnaires are submitted to a body o f very distinguished statisticians somewhere in the bowels o f Downing Street, who sit on them for eighteen months or so, and then the wheels o f the Paymaster General ’s Department are slowly set in motion.115 Mills hardly ever meets the ambassador, Sir William Drexler, who visits the Vice-Consulate about once in eighteen months. (‘He simply had no interest in anything except oriental carpets, o f which he had a magnificent collection, and on which, as soon as he retired, he was going to write a book.’) " 6 The young diplomat spends most o f his working hours smoking his pipe and reading The Times, and on occasion reluctantly helping the commercial secretary with elaborate forms, such as a particularly lengthy one ‘concerning possible outlets for British toothbrushes’ in Vuchinia. ‘I felt the Department o f Overseas Trade was wasting tim e,’ he concludes. In search o f some excitement, Mills gets involved in a range o f dubious business ventures with a m ysterious Colonel Vickery who arrives in Tsernigrad from Warsaw. Having embezzled considerable funds from a company called Tsernigrad Transport Ltd, Vickery finally escapes to Romania, while Mills is appointed ‘llis Majesty’s Vice-Consul for the Vilayets o f Bilitis and Van, to reside at Bilitis’.117 This is another job which involves

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no work. The appointment is there only ‘because there was always one in the past, and the powers that be can’t be bothered to close the post down.’118 In Footman’s second novel about the Balkans - entitled Pemberton and published in 1943 - Mills returns to Vuchinia after an interval o f fifteen years (in early 1941 ).119 After Cairo, where he had been trying to get a war job, he arrives in an unnamed Balkan capital, and is - within twenty-four hours - expelled from the country. His British employers (no longer the Foreign Office) had sent him a telegram en clair, ordering him to ‘attach him self to the Legation for intelligence or similar work’ and the local police, not unexpectedly, ‘jum ped to the conclusion’ that he was a spy. Mills ends up in Tsernigrad again, as a ‘cipher officer’ at the British Legation. He meets up with Pemberton, a local agent for a range o f British firms, with whom he later participates in the organisation o f a coup d ’état in Vuchinia, as its government prepares to sign a cooperation pact with the Germans. In historical terms, Footman’s Vuchinia here closely resembles Yugoslavia. In March 1941, massive popular demonstrations, allegedly encouraged by the British, opposed Prince Paul’s signing o f the Tripartite Pact with Germany and he was ousted from power by an (air-force led) military coup. In a famous speech, Churchill pronounced that Yugoslavia had finally found its soul. ‘A people paralysed in action, hitherto ill-governed and illled, long haunted by the sense o f being ensnared, flung their reckless, heroic defiance at the tyrant and conqueror in the moment o f his greatest power,’ he wrote in The Second World War.'20 Instead o f the pro-British Yugoslav military coup, Footman describes an attempted Communist revolution, a development akin to that described in Greene’s Stamboul Train. The Vuchinian government signs a pact with G erm any hoping that the Germ ans would get rid o f ‘the R eds’ and Pemberton is killed while trying to reach his friends who had withdrawn to the mountains. Mills manages to get to Istanbul where, in the lounge o f the Pera Palace Hotel, he catches up with an embassy colleague ‘doing the Legation accounts for last December’.121 The novel’s title character, Pemberton, is in many ways typical o f Footman’s expatriates in the Balkans. In ‘the palmy days o f 1925’, he made a lot o f money and bought him self a flat on ‘the Wilsonovi, the main street . . . rather too full o f pretentious modern Viennese furniture’ and ‘kept ÊpctleæhyM atil3a,hjsS]D vaneaetyant' I22* While there is some talk o f a Mrs Pemberton in Willesden, Pemberton nevertheless installs a different cabaret girl in his flat every month as a maîtresse en titre. His sociability helps him a great deal with the Vuchinians: Balkan people do not take kindly to the habit o f saying what there is to *

‘W ilsonovi’ - named after President Wilson, the patron o f self-determination in Eastern Europe. One o f the main streets in Sarajevo, for example, is named aller him.

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be said in the fewest possible words, and resent dealing with people who are always looking at their watches. Nothing o f this sort happened to Pemberton. With him they could talk themselves out till it was time to start the party.123 Getting on so well with Balkan people, Pemberton also has a ‘fundamental John Britishness, and an eager devotion to the English things he loved when young - English beer, English music halls, English race crowds, and, though this last was a platonic devotion, the English countryside’.124 In this respect he is - like other British (male) characters in Footman’s writing, including the narrator M ills -th e comic counterpart o f Buchan’s heroic spy or the Rudolf Rassendy 11s o f the Balkan romance. The essential trait of Britishness, John Buchan wrote in Greenmantle, lies in an ability to ‘get under the skin o f alien peoples’. The quintessence o f being British is there­ fore, paradoxically, the a b ility -a n d indeed the d e s ire -to be somebody else. In popular romances and in the adventure novel, the Byronic heroes ‘go native’ in order to safeguard the British way o f life. The comic hero, while just as intensely patriotic, adopts the Balkan way o f life as a liberat­ ing experience through which he escapes from the conventional limitations o f home existence, such as a ‘wife in W illesden’ or a ‘platonic devotion to the English countryside’. In this sense Pemberton is no less a descendant of the Byronic myth than the romantic heroes o f Hope’s or Buchan’s novels. British wom en —with the exception o f eccentric spinsters like Colonel F ra se r-m o stly occupy secondary roles in Footman’s fiction, are usually aloof and full o f scorn for local society, rarely stray beyond the limits o f the British expatriate community, and are akin perhaps to the stereotype of the memsahib in British India. Footman’s Vuchinia is, like the Ruritanian kingdoms or Shaw’s Bulgaria, an exotic amalgam o f Eastern heritage and Western aspirations. It is ruled by a corrupt governm ent and prone to undem ocratic m easures. ( ‘A dictatorship in the Balkans simply means that the gang in power issues a decree to abolish the opposition and carries on ju st as before.’) 125 Its ‘democratic elections’ are a sham. (‘Gipsies like general elections. They can generally reckon on at least the equivalent o f eighteen pence per vote.’) 126 The Vuchinians are, again like Shaw’s Bulgarians, rather fond of childish and inept imitations o f ‘civilised’ Western customs, as the following description o f a ball in Tsernigrad shows: At one end was a platform on which were perched the bandsmen o f the Republican Guard, probably o f all musicians in Europe the most unfitted to play modern dance music. Not that there was any room to dance in, for the social cream o f Tsernigrad (dressed, as prescribed on the invitation cards in uniforme, frack, redingote, smoking, ou hahit de gala) with their wives, daughters, mothers and aunts covered the floor in a dense and perspiring mass.117

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Although Mills accepts his posting to Tsernigrad relieved that he was ‘going to live among Europeans’, all his subsequent favourite haunts are decidedly ‘oriental’. Uncle Bozha (his wine merchant) hides behind ‘an old Turkish archway’, in a cavern which ‘exudes a curiously cold smell o f slivovica and much-breathed air’.128* Kosta, the chevapchiya next door, sells his kebabs while, around his stock-in-trade o f raw meat and entrails and his sleeping face, ‘flies cluster in swarms’.129* ‘It was a very peaceful place,’ Footman remarks, adding: ‘It was also a good place to bring visitors to, as they were always delighted and used to declare that this was the real East at last.’130 When the young diplomat looks back to his time in Tsernigrad, it is the ‘Balkan’ things that he remembers, as he admits, recalling the ‘ramshackle tow n’, ‘a feeling that no other place was able to inspire’: Perhaps it is because there I had my most vivid emotional experiences; perhaps I still feel the magic o f that first glimpse from the river. Whatever the reason, I have a hunger for the sound o f peasant carts rattling over its uneven cobbles, for the blare o f gipsy music round the café doors, and for that blended smell o f dust, cattle, cheap Viennese scent, petrol and slivovica that hangs about its streets.131 Among the comic accounts o f British diplomatic life in the Balkans in peace-time perhaps the best-remembered are Lawrence Durrell’s Antrobus stories, which he began writing in the 1950s, hoping, as with White Eagles O ver Serbia, to make some money out o f his otherw ise dire Balkan experiences. At the time when Durrell took up his post as a press attaché at the British Embassy, Yugoslavia was still devastated by the Second World War. Furthermore, as he found out when he arrived in Belgrade in July 1949, in the aftermath o f Tito’s split with Stalin the year before, the Yugoslav Communist rulers greatly feared the possibility o f foreign invasion, and distrusted both the East and the West. Foreigners were regarded with suspicion, and members o f the corps diplomatique were isolated from the local population. Although the m ovem ents o f diplom ats were closely observed and severely restricted, Durrell managed to see several parts o f the country. In January 1950 he travelled westwards across the Balkans to visit Trieste, a port in the northern Adriatic which was at the time controlled by the Western Allies, while its future was contested by Italy and Yugoslavia. He enjoyed the comparative prosperity o f Trieste, but disliked what he saw as the tow n’s Middle Europeanness. Recalling that Stendhal, who served as a consul in Trieste in the 1830s, found the isolation o f Trieste deadening, Durrell wrote to Henry Miller: * *

Sljivovica: Serbian plum brandy. éev ap d ïija: a purveyor o f Serbian-style kebabs.

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Here at least we could see shops with something in them, and people who did not look whey-faced with starvation and fear. Cafés to sit in and smiling faces. But the town for all its Italian population has a curious sedateness - a lack o f southern brio. I discovered why - 60,000 Slovenes and 6,000 Croats. The character o f these Middle-Europeans is dull, selfpitying and Slav - like the Poles; heavy as gunmetal. Far from the Medi­ terranean lightness and sensuality. It was good however to see Trieste to understand why Stendhal reacted against it so strongly. After Italy he tasted the first harsh notes o f Central European landscape and character it smells o f the great Hungarian plain and the steppes beyond.132 If Trieste, which despite its Austrian influence strikes most people as a Mediterranean town, inspired Durrell to think o f the Hungarian plains and the steppes, it is hardly surprising that the Yugoslav capital, Belgrade, the drab setting o f White Eagles Over Serbia, seemed to him a harsh and un­ welcoming northern city. In fact, every town Durrell lived in or visited at this particular period o f his life suffered in comparison to an idealised image o f a sunny Greek island, the only place where, he believed, his literary inspiration could never desert him. In Argentina, where he spent some time before his posting to Belgrade, he complained that his writing suffered because the place was so boring that it left him with ‘no concentration, no power o f holding onto things’.133 In the Yugoslav capital it was not boredom but pressure o f work that rendered him unable to devote much time to his creative urge. As one Balkan political crisis followed another, he used to finish his letters to friends saying: ‘Meanwhile, however, not a line o f poetry and prose - O Lord. I can’t work here.’134 Among the English authors who visited the Balkans in the first half o f this century, Durrell had the longest experience o f life in the region, spending three years in Belgrade. He had few opportunities to get to know ordinary people and for the most part, as he often complained, he met surly and primitive Communist officials. Although Durrell’s letters contain several orders for medicines on behalf o f his local acquaintances (given the prevailing shortages, the Embassy was, Durrell wrote to Henry Miller, ‘a clearing house for parcels for Yugoslavs’),135 he reveals nothing specific about any o f his friendships in Belgrade. His dislike o f Yugoslav officials seems to have been mutual. A Yugoslav literary historian noted that Durrell’s resignation and his subsequent departure from Belgrade were not particularly regretted locally.136 His somewhat eccentric behaviour might have been, in those austere times, an irritant not only to local officialdom but also to his fellow diplomats. A suitable illustration for this can be found in Durrell’s account o f how he bought him self a rather unusual vehicle. On his journey to Trieste he discovered ‘hiding in a garage, too big to be used, a perfectly gigantic c a r - a Horch: the German Rolls Royce’.137 The car, which the Durrells subsequently named Herman, used to belong

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to Goering. ‘As a matter o f fact you have often seen Herman in the news­ reels,’ Durrell wrote to his friend Anne Ridler: do you remember the entry into Prague etc. with one o f the big shots standing up in the front and giving the boys the salute. That’s how I go to the office now. Everyone is speechless with rage and few will speak to me these days. But the Belgrade police force is deeply respectful. There are two horns on the car, bass and tenor. I say that I’ve struck a blow for poetry because it is an ideal poet’s car: too large for any purpose except triumphal entries, and so expensive to run that only a lunatic would buy such a thing. I shall sell it to Tito when I leave. He already has one but not as nice as m ine.138 Durrell seemed unconcerned that such dramatic gestures, in a city which not long beforehand had been thoroughly bombed and then occupied by the Germans, before being bombed again by the Allies, might not appear particularly amusing to everyone. He was well aware, nevertheless, that he was living his life ‘in the lap o f a positively pre-war luxury’, while ‘the inhabitants o f this benighted country are facing starvation.’’39 Alan Thomas records an intriguing acquaintanceship between Durrell and a Yugoslav, which seems to have had tragic consequences: ‘In Belgrade, an incipient friend­ ship with a young Yugoslav writer was swiftly nipped in the bud when the young man was flung into prison for associating with a western imperialist.’* If Durrell did not manage to write as much as he wished while still in Yugoslavia, his unusual experiences in the country subsequently found expression through what are, within his oeuvre, rather unusual literary genres - an adventure in White Eagles Over Serbia, and a series o f comic stories. First published in newspapers and magazines, the latter stories use the trials and frustrations o f Durrell’s job in Belgrade as raw material for comedy. The darker moods which permeate much o f Durrell’s corres­ pondence are only occasionally echoed in his poetry. ‘Letters in Darkness’, written in Belgrade in February 1952, begins: Imagine we are the living who inhabit Freezing offices in a winter town, and goes on to depict a desolate and alienated urban land.140 A similar mood is expressed even more directly in ‘Iron Curtain Blues’, Durrell’s own musical composition. According to Alan Thomas, Durrell apparently used to sing it while accompanying him self on the piano at some o f the more intimate diplomatic parties in Belgrade.

*

Fruitless enquiries in Belgrade about the identity o f this young man lead me to assume that this friendship was either invented by Durrell, or that the young writer’s career was perhaps affected so deeply by this episode that he remained little known (if and when he came out o f prison).

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Although we keep drinking, Our spirits keep sinking, They are sinking like New Belgrade.* the song laments, complaining that romantic sounding cities such as Prague, Belgrade and Vienna are all gripped by the Iron Curtain blues which infects the members o f the corps diplomatique: ‘The Naval Attaché hung him self on the stairs, / We brush past his body now - nobody cares.’141 Unsurprisingly perhaps, in view o f his resentment towards the place, the Yugoslav years represented a particularly barren period o f Durrell’s writing career. He worked ‘awfully hard’, and he travelled ‘up and down this bloody country with various nobs’.143 Among the ‘nobs’ was, for example, Anthony Eden, whose visit to Y ugoslavia was, Durrell boasted, ‘publicity managed by little m e’. Eden’s Balkan tour provided nearly as much publicity for Durrell, he claimed, as for the then British Foreign Secretary. On several occasions, Durrell met ‘Mr. And Mrs. Tito’ (as he referred to the then President o f Yugoslavia and his wife) in the White Palace in Belgrade. ‘I was able to examine the leaders o f this country at close quarters. Seeing is believing they say,’ he joked.143 While he had to compose ‘millions o f words o f Foreign Office dis­ patches’, Durrell constantly complained about his inability to write.144 These years o f his life were, he later remarked in an interview, ‘valuable to me as a novelist, but o f not much help otherwise’.145 From his correspondence, it is clear that he could scarcely bring him self to find a single good word for the Yugoslav capital. In his letters from Belgrade, he often described it as a ‘dreary white city on its dirty rivers’.146 In his longing for the Mediterra­ nean and ‘freedom ’, Durrell seems to have found the rivers o f Belgrade particularly loathsome. His typical description o f the town never fails to bemoan the fact that ‘Belgrade lies on the confluence o f two damnably dirty and moist rivers’.147* His dislike o f anything that might be remotely reminiscent o f a northern landscape endlessly resurfaces in his letters: God! This place feels so far from the Mediterranean. Flat, land locked, inhabited by pigs indistinguishable from Serbs and Serbs vice versa: no olives: blank stupid geese: dust in summer and fog in winter. This week terrific snow. Leave your car outside the office for an hour and it disappears into a giant snow-drift. Icy wind from Tartary.148 * Only after he had resigned from his job and abandoned Yugoslavia was Durrell able to see the comic side o f his life in Belgrade and his duties *

*

New Belgrade, a Corbusier-inspired high-rise satellite city, was built by the Communists on marshland across the Sava from Belgrade proper. He fails to elaborate on the possibility o f un-moist rivers. D urrclPs - and. others’ - talismanic longing for olive groves illustrates the existence o f a very British romantic dream ofthe Mediterranean which the Balkans could never quite fulfil.

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within the diplomatic service. They found expression in humorous stories about Antrobus, an experienced diplomat o f a very English kind. The stories were originally published in newspapers and magazines ranging from the New Statesman and the Sunday Times to Mademoiselle and Playboy, and subsequently gathered in three books: Esprit de Corps, first published in 1957, S tiff Upper Lip, which appeared in 1958, and Sauve Qui Peut, published in 1966. In 1985 Faber and Faber issued them all under one cover with the title Antrobus Complete. Although the first collection, Esprit de Corps, was initially rejected by the publishers (‘in toto’, Durrell remarked),149 it enjoyed great success with the reviewers. ‘Mr Durrell writes a prose as finished as his verse, is extremely entertaining, and each o f these brief anecdotes without malice is as light and delicious as the very best Viennese pastry,’ noted Constantine FitzGibbon in the Spectator,'™ while Gerald Sykes remarked that the stories were written ‘in the Wodehouse manner but with ten times more animus’.ISI On publication, Durrell received ‘numerous fan-letters from prolapsed ancients who (subscribers to Punch) thought it was in the tradition’.152 He had, in fact, admitted that he began writing the Antrobus stories ‘in the hope o f making a little money from Punch’’ explaining that he was ‘in extrem is’.153 ‘I have had to do a lot o f potboiling in my career,’ he said in an interview, adding: Let me say this: if one stays absolutely honest towards a form - even when I am writing this Antrobus nonsense, I am writing it with a reverence to P. G. Wodehouse. I mean every form thoroughly exploited and honestly dealt with is not shameful.154 The second book, S tiff Upper Lip, had mixed reviews - one reviewer praised it for having ‘English subtlety and European robustness’,155 another found it an ‘anachronistic blend o f Sir Harold Nicolson and P. G. W odehouse’.156 When the third volume o f Antrobus stories appeared in the mid-sixties, the time for Durrell’s embassy antics seems to have passed. It was not widely reviewed, and even those reviewers who recommended the previous two volumes, like John Allison o f the Saturday Review, were beginning to feel bored - in a very sixties way - with Antrobus: ‘Most o f the stories read as if they had been written after a night with LSD or perhaps they might seem better along with LSD.’157 While most reviewers compare Durrell’s sketches to the writings o f P. G. Wodehouse and Harold Nicolson, the short stories also seem to be inspired by Evelyn W augh’s comic fiction, although it should be emphasised that W augh’s novel Unconditional Surrender, which includes highly comi­ cal descriptions o f Yugoslavia in war-time, was published in 1961, when the first two volumes o f Antrobus stories had already appeared. Both writers extract similar comic effects from the encounter between English upper-class eccentrics and the Balkan brand o f Communists, o f which each

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had first-hand experience. Durrell certainly admired Waugh’s earlier comic works. He had read The Loved One in Argentina and recommended it to a friend as ‘the best thing o f its kind since Brave New World'. ‘In its curious way I think it’s a m asterpiece’.’158 In 1963 Durrell told an interviewer: ‘Evelyn W augh’s The Loved One is a masterpiece that Swift would have been proud to write had he lived in our age. But 1 want to stay near Rabelais; 1 want to be coarse and vulgarly funny.’159 Durrell’s formulaic, mannered diplomatic sketches show little o f this alleged desire to write humour in the Rabelaisian vein. The stories all follow the same, old-fashioned template. Whenever in London, the narrator is invited to lunch with Antrobus in his club, where they reminisce about the ‘happy days passed in foreign capitals ‘lying abroad’ for our country’.160 Antrobus usually recalls a particularly funny episode from his diplomatic career. Many o f these take place in the Balkans. The earlier stories o f the sequence are placed specifically in post-war, Communist Yugoslavia, but Durrell later moves them to Vulgaria, an imaginary Balkan land. This is a country where anything that can go wrong normally does go horribly wrong, ‘an unspeakable place full o f unspeakable people’, which tests the nerves o f even the most seasoned o f diplomats. Although they apparently belong to the same comic world as many o f the characters o f Wodehouse or Waugh, Durrell’s heroes are not created with the same amount o f métier and often represent little more than social and national stereotypes. From the Ambassador Polk-Mowbray to the Third Secretary De Mandeville, the Englishmen who appear in Durrell’s stories tend to be ‘gentlem en’ from impeccable public-school backgrounds, who compensate for any lack o f intelligence with a ready supply o f sang-froid. As in W augh’5 Sw ord o f Honour trilogy or Footman’s comic prose, English women seldom appear, but where they do, they usually cause trouble. One such example is the Am bassador’s niece Angela in ‘Noblesse O blige', who must be found a suitable husband, preferably ‘a Third Secretary, Eton and Caius, aged 25 (approx)’, or she might ‘fall in with a hard-drinking Serbian set and set the Danube on fire’.161 Another is the Am bassador’s Aunt Norah ofthe eponymous story, who, happening ‘upon some Labour Party pamphlets’, was ‘at once captivated by their attitude to sex’ and decided to travel to Vulgaria to give a series o f lectures about the necessity o f ‘having more o f it’.162 Representatives o f other nationalities are similarly stereotyped. The French Ambassador to Vulgaria is a ‘slightly mustached young widow called Mole with a parlous amount o f frou-frou’163 who insists on organising some highly intellectual soirées at her embassy. The French cultural attaché (‘Burning eyes. Dirty hair. A moist and Farenheit handshake. You know the type. W asn’t even married to his own w ife’) gives a public lecture. Antrobus, proud o f his own ignorance, explains that the lecture was ‘on a French writer called, if I understood him correctly, Flowbear’, followed by another one on ‘Goaty-eh’.IM The Italians, predictably, perform an amateur

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opera; the Swiss, ‘all dressed as edelweiss’, an ‘ear-splitting evening o f Yodelling’, the Japanese a ‘Noh play o f goulish obscurity lasting seven hours’. The vehemently anti-intellectual British diplomats try in vain to keep their ‘cultural man’ (‘Name of Gool. And he looked it. It was a clear case of Harrow and a bad third in history’) under control, but he goes adrift and gives ‘readings with writhings’ on ‘everything short o f Mrs Beeton’.165 The preference for familiar national stereotypes over any more unusual direct experience o f diplomatic life also applies to the Balkan protagonists o f Durrell’s diplomatic stories. Although many of the Antrobus stories deal with post-war, Communist Yugoslavia, they exploit the comic potential o f an older vision o f the Balkans developed in popular fiction and comic opera. If Durrell thought prim arily o f the future com m ercial success o f his diplomatic stories, when it came to the Balkans he tried particularly hard not to disappoint the expectations o f (what he rather patronisingly estimated to be) the average subscriber to Punch. In his book on Durrell, John Weigel observes, without apparent irony, that ‘to many English and Americans, the Balkan countries such as Yugoslavia, where Durrell served in the Diplomatic Corps, are musical comedy settings.’166 The same stereotypes influenced the reviewer in Time magazine to conclude that the best stories ‘extract a flavorsome slivovitz from the Titoesque’, explaining how Durrell shows that ‘in certain vital respects, Marxism had not altered the Balkans from the dear old musical comedy days, when their wars were fought by chocolate soldiers and their diplomats were outmaneuvred by merry w idows.’u’7 Durrell’s stories are, in fact, fairly ruthless in exploiting a multitude of prejudices about the Balkans. The way he recycles opéra bouffe clichés can be observed in the following paragraph from the story entitled ‘The Call o f the Sea’: It was lucky that there was only one gun in Belgrade castle. This was manned by Comrade Popovic and a scratch team o f Albanian Shiptars clad in skull caps o f white wool and goatskin breeches. (Fearsome to look at because o f his huge moustache and shapeless physique the Shiptar is really a peaceable animal, about as quarrelsome as a Labrador and with the personality o f a goldfish.) Usually it took the team about a week to load the Gun, which was a relic left behind them by the depart­ ing Visigoths or Ostrogoths - I forget which. Strictly speaking, too, it was not an offensive weapon as such but a Saluting Gun. Every evening during Ramadan it would give a hoarse boom at sunset, while a pair o f blue underpants, which had been used from time immemorial as wadding for the blank charge, would stiffen themselves in the sky.168* The humorous effect o f this paragraph lies in a series o f improbable images redolent o f the land o f Syldavia which featured in a (funnier) Tintin strip-cartoon by Hergé, entitled King O ttokar’s Sceptre (1947),161' another *

Quite how they lired the gun each evening if it took a week to load is not explained.

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comic version o f a Balkan Ruritania which itself offers evidence o f the wide influence o f the wave o f popular ‘Balkan’ fiction initiated by Anthony Hope. Durrell’s soldiers with huge moustaches, wearing goatskin breeches, who, in time o f danger, load their ancient weapon with ‘beer bottle tops, discarded trouser buttons, cigarette-tins and fragments o f discarded railwaytrain’,170 belong to the world o f slapstick comedy, unrestrained by historical or geographical facts. There is no reason, for example, why ‘Albanian Shiptars’* - under Serbian command - would man a gun on Belgrade castle and why they should fire a salvo at Ramadan in the middle o f the Commu­ nist (and otherwise overwhelmingly Orthodox Christian) Yugoslav capital. Durrell’s somewhat creaking humour becomes even more exaggerated when he moves his stories from Yugoslavia to the imaginary Balkan land o f Vulgaria. His imagination now feels free to play with the most improbable combinations o f elements from Balkan history: It was during the Civil War when the country was Communist all the week and Royalist at the weekends. Every Saturday morning the Royalist troops came down from the hills and took the Praesidium; every Monday morning they were driven back with heavy losses. Monday was payday for the Communist forces, Saturday that o f the Royalist army. This had a strange effect on the hairdressing business, for during the week you only found heavily nationalized barbers at work, while at the weekend you could borrow the five Royal barbers from the other side.171 The same strategy o f employing the comic effects o f knockabout farce lies behind the creation o f a whole gallery o f Balkan types with ‘funny’ names - along the lines o f Icic, Cicic, Pepic and so on - which, although they might sound like Serbian or Croatian names, are mostly made up. (Icic - spelt ‘Itchitch’ - was obviously so irresistible an idea that it also appears in W augh’s Unconditional Surrender.) Durrell’s dislike o f the Serbs, frequently expressed in his letters, is on full display in the Antrobus stories. They are, most frequently, described as ape-like, inarticulate creatures. In the story entitled ‘Frying the Flag’, for example, the printing-presses o f the Central Balkan Herald, which is edited by two valiant elderly Englishwomen, are manned by ‘half a dozen hirsute Serbian peasants with greasy elf-locks and hands like shovels’: Bowed and drooling and uttering weird eldritch cries from time to time they went up and down the type boxes with the air o f half-emancipated baboons hunting for fleas. The master printer was called Icic (pronounced Itchitch) and he sat forlornly in one corner living up to his name by scratching him self from time to tim e.172

*

‘Albanian’ and ‘Shiptar’ have the same meaning. The tautology is presumably designed to make an 'exotic' group o f people sound even more cxotic.

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Durrell uses not only Balkan but also wider Slavonic references in order to add a measure o f exoticism. In ‘The Ghost Train’, for example, train drivers are ‘hairy m en in cloth caps who looked like D ostoyevsky’s publishers’. Subsequently they are referred to as the ‘Karamazov brothers’. In the story entitled ‘For Immediate Release’, an English press officer gets drunk in a ‘Balkan bistro with an unprounounceable name’ where he breaks into a song and, moved by his own performance, begins to cry ‘huge, round almost solid tears’. His (Serbian) fellow drunkards are not in the least perplexed: ‘This sort o f behaviour is fairly normal among Serbs whenever they are drunk and the tragedy of the General Panslav idea comes to mind.’173 Among the most frequently recurring aspects o f Durrell’s depiction o f the Balkans are his caricatures o f primitive Communist officials. In the story entitled ‘Jots and Tittles’, for example, the British Embassy gives a party in honour o f the ‘Communist People’s Serbian Trade and Timber G uild’, and welcomes a ‘very hot and embarassed little group o f peasants dressed in dark suits’: Most o f them spoke only their mother tongue. Comrade Bobok, however, the leader o f the delegation, spoke a gnarled embryonic English. He was a huge, sweating Bosnian peasant with a bald head. His number two, Pepic, spoke the sort o f French that one imagines is learned in mission houses in Polynesia. 174 His jokes about the lack o f savoir-faire among Yugoslav Communist poli­ ticians pandered to his target audience, but also provided an important out­ let for Durrell’s anger about the ‘philistinism, puritanism and cruelty’ o f the Yugoslav regime and perhaps for his bitterness that at the time the best career option available to him had been an obscure post in Belgrade.175 Although his humour is frequently crass rather than coarse in any Rabelaisian way, it seems that on occasion his imagination was somewhat less outré than the ‘average subscriber to Punch’ might suppose. One or two o f the most extraordinary episodes seem to have been inspired by real events. ‘The Call o f the Sea’ was, I have heard in Belgrade, based on an incident in the Adriatic port o f Split, when, to everyone’s horror, a pontoon carry­ ing a number o f naval attachés and an assortment o f diplomats sailed out o f control during a naval exercise. ‘The Ghost Train’, which describes a perilous journey when the whole corps diplomatique is taken on a special train named the ‘Liberation-Celebration Machine’ to the Croatian capital, Zagreb, is based on an actual event described in a letter to Anne Ridler. ‘It was a scene from a Waugh novel,’ Durrell wrote to his friend, in a passage which itself reads like one o f the Antrobus stories: The Netherlands chargé d ’affaires slightly tipsy on the platform; the m in isters sh ak in g hands and co o in g like doves; the A rg en tin e Am bassador in a frock-coat got locked out o f his pullman and ran shrieking beside the train for a hundred yards. . . The wife o f the Brazilian

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Ambassador got locked in a lavatory and had to be set free with axes and dosed with pepperm int.176 Durrell set out - as with White Eagles Over Serbia - with openly commercial motives. The fact that he chose to produce a rather obvious set o f patronising stereotypes reveals his belief that this particular type o f vision o f the Balkans was the most marketable one. However cynical he might have been about such exploitation o f a world he knew and hated, his reviewers, with their operetta-like ideas o f the peninsula, prove that his assumptions were largely correct.

Evelyn W augh: An English O fficer with the Partisans D urrell’s unfavourable opinions o f Yugoslavia and his scorn for the Yugoslav Communists recur in Evelyn W augh’s descriptions o f his per­ sonal experiences o f the country during the Second World War. The auto­ biographical material contained in Waugh’s diaries and correspondence reappears in the Yugoslav episodes o f Guy Crouchback’s wartime career, described in the final volume o f The Sword o f Honour trilogy, Unconditional Surrender, which appeared in 1961. By that time, the publication o f Durrell’s Antrobus volumes was well under way. In July 1944, Waugh and Winston Churchill’s son Randolph were sent to Yugoslavia as part o f the British Military Mission to Tito’s Partisans which was headed by Brigadier Fitzroy Maclean. Maclean, who had been parachuted into Yugoslavia in 1943, was instrumental in convincing the British Government to switch their support from the Chetniks, the resistance m o v em en t o f G e n eral D ra za M ih ailo v ic , w ho w ere ro y a list and predominantly Serbian (Mihailovic him self was a Serb who had been an officer in the pre-war Yugoslav army) to the Communist Partisan forces led by Marshal Josip Broz Tito, him self a Croat o f partly Slovene ancestry. Randolph Churchill and Waugh reached Yugoslavia via the headquarters o f the mission in the Italian city o f Bari, flying to the Dalmatian island of Vis,* with - as Waugh records in his diary - ‘many Jugs’ and ‘a Hungarian dancer’.177 Waugh m et Tito for the first time on 10 July 1944. His diary entry for that day records: A great banquet for Tito at HQ (a modern villa with all conveniences except water), a bagpipe band, much gin and wine and kummel. Tito and staff an hour and a half late for luncheon. He in brand new cap and uniform o f Russian marshal with Jug badge. Hammers, sickles and Com­ munist slogans everywhere . . . Orphans singing . . . Tito like Lesbian. Randolph preposterous and loveable.178

For Vis’s British antecedents, see p. I.

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‘W augh’s mind was, as usual, cluttered with fictions,’ Martin Stannard remarks in his biography o f the novelist, explaining that ‘Tito’s uniform was Yugoslav, not Russian, and his gender was far from indeterminate.’179 W augh’s jokes about Tito’s lesbianism, inspired by the rumours that the leader o f the Yugoslav Communists was a woman which had reached Britain a few years earlier, were obviously not confined to the pages o f his diary. Before the end o f the novelist’s first day in Yugoslavia, Tito came up to Maclean and Waugh wearing nothing but a wet swimsuit, and told M aclean: ‘Will you please ask Captain W augh why he thinks 1 am a L esbian?’180 Waugh ‘had not expected humorous self-assurance in a Communist and he never forgave Tito for ridiculing him ’.181 W augh’s Yugoslav war-time diaries contain a number o f sharp, if fre­ quently extravagant, sketches of his British colleagues and his Communist hosts. Descriptions o f Randolph Churchill’s drunkenness punctuate most o f the entries. The head o f the British Military Mission, Fitzroy Maclean, is described upon W augh’s arrival in Yugoslavia as ‘dour, unprincipled, am­ bitious, probably very wicked; shaved head and devil’s ears’.182 On the following day, Waugh describes him as ‘saturnine and N azi’.183 Differ­ ences in attitude between the two men would have been considerable. Maclean gave clear, if not wholly unreserved, support to the Yugoslav Partisans, albeit for pragmatic reasons, while Waugh was bitterly antiCommunist and had - in M aclean’s words - arrived in Yugoslavia with ‘his mind already made up’.184 Maclean was aware that a Partisan victory would lead to the establishment o f a Marxist government in the country. W inston Churchili famously asked him whether he intended to live in Yugoslavia. ‘No Sir,’ Maclean replied. ‘Neither do I,’ said Churchill, put­ ting an end to Maclean’s argument against backing the movement which was to form the future Communist government.185 (Paradoxically, under the post-w ar C om m unist regime M aclean became the only foreigner allowed to own a home in the former Yugoslavia - a Venetian palazzo on the Adriatic island o f Korcula which was given to him by Tito.) Following their initial visit to Vis, Waugh and Randolph Churchill flew to Topusko, a small Croatian spa town just north o f the border with BosniaHerzegovina which was the temporary seat o f the Anti-Fascist Council o f the Croatian People (the Communist Partisan government in the liberated territory o f Croatia). The plane crashed on landing. Randolph Churchill’s servant was killed, but Waugh and Churchill escaped with relatively minor injuries. ‘I kept saying, ‘D on’t let them put margarine on my burns, it is the worst thing’. Randolph shouting for morphia.’ Waugh records in his diary.186 He was hospitalised in ‘what must have been an inn’, with an armed guard outside the door. Randolph Churchill was lying in a neighbouring house, ‘side by side with a badly hurt Communist commissar o f asiatic appear­ ance’.187 Waugh’s diary records another bizarre encounter:

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A Hungarian Jew from Cricklewood appeared who told me he had been a ‘Fine Art Dealer’ in Bond Street and solicited help in escaping from the country. The place was misty, a curiously suburban agricultural land­ scape. A bombed-out bathing establishm ent.'88 Waugh was flown to Italy for treatment, and returned to Topusko in midSeptember 1944. He set him self up in a farm, ‘reeking o f pigs’, as he wrote to his wife Laura, but with ‘a room away from Randolph, whose rhetoric in his cups I find a little wearisom e’.189 Another member o f the mission described the two men, in a report to the Foreign Office forwarded in Novem ­ ber 1944, as ‘ensconced in a snug little farm building pleasantly heated by the usual tall china stoves fed by logs o f wood. Their wants were attended to by an imposing retinue o f menials, both English and Yugoslav.’190 Topusko was a deserted town (‘except soldiers and Jews aw aiting evacuation who give the Communist salute and write illiterate appeals to Randolph’),191 yet, judging by W augh’s descriptions, a relatively pleasant place to be: ‘Plane trees down the street, pretty cobbles in the centre, plinth without statue (king?). Baths brand new, clean and still working. We go and take them most days, no charge.’192 The Partisan fighters made a favourable impression on him: ‘Note on Jugoslav soldiers: simple blue eyes, fair hair, cheerful and respectful, always singing and joking. After the sulkiness o f British troops it is extraordinary to see the zeal they put into fatigues.’193 However, W augh’s early impressions o f the Partisans’ efficacy in fighting the Germans were very different from the opinions expressed in the official reports sent by Fitzroy Maclean. ‘They have no interest in fighting the Germans but are engrossed in their civil war,’ Waugh wrote, adding that ‘they make slightly ingenious attempts to deceive us into thinking their motive in various tiny campaigns is to break German retreat routes’.194 W augh’s diary from Topusko records (alongside more complaints about his increasing irritation with Randolph Churchill) a series of encounters with Yugoslav Communists, many o f whom became prominent political players in post-war Yugoslavia. There are few descriptions o f any military action. Waugh regularly attended Mass in the local Roman Catholic church and was to become, during his stay in Yugoslavia, increasingly concerned about the way in which the Croatian Roman Catholic Church was treated by the emerging Communist regime. In December 1944 he was posted to Dubrovnik (he refers to it in his diaries by its older, Latin name o f Ragusa). On 9 December his diary records that he ‘sent a signal to Fitzroy Maclean seeking an authority to make an enquiry and a report on the religious situation’.195 M aclean’s immediate reaction is not recorded. After October 1944, with Tito established at the White Palace in liber­ ated Belgrade, the attitudes o f the Partisans towards the British were, as Donald Hamilton-Hill (an army major whom Waugh describes as ‘a dap­ per, rather common fellow’1'"’) records in his book S O K. Assignment,

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‘increasingly peremptory’.197 W augh’s interest in the welfare o f Croatian Catholics deepened during his time in Dubrovnik. He attended services at the Franciscan monastery almost daily and arranged a gift o f a thousand rations to the city’s Dominicans. In January 1945 he notes ‘an encouraging demand from the Foreign Office for a report on Church affairs’ and records that he is ‘writing hasty notes on the Church in Croatia’.198 The Public Record Office preserves a report ‘by Captain Waugh’, dated 17 May 1945, forwarded by Anthony Eden to Ralph Stevenson, the then British Ambassador to Yugoslavia, for comments. The report had originally been submitted to the Foreign Office in late March 1945. This report, Andrew Harvey writes, ‘provoked considerable disquiet in Foreign Office circles - not because the Foreign Office was worried about the Croatian Catholics but because they feared Waugh would pass his information to the Catholic hierarchy in Britain’.199 On 2 March 1945, Waugh had in fact had a private audience with Pope Pius XII at the Vatican. He ‘embarked at once on Jugoslav church affairs’: the Pope ‘took it all in, said ‘Ça n ’est pas la liberté’, then gave his English parrot-talk o f how many children had I and that he saw the naval review at Portsmouth’.200 ‘But I left him convinced that he had understood what I came for,’ Waugh concludes, attempting to mitigate his disappointment at what he felt was the insufficient attention devoted to the cause he was representing.201 His report dealt with ‘the liberated areas o f the proposed Federal State o f Croatia, including Bosnia-Herzegovina whose future status is still under discussion’, and described the different ways in which the Communist minority was consolidating its control over these lands. Outlining the position o f the Croatian Catholic Church, Waugh explains that ‘in districts such as Dalmatia where Catholics were in an overwhelming majority they tended to be tepid in their devotion; in districts such as Bosnia where they were in the minor­ ity, they tended to be truculent and bigoted.’202 Those o f the clergy who interested themselves in politics were mainly actuated by two emotions, fear o f communism, which, in the event, needs no justification, and resentment against the Serbs which today seems less reasonable.203 Waugh then analyses the relationship between the Roman Catholic Church and the war-time Croatian Ustase regime, which was - according to his report - welcomed by the great majority o f Croats. The Franciscans were, Waugh claims, conspicuous among those members o f the clergy who made themselves ‘particular champions o f the new State’ and ‘caused misgiv­ ings at Rome by their independence and narrow patriotism ’.204 However, only a few o f them actually served with the Ustase troops, Waugh argues, detailing several cases o f friars who committed war crimes, including one ‘who was practising great cruelties at the notorious Jasenovac concentration cam p’.20' Waugh reports that many Catholic priests were subsequently

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executed by the Communists, with or without a ‘popular trial’, and he describes the ways in which the Communists attempted to make the work o f the remaining Catholic clergy difficult. (‘The Croatian clergy believe that a premeditated plan is being put into operation for the gradual extermination o f the Church,’ Waugh warns.)206 His report ends with a reminder o f the possible influence the British Government might have over Tito’s regime: Great Britain has given great assistance to the establishment o f a regime which threatens to destroy the Catholic Faith in a region where there are now some 5,000,000 Catholics. There is no hope for them inside their country. Marshal Tito has paid lip-service to many liberal principles including that o f freedom o f worship. He may still be amenable to advice from his powerful allies.207* The details o f W augh’s account were not seriously disputed by the Foreign Office, although officials such as the British Ambassador in recently liberated Belgrade were keen to balance them by emphasising the Communist viewpoint and ‘the Catholic clergy’s record of collaboration with Fascists’.208 W augh’s Roman Catholic contacts and activities, as well as the ‘illdisguised sense o f superiority’ he displayed,209 antagonised the newly in­ stalled local Partisan commander in Dubrovnik, whom he described in his diary as ‘a pubescent cretin named Antoravic’.210 He requested W augh’s removal from the city and the British gladly complied. ‘It was plain to all, and W augh appears to have made no secret o f it, that he preferred the interests o f the Church to those o f the British government,’ his biographer remarks.211 Waugh soon talked about showing his report to the Archbishop o f W estminster and even publishing it, while ‘the Foreign Office expended some energy in working out how to shut him up.’212 Fitzroy Maclean advised against attempts ‘to coerce Captain Waugh by threats’, as ‘he was likely to respond to such treatment by making as much trouble as he could.’213 In the end, as Andrew Harvey claims, ‘Waugh succumbed to friendly persua­ sion and contented him self with denouncing Tito in two letters to The Times (23 M ay and 5 June 1945).’2'4 His subsequent requests to return to Yugoslavia were turned down.215 One o f W augh’s biographers, Christopher Sykes, suggests that the imagi­ nary M editerranean state o f ‘N eutralia’ which served as the setting o f W augh’s short novel Scott-King's Modern Europe (1947) may have been partly inspired by Yugoslavia.216 Written immediately after W augh’s visit *

In his autobiographical work Rise and Fall, Milovan Djilas describes T ito’s meeting with a delegation o f Catholic prelates in Zagreb in June 1945: ‘Tito chose this opportunity to state that he was dissatisfied with the wartime conduct o f ‘some o f the Catholic clergy.’ This was when he let slip the phrase ‘I, as a Catholic (Milovan Djilas, Rise and Fall (London: Macmillan, l‘>85), p. 39.)

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to Spain in 1946, the novel itself defines ‘The Republic o f N eutralia’ as ‘imaginary and com posite’.217 The fictitious country certainly seems to have as many Spanish and generally M editerranean, as opposed to specifically Y ugoslav, traits. The name o f the Neutralian capital, Bellacita, reflects this amalgam - it is an Italian-sounding name which bears a resemblance to that o f the Yugoslav capital, Belgrade (grad meaning town or city, as città does in Italian). Some figures, such as Arturo Fe or Engineer Garcia, bear Spanish names, while the Croat Dr Bogdan Antonie, one o f the few m ore elaborately developed characters, is an ém igré from Yugoslavia. Neutralia can be seen as a comic patchwork o f (British) per­ ceptions o f continental Europe or, a Dutch critic claims, as ‘a mosaic of what is felt to be really European’:218 [the] country has suffered every conceivable ill the body politic is heir to. Dynastic wars, foreign invasion, disputed successions, revolting colonies, endem ic syphilis, im poverished soil, m asonic intrigues, revolutions, restorations, cabals, juntas, pronunciamentos, liberations, constitutions, coups d 'éta t, dictatorships, assassinations, agrarian reforms, popular elections, foreign intervention, repudiation o f loans, inflations o f currency, trades unions, massacres, arson, atheism, secret societies.219 If Waugh’s experiences of Yugoslavia did intluence some Neutralian images (the country is run, for example, by a single political party led by a Mar­ shal), they certainly inspired the character o f Dr Antonie, the International Secretary o f the Bellorius Association. Antonie is a Croat, ‘born under the Habsburg Empire’, who ‘studied in Zagreb, Budapest, Prague, Vienna’: one was free, one moved where one would: one was a citizen o f Europe. Then we were liberated and put under the Serbs. Now we are liberated and put under the Russians. And always more police, more prisons, more hanging.220 In spite o f his complaints about the Yugoslav regime, Dr Antonie used to be a Yugoslav diplomat (‘It was a great thing, you must believe, for a Croat to enter our diplomatic service. All the appointments went to Serbs,’ he boasts).221 In one o f the opening scenes o f this short novel, he remembers his ‘little house on the point at Lapad’ (a peninsula just outside the old walled city o f Dubrovnik), where his family ‘used to sit on the terrace laughing so loudly, sometimes, that the passing fishermen called up to us from their decks asking to share the jo k e’.222 In his war-time diary entry for 26 December 1944, Waugh records an incident which might well have inspired this description. On ‘a day o f brilliant sun’, Waugh walked to Lapad with an interpreter, ‘to investigate the claims o f a family named Mustapic to be British subjects’.223 ‘We walked a full circuit o f the peninsula before we found the house, a rather shabby

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little villa,’ Waugh recorded, adding a description o f the family which awaited him. The four daughters - the ‘ladies Mustapic’ - some o f them in their dressing gowns, smiled at him so pleasantly that Waugh (in a characteristically sarcastic way) wondered if the house was a brothel. ‘Mustapic père had been born an Austrian, had emigrated to New Zealand and prospered modestly there as a dairy farm er,’ Waugh noted.224 The visit to a ‘shabby villa’ in Lapad, and to Mr Mustapic, may have helped inspire W augh’s lament over Antonie’s laughter-filled house on the edge o f the sea. The frustrations o f W augh’s mission to Yugoslavia found a much more elaborate literary expression in Unconditional Surrender, the final volume o f the Sw ord o f Honour trilogy. The way in which the novelist transformed his personal hostility towards the Yugoslav Communists into comic imagery is similar to the way Durrell exploited his Yugoslav experiences, although it seems unfair to compare Durrell’s Antrobus ‘pot-boilers’ to the trilogy which Frank Kermode calls the climax o f W augh’s career as a novelist,225 and which is, according to Bernard Bergonzi, the major achievement in the post-war English novel, alongside Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music o f Time.™ Both writers managed to make themselves unpopular with Yugoslav officialdom, Waugh to such an extent that he was largely excised from overview s o f English literature written in Serbo-Croat.* While D mreW s Alexandria Quartet had been translated as early as 1965, and his Avignon Quintet appeared in Sarajevo in 1989-90, White Eagles Over Serbia became available to Yugoslav readers only in 1995. Durrell’s diplomatic stories remained untranslated in the Balkans until 1991. The first and, before the wars o f the 1990s, the only novel by Evelyn Waugh to be pub­ lished in the former Yugoslavia was The Loved One, which appeared in Zagreb in 1982. Soon after Croatia became an independent state in 1991, both W augh’s Sword o f Honour trilogy, and his war-time report on the Catholic Church in Croatia were translated and published.* The first volume o f W augh’s Sw ord o f Honour trilogy, Men at Arms, was published in 1952. The second, Officers and Gentlemen (initially named H appy Warriors) followed in 1955, after an interim period which for Waugh, as Frank Kermode notes, ‘was occupied by a crisis in his life, and since his life provided the matrix o f these books it must have influenced the second o f them, which ends in something close to despair’.227 Following *

*

In his Zemlja cuda u izlomljenom ogledalu, Svetozar Ignjacevic claim s that prior to the publication o f his study on W augh’s work in Zagreb in 1988, only one historical overview o f British literature contained any reference to the writ­ ings o f Evelyn Waugh. Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet was published by Prosveta, Belgrade in 1965, The A vignon Quintet by Svjetloxt, Sarajevo, in 1989 90, and White Eagles Over Serbia by C tntar za geopoetiku, Belgrade, in 1995. A selection o f Antrobus, stories w i i s published hy /n a n /e, Zagreb in 1991, n i P jevaii diplom atskog

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a similar pattern to the first two, the third volume - Unconditional Surrender - which appeared, after an even longer break, in 1961, reflects the course o f Waugh’s own war. Waugh spent a total of about six months in Yugoslavia, between July 1944 and February 1945, and his Yugoslav experiences are reflected in the final book o f the novel, entitled The Death Wish. Like the novelist himself, the hero o f the trilogy, Captain Guy Crouchback, is already disillusioned and frustrated by his experiences o f the war, when he is unexpectedly posted to Yugoslavia as a liaison officer with the Partisans. (‘On a morning shortly before Christmas in an office quite independent o f HOO Sir Ralph dropped in for an informal chat on the subject o f liaison with Balkan terrorists.’228) Waugh him self was allegedly chosen because it was believed that his Roman Catholicism would help him establish contacts in the Partisan ranks, while it was in fact the very reason for his final fall from Partisan grace.229 Guy, meanwhile, seems to have been chosen merely because he had been previously recommended for work in Italy. The fact that he does not speak a word o f Serbo-Croat is not a disadvantage, for, as Brigadier Cape states, the previous liaison officers who did speak some either joined the Partisans or were sent back after receiving complaints for ‘incorrect behaviour’: ‘The Jugs prefer to provide their interpreters - then they know just what our chaps are saying and who to. Suspicious lot o f bastards. I suppose they have good reason to be.’230 Like Waugh, Guy arrives in Yugoslavia through Bari, the ‘Headquarters o f the British Mis­ sion to the Anti-Fascist forces o f National Liberation’,231 and sets him self up in the village o f ‘Begoy’ in Croatia, in relatively comfortable surroundings - again, comparable to W augh’s snug billet in Topusko (‘Better quarters than 1 am used to ’, one o f G uy’s colleagues later says enviously, ‘Until a few days ago I was living in a cave in Bosnia’.)232 Guy spends a lot o f his time - just as Waugh appears to have done - dealing with the problems o f a large group o f Jews who had been freed from an Italian camp on the island o f Rab and later brought inland by the Partisans. The increasing difficulties and delays in their planned evacuation by the Allies seem to have been one of the main reasons for Waugh’s desire to be transferred from Topusko,233 although his published diaries and correspondence offer scant information about the plight of these people. In the final section o f the Sword o f Honour trilogy, an encounter with a Jewish woman brings one o f the most poignant moments o f self-revelation to Guy. It is through the realisation that not only is he unable to help these people but he is causing them actual harm, that he comes to view his whole war as a failure. The woman (Mrs Kanyi, who is finally tried and presumably executed by the Partisans because zbora in a translation by Zlatko Crnkovic. W augh’s The L oved One was published by the same publisher in 1982. Znanje also published W augh’s Sword o f H onour trilogy in 1993. The Croatian translator o f the trilogy, Zlatko Crnkovi£, translated W augh’s report on the Catholic Church in Croatia which was published by the M anilla review in 1W4.

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o f her conversations with Guy) mentions the way in which many people on all sides, not only the Nazis, wanted the war to happen, when Guy says, ‘God forgive me . . . I was one o f them .’234 The subsequent paragraph ex­ plains G uy’s moment o f self-realisation: Guy had come to the end o f the crusade to which he had devoted him self on the tomb o f Sir Roger . . . All the stamping o f the barrack square and the biffing o f imaginary strongholds were finding their consummation in one frustrated act o f mercy.235 W augh’s short story, ‘Compassion’, published in August 1949 in the Jesuit review The M onth, deals with a similar crisis. Its hero, Major Gordon, is forced to seek out the help o f a priest when Jewish refugees are executed, although he is not a particularly religious man. W augh’s unsuccessful attempts to draw attention to the plight o f Croatian Catholics (even his audience with the Pope had been a frustrating experience which resulted in the Pope politely encouraging him to continue his good work for the ‘church and civilisation’236) find few direct reflections in the novel. G uy’s gifts o f bully beef and other food to the local priest after he held a requiem Mass for his wife Victoria do cause the removal o f the priest from his parish, but that is about the only direct contact Guy has with the Croatian Catholics. It is possible that W augh’s perception that his work on the Catholics’ behalf was unsuccessful, as well as his largely fruitless dealings with the Topusko Jews, blended to form the conclusion about the ‘futile act of mercy’ amid the wider war which remained with him in the twelve years between the publication o f ‘Compassion’ and Unconditional Surrender. G uy’s final journey from Begoy through ‘the desolate Lika where every village was ravaged and roofless, down into the clem ent coast o f the Adriatic’237 to Split and on to Dubrovnik, corresponds to W augh’s departure from Topusko, although the months in Dubrovnik are condensed into a mere paragraph in G uy’s story. In Split harbour, Guy witnesses the sad sight o f an English cruiser ‘with the shore batteries trained at her’. ‘W ho’d have thought that the Navy would stand for that, sir? It’s politics, that’s what it is,’ his sergeant concluded.238 Without even a hint o f the problems Waugh ran into, Guy finally leaves Dubrovnik for Italy with an advance party while the rest o f the British force is preparing to withdraw. Many events described in the Yugoslav pages o f the Sw ord o f Honour trilogy are historical, and provide Waugh with a chance to recreate the arguments about the Partisans expressed in his diaries and correspondence. The British intend to use the Partisans in their struggle against the Germans but find themselves outwitted by the more cunning and ruthless Comm­ unists. Waugh describes Tito’s visit to Italy and his planned meeting with Churchill, finding it an opportunity to compare the two leaders:

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‘W ho’ll make rings round whom ?’ ‘Tito round Winston o f course. The old boy is being briefed to meet a Garibaldi. He does not know Tito is a highly trained politician.’ ‘Well, isn’t Winston Churchill?’ ‘He’s an orator and a parliamentarian, uncle. Something quite different.’239* The British decision to switch support from the royalist General Mihailovic to the Partisans was, historically, caused in part by M ihailovic’s hesitation to take action against the Germans through fear o f reprisals. According to a German directive o f September 1941, a hundred hostages were to be executed for each German killed and fifty for each one wounded. (In October 1941 the German occupying forces shot 7,000 Serbian citizens, including hundreds o f school-children, in the city o f Kragujevac after an attack by the Partisans in which ten Germans were killed and twenty-six wounded.)240 The Partisans, meanwhile, saw in such reprisals something that might actually strengthen the people’s will to fight and had few qualms about provoking the Germans. Waugh conveys this in De Souza’s dead­ pan account: M ihailovic’s boys were given a test - told to blow a bridge by a certain date. They did nothing. Too squeamish about reprisals. That’s never worried our side. The more the Nazis make themselves hated, the better for us!241 The Americans were perceived as more reluctant to give their backing to any Communist force. In W augh’s novel, the British are actually helping the Partisans ‘to square the Yanks’ when the American General Spitz comes on his investigative mission to Begoy. On Guy’s first arrival in Bari, he hears a story about a Mihailovic agent who was ‘dealt with’ by the Partisans, after the British passed on confidential information received from the Americans.242 When Guy passes through the Italian port for the last time, M ajor Marchpole is busy ‘despatching royalist officers - though he did not know it - to certain execution’.243 While the fate o f M ihailovic’s officers or the Yugoslav government in exile was o f no particular interest to Waugh, he was greatly troubled by what he saw as Britain’s willingness to be ma­ nipulated by the Communists. Unconditional Surrender contains numer­ ous variants on the self-contradictory Partisan attempts simultaneously to convince the British that they ‘were destitute and that they maintained in the field a large, efficient modern arm y’ making them a formidable ally against the Germans, as they tried to ensure they received maximum levels o f supplies from the British while remaining staunchly pro-Russian. The discussion between Maclean and Churchill about a future Marxist regime in Yugoslavia, described earlier in this section, reappears as an * Waugh probably still felt sore about T ito’s put-down on Vis.

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exchange between Brigadier Cape and Guy. ‘Neither you nor 1 are going to make his home in Jugoslavia after the war. How they choose to govern themselves is entirely their business,’ Brigadier Cape opines.244 Individual Yugoslav Partisans are, as in W augh’s diaries and letters, described with a mixture o f fascination and scorn. The comic aspects o f these descriptions display W augh’s taste for bizarre detail. He seems to have been particularly obsessed by anything that related to Partisan women. An example o f this fascination can be seen in the speech given by Major Cattermole, who is admittedly, as Brigadier Cape says, ‘an enthusiast’ (‘The Jugs love him and they don’t love many o f us. And Joe loves the Jugs, which is something more unusual still.’)245 ‘Officers and m en,’ [Cattermole] proclaimed exultantly, ‘share the same rations and quarters. And the women too. You may be surprised to find girls serving in the ranks beside their male comrades. Lying together, sometimes, for warmth, under the same blanket, but in absolute celibacy. Patriotic passion has entirely extruded sex. The girl Partisans are something you will never have seen before. In fact, one o f the medical officers had told me that many o f them had ceased to menstruate. Some w ere barely more than schoolchildren when they ran away to the m ountains leaving their bourgeois families to collaborate with the enem y’ ,246* Many o f W augh’s descriptions o f Y ugoslav Partisans in the novel including some o f the most comic ones - are recorded in a more rudimentary form on the pages o f his diary. The account o f the tragic crash-landing on W augh’s original arrival in Topusko reappears, in Unconditional Surren­ der, in the description o f the arrival o f the American fact-finding mission headed by General Spitz. ‘A savage Yugoslav woman tried to give me a tetanus injection,’ Waugh noted in his diary during his hospitalisation.247 In the novel, Ian Kilbannock is the victim o f a similar treatment: The door opened again; someone stamped into the room and opened shutters and windows revealing herself in the brief moment before Ian shut his eyes and turned them from the light, as a female in m an’s uniform, wearing a red cross brassard and carrying a box o f objects which clinked and rattled. She began stripping Ian o f his blanket and pulling his arm. ‘What the devil are you doing?’ The woman flourished a syringe. ‘Get out’, cried Ian. She jabbed at him. He knocked the instrument from her hand. She called: ‘Bakic, Bakic,’ and was joined by a man to whom she talked excitedly in a foreign tongue. ‘She’s de nurse,’ said Bakic, ‘She’s got an *

There is ample evidence that Tito enjoyed Car more than wurmlh from female

Partisan!.

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injection for you’. ‘What on earth for’ ‘She says tetanus. She says she always injects tetanus for everyone.’248 If W augh’s account blends the early anti-Communist stereotypes with purely Balkan imagery (the Partisans’ indoctrination with, and blind dedication to, the Soviet cause, combined with colourful confusion o f the kind with which the Balkans seem to be associated), Lawrence DurrelPs descriptions of Yugoslav (and later Vulgarian) Communists are based almost entirely on older Balkan stereotypes, already well established before the First World War. Both Shaw and Saki employ similar images o f ‘Balkanness’ to achieve comic effect. Traditional Balkan ‘chaos’ and barbaric attitudes, coupled with futile, childish aspirations to be ‘European’ and civilised (Shaw ’s Bulgarians wash their hands regularly, and Durrell’s ‘apes’ don badly cut suits), provide a backdrop for farcical developments. In Durrell’s facetious visions o f Balkan states, Communism is the heir to the ‘age-old Balkan principle’ according to which nothing ever functions as it should. In this sense, Durrell’s humorous version o f the Balkans relies much more on Victorian and Edwardian traditions than on the stereotypical perceptions o f the Bolshevik threat cultivated in the 1920s. Although Durrell hated Communists just as much as Waugh did, he also ‘domesticated’ the Yugoslav regime. By m aking it appear childish and incompetent, he reduced its perceived threat. Waugh’s descriptions o f Yugoslav Communists - even at their most comic - are less exclusively ‘Balkan’. The Partisans are cunning and devious in their exploitation o f the British, but well disciplined and devoted both to their cause and, even more, to the Soviet Union. ‘Every bomb that falls here is one less on Russia,’ one Zagreb university student says.249 Although the Yugoslav section o f Unconditional Surrender abounds in humorous scenes, the comic effects are drowned in a melancholy realisation o f the futility o f Britain’s efforts in Yugoslavia. However, one important moment in Unconditional Surrender is founded on that sense o f a particular affinity between the British and the Balkan nations which creates Byronic destinies. The scene is an attack against a domobran (the forces o f the pro-German Croatian puppet government) fort in which the British Brigadier Ritchie-Hook loses his life. Waugh offers his reader a comic re-evaluation o f a Byronic endeavour. The British are, in effect, aiding the Partisans to stage a sham attack in order to win over American support. The planned attack, in which two RAF planes and several Partisan brigades are to be used against less than a dozen domobrans, reawakens the combat fervour in Brigadier Ritchie-Hook who secretly plots his role in the battle: Ritchie-I look took Guy aside and said: ‘I’d like you to arrange for me to have a quiet talk with the fellow whose name ends in ‘itch’.’

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‘All their names end like that, sir.’ ‘I mean the decent young fellow. They call him a brigadier. The fellow w ho’s going to lead the assault.’ Guy identified him as a ferocious young Montenegran who had a certain affinity to Ritchie-Hook in that he, too, lacked an eye and a large part o f one hand. G uy arranged a m eeting and left the tw o w arriors w ith the Com missar’s interpreter. Ritchie-Hook returned in high good spirits. ‘Rattling good fellow that Itch,’ he said. ‘No flannel or ormolu about him. D’you suppose all his stories are true?’ ‘No, sir.’ ‘Nor do I. I pulled his leg a bit but I am not sure that interpreter quite twigged. Anyway, we had a perfectly foul drink - that ended in Itch too - extraordinary language - and we parted friends. I’ve attached m yself to him for tomorrow. Don’t tell the others. Itch hasn’t room for more than one tourist in his car. W e’re driving out tonight to make a recce and get the men in place for the attack.’250 The next morning the convoy sets out ‘through a terrain o f rustic enchant­ ment, as through a water colour painting o f the last century’.251 Soon, the carefully planned operation shows the first signs o f chaos, and one o f the Partisan ‘brigades’ (according to Waugh they usually consisted o f a few dozen fighters) loses its way. As the RAF planes start firing their rockets, killing four Partisans, the rest o f the Partisan brigades ‘disperse’ before a German ‘armoured colum n’ which consists, it later turns out, o f two scout cars. ‘That is the secret o f our great and many victories,’ a Partisan tells General Spitz.252 At that moment, Brigadier Ritchie-Hook, unaware that no one is following him, seeks to lead a heroic advance. When the first bullets hit him, Waugh writes, ‘he spun completely round, then fell forward on his knees, rose again and limped slowly on . . . He was touching the walls, feeling for a handhold, when a volley from above caught him and flung him down dead.’253 A puzzled German captain composed his report on the incident which circulated through appropriate files o f the Intelligence Service attract­ ing incredulous minutes as long as the Balkan branch continued to function. The single-handed attack on a fortified position by a British major-general, attended in one account by a small boy, in another by a midget, had no precedent in Clausewitz. There must be some deep un­ derlying motive, German Intelligence agreed, which was obscure to them .254 Ritchie-Hook, in his ‘shorts, a bush-shirt, and a red-banded forage cap’,255 attended by his faithful Halberdier servant, the long-suffering Dawkins, represents the last o f the old guard, the ultimate tragi-comic Romantic warrior, lie wus, as Evelyn Waugh writes, a ‘ferocious hero o f the first

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w ar’,256 and, sent to Yugoslavia with the American General Spitz because no one else had any use for him, he represents a comic counterpart to the patriotic Indian Army officers in Buchan’s novels. His tragic death in the Balkans wins the Yugoslav Partisans American support. In W augh’s novel this, paradoxically, pushes the B ritish into a position o f near total insignificance as the new superpower takes over. Highly amusing in his misplaced heroism, Ritchie-Hook is also a representative o f those English­ men who, although proudly English (like Pemberton in Footman’s epony­ mous novel), are happier in the Balkans than in England. ‘Dawkins, I wish those bastards would shoot better,’ he tells his servant more than once, ‘I don’t want to go hom e.’257

Chapter Five

Spectres of War: Representations o f the ‘Real’ Balkans

‘You like our country. Will you do something for us?’ said a Balkan man to me the first time I met him. I inquired cautiously what this odd job might be. ‘E xplain u s,’ he said, ‘to the new C onsul. He does not understand us;’ and he made this request as if the ‘explaining’ o f a nation were an ordinary, everyday affair. Its com pre­ hensiveness staggered me. ‘But 1 do not understand you myself,’ I said. ‘Our language not well perhaps yet, but us - the spirit o f the people - yes. Everyone says so . . . ’' The diversity and popularity o f Balkan-inspired popular fiction, as well as the telling presence o f the area in a variety o f comic genres, speaks o f the ‘exoticism ’ o f the Balkans, but also o f the way the area, with its turbulence and upheavals, was a recipient o f any number o f projected anxieties about the identity o f Europe. Different kinds o f fictional constructions, as previous chapters dem onstrate, w ere som etim es scarcely influenced by any experience their authors had o f the area, even if reviewers tended to emphasise experience whenever they could, in order to offer a fresh veneer o f authenticity to well-worn prejudices. Life in the Balkans might, for example, have encouraged Lawrence Durrell to choose the peninsula for his settings, but his diplomatic stories owe less to that experience than to what he saw as his readers’ expectations about the area. The primary aim o f m any o f these B alkan constructions - and D urrell’s writing is no exception - is to project an image o f the superiority o f Britishness by infantilising or exoticising the Balkan Other. Alongside the tradition explored in the previous chapters which cashes in on the topicality o f the Balkans, relying on established perceptions rather than on ‘hands-on’ experience o f the area, parallel waves o f publications attempt to ‘explain the real Balkans’ to the British reading public. Numerous travelogues, memoirs and historical studies were followed by works o f ‘realist’ fictio n created by writers who had direct experience o f life in

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south-eastern Europe. In many cases, the writers and narrators are appar­ ently marginalised, as observers, interpreters or chroniclers o f the region’s way o f life. The number o f British writers travelling to the area or studying its history gradually increased in the course o f the nineteenth century. In Eothen (1844), Kinglake could still infuse his journey on the River Danube, from the then Austro-Hungarian Semlin (Zemun) to the Ottoman-administered Belgrade, with some o f the drama o f Dante’s descent into Hell, a parallel underscored by the strict quarantine regulations: I had come, as it were, to the end o f this wheel going Europe, and now my eyes would see the splendour and havoc o f the E a s t. .. Now, there­ fore, we shook hands with our Semlin friends, and they immediately retreated for three or four paces, so as to leave us in the centre o f a space between them and the ‘compromised’ officer; the latter then advanced, and asking once more if we had done with the civilised world, held forth his hand - I met it with mine, and there was an end to Christendom for many a day to come. We soon neared the southern bank o f the river, but no sounds came down from the blank walls above, and there was no living thing that we could yet see, except one great hovering bird o f the vulture race flying low and intent, and wheeling round and round over the pest-accursed city.2 By the 1870s, dozens o f travelogues and autobiographical works with Balkan themes were published every year, and after the 1890s these writings became so plentiful as to make any detailed analysis quite impossible within the scope o f a single study. This chapter focuses on a selection o f the bestknown works - books which enjoyed a wide reception and influenced the reading public outside the circles of Balkan enthusiasts - in order to examine the degree to which their apparently different agendas influenced perceptions o f the peninsula.

Edith Durham and the Balkan Tangle Among the British travel writers who toured south-eastern Europe in the first half o f this century, Mary Edith Durham and Rebecca West are often mentioned as the chief contributors to the project o f ‘explaining’ the Balkan peninsula and its nations to the English-speaking world. While many o f their male counterparts were posted to the Balkans as diplomats, business­ men or army officers, or sent there on ‘fact-finding missions’ as journal­ ists, politicians, clergymen or historians, Durham and West were, perhaps characteristically for women writers, led to this part o f the world by chance events. Edith Durham, born in Hanover Square in London in 1863 as the eldest o f eight children o f a prosperous London doctor, studied art and went on to

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illustrate several volumes o f the Cambridge Natural History. While her younger siblings pursued successful careers and married, Durham spent most o f the 1890s looking after her sick mother. In her diary she wrote: ‘The future stretched before me in endless years o f grey monotony, and escape seemed hopeless.’3 Her own health began to fail and her doctor suggested travel as a cure for depression. He advised Durham to spend two months a year away from her unhappy domestic circumstances, ‘no matter where, so long as the change is complete.’4 It was thus that in April 1900, at the age o f 37, Durham found herself on board an Austrian Lloyd steam er leaving the main Austrian Adriatic port o f Trieste, not quite knowing ‘where the East proper begins’,5* travelling, as it were, towards her destiny. While ajourney along the ‘Illyrian’ coast o f what is now Croatia was, at that time, a common enough experience undertaken by many travellers, a glimpse o f the ‘Near East’ enticed Durham further, into Mon­ tenegro and even (initially only on a brief excursion) across what, at the turn o f the century, remained one o f Europe’s most mysterious frontiers, into the country she called ‘the land o f the unspeakable T urk’ - the Albanian-populated highlands which still lay within the Ottoman Empire. Following her initial visit to Montenegro in 1900, Durham returned to the area on numerous occasions and went on to produce a series o f books about the Balkans. She became a familiar figure in the Montenegrin capital, Cetinje. She travelled extensively through the ‘Serbian lands’, and was particularly interested in those areas to the south o f the then kingdom o f Serbia which were still part o f the Ottoman Empire. During the Macedonian uprising o f 1903, she was involved in relief work, and she even (without formal medical experience) administered vaccines for smallpox.6 She often met Nicholas Petrovic-NjegoS, the Prince and, from 1910, the King o f Montenegro, who, on one occasion, promised to pay ransom money if Durham was kidnapped in the course o f one o f her excursions into the Albanian lands. During the Balkan wars o f 1912-13, when Montenegro joined the newly independent states o f the Balkans in the attack on the Ottoman Empire, Edith Durham worked in Montenegrin field hospitals. Durham shared her initial strong affinity with the Montenegrins with many other English visitors to the area. She saw them as fearless heroes straight from the pages o f Homer, and described them in Romantic imagery which was custom arily used by nineteenth-century poets. It was such perceptions o f Montenegro that were to inspire the novelist Joyce Cary born in 1888 and twenty-five years younger than Durham - to become perhaps the last British author to attempt to follow Byron’s example o f personally participating in a Balkan w ar when he went to the aid o f *

Alter ii post-war dispute between Tito’s Yugoslavia and Italy, Trieste itself is now o f course In Italy, but the Slovene border marches along the city’s eastern edge*.

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Montenegro in the war against Turkey in October 1912. Although, like Durham, Cary was mainly involved in medical work, the initial impulse to travel to Montenegro shortly after he had completed his studies at Oxford came from a boyish desire to gain military experience rather than from any altruistic, humanitarian urge (indeed, he initially intended to join the Montenegrin army). He was nearly blown apart in an explosion in Antivari (Bar), on the Adriatic coast, almost as soon as he arrived and was arrested on suspicion that he caused the explosion, becoming ‘a seven-day hero in the London and Londonderry new spapers’.7 In a letter sent to Cary in Montenegro, his brother describes an article in the Daily Express entitled ‘The Man Who Was Blown Up’, ‘all about a curly haired Irishman with a love o f adventure’.8 The future novelist wanted ‘the experience o f w ar’, he recalled forty years later: ‘I thought there would be no more wars. And I had a certain romantic enthusiasm for the cause o f the Montenegrins; in short I was young and eager for any sort o f adventure.’9 Working with the British Red Cross he was, with other members o f his unit, decorated by King Nicholas o f Montenegro. In his posthumously published Memoir o f the Bohotes (1960), Cary describes Montenegrins in Romanticist terms, as proud and naturally aristocratic people (‘or rather an aristocratic people where there is equality, because all are aristocrats o f an equally good fam ily’).10 The then capital o f Montenegro, Cetinje, was relatively accessible from the Adriatic Coast and received a steady trickle o f visitors from England. The narrow track winding up from the Austrian-controlled coast to the Montenegrin border, high up in the mountains, had been described by so many British travel writers that, in 1904, Edith Durham already felt able to write: ‘The road from Cattaro [Kotor] to Cetinje has been so often written o f that it is idle to describe it once again, nor can any words do it justice.’" Like Stoker’s Borgo Pass in the Carpathians, this rock ladder (as the route was frequently called) from the Adriatic coast into Montenegro acquired a certain mystical resonance as one o f those points at which the English traveller stepped out from the ‘known’ West into the unknown ‘real’ Balkan world in which the feudal European past and the Orient overlapped in a kind o f Ruritanian enchantment.* Many report the chilling warnings they received from Dalmatian ships’ officers and townsmen before they entered the land o f the Black Mountain, contributing to the theme-park quality it possessed for upper middle-class British tourists o f the day.* The picturesqueness o f life in Montenegro (King Nicholas insisted that men should w ear national costum e and bear arm s at all tim es), and *

*

The approach perhaps jogged travellers’ subconscious m em ories o f the tale o f Jack and the Beanstalk, particularly since a key point o f interest w as the giant stature o f the men who lived on top o f the ladder. (See below .) Am ong those circles in Britain which admired the martial verve o f mountain peoples such as the Pathans and Ciurkhas, Montenegrins appealed us Christian

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particularly the customs o f the Montenegrin tribes which she compared to Scottish Highland clans, held instant attractions for Edith Durham. Her interest in those aspects o f Montenegro which would have been most remote from the English way o f life at the time soon led her further into the Balkans. She felt great curiosity about the lands beyond the Ottoman frontier, whence came the strange people she spotted in Podgorica* in eastern Montenegro (a town which was at the time, as she recorded, the centre o f the AngloMontenegrin trading company, with a lively trade in Manchester cottons). In the markets o f Podgorica she s a w - n o t unlike Byron in Tepelena almost a century before her12 - ‘the half-wild natives o f the Albanian mountains passing from the world of the Middle Ages to a place which feels, however faintly, the forces o f the twentieth century’.13 Edith Durham gradually developed an overriding interest in Albanians and decided to study the life o f the remote mountain villages in the north o f the country. The most inaccessible territories which she described in her best-known work, High Albania (1909), places such as Gusinje, now in Montenegro - which she described as ‘the Lhassa o f Europe, closed to all’14 - became in due course, paradoxically, as parts o f Montenegro or Serbia, more accessible to Western travellers than many o f the Albanian towns she used as starting-points on her ventures. The highland Albanian tribes had, since Byron’s days, enjoyed a reputation in Western Europe for fierceness (as witnessed by the many references to ‘bloodthirsty Albanians’ and the like in the popular literature and comic writing analysed in previous chapters). In High Albania, Durham refers to ‘the A lbanian’s sinister reputation’ in England.15 Similar views prevailed, according to her, among Albania’s immediate neighbours in the Balkans, who viewed her departures into the Albanian lands as acts o f folly. On one occasion, for example, two young men, a Montenegrin and a Hungarian, whom Durham met near the frontier o f Ottoman Albania, told her of their plans to travel to the Transvaal in South Africa. They explained how they had given up the idea o f ‘walking from Alexandria’ when they heard that ‘there was a tribe o f Arabs in the centre o f Africa even more ferocious than the Albanians, so, though they were o f course very brave men, they thought on the whole they preferred the boat.’16 Although some Albanians were Christian (Roman Catholic in the north and Orthodox in the south), the majority o f the Albanian population was equivalents in Europe’s backyard, a role to which they were more than happy to play up. Their warrior chic was assisted by the exceptional average height of Montenegrin men, with many ‘fine specimens’, as British travellers record, rising to well over two metres tall. During the Napoleonic Wars, the Monte­ negrins helped the Anglo-Russian cause by attacking French-held Dubrovnik, an event which caused local people to flee in terror. The accounts have a qual­ ity of déjà vu. * The current capitul of Montenegro, and now once again Podgorica after several dccadcs us Titograd.

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Muslim. Muslim Albanians had enjoyed certain privileges as a result o f their faith, but this in turn meant they were identified with their Ottoman occupier, both in the Balkans and in Europe. Durham felt very strongly that Albanian national aspirations were not sufficiently recognised. She became an ardent champion o f the Albanian cause in Britain, and gradually changed her perceptions o f the Serbs and the Montenegrins, whom she viewed as hostile towards the Albanians, thus providing an unusual example among British writers o f someone openly changing their Balkan allegiances. Durham travelled through the Albanian lands in the company o f Konstantin Sinas, a colporteur o f the British and Foreign Bible Society (and, apparently, one o f the foremost Albanian intellectuals o f his tim e).17 Sinas introduced her to a number o f prominent Albanians from whom she was able to learn about the strength o f Albanian national feeling. She became an energetic campaigner for Albanian independence and, after the First World War, a prominent member o f the Anglo-Albanian Society. As early as 1908, she was mentioned in the Foreign Office card index under: ‘Durham, Miss M.E.: Inadvisability o f Corresponding With’.18 (Before 1914, the British Foreign Office maintained that it was not advisable to seek opinions about the Balkans from British people who had spent any substantial period o f time in the area as their views would be tainted.) D urham ’s reputation as ‘Kraljica e M alesorevit’ (Albanian for ‘the Queen of the Mountain People’) was well established before the First World War. On her last visit to (the by then independent) Albania in 1921, she was welcomed by large crowds - bands played and speeches were made in her honour; streets were even named after her. During the Second World War, although in her early eighties by then, she offered hospitality to numerous Albanian exiles in her house in London. She died in 1944, less than a month before Enver Hoxha’s Communist regime was established in Albania. Although her books about the Balkans were all published in this century, in many ways Edith Durham was the last o f the Victorian travellers in the Balkans. The didactic aims of her work were coupled with a sense o f her superior Britishness and a romantic perception o f her vocation which influenced her particular championing o f the Albanians, although she reject­ ed an Albanian invitation to live there.* She saw Albanians as the ‘youngest’ among the Balkan nations and felt particular admiration for the highlanders, who in turn called her their

*

‘K ing Z og (w hom Durham sharply d islik ed ) awarded her the Order o f Skenderbeg, and the Albanian Government offered her a hom e in A lbania,’ John Hodgson records in his introduction to Durham’s High Albania, p. xvi. The only English person to rival her popularity in Albania during this century is probably the comcdian Norman Wisdom a favourite o f Enver Hoxha.

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‘Q ueen’. She would have been the most likely person for Saki to have in mind when he talked about the English spinsters who go about adopting small countries. Finding in the Balkans the political engagement and position o f authority which might not have been open to her as a woman in Britain, Durham also discovered her life’s purpose in the peninsula. ‘The endless vista o f grey imprisonment at home’ was so intolerable, she wrote in Twenty Years o f the Balkan Tangle, that she was not afraid o f danger: ‘A bullet would have been a short way out.’19 Devoting all her energies to the Balkans, Durham became - from the British point o f view - ‘Balkanised’ herself, a perception which hampered her personal campaign. The accusation o f ‘Balkanness’ was raised against her as early as in 1905, in H. N. Brailsford’s review o f her book The Burden o f the Balkans. The review describes Edith Durham travelling ‘blithely’ through Albania while ‘the roadside was strewn with the graves o f murdered men, and splendid creatures in gay costumes boasted o f their prowess and talked o f their ‘honour’.’20 In spite o f her pro-Albanian sentiments, it would be too simplistic to conclude that Edith Durham was naïve in her approach to what she termed the ‘Balkan tangle’. In her first book devoted to the Balkans, she outlined the complexity o f the issues at play, stressing, just as convincingly as Rebecca West did thirty years later, the dangers o f accepting any one side o f a Balkan argument. On the deck o f the steamer that was taking her to Cattaro (Kotor) for the first time, Durham listened to Austrian complaints about the Montenegrins, and commented: Thus either party seizes upon the stranger and tries to prevent his views being ‘prejudiced’. He seldom has need to complain that he has heard one side only; but there is a Catholic side, an Orthodox side, a Moham­ medan side, there are German, Slav, Italian, Turkish, and Albanian sides; and when he has heard them all he feels far less capable o f forming an opinion on the Eastern Question than he did before.21 Edith Durham’s notions o f the purpose o f her writing about the Balkans were, as I m entioned, essentially Victorian. Her aim was primarily to educate and inform her British readership about a little-known part o f the world. The pedagogical urge gradually transform ed the nature o f her writing. Her first book, Through the Lands o f the Serb (1904), is the only one which, with its vivid and often humorous descriptions o f the landscapes and people Durham encountered, could be said to represent a travel narrative. In subsequent volum es, her preoccupation becam e more obviously ‘scholarly’ and less personal. Durham ’s last book, Some Tribal Origins, Laws and Customs in the Balkans (1928), is an attempt at an anthropological study which, stripped o f the witty episodes drawn from her journeys, loses the unselfconscious charm and much o f the literary merit o f her early volumes. Among these, her third book. High Albania

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(1909) is a very readable mixture o f ethnography and personal experience, and is often considered her best work. In High Albania, Durham produced a travelogue w ith num erous digressions w hich aim s to provide an entertaining but all-encompassing view o f the country’s customs, folklore and traditions: The land is one so little known to English travellers that I have given rather a comprehensive view o f it as a whole than details o f any special branch o f study, and have reported what the people themselves said rather than put forward views o f my own —which are but those o f an outsider. O f outsiders’ views on Balkan problems we are, most o f us, tired.12 The belief, outlined in this opening quotation from High Albania, that her writing could provide a ‘neutral’ account, a faithful ‘transcript’ o f the ‘real’ Balkans, rather than an ideologically conditioned and biased view ‘from the outside’, reflects Durham ’s view o f herself as an ‘objective’ observer, a reporter rather than a commentator, someone who is both ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ the Balkans. Histories, political studies or travel accounts o f the lands in the peninsula frequently claim ‘objectivity’ as a characteristic which distinguishes them from their ‘biased’ predecessors. The belief that the writer’s task should be to convey, from ‘the inside’, the Balkan peoples’ view o f themselves, is cited particularly frequently by women writers. Perhaps because o f their gender, they seem to have more sympathy for the Balkan desire to speak out rather than be spoken for, and they attempted the impossible task o f being the vehicle o f that voice in the West. Edith Durham and Rebecca West both made substantial efforts to master the languages o f the Balkans so that they could ‘understand’ the peninsula and its peoples without intermediaries, in a way which is both empathic and ‘objective’. The position o f small nations in the world o f European politics corresponded in some ways to the position o f wom en in Britain. The background o f the suffrage movement and the struggle for wom en’s rights may have made British women writers sympathetic towards the Balkan desire to be heard. Durham ’s expeditions into the Balkans became longer (she spent eight months touring Albania on one occasion), and focused on ethnographic study and research. At the time o f her initial journeys through Montenegro and Serbia, English women were rarely encountered there. In 1903, in Antivari (Bar) on the Montenegrin coast, for example, a relation o f the King o f Montenegro tells Durham ‘that he had met two English ladies once before, in 1865.523 Compared to Albania, however, Montenegro and Serbia were firmly on the tourist map. In the Albanian highlands, Durham travelled through areas which appear never to have been visited by any foreigner, male or fem ale. In those circumstances, the ‘business’ character

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o f her expeditions gave her certain advantages in approaching mountaindwelling Albanians, suspicious o f any outsider, and eased her dealings with people in the patriarchal Balkan countryside. Durham was a typical Victorian traveller in choosing - unlike Rebecca West only three decades later —to spend most o f her time in Balkan villages. The Romantic-inspired idea that the village, rather than the city, offers genuine insight into the ‘real’ culture o f an area dictated the itineraries o f Victorian and early twentieth-century travellers through the Balkans. While the cities were visited, their inhabitants were looked down upon or patronised in their attempts to be European. The exception was, o f course, the Montenegrin capital o f Cetinje, where even room service in the one hotel came in national costum e, armed to the teeth! In his Balkan Holiday, David Footm an describes the peasants o f Sumadija, a hilly region to the south o f Belgrade (exploited for many o f the settings o f Lawrence Durrell’s White Eagles Over Serbia) and points to the way in which the ‘Balkan peasant’ and ‘the English traveller’ slip into easily identifiable roles: I like the Shumadian peasants, and I shall always like them. But not having this community o f background, we can never play straight parts in each other’s lives, only character parts. For me they will always be ju s t S erb ian peasants; for them I shall alw ays be the eccentric Englishman. In a way it is easy not to get tired o f peasants. I am not referring to the quite unjustified sense o f superiority which keeps us from being bored by them just as we are never bored by dogs and cats. But peasants stay p u t . . . It is educated foreigners who, in large doses, are the difficulty.24* In keeping with her quintessential^ Victorian outlook, Durham sought her ‘truths’ about the Balkans through ever more adventurous expeditions into the rem ote hinterland o f the peninsula. Many o f the people she encountered on her journeys were keen to offer advice, express their pleas and suggest topics she should write about. Her drawings o f Albanian costumes were admired as a sign o f an almost supernatural ability. The ‘Queen o f the Highlanders’, whom one o f her fellow English relief workers in Macedonia described as ‘short hair, no stays, very plain and stout - old filthy tam o ’shanter and dirty dark-green flannel blouse’,25 probably cut a most unusual figure, going through the Albanian mountains in a costume *

This hierarchy o f ‘true’ insight is now largely reversed to the point where it is most frequently sought not from those who are most different but most similar to ‘ourselves’. The voice o f the ‘real’ Balkans as heard in the Western media is now typically a member o f the Westernised (preferably W estern-educated), urban, English-speaking élite who often belongs to the same profession as the inquirer a journalist, a writer or an academic and is able to use not only the same language but also the same (Western) points o f reference. The Western inquirer will frequently accept their allusions to backward peasants.

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almost as picturesque as those she sketched. She travelled from village to village wearing ‘a waterproof Burberry skirt’ and a ‘Scotch plaid golf cape’, and carrying large maps with drawings. The success o f Durham ’s ex­ peditions was probably ensured as much by her disarming appearance as by the fact that the Albanians had no particularly strong feelings about the English: ‘England, having no design on Albania, does not count much as a Power with the ordinary Albanian, but is merely something distant and harmless that does not matter.’26 Durham believed that her writings had an importance beyond the purely literary or ethnographic. Like other Balkan ‘experts’, she developed her own vision o f the political solution to the Balkan question and was certain that her own work would contribute to this. ‘It occurred to me that the vexed question o f Balkan politics might be solved by studying the manners and customs o f each district, and so learning to whom each place should really belong,’ she n o ted -o p tim istica lly -a year before her death. Believing that the past o f the countries she travelled to was crucially important to her project, Durham nevertheless accepted that knowledge o f their history did not necessarily bring true understanding. ‘It is doubtful, indeed, whether one race will ever understand another. It has certainly never done so yet,’ she wrote in The Burden o f the Balkans.21 She maintained, however, that the story o f the past offers a useful explanation o f an area where ‘there were problems o f the fourteenth century still unresolved’: Without some knowledge o f it, travel in the Near East is but dull work, for the folk in the Balkans live in their past to an extent which is hard for us in the West to realise. It is a land strewn with the wreckage o f dead empires; peoples follow one another, intertangle, rise and fall, through dim barbaric ages blood-stained and glittering with old-world splendour, striving, each for itself, in a wild struggle for existence, until the aft-conquering Ottom an sweeps down upon them, and for four centuries they are blotted out from the world’s history. When after that long night they awoke - the Rip Van Winkles o f Europe, animated only with the desire o f going on from the point at which they left o ff - they found the face o f the world had changed and new Powers had arisen.28 In order to ‘understand’ the Balkans, Durham claimed, one must investigate the origins and reasons for each individual nation’s plight. Her own vision o f the ‘Balkan solution’ (which chooses to ignore the military and other interests o f the great powers, normally uppermost in her mind) proposes to give each nationality ‘its own territory’. Durham sees hatred as something inherent to the Balkans, as ‘natural’, rather than created and fostered: ‘Servian!’, said an Albanian to me but a month or two ago. ‘Servian! Yes, I have heard so much that I understand it, but I will not soil my mouth by repeating Iheir dirty words!’

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‘Why do you hate them so?’, 1 asked. ‘Because’, he replied calmly, ‘we are born like that. It is in our blood.’ ‘Like cats and dogs,’ said I. ‘Exactly so, mademoiselle. It is like cats and dogs.’29 Durham hoped that her own study would foster a knowledge which could create the necessary conditions for a ‘just division’ o f the Balkans. Believing (quite generously for her time but characteristically, as I have mentioned, for a woman writer) that the voices o f the Balkan peoples needed to be heard, she made great efforts to master the local languages. Even with Serbian, the most widely spoken language in the areas to which she travelled, this was not an easy thing to accomplish in England at the turn o f the century. ‘The schools and systems that teach all the languages o f Europe, Asia, Africa and America know it not,’ complained Durham.30 Her quest for a language teacher led her ‘to a Balkan consulate, which proved to consist entirely o f Englishmen who knew nothing o f the tongue’.31 Finally, a ‘certain gallant and dashing officer, attaché to the Legation’ was offered as tutor (without remuneration), but Durham felt obliged to refuse: As I am not a character in one o f Mr. Anthony Hope’s novels, but merely live in a London suburb, I thanked everybody and retired upon a small grammar, dazzled by the fierce light that my inquiries have shed upon the workings o f this Balkan State, and wondering if all the others were equally ready to loan out Ministers and attachés to unknown foreigners.32 While she achieved a degree o f fluency in Serbian, Durham’s attempts to learn Albanian were not successful. The fault was, in the main, not her own. A lbania, which gained its independence only in 1912, had no standardised alphabet at the time o f her journeys, and no fixed grammar. The number o f Albanian speakers in England, if there were any at all, would have been considerably smaller even than the number o f those who spoke Serbian. (Even nowadays, works o f Albanian literature, such as those o f the foremost Albanian novelist Ismail Kadare, are routinely translated into English from French.) Durham ’s efforts to address people in their own language on her travels were much admired by the native populations. In Serbia and Montenegro, she occasionally found herself reciting Serbian declensions to an awestruck audience. Her books convey the eagerness o f many o f her Balkan hosts to communicate, often believing that Durham could pass their messages to important people in England (including the King himself!),* and emphasising in particular their complaints about the Turks, towards whom Britain was, they thought, more benevolent than the

Albanian peasants, she frequently noted, tended to approach her believing that she was closely related to the King, possibly even his sister.

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other great powers. ‘You keep the Turk in Europe,’ the archimandrite o f a Montenegrin monastery told Durham.33 ‘Ah, Fräulein,’ sighed an old man on the banks o f the Danube, in eastern Serbia, ‘it is the suffering o f five hundred years, and it is your nation that keeps the Turks in Europe.’34 ‘Why should we suffer because it suits British politics that the Turk should rem ain?’ she was asked, ‘on all sides’.35 Edith Durham’s writing is, except for High Albania which was reissued by Virago in 1985, now largely forgotten. After her expeditions, she often returned to England with a sense that she had ceased to belong to it: 1dropped into the West with a shock. Nor did I look as though I belonged to it, for most o f those that 1 met on the four days’ whirl to England said: ‘May I ask where you have come from?’ And I said: ‘I have come out o f the wilderness, and I am going back there some day!’36 When the first constitution o f the independent state o f Albania was adopted (‘ It struck me suddenly that among some two thousand five hundred armed men I was the solitary petticoat,’ she noted in her description o f the occasion),37 Durham felt that the world she belonged to was about to disappear: ‘The summer had gone, the year was dying. I had seen the Land o f the Living Past.’38 Her own world depended on the existence o f the Balkan ‘wilderness’ and the fearless traveller into the Albanian mountains herself belonged to ‘the Living Past’. A recently published article records one o f the most poignant twists in her destiny. Up to a year before she died in 1944, she received parcels o f sugar, dried eggs, tea and coffee from the Albanian community in America. In a letter to an Albanian friend, she noted: ‘I little thought when I was distributing relief in North Albania in 1913 and South Albania in 1914 that later on Albania would feed m e.’39

Rebecca W est Travels East Rebecca W e s t-th e adopted name o f Cecily Isabel F airfield -w as 44 when she visited the Balkans for the first time on a British Council lecture tour in autumn 1936. Already a renowned journalist and writer, with five novels and two lengthy critical studies behind her, West, like Edith Durham, had no great prior knowledge o f the Balkans and no specific interest in Bulgaria, Greece or Yugoslavia, the countries to which the tour was to take her. She did, however, claim an interest in the relationships between small states and great empires (‘because I was born a citizen o f one o f the greatest empires the world has ever seen, and grew up as its exasperated critic’).40 When, according to her own admission, she ‘fell in love’ with Yugoslavia, West was in fact contemplating a book not about the Balkans, but about a country at the opposite end o f the continent: I w anted to w rite a book on Finland, w hich is a w o n d erfu l case o f a sm all nation w ith em pires here and there, so I learnt Finnish and I read

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a Finnish novel. It was all about people riding bicycles. But then, when I went to Yugoslavia, I saw it was much more exciting, with Austria and Russia and Turkey, and so 1 wrote that. I really did enjoy it terribly, loved it.41 While Edith Durham went on many protracted expeditions in the Balkans and wrote seven books and many articles and studies dealing with Balkan themes, Rebecca West travelled to Yugoslavia only twice, following her initial British Council tour in 1936. These journeys took place in spring 1937 and the early summer o f 1938. Black Lamb and Grey Falcon is West’s only book about this part o f the world. It continued to be recommended, fifty years after its publication, as ‘still one o f the best general introductions to the country and its people’.42 In literary terms, it is often referred to as am ong the most m emorable books about Yugoslavia available in any language. An enormous book, half a million words long, it was regarded as ‘a work o f genius’ by the historian A. J. P. Taylor who commented that ‘no greater and no more deserved tribute has ever been paid to a people.’43 More recently, Brian Hall described it in the New Yorker as ‘her master­ piece . . . a book as long as the Old Testament’.44 In his Balkan Ghosts, perhaps the most influential o f numerous recent travel accounts o f the Balkans, Robert Kaplan describes Black Lamb and Grey Falcon as ‘this century’s greatest travel book’.45 Balkan Ghosts, which counts among its readers the American President Clinton, his wife Hillary and the former Chairman o f the US Joint Chiefs o f Staff, General Colin Powell, claims that one can read W est’s work ‘like the Talmud . . . over and over again for different kinds o f meaning’.46 Rebecca West’s biographer, Victoria Glendinning, remarks: It turned out to be the central book o f her life: a two-volume, 500,000word work not only o f history, archaeology, politics, conversation, folklore, prophecy, and the evocation of landscape, but the work in which Rebecca West formulated her views on religion, ethics, art, myth and gender.47 While critics and reviewers agree that Black Lamb and Grey Falcon represents W est’s greatest - and certainly her most lasting - achievement curiously little is written about it. If the importance o f this work, both within the body o f literature about the Balkans and within Rebecca W est’s own oeuvre is rarely doubted, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon had not, until recently, begun to receive the literary and critical attention it merited. Perhaps the most frequently reissued o f her works, it has tended to be marginalised even in studies devoted to W est’s life and work. Victoria Glendinning, for example, devotes just over three out o f a total o f almost 300 pages o f her biography o f West to Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. Perhaps because o f her gender. West’s personal life seems to have stood in

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the way o f serious literary appreciation o f the work which changed her destiny in many ways. ‘1 was obliged to write a long and complicated history,’ writes Rebecca West in the Epilogue to her monumental travelogue, and to swell that with an account o f m yself and the people who went with me on my travels, since it was my aim to show the past side by side with the present it created. And while 1 grappled with the mass o f my material during several years, it imposed certain ideas on me.48 The ideas and the world she encountered in the Balkans had a profound influence on her writing after the Second World War. They underpin opin­ ions expressed in The Meaning o f Treason (1948), which examines the case o f William Joyce, known as Lord Haw-Haw, who broadcast Nazi propaganda during the Second World War. Her novel The Birds Fall Down (1966), which, according to a recently published history o f English literature, ‘remains one o f the most stimulating novels o f the latter half of the century’,49 is dedicated to two o f her Serbian friends exiled in London. The depth o f knowledge West gained about a complex country which was, according to her biographer, ‘not so much a nation as a federation of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, plus Bosnian Macedonians, Montenegrins and a scatter o f diverse minorities’,50* is all the more remarkable when one bears in mind that the book was produced in such a short space o f time, as a result o f a chance encounter with what was, for its writer, a completely new part o f the world. Written in the late 1930s, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon was published in 1941, with bombs falling on London and Yugoslavia dismembered. Most o f its territories were under German and Italian occupation. The Germans established an enlarged puppet Croatian state which covered BosniaHerzegovina and smaller parts o f present-day Serbia, while in the south, M acedonia came under Bulgarian domination, and some territories in the north o f the country were taken over by the Hungarians. As she stood in her garden, watching the explosions and playing ‘Deh vieni, non tardar’ (‘O come do not delay’), Susanna’s aria from Mozart’s Marriage o f Figaro, on her gramophone, West pondered the possible destinies o f her Yugoslav friends. Many o f them were doomed, as she knew very well. Worried that her account o f a country which no longer existed might endanger their lives, West altered their names. ‘If I were to name any of my friends this might add a last extravagance to their sufferings,’ she wrote.51 Her travelling companion and guide, Stanislav Vinaver, an official o f the Yugoslav Ministry o f Information, became Constantine (Stanislav being the Serbian equivalent), and his German wife Elsa took on the name o f Gerda (although sufficient circumstantial information is provided to *

Glendinning’s erroneous conflation o f Bosnia and Macedonia reveals the schol­ arly minefield deterring writers concerned with W est’s work.

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render th eir identities quite obvious). V inaver, a Serbian Jew who distinguished himself while serving with the Serbian army in the First World War, and then studied under Bergson at the Sorbonne, was him self a wellknown expressionist poet, and a polyglot famous for his unorthodox, witty translations o f Rabelais, Molière, Goethe and Dickens into Serbian. The man who had introduced West and her husband, Henry Andrews, to some o f the most interesting people in the lands they visited was, at the time when Black Lamb and Grey Lamb appeared, in a prisoner o f war camp in Germany. Rebecca West sent him parcels through the British Red Cross. A fellow Yugoslav army officer and inmate in the same camp remembered him as being reluctant to collect his meals, fearing that he might, if his Jewishness were discovered, be transferred to the death camps. (Vinaver’s mother died in the gas chambers.) Vinaver’s friend and one o f the leading Orthodox Christian thinkers o f his time, Bishop Nikolaj Velimirovic, who was, according to W est’s bio­ grapher Carl Rollyson ‘one o f Black Lam b's major characters - the most remarkable man she ever m et’,52 was, after a period o f internment in a remote Serbian monastery, taken to Dachau. Freed by the Allied armies in 1945, he died in exile in the United States in 1956. The woman who im­ pressed West so much on her visit to Skopje, Anica Savic-Rebac (Milica in W est’s book), the Serbian philosopher and classical scholar, who was mar­ ried to H asan Rebac (M ehm ed in Black Lamb and G rey F alcon), a H erzegovinian M uslim with a degree in oriental languages from the Sorbonne, commited suicide in 1953. The country which West described, providing ‘an inventory . . . down to its last vest-button, in a form insane from any artistic or commercial point of view ’,53had - after its temporary dismemberment under different occupiers in the Second World War and civil war followed by the Communist take-over in 1945 - been changed beyond recognition. Edith Durham ’s work received a cautious endorsement from Commu­ nist Albania. An official publication pointed out that ‘she remained until the end a defender o f Albania,’ but that ‘alongside objective analysis there are also m istak en g en e ralisatio n s stem m in g from her id eo lo g ical limitations.’54 W e st- herself an ardent anti-Communist and a devoted friend to many Yugoslav exiles in London - remained a supporter o f the pre­ dom inantly Serbian royalist forces in form er Y ugoslavia during the Second World War, at a time when the British establishment was quietly dropping its backing for them in favour o f Tito’s partisans. In 1944, she wrote ‘Madame Sara’s Magic Crystal’, a ‘savagely satirical short story’, which lampooned ‘the Allies’ attitude towards Yugoslavia and its factions’.55 The story, in which an imaginary French Communist, ‘Marshal Pierrot’, provides the thinnest o f disguises for the leader o f the Yugoslav Communists, Josip Broz Tito (Marshal Pierrot shares Tito’s date o f birth and the details o f his rise to power), remained unpublished. West, in fact, had a meeting

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with Sir Orme Sargent, an Assistant Under-Secretary o f State at the Foreign Office, who persuaded her that ‘the recognition o f Marshal Tito was made by reason o f our military necessities, and for no other reason.’ West subsequently informed him that ‘she was not publishing it, thus giving guarantee o f [her] willingness to sacrifice [herself] to the needs o f the country.’56 When the Western Allies endorsed the post-war government o f Yugo­ slavia, some prominence was given to vitriolic attacks on Black Lamb and Grey Falcon which were written by Yugoslavs and which appeared in 1945 in the British and American press. With her work untranslated into SerboCroat, she remained largely unknown in the country she described so lovingly. Black Lamb and Grey Falcon s ability to stir controversy was apparent in 1989 when, forty-eight years after its original publication in London, an abridged translation o f it was published as a joint venture between a publisher in Belgrade and a publisher in Sarajevo. W est’s trans­ lator was Nikola Koljevic, an English literature scholar from Sarajevo who was, as I point out in the introduction, soon to become the Vice-President o f the Bosnian Serb Republic (he subsequently lost political office and committed suicide in 1997). This publication was followed by a tense debate about Koljevic’s (or his publisher’s) reasons for the omission of particular sections o f the original. The recent reissue in Britain o f Black Lamb and Grey Falcon was accompanied - for the first time - by a lengthy preface which offers a ‘historical explanation’ o f West’s political sympathies. Its apologetic tone reveals a sim ilar interference by current political assumptions in perceptions o f her work.57 If Edith Durham found a new purpose for her life in the Balkans, Yugoslavia remained only one among innumerable interests for Rebecca West. How­ ever, she too - like most other British writers who wrote about the area became involved in Balkan politics with her public backing for the Yugoslav royalist cause. Despite being, as Glendinning remarks, ‘under strong pressure from the Foreign Office and her friends in political life’,58 she persisted in arguing their case through many letters to British newspapers and a series o f public appearances. On 15 April 1942 she presided over the meeting o f the London PEN, held in support o f Yugoslavia, with King Peter II o f Yugoslavia and the Prime Minister o f the government in exile speaking after her. She offered generous help to the (mainly royalist Serb) Yugoslav exiles in London and made representations on behalf o f King Peter II to the British government as late as 1945. Their support for two different Balkan nations who themselves had no love for each other did not foster personal sympathy between Durham and West. West’s admiration for the Serbs angered Edith Durham, who was, in the last decades o f her life, vigorously anti-Serb in her attitudes. In her

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study o f the assassination o f the Austrian Archduke Ferdinand in 1914, The Sarajevo Crime, which was published in 1925, Durham endorsed the Serbophobe arguments o f the former central powers in her discussions o f the causes o f the First World War. When her articles were published in a Berlin-based magazine, Die Kriegschuldfrage, she faced accusations in Britain that she had always been pro-German. ‘Ever afterward she was to be regarded as a maverick in academic circles and her opinions taken as reflex prejudice,’ John Hodgson notes in his study o f her w ork.59 After her tireless humanitarian work during earlier conflicts in the Balkans, the pacifist stand she took in the First World War and her refusal to work for the Red Cross (‘by curing men to go back to the front I was not only prolonging the war but aiding and abetting every kind o f atrocity’)60 could also have been taken by some as proof o f a pro-German attitude. When Black Lamb and Grey Falcon was published, Durham wrote to a historian friend: ‘The novelist Miss West, has written an immense book on the strength o f one pleasure trip to Yugoslavia, but with no previous knowledge o f land or people.’61 The accusation o f insufficient knowledge ‘o f land or people’ is one that is constantly traded against rivals by those who wrote - or write - about the Balkans. Individual experience o f the peninsula is considered either ‘too long’ (a person becomes too involved and partisan) or ‘too short’ (the Balkans are so complex that without protracted study no one can understand what is going on there). Such accusations, on the one hand fetishise the idea o f the ‘impenetrability’ of the Balkans, or, on the other, reinforce perceptions o f a ‘Balkan’ state of mind as a contagious disease which is best observed from a safe distance. In the passage o f the Prologue to Black Lamb and Grey Falcon in which she admitted that she had no previous knowledge o f the region, Rebecca West recognised the passions at play in debates o f this kind. She argued that the Ottoman Empire had cleverly set the Balkan nations against each other in order to avoid a united rebellion against its rule. Each o f the small Balkan nations accused the others o f ‘every crime under the sun’, wrote Rebecca West, noting how English writers became caught in a web o f strong passions: English persons, therefore, o f humanitarian and reformist disposition constantly went out to the Balkan Peninsula to see who was in fact illtreating whom, and, being by the very nature o f their perfectionist faith unable to accept the horrid hypothesis that everybody was ill-treating everybody else, all came back with a pet Balkan people established in their hearts as suffering and innocent, eternally the massacree and never the massacrer. The same sort o f person, devoted to good works and austerities, who is traditionally supposed to keep a cat and a parrot, often set up on the hearth the image o f the Albanian or the Bulgarian or the Serbian or the Macedonian Greek people, which had all the force

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and blandness o f pious fantasy. The Bulgarians as preferred by the Buxton brothers, and the Albanians as championed by Miss Durham, strongly resembled Sir Joshua Reynolds’s picture o f the Infant Samuel.62 There follows an account o f ‘Miss Durham . . . who had been led by her humanitarian passion to spend nearly all her life in the Balkans and was strongly anti-Serbian’, which sufficiently angered Edith Durham (who was asked to write a review o f W est’s book for the Manchester Guardian) for her not only to start an acrimonious correspondence with West and her publishers, but to instruct her solicitor to investigate the possibility o f legal action. W est’s publishers, M acmillan, eventually agreed to delay the publication and reprint the offensive passages, omitting Durham ’s name. The reference was reinstated in the 1984 edition o f Black Lamb and Grey Falcon - forty years after Durham’s and a year after W est’s death. Unsurprisingly, the two women held each other’s writing about the Balkans in deep contempt. Edith Durham accused West o f superficiality and insufficient knowledge. Rebecca West objected to what she saw as gullibility and obsessive involvement with the Balkans which, she claimed, closed Durham’s mind to any argument clashing with her own attitudes. West recognised the fact that the Balkan question had historically exerted an unexpectedly divisive power even am ong those people who were otherwise the most tolerant o f British intellectuals: No other case espoused by liberals so completely swept them off their feet by its own violence. The problem s o f India and A frica never produced anything like the jungle o f savage pamphlets that sprang up in the footsteps o f the Liberals who visited Turkey in Europe under the inspiration o f Gladstone.63* Durham and West shared a belief that their writing could offer pure, ‘unprejudiced’ knowledge about the Balkans, although they differed as to how one might best gain that knowledge. These differences are, to some extent, a reflection o f historical changes in the peninsula. Although only thirty or so years divide Durham’s expeditions from W est’s journeys in the Balkans, the difference coincides with one o f the most rapid periods of change in the region. Durham encountered a Balkan world gradually emerging from a century o f struggle against Ottoman rule. In the years before the First World War she witnessed the rebellions in Macedonia and Albania, the last Ottoman strongholds in Europe outside eastern Thrace itself. In contrast, in the Yugoslavia o f the 1930s, West was able to see an apparently successful attempt by several o f the Balkan nations to create a *

In 1876, as I mention in Chapter 2, R. W. Church, the Dean o f St Paul’s Cathedral, similarly referred to the Balkans as the most divisive issue since the height o f the Tractarian row.

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large, multinational state. So convinced was she o f the benefits o f such an arrangement for the small nations of the Balkans that the dissenting voices o f some o f the Croats she met, who saw Yugoslavia as a transitional point between Austro-Hungarian rule and full independence, angered her greatly. She maintained that, in their desire for the break-up o f the country, they ‘were wrestling with their natural friends, their fellow-Slavs, while their natural foes, the Germans and Austrians, the Italians and the Hungarians, stood round them in a circle, waiting for the first sign o f collapse that would make it safe to fall on them and strip them and slay them ’.64 One o f the most important differences between Edith Durham and Rebecca West lies in the fact that West maintained that there was a lesson to be learnt not only about but from the Balkans. It was in the peninsula that she saw the truest reflection o f European values. The struggle o f the Orthodox Christian Serbs against Ottoman rule was, as she saw it, the bravest o f efforts to guard and preserve European civilisation. West was a devoted reader o f Dostoevsky, from whom, she wrote, ‘many o f us receive our first intimations about the difference between Western Europeans and Slavs,’65 and who inspired her Slavophile ideas and awakened an admiration for Orthodox Christian thought.* Her encounters with the Serbs strengthened such ideas. She even came to believe that, having been for so long a rampart guarding Europe against Islam, the Serbs had been granted a special revelation o f Christianity. The art in their monasteries, she wrote, puts ‘forward solidly and without sense o f any embarrassment that there are those who are predestined to pain, contrary to the principles o f human justice. Calvin adm itted this with agony, but there is none here; and Dostoievsky never complains against the God who created the disordered universe he describes.’66 Some o f the most reflective pages in Black Lamb and Grey Falcon are those in which West describes her own encounter with the spiritual heritage o f Byzantium. This heritage, she argued, was best preserved not in Constantinople, robbed and burned down by the Crusaders and by the Turks, but in the far-flung outposts o f the Byzantine Empire in the Balkans. In M acedonia (which she referred to as the ‘key to the Balkans’) she discovered a living face o f the vanished Orthodox empire: With our minds we all know what Byzantium was . . . But this woman knew it with all her being, because she knew nothing else. It was the medium in which she existed. Turkish misrule had deprived her o f all benefit from Western culture; all she had to feed on was the sweetness spilled from the overturned cup o f Constantinople.67 As might be deduced from her championing o f the largely Muslim Al­ banians (even if many o f the mountain tribes in northern Albania whose *

W est’s companion on one o f her visits to Belgrade, the Romanian Prince Antoine Bibesco, was also, according to his cousin, the novelist Marthe Bibcsco, an avid reader o f Dostoevsky.

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cause she espoused were Roman Catholic), Edith Durham had no strong prejudices against Islam. She was, furthermore, brought up believing in the Turcophile arguments advanced by many in nineteenth-century Britain, according to which the preservation o f the Ottoman Empire was vital in order to prevent Russian expansion and thereby protect the links with the British Raj and all points east. An aspect o f Durham’s Victorian mind-set - marking the thirty-year gap between her and W est’s travels - was that she was generally not disposed to learn from the Balkans, any more than her contem poraries learned from non-white or non-Christian peoples, through exchange and com munication based on equality. While West generally approached her Balkan acquaintances with a degree o f humility, Durham adopted the attitude o f a sympathetic schoolmistress for whom the Balkans recreated the lost world o f childhood. Writing about Shala, ‘the wild heart o f a wild land’, she asks: Do you know the charm o f such a land? It has the charm o f childhood. It has infinite possibilities - if it would but grow up the right way. It has crimes and vices; I know them all (that is to say, I trust there are not any more). But it has primitive virtues, without many o f the meannesses o f what is called civilisation. It is uncorrupted by luxury. It is cruel - but so is Nature. It is generous as a child that gives you its sweets. It can be trusting and faithful. And it plays its own mysterious games, that no grown-ups can hope to understand.68 As an implicitly superior, ‘grown-up’ observer she nevertheless differed from a number o f her male counterparts in the Balkans in that, occasionally, she owned up to a change o f heart. Brought up in the Tory tradition, she came to advocate Gladstonian ideals o f self-determination in the Balkans: I was brought up to consider the Turk a virtuous and much injured individual. Now I never cross his frontier without hoping soon to be able to witness his departure from Europe.69 For Rebecca West, the Turks were an ‘alien and indecipherable race’. Yet, although she described the suffering their rule caused among Balkan Christians, this was, perhaps, already fading from memory. She was charmed by the beauty o f the settlements they built in Yugoslavia: ‘They build beautiful town and villages. I know o f no country, not even Italy or Spain, where each house in a group will be placed with such invariable taste and such pleasing results for those who look at it and out o f it alike.’70 Compared to the beauty and elegance o f these settlements, latter AustroHungarian attempts to emulate Ottoman architecture in Sarajevo were crude, ‘stuffed with beer and sausages’ and ‘Oriental in a pejorative sense’.71 Black Lamb and Grey Falcon is at its most poetic when it describes those areas o f the Balkans where, in W est’s view, centuries o f standstill in the conflict between Christianity and Islam had created a sense o f doom

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and unreality. On the road to Mostar, in Herzegovina, she recognised ‘the fly-blown, dusty, waking dream atmosphere that lingers in Balkan districts where the Turk has been’.72 She felt that she had crossed an invisible fron­ tier between ‘East’ and ‘W est’ at the moment when she abandoned the Italianate beauties o f D alm atia for the ‘real’ Balkans o f B osnia and Herzegovina, whose passion, malediction and melancholy she so memora­ bly described. Entering Herzegovina from the Dalmatian hinterland, West sensed that she had reached the point ‘where the really adventurous part o f our journey begins’.73 The sense o f adventure was spiritual rather than physical. West travelled through Yugoslavia in a chauffeur-driven car, usually accompanied by her wealthy banker husband, at a time when Balkan travel was incomparably easier than in Durham’s day. Vinaver was, by all accounts, more imaginative and more bohemian in his understanding o f his duties as a guide than his official position would suggest. The book reflects W est’s fascination with his charm and energy, and her animosity towards his German wife who, for W est in the late 1930s, came to represent an odious symbol o f the Teutonic character. West’s portrayal o f her Yugoslav friends in Black Lamb and Grey Falcon reverses the traditional position o f British travel writers in the Balkans who usually, before the 1930s, encountered passionate but childish creatures with little understanding o f the outside world. In Rebecca W est’s case, the adventure and the sense o f discovery often arose from the encounters with Balkan intellectuals which Vinaver facilitated. They turned her journey through Yugoslavia into an inward journey o f self-discovery and a spiritual quest. Returning to England, she wrote: This return meant, for me, going into retreat. Nothing in my life had affected me more deeply than this journey through Yugoslavia. This was in part because there is a coincidence between the natural forms and colours o f the western and southern parts o f Yugoslavia and the innate forms and colours o f my imagination. Macedonia is the country 1 have always seen between sleeping and waking . . . But my journey moved me also because it was like picking up a strand o f wool that would lead me out o f a labyrinth in which, to my surprise, I had found m yself immured.74 Thirty years beforehand, in an inn in a small Serbian town, as ‘the rain poured in torrents’, Edith Durham noted: The two oil lamps made the black corners blacker and threw old shadows o f the fur-capped peasants on the walls, and as I looked at my surround­ ings, saw the white kilts, the leathern sandals and the uniforms, and heard the clank o f sword and spur, I wondered to which o f my ancestors I owed the fact that I felt so very much at home.'”

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If the Balkan images recall the way in which Byron - seeing white kilts - thought o f Walter Scott and Scotland, the recognition o f a shared past which inspired Durham ’s lines might conceivably be compared to W est’s, even if Durham never paused longer than this to consider her own feelings about the Balkans. Any such attempt would have contradicted her endeavour to be ‘objective’ and ‘scholarly’ in her descriptions. For West, the emotions and the introspection are as important as the act o f travelling - they are, in fact, the essence o f her journey. The differing attitudes o f the two writers reflect the transformation o f the nature o f travel writing in the first half o f this century. The change, from the ‘realist’ mode o f Durham’s writing to the ‘modernist’ mode of W est’s, affected their visions o f the Balkans. Black Lamb and Grey Falcon is a self-portrait as much as a travelogue. Earlier, West contemplated the changing philosophy o f travel in her critical work when she wrote about an encounter in Florence with D. H. Lawrence who, on reaching the city, went straight to his hotel and proceeded to ‘hammer out articles about the place, vehemently and exhaustively describing the temperament o f the people . . . This seemed obviously a silly thing to do,’ West thought at first, but later realised that he was writing ‘about the state o f his own soul . . . and the city o f Florence was as good a symbol as any other’.76 Like Dante, ‘who made a new Heaven and Hell and Purgatory as a symbol for the geography within his own breast . . . Lawrence was in fact no different from any other great artist who has felt the urgency to describe the unseen so keenly that he has rifled the seen o f its vocabulary and diverted it to that purpose.’77 The essence o f West’s journey to Yugoslavia is concentrated in moments o f epiphany, when the country offers ‘knowledge o f its e lf. ‘Sometimes a country will for days keep its secrets from a traveller,’ she wrote in Macedonia, ‘showing him nothing but its surfaces, its grass, its trees, the outside o f its houses. Then suddenly it will throw him a key and tell him to go where he likes and see what he can.’78 In such flashes o f recognition Yugoslavia provided symbols which helped West to understand what she saw as the meaning o f the long and bloody history o f the Balkans. She used these symbols to analyse the destiny o f Europe. Witnessing a scene in w hich a black lamb was sacrificed on a rock on St G eorge’s Day in Macedonia, West was granted one such moment of epiphany in what was to become the most frequently quoted passage from her book: I knew this rock well. I had lived under the shadow o f it all my life. All our Western thought is founded on this repulsive pretence that pain is the proper price for any good thing. Here it could be seen how the mean­ ing o f the Crucifixion had been hidden from us, though it was written clear.7’

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A contemplation o f self-sacrifice, initiated by her ‘recognition’ o f the Macedonian rock, becomes the central theme o f W est’s work. On the field o f Kosovo, where the medieval Serbian kingdom was defeated in battle by the Ottoman Turks on 28 June 1389, she heard an old epic poem, in which the Prophet Elijah, in the shape o f a grey falcon flying from Jerusalem, asked the Serbs to chose between a heavenly and an earthly kingdom. The Serbs, the poem says, chose to build churches rather than prepare their defences against the advancing Turk. D escribing the black lam b o f M acedonia and the grey falcon o f Serbia as symbols o f sacrifice, West expressed her anger towards Christianity which, worshipping pain, failed to protect its adherents. In a characteristic manoeuvre, she switched from medieval Serbian history to the advance o f fascism in Europe, and finally to her own life: And I had sinned in the same way, I and my kind, the liberals o f Western Europe. We had regarded ourselves as far holier than our tory opponents because we had exchanged the role o f the priest for the role o f the lamb, and therefore we forgot that we were not performing the chief moral obligation o f humanity, which is to protect the works o f love.80 The key questions West attempts to answer in her book on Yugoslavia are therefore not so much historical and concrete as ethical and timeless. The Serbs and the Macedonians are characters in a parable addressed to W est’s British and American readership, the message o f which is that each citizen o f these countries has a moral duty to fight Nazi Germany even if he or she is not personally under attack. The poem about the grey falcon is repeated in the Epilogue to Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, which reiterates one o f the main themes o f West’s work. ‘The real importance o f the book, in 1941, lay in the call to action that it directed at England and, by implication, America,’ Brian Hall argues in the N ew Yorker, adding that: ‘The Epilogue is one of the most stirring pieces o f straight-ahead war propaganda ever written.’81 The Epilogue, which is itself over a hundred pages long, was written in London in the spring o f 1941, at the moment when Britain faced its choice between becoming a sacrificial lamb and continuing to stand against Hitler alone: ‘Again the grey falcon had flown from Jerusalem, and it was to be with the English as it was with the Christian Slavs.’82 A book about the Balkans, which seemed to West ‘an unendurably horrible book to have to write’, ends poignantly at the moment when ‘all Europe suffers as the Slavs’: Often, when 1 have thought o f invasion, or when a bomb has dropped near by, I have prayed, ‘Let me behave like a Serb,’ but I have known afterwards that I had no right to utter such a prayer, for the Slavs are brothers, and there is no absolution for the sins we have committed against the Slavs through our ineptitude. Thus we were without even the support o f innocence when we went to our windows and saw London

bum."

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Recalling the ‘sins . .. committed against the Slavs’ - the dismemberment o f Czechoslovakia and Poland - West closes her book with the events in late March 1941, when Yugoslavia rejected a pact with Hitler and the news o f its defiance ‘travelled like sunshine over the countries which he had devoured and humiliated’.84 This final episode, in which West depicts the South Slavs staring bravely in the face o f what seems to be another certain defeat, offers again the m otif o f sacrifice. The discovery o f its meaning is for West a moment o f epiphany. The sight o f London burning touched ‘deep sources o f pain that will not listen to reason’. As the Blitz continued, West wrote that she understood that it was ‘most natural that the Dalmatians, in peril like our own, built churches and palaces, deliberations in stone on the nature o f piety and pleasure’.85 Art, she wrote, as she contemplated the troubled history o f Europe, is ‘not decoration’ but the only way to reveal the true significance o f our existence. Such ‘personal statements on a grand scale’, wrote Victoria Glendinning, were o f little interest to the majority o f the book’s critics, who were preoccupied with ‘single issue politics’ and were to use Black Lamb and Grey Falcon as a battlefield.86 Seeing her book turn into a theatre o f war is an apt destiny for a writer who was, in Glendinning’s revealing words, ‘one o f nature’s Balkans as a chronicler as well as in her own person’.87 Recent events in the former Yugoslavia have inspired a new series o f debates about Black Lamb and Grey Falcon which again divert attention away from the central issues posed by W est’s book towards ‘single issue politics’. While some o f the new crop o f Balkan commentators use quot­ ations from her work as uncannily correct prophecies, others reject her judgem ents, using her biography rather than her writing in support o f their rejection. They see in West, quoting not the most objective o f her friends, H. G. Wells (the voice o f male ‘reason’ triumphing over female ‘passion’), ‘a splendid disturbed brain’.88 It is obviously tempting to engage in the debates about W est’s possible ‘allegiance’ in the crisis in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, although such discussions tend to distract from the wider questions she raises in her work and from the book’s preoccupation with the theme o f responsibility and duty towards Europe as a whole. This preoccupation, although discussed by West in the context o f the Second World War, is still relevant. In her appeal to the W estern world to em brace Eastern Europe - the ‘other Europe’ - as part o f itself, and indeed to learn from its turbulent history, West argued (originally and explosively) that the Balkans are, in some ways, the truest reflection o f European values. This argument is frequently echoed by present-day commentators on the affairs o f the region, but it is too important a point to be left only to Balkan experts. ‘The figure o f the cultivated traveller to the dark lands o f Eastern Eu­ rope was as old as the idea o f Eastern Europe itself,’ Larry W olf remarks in ‘Rebecca West: This Time Let’s Listen’, describing the way in which Rebecca

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West, arriving in Yugoslavia in the 1930s and realising that a civilisation was at stake, refused to accept the conventional division o f Europe, but tried to redefine the conceptual map: When Black Lamb and Grey Falcon was published in 1941, Hitler had m ade h im self the m aster o f Eastern Europe. Y ugoslavia had been bombed and abolished, and Rebecca West found that she had been a visitor to a now lost world. At that moment in history, Rebecca W est’s book challenged Britain and America to cherish an image o f Europe in its full moral and political dimensions, to recognize unequivocally that Eastern Europe was a necessary part o f Europe.89 The idea o f Balkan ‘Europeanness’ runs through the entire book, under­ scored by the repeated comparison West makes between the Balkans and her own world. It is there in the opening quote from Shakespeare’s Henry V (a significant choice in view o f the play’s national message, underlined three years after the publication o f W est’s work by Laurence Olivier’s 1944 film o f the play, dedicated to ‘the commandos and airborne troops o f Great Britain’) - ‘I tell you, captain, if you look in the maps o f the ’orld, I war­ rant you shall find, in the comparisons between Macedon and Monmouth that the situations, look you, is both alike.’ The closing images o f her own country in 1941 reiterate the final parallel: ‘Now we in England stood alone. Now we, who had been unchallenged masters o f the world, were poor and beset like the South Slavs.’90 O livia M an n in g ’s B alk an C ity scap es While Rebecca West was writing the final pages o f Black Lamb and Grey Falcon in London, Olivia Manning found herself briefly in Athens, from which, following Germ any’s invasion o f Greece, she was to be evacuated in late April 1941. She had, at that point, spent just under two years in the Balkans. In the summer o f 1939, while working in London, she met and married Reggie Smith, then an employee o f the British Institute in Bucharest. She was 31 and Smith 25 when they left for Romania, their marriage a fortnight old, in August 1939. Just over a year on, in October 1940, with Romania partitioned and Bucharest occupied by German troops, Manning had to move on to Athens. Two decades later she was to base her bestknown work on these experiences, The Balkan Trilogy - comprising the novels The Great Fortune (1960), The Spoilt City (1962), both set in Bucharest, and Friends and Heroes (1965), set in Athens.91 While historical circumstances forced Rebecca West to transform her travelogue by fictionalising certain characters and events, Manning set out to write works o f fiction whose foundations were explicitly autobio­ graphical. ‘My subject is simply life as I have experienced it and I am happiest when writing o f things I have known,' she said in an interview.92

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The story o f Harriet and Guy Pringle, as told in The Balkan Trilogy and subsequently The Levant Trilogy, which together form the Fortunes o f War hexalogy, ostensibly follows the wartime odyssey o f Manning and R. D. Smith. Her friend Kay Dick remarks that ‘the books are in effect a ruthless and illum inating analysis o f Olivia M anning’s m arriage.’93 Like Guy Pringle, Reggie Smith was, according to his friends, ‘the most gregarious o f m en’,94 while Olivia was, like Harriet, colder and more reserved. ‘I found him a little too woolly and her a little too severe,’ Ivor Porter, an English lecturer in Romania before the war, notes in his book about his wartime activities with the Special Operations Executive.95 If the character­ isation appears to be true to life, the story o f Harriet’s loneliness and mari­ tal difficulties in Bucharest seems to gloss over what is known o f M anning’s early married life. When Reggie Smith returned to Bucharest with her, he ‘continued to sleep around as if nothing had changed’.96 Olivia, who spoke no Romanian and had few friends in Bucharest, suffered a painful miscar­ riage (at a stage when the novelist Walter Allen had already been asked to be the child’s godfather).97 She attempted to write, and abandoned, a novel which in essence was the first draft o f the future Balkan Trilogy. Many o f the fictional characters in The Balkan Trilogy resemble people who actually lived and worked in Romania and Greece at the time when M anning was there. The similarities between Guy’s fictional friend David Boyd and the historian Hugh Seton Watson extended to physical looks, interests and even hobbies such as bird-watching. Bella Niculescu, a wealthy Englishwoman whose Bucharest flat was filled with furniture from Maples in London, was, according to Ivor Porter, inspired by M anning’s friend Sylvia Placa(aIso an Englishwoman married to a Romanian). Sir Montague, the British am bassador to Bucharest in The Balkan Trilogy, distinctly resembles the actual ambassador at the time, Sir Reginald Hoare.98 Even the most outlandish o f Manning’s characters, the amiable sponger Prince Yakimov, was, according to the novelist Francis King, loosely inspired by the journalist Derek Patmore, who in 1939 published Invitation to Roumania, a travelogue dedicated to Princess Anne-Marie Callimacki.99 In the Greek volume o f the Trilogy M anning’s friends and acquaintan­ ces from this later period are more or less thinly disguised as fictional characters. Alan Frewen, Harriet’s philhellene friend, shares many traits with the novelist and critic Robert Liddell, who worked for the British C ouncil in A thens at the tim e .100 The eighteenth Baron D unsany, a ‘magnificently bewhiskered Irish poet in his mid sixties’, who was sent out to Greece in October 1940 to occupy the Byron chair o f English at A thens U n iversity, seem s to have been the inspiration behind the cantankerous Professor Lord Pinkrose, who turns up in Bucharest to deliver a lecture on Byron and then follows the Pringles to Athens and on to Cairo. Lord Dunsany was evacuated from Athens on the same ship as Manning and her husband.101

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In spite o f these parallels, it would be wrong to treat The Balkan Trilogy as ju st a thinly disguised autobiography. The novels involve complex parallel lines o f narration in which Harriet’s perspective is intertwined with Prince Yakim ov’s story. Each o f the three volumes consists o f four parts, named after a particular event in Romanian or European history. ‘The Assassination’, for example, refers to the killing o f the Romanian Prime Minister, Armand Calinescu, in September 1939; and ‘The Captain’ to the strengthening o f the extreme right-wing Iron Guard and the rehabili­ tation, in 1940, o f its spiritual father, Comeliu Zelea Codreanu, who was killed, in Ottoman style, by strangulation, ‘trying to escape from prison’ in 1938.102 ‘The Fall o f Troy’ deals with Guy Pringle’s production o f Troilus and Cressida in Bucharest, but also alludes to the German victory march in Paris which coincides with the single performance o f the play. The Balkan Trilogy can be described as a trilogy o f historical novels only in a loose sense. Historical events represent a series o f ‘pegs’, temporal foci for personal developments in the lives o f Manning’s protagonists. The kind o f historical tremors Rebecca West confronts in Black Lamb and Grey Falcon are recounted here at a very private level. Balkan ‘history’ is what rumbles and thunders in the background while the characters try, as best they can, to carry on with their day-to-day lives. At the end o f the Fortunes o f War hexalogy Manning writes: ‘Then at last, peace, precarious peace, came down upon the world and the survivors could go home.’101 Her main characters are not heroes but ‘the stray figures left on the stage at the end o f a great tragedy’.104 Arguably, however, the most memorable characters o f her novels are not the stray British figures, but the two Balkan cities, Bucharest and Athens, portrayed in the cold light o f the war which was about to change them beyond recognition. This is particularly true o f Bucharest - and The Balkan Trilogy is chiefly remembered as a rare English language portrait o f life in pre-war Romania. The appeal o f the land in Manning’s novels lies in the double remove o f her Romania - an aristocratic, old-fashioned ‘European’ Romania overlapping with an oriental, alien one - from its post-war British readers. Like, more recently, the Rom ania o f Patrick Leigh Ferm or’s Between the Woods and the Water'05 M anning’s country is both geo­ graphically and historically distant. It is a place whose mystique is enhanced by its transience and fragility, and by the fact that it cannot be revisited. Rebecca West wrote about Yugoslavia, worrying that the world she had known might be destroyed for ever. For Manning, writing her novels in the early 1960s, while Romania was in the grip o f one o f the most ruthless o f the East European regimes, the destruction o f that world had already been accomplished. A m o n g the representations o f in d iv id u al B alkan countries in B ritish literature, R om ania and A lb a n ia seem to occupy a som ew hat sim ila r place. A w a y from the m ain B alkan thoroughfares, these countries rem ained, for

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longer than others, the epitome o f the symbolic Balkan ‘unknown’, and twentieth-century British travel writers, from Durham in High Albania in 1906 to Richard Bassett in Balkan Hours in 1990 (‘There were few more sinister airports in Europe to land at than Bucharest’, begins his description o f the Romanian capital)106continued to describe them with the same sense o f discovery as Byron arriving in Tepelena in 1821. In the 1890s Jonathan Harker, the hero o f Bram Stoker’s Dracula, had to reach for an atlas to find the country o f his destination. The situation seemed little different in the late 1930s. ‘At the first mention o f going to Roumania, a great many persons, as did myself, would take down their atlas,’ Sacheverell Sitwell wrote in the introduction to his 1938 account Roumanian Journey (which, judging by the oblique references in her novel, Olivia Manning read while expecting to leave for Bucharest), concluding that: ‘Roumania, there can be no question, is among the lesser known lands o f Europe.’107 Narratives set in the Balkans often provide, in the opening lines, one last glimpse o f the West. Bram Stoker’s Dracula begins with a sight o f ‘the most Western o f splendid Bridges’ over the Danube. A visit to M ozart’s house in Salzburg marks the beginning o f Rebecca West’s journey into the Balkan world. Visitors to Montenegro receive their last warnings as their ships approach Kotor (Cattaro). The first words o f Manning’s Trilogy are: ‘Somewhere near V enice...’108Reminding the reader how close the penin­ sula is to the well-known cities o f Western Europe makes subsequent de­ scriptions appear more extraordinary, precisely because the assertions o f Balkan ‘Europeanness’ blend and overlap with deliberately startling ‘ori­ ental’ images. In a manner redolent o f the Romanticist constructions o f the Balkans, the most exotic o f descriptions are accompanied by images which underscore the claim that the peninsula obviously belongs to the European world. ‘ The Merry Widow heard much further to the East, in Calcutta, say, or Hongkong, would never produce this same nostalgia,’ Sacheverell Sitwell writes in his Roumanian Journey. ‘Those places are too far away, they exist in another world with its own sentiments and regrets.’109 Much o f The Balkan Trilogy offers Harriet Pringle’s view o f events, but the first impressions o f Bucharest are not hers. Prince Yakimov, a half-Irish, half-Russian aristocrat who considers him self to be a ‘Genuine English­ m an’, arrives in the Romanian capital on the same Orient Express train as the Pringles: Hounded (his own word) out o f one capital after another, he had now reached the edge o f Europe, a region in which he already smelt the Orient. Each time he arrived at a new capital, he made for the British legation, where he usually found some figure from his past.110 Prince Yakimov’s first impressions, as he wanders through the town in a sable-lined coat inherited from his father, are o f an oriental rather than a European capital city. Besieged by beggars, he notices ‘tramway cars, hung

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with passengers like swarming bees’,'" peasants in pointed astrakhan caps, and orthodox Jews with fox-fur hats and long earlocks. He passes through a basket market, tries unsuccessfully to avoid the stench o f the chicken market full o f ‘stringy Balkan birds’, and finally - lost - reaches the river, where ‘on the banks o f muddy clay stood houses o f dilapidated Ottoman elegance.’112 After Yakimov’s first glimpses of the oriental aspect o f Bucharest, Harriet Pringle discovers the Latin, Parisian face o f the town. Her impressions, however, are already influenced by her discoveries about the lifestyle Guy had built him self before their marriage: G uy pointed out an archw ay at the end o f the vista. ‘The Arc de Triom phe,’ he said. ‘The Paris o f the East,’ Harriet said, somewhat in ridicule, for they had disagreed as to the attractions o f Bucharest. Guy, who had spent there his first year o f adult freedom, living on the first money earned by his own efforts, saw Bucharest with a pleasure she, a Londoner, rather jealous o f his year alone here, was not inclined to share.113 Before the Second World War, Bucharest was one o f the most sophisticated cities in the Balkans. Amid its great poverty, it alone had a sizeable, cosmopolitan aristocracy. Its well-known opera house, shops stocked with expensive imported goods, and luxurious cafes and restaurants are described in som e detail both in M anning’s novels and Sacheverell S itw ell’s travelogue. ‘I tell you these things to shew you that you are not in the house o f ignorant country folk who would kill you the moment they saw your Serbian uniform, but among civilized people. We go to Bucharest every year for the opera season; and I have spent a whole month in Vienna,’ S haw ’s R aina P etkoff asserts in an accurate, if com ic, reflection o f Bucharest’s earlier reputation.114 With the rich much richer than in other Balkan countries, and the poor much poorer than in all except Albania, the social divisions in pre-war Bucharest were considerably greater than elsewhere in the region.* English travellers in the 1930s, including Sacheverell Sitwell, compared the con­ trasts o f Bucharest to those seen in India. A frequent conclusion is that, with all its European pretensions (Manning describes Bucharest shop win­ *

The average annual incom e in 1 9 25 -3 0 was $243 in Romania, $284 in Bul­ garia, $330 in Y ugoslavia, and $397 in Greece. (Barbara Jelavich, History o f the Balkans. Twentieth Century , p. 187.) Other Balkan countries lacked latifundia-owning aristocracies; their societies were made up preponderantly o f peasants with an embryonic urban bourgeoisie and proletariat. However, the dim inished status o f Romania’s aristocracy follow ing land reforms is reflected in M anning’s portrayals o f impoverished princes hanging out in the Athdnde I’ulucc hotel.

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dows where goods have tags like ‘pulloverul, chic, golful and fiveo ’clockul’115 and cafés where people ‘saw themselves in Rome or Paris or, best o f all, New York’)"*’ the Romanian capital is essentially a Levantine city. In Bucharest, Prince Yakimov begins to feel ‘the smell o f the Orient’. Sacheverell Sitwell describes this in a more poetic vein, enthusing about ‘the soft airs o f the Bosphorus that we seemed to breathe at Bucharest’.117 (One should, perhaps, mention that the Romanian government paid the publishers a subsidy o f £500 towards the publication o f Sitwell’s book.)118 Derek Patmore owns up to his exotic expectations of the Romanian capital: ‘Bucarest [sic]. The name alone had an exotic sound. I imagined a city o f domes and minarets, streets filled with a mixed population o f Eastern and Western types. I had visions o f great houses, furnished in a style o f preWar m agnificence.’115 G regor von Rezzori, who was brought up in R om ania and whose Memoirs o f an Anti-Semite is, alongside Manning’s work, probably the finest account o f Romanian life in European literature outside Romanian writing itself, writes o f Bucharest in the years immediately before Sitwell’s and M anning’s visit: ‘For all its Art Nouveau villas and futuristic glassand-concrete buildings, Bucharest was as oriental as Smyrna. The Occident, with its many splendored towered citadels, was far aw ay.’120* Forty years after Manning’s departure from Bucharest, the Italian writer Claudio Magris describes the Communist Bucharest as still being a city in which a Parisian passage can suddenly turn into an oriental souk: The Franco-Balkan style grows heavier and more ornate, carried away by ornamentation and hounded by an abhorrence o f vacuum . . . Art N ouveau is present with its splendours and squalors, stained glass windows and decrepit stairways. The vast Jugendstil hallway o f the Casa de Mode is thronged with gypsies, while not far o ff the market stalls o f Lipscani display evil sm elling cakes and brassières that look still warm from use. An exaggeratedly Parisian passage leads to a series of shops with exhibitions o f pictures or handicrafts, but when they are closed their black iron doors become coffins leant up against the w all.121 Manning wrote about Bucharest two decades after she had left it, yet her images o f the town have enormous immediacy and sharpness. When she describes the town, her eye is that o f a painter (she had tried her hand at painting before her marriage and, in her, Bucharest arguably found its literary Canaletto), depicting street life, and recording colours, proportions

*

Von Rezzori was a member o f an aristocratic family from Bukovina, a remote part o f the Austro-Hungarian Empire which was acquired by Romania after the First World War. His work originally appeared in German.

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and, above all, the light, with great precision. These qualities mark both the descriptions made from Prince Yakimov’s point o f view (‘After walking a couple o f miles, he reached the main square as the sun, rising above the roof-tops, flecked the cobblestones. A statue, heavily planted on a horse too big for it, saluted the long grey form o f what must be the royal palace’) 122 and those seen through Harriet’s eyes. (‘The Pringles left by a side door that opened on to the Calea Victoriei, the main shopping street, where the blocks o f flats rose to such a height they caught the last rose-violet glow o f the sun. A glimmer o f this, reflected down into the dusty valley o f the street, lit with violet grey the crowds that clotted either pavement.’) 121 Some o f the m ost m em orable cityscapes o f Bucharest painted by Manning evoke the town during the changing seasons. Autumn brings threatening signs o f the harshness o f winter: With late November came the crivat, a frost-hard wind that blew from Siberia straight into the open mouth o f the Moldavian plain. Later it would bring the snow, but for the moment it was merely a threat and a discomfort that each day grew a little sharper. Fewer people appeared in the streets. Already there were those who faced the outdoor air only for as long as it took them to hurry between home and car. In the evening, in the early dark, there were only the workers hurrying to escape the cold.124 The winter weather provides some o f the most striking comparisons: The new year brought the heavy snow. Day after day it clotted the air, gentle, silent, persistent as time. Those who walked abroad - and these now were only servants and peasants - were enclosed in flakes. The traffic crept about, feeling its way as in a fog. When the fall thinned, the distances, visible once more, were the colour o f a bruise.125 M anning’s im ages o f the tow n enveloped in sum m er heat have a shimmering, almost impressionistic quality: The end o f June brought a dry and dusty heat to Bucharest. The grass withered in the public parks. Up the Chausee, the lime and chestnut leaves, fanned by a breeze like a furnace breath, curled, brown and papery, and started falling as though autumn had come. Each day began with a fierce, white light splintering in between blinds and shutters. When people ate breakfast on the balconies, there was a smell o f heat in the air. By noonday, the ingot o f the sun dissolved in the sky as in a vat o f molten silver. The roads, oozing tarmac, shimmered with mirages. The dazzle hurt the eyes. During the afternoon, the hot air concentrated between the clifffaces o f buildings, seemed visible and tangible in the ochre dust-fog. Deadened by it, people slept.I2<’

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These portraits o f the city are painted on a wide canvas, but Manning sketches, with equal precision, intimate scenes o f Bucharest street life. The detailed descriptions o f individual restaurants, cafés, shops or the interiors o f Romanian households help create a strong sense o f both period and place. The centre o f M anning’s Bucharest is the Athénée Palace Hotel, and its focus in turn is the famous English Bar. Here the gossip-mongers meet the journalists, and famous politicians rub shoulders with the decadent and seedy Phanariot princes who spend their days reading free English newspapers in the lobby. When Manning lived in Bucharest, the Roma­ nians were ruled by a monarch o f German extraction, a member o f the Hohenzollern dynasty. However, most o f the higher aristocracy were by origin Phanariot Greeks (taking their name from the Phanar (or lighthouse) district o f Constantinople). By the late 1930s, the Romanian descendants o f these Greek families had lost most o f their lands and money, together with much o f their social influence, but they still contributed a decadent, post-imperial flavour to the social scene in Bucharest. The Phanariots embodied most clearly the startling but evanescent mixture o f oriental and European influences which epitomised Bucharest in the eyes o f the British writers who visited it in the 1930s. Manning chooses to introduce this unusual social group in one o f the first episodes o f the trilogy. Prince Hajimoscos and his coterie, hanging around the English Bar o f the Athénée Palace in the hope that someone would buy them a drink, represent natural companions to Prince Yakimov, who, through his Russian father (and perhaps, indeed, his Irish mother), is a descendant o f another dispossessed aristocracy. The encounter with the Phanariots, which follows Yakimov’s ramble through the Ottoman parts o f Bucharest, contributes to the first impressions o f the city as an alien, oriental capital, with an end-of-empire, decadent European feel. Prince Hajimoscos, with mongoloid features and wearing kid slippers, and Prince Yakimov, with one brown and one black shoe on his feet (a party prank fully in keeping with his public-schoolboy behaviour but quite misunderstood by the Romanians, who are too polite to ‘notice’ English eccentricities), attend a party given by Princess T eodorescu, in her apartment in the Athénée Palace. The apartment, paid for by a German baron, is painted black, with black carpets and black furniture, and represents a suitably outré scene for a party in the course o f which the guests undress in order to play a game o f ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs’. Half-asleep, half drunk, Yakimov eventually finds him self without any clothes on, and realises that ‘all the guests were naked and shunting each other in a circle around the room .’127 Other accounts o f Bucharest in the 1930s do not fail to mention the Phanariots. Sitwell owes, in his own words ‘the instigation and encourage­ m ent’12" for his book to Princess Anne-M arie Callimacki who in 1949,

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from her exile in New York, published a poignantly-named memoir, Yes­ terday was Mine, which includes some o f his letters.129 Derek Patmore’s Invitation to Roumania is similarly dedicated to ‘Princess Anne-Marie Callimachi [sz'c] who gave me my invitation’. Princess Callimacki intro­ duced Sacheverell Sitwell to a number o f Phanariot princes who enter­ tained him in their lavish Franco-Byzantine-Ottoman palaces. Roumanian Journey reflects a fascination with the portraits o f the Romanian aristo­ crats’ ancestors in ceremonial robes o f heavy silk, with their pearls and long beards. Sitwell loved the poetic-sounding names, such as Basaraba, Cantacuzene or Mavrocordato. Sir Henry Channon, in his diaries, recalls a Liberal politician impressed, in a very similar way, by the novelist Princess Marthe Bibesco, ‘a writer and a famous mondaine and exotic’, during her visit to London. (Marthe was related by marriage both to Prince Emanuel, who inspired the character o f Saint-Loup in Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu, and to Antoine Bibesco - Elizabeth Asquith’s husband and Rebecca W est’s discreet companion on one o f her visits to Belgrade.) ‘One can picture the scene, the reclining, luxurious lady in a tea-gown and pearls, surrounded by roses, and the impressed Under-Secretary, dazzled by the mise-en-scene,’ Sir Henry Channon records in his diary, revealing the impact encounters with the Romanian aristocracy had on the British, but also the eroticised m ixture o f Orientalist and decadent im aginings which such encounters could sp ark .130 In an interesting reflection o f the way the stereotypes and preconceptions discussed in this work influenced mutual perceptions, Edith, Lady Londonderry, described Marthe Bibesco’s palace in Romania as ‘a bit o f England in faraw ay Ruritania', while Marthe herself, visiting the remote Scottish home o f her close friend, the Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald, wondered: ‘What strange caprice o f fate had deposited me, an international aristocrat, a Romanian, in the midst o f a village in northern Scotland, to listen to a speech made by this apostle of Socialism?’131 In a mirror image o f the Scottish Emily G erard’s interest in the magical world o f Transylvania, the Romanian princess writes about Scotland: ‘How strange is my destiny and how odd that I should feel so perfectly at home here in this land o f witches and fairies.,m Sitwell’s enthusiastic account and Olivia M anning’s more detached, mel­ ancholy observation o f the Phanariot world are divided by not only a dif­ ferent attitude to social class but also a crucial two-year gap. During Sitwell’s visit in 1937, this circle was impoverished but still discernible. By late 1939 the war, which was to disperse some o f them and make the others all but indistinguishable from the rest o f the Romanian population, was al­ ready looming across the Balkan frontiers. The princes o f the old world, mingling with the noisy Germans o f the threatening new order, and ob­ served by the relatively impoverished English teachers in the bars o f the

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Athénée Palace, have the pathos o f spectres; they are, to use Edith Durham’s phrase, another aspect o f the Living Past o f the Balkans. M anning’s Bucharest, exuberant and lavish, is similarly a melancholy presence in spite, or perhaps because of, its enormous luxury. Doomed to destruction, this ‘Paris o f the East’ is a proto-Beirut, its wealth and sophis­ tication revealed only after they had disappeared. Some o f M anning’s most intricate descriptions in the novel sequence are those o f the food on display in Bucharest’s restaurants and shops. Sitwell’s hired pen similarly enthuses at enormous length about meals consisting o f caviar, fine soups, grillades o f fillets o f the finest meat, tender poussins, pilaffs o f quail or freshly caught fish, followed by puddings made with fresh peaches or wild strawberries, and claims that ‘after pre-revolutionary Russian the Roumanian is the best native cuisine in Europe.’133 Manning gives a different explanation for her own enthusiasm for food in an interview: ‘1 think it is because I was so terribly hungry. Once when I was working in London, I fainted in the street through lack o f food. And when we reached Rumania, the food was so rich, so fantastic.’134 Depicting H arriet’s and Prince Yakim ov’s dazzled look at the food displays, M anning’s descriptions resemble intricate still-life paintings. The following example is taken from Harriet’s first visit to a garden restaurant:* The heart o f the display was a rosy bouquet o f roasts, chops, steaks and fillets frilled round with a froth o f cauliflowers. Heaped extravagantly about the centre were aubergines as big as melons, baskets o f artichokes, small coral carrots, mushrooms, mountain raspberries, apricots, peaches, apples and grapes. On one side there were French cheeses; on the other tins o f caviare, grey river fish in powdered ice, and lobsters and crayfish groping in dark waters. The poultry and game lay unsorted on the ground. ‘Choose,’ said G uy.135 Bucharest’s food stores offered just as great a variety. Nowhere are the colourful displays described in such detail and with such humour as on the occasion o f Prince Yakimov’s visit to Dragomir, Bucharest’s answer to L ondon’s Fortnum and Mason or Fauchon in Paris, and stocked from R om ania’s remaining latifundia. Lavishly decorated for Christmas and surrounded by peasants selling fir trees from the Carpathians and ‘heaps o f holly, bay and laurel’, the shop’s entrance afforded shelter to some o f B ucharest’s m ost persistent beggars, but inside it offered the hungry Yakimov, ‘a refuge where a gentleman might sample cheese unchallenged and steal a biscuit or tw o’:136 A little department at the door sold imports from England: Quaker Oats, tinned fruits, corned beef, Oxford marmalade .. . These did not interest *

In summer Bucharest’s leading restaurants occupied gardens alongside the avenues leading out of the city.

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Yakimov who made for the main hall, where turkeys, geese, ducks, chicken, pheasant, partridge, grouse, snipe, pigeons, hares and rabbits were thrown unsorted together in a vast pyramid beneath a central light. He joined the fringe o f male shoppers who went around with intent, serious faces, examining these small corpses. This was not a shopping place for servants, not even for wives. The men came here, as Yakimov did, to look at food, and to experience, as he might not, an ecstasy o f anticipation.117 Y akim ov’s first visit to D ragom ir provides one o f M anning’s m ost memorable images o f Bucharest under the shadow o f war - for this was, literally, one o f the last Christmases o f this kind in the city. When the American journalist Goldie Horowitz, writing under the pseudonym o f R. G. Waldeck in her book Athene Palace (sic), describes a visit to the same place two years later, in 1941, Dragomir is filled with ‘baby-faced German soldiers carrying candy-boxes’.138 M anning’s descriptions o f Bucharest are not, however, the nostalgia­ laden evocations o f a lost aristocratic world, the ‘last corner o f real Europe’ o f Sitw ell’s Roumanian Journey, or - more recently - Patrick Leigh Ferm or’s ‘yellowing m ap’ o f Balkan wanderings so vividly evoked in Between the Woods and the Water. Sitwell’s Romanian palaces, with their wood-panelled walls, have a doomed, rarefied air, and his Balkan peninsula represents a poeticised, vulnerable world gazing into Europe’s feudal past - a Ruritania with Byzantine boyars instead o f Germanic barons and counts. M anning’s bittersweet descriptions convey Bucharest’s cruelties as well as its charm. Scenes o f turbulence and political violence, such as the assassination o f Prime Minister Armand Calinescu in the Chicken Market in Bucharest (‘Filled him full o f lead,’ Galpin broke in. ‘He clung to the car door - little pink hands, striped trousers, little new patent-leather shoes. Then he slid down. Patches o f dust on the side o f his shoes.’),139 dominate many pages o f her novels but would be unthinkable in Sitwell’s quaint Balkan landscapes. The vividness her work shares with Leigh Ferm or’s or von Rezzori’s writings about Romania is created by a mixture o f wonder and nostalgia for something that is already lost. The sense o f discovery of a new world is tainted with omens which point to its imminent destruction: the writers know that the reader cannot revisit the world they describe. Although written from a much shorter perspective o f time than M anning’s recollections, W est’s descriptions o f her journeys through the Balkans the fields o f young wheat in Macedonia, the cypress groves o f Dalmatia, the gorgeous bleakness o f Herzegovina, golden with broom and gorse, the pine scented moorlands o f Montenegro - are reminiscent o f the images o f the summer o f 1914 in English literature. Olivia Manning describes a world clearly burning at the edges, with her English characters fleeing the flame. Still undisturbed, but wilh (he Continent at war behind if, Athens was, when

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Harriet Pringle reached it in the early autumn o f 1940, an almost unreal oasis, deliberately oblivious and seemingly immune to the storms just beyond the country’s northern borders. Even the climate preserves the illusion o f permanence: ‘Athens’, Harriet thought: ‘The longed-for city.’ Bucharest had been enclosed by Europe, but here, she had reached the Mediterranean. In Bucharest, the winter was beginning. In Athens, it seemed, the summer would go on forever.140 If M anning’s descriptions o f Romania reflect a sense o f the discovery o f an unknown world, Greece is, as in Lawrence DurrelPs descriptions o f it, alw ays ‘longed-for’, dreamed of, already known and locked into the imagery o f ‘returning hom e’. For Manning, as for so many other English w riters, descriptions o f Greece consist o f defining the term s o f that ‘recognition’ - the ways o f finding a long-lost home. As in B yron’s descriptions o f it, the impossibility o f seeing Greece ‘for the first tim e’ is clear from the opening pages o f the final, Greek volume o f The Balkan Trilogy, as Harriet’s plane sweeps down over Athens ‘at a sublime moment - the moment acclaimed by Pindar when the marble city and all its hills glowed rosy amethyst in the evening light’.141 M anning’s precise, vivid sketches o f Bucharest are replaced by impressionistic, blurred outlines o f the better-known features o f the Athenian cityscape: As they went through the narrow Plaka streets, the Parthenon appeared. It was flood-lit, a temple o f white fire hanging upon the blackness o f the sky. Harriet, catching her breath, said: ‘I’ve never seen anything more beautiful.’ ‘Is there anything more beautiful to be seen?’ Alan asked.142 For all her evocations o f Pindar, Manning’s descriptions o f Athens, with their references to light and fragrance, the lustre o f marble, the gold and blue o f the sky, come closer to English romantic water colours than to the poet’s odes in which the city soars towards the skies, craggy, powerful and triumphant in its might. In any case, Pindar’s Parthenon would have been painted and gilded rather than ethereally white. Life in the city between early October 1940 and April 1941, as described in Friends and Heroes, is, however, similar to the depictions o f Harriet’s first days in Bucharest. Waves o f refugees kept filling the hotels, and leaving, in pursuit o f the greater safety that only Africa and America could offer. The origins o f the newcomers indicate that the war is inexorably approaching Athens. Even before 1939, as Manning remarks, there had been ‘a backlog o f white Russians and Smyrna Greeks’ in the capital. When Poles and Jews begin to arrive, their presence hardly disturbs the city’s peace. 1lowever, its inhabitants’ fears become almost palpable when fleeing

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Yugoslav officers, in their gold-braided uniforms, begin to fill the lobbies o f expensive hotels. Just as her impressions o f Athens are coloured by perceptions o f its classical past, so the inhabitants o f the city preserve much o f the heroic Hellenic ideal. They are a proud and defiant people, marked by a dignity which (in contrast to the descriptions o f the pestering ‘Levantine’ traders and beggars in Bucharest) now extends even to street peddlers: As soon as he saw the English couple, a gentle, quivering old Greek came to Guy and held a copy o f the paper before him. When Guy handed over a note, the old man neither bolted with it nor begged for more, but carefully counted the change on the table and began to move on. When Guy pushed some o f the coins back to him he bowed and gathered them up.'43 The man offered other sponges, cream, golden, fawn and brown; at each Harriet gave a smaller tilt o f the chin and her ‘Oxz” became scarcely audible. The man did not became angry like the terrible beggars o f Bucharest, but smiled, amused by her performance, and moved on.'44 In her admiration o f the Greeks, Harriet shares many o f the attitudes o f her philhellene friend Alan Frewen, who extols Greek creativity and their love o f life: ‘Yes, I love the country and I love the people. They have a wonderful vitality and friendliness. They want to be liked, o f course; but that does not detract from their individuality and their independence. Have you ever heard about the Greek carpenter who was asked to make six dining room chairs?’ ‘No. Tell us.’ ‘The customer wanted them all alike and the carpenter named an extremely high figure. ‘Out o f the question’, said the customer. ‘W ell’, said the carpenter, ‘if I can make them all different, I’d do them for half that price’.’145 The notion o f the Greeks as a race o f noble warriors permeates M anning’s descriptions o f their dignified dances and their love o f music, her portraits o f evzones in their fustanellas, and even the accounts o f Harriet’s encounters with old men who regret their age because it does not allow them to join the battle. The imagery Manning uses is quintessentially Romanticist: the Greeks are, for her, born soldiers. In Epirus, Harriet had been told, many of them had no weapons ‘yet, like riderless horses in a race, they had gone instinctively into the fight.M46In a comparison which is transmitted from Byron through the works o f subsequent generations o f British writers, the Cireeks recognise Scottish Highlanders as one warrior race acknowledges and respects another:

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One day the Athenians were amazed to see Highlanders in the street: men skirted like evzones and carrying bagpipes like the shepherds o f Epirus. At the cellar café o f Elatos two o f them took the floor, placed their knives on the ground and danced, grave-faced, without music, the rhythm marked by the pleats o f their kilts that closed and opened them like fans. As the Scotsmen toed and heeled and turned in unison, the Greeks, intent and silent, understood that this was a ritual dance against the common enem y.147 The Italian ultimatum to Greece, on 28 October 1940, marked G reece’s entry into the war. In England, Henry Channon recorded the event in his diary: ‘An historic day. Italy sent an ultimatum at 3 a.m. that she would take over strategic bases at 6 a.m. unless Greece capitulated. General Metaxas refused, and now tonight, the flames have spread to the Balkans.’I4S M anning’s description o f the way Athens welcomed M etaxas’ refusal echoes the classical myths o f heroism. Mussolini had wrongly supposed that a small country was a weak country, but, she writes, ‘Metaxas had said ‘N o ’ and so, in the middle o f the night, while the Athenians slept, Greece had entered the war.’141' While Athens resounded with this historic Oxi, its citizens were filled with a sense o f elation ‘so it seemed that in secret everyone had been longing to live actively within the war and now felt fulfilment’.150 Greece’s defiance and the subsequent victorious cam­ paign against the Italians in Epirus are recorded in a sequence o f Byronic images: After Podgorets, there came the capture o f Mt. Oztrovitz, then Premeti, Santa Quaranta, Argyrokastro and Delvino. The evzoni captured the heights o f Ochrida in a snowstorm. The attack lasted four hours and the Greek women, who had followed their men, climbed barefooted up the mountainside to take them food and ammunition.151 The image o f the evzones fighting in a snowstorm, aided by the fearless Greek women, brings to mind Greek defiance against the Turks in Byron’s day and episodes from the time o f the Ottoman occupation, such as the story o f the women o f Souli who threw themselves off the high cliffs on which their village nested, rather than be captured. In their turn, the tales o f liberation from the Turks are themselves told in terms o f parallels with ancient Greek history. In his book about northern Greece, Roumeli, Patrick Leigh Fermor cites the words o f a popular song about the same winter cam paign o f 1940, in which, he suggests, the Italians (referred to as Makaronddes) ‘replaced the name o f some much older foe’: Would that I had wings to soar on high, up to the topmost peaks o f the mountains, to alight there and gaze down, down over Epirus and over poor Chimarra; to look down on the war, where the Greeks are fighting the Makaronddes.'*2

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In a sim ilar fashion, M anning’s descriptions reaffirm and update the nineteenth-century Byronic vision o f the Greeks as the descendants o f the Hellenes, ‘the remnant o f a line such as the Doric mothers bore’.1” This study begins with an analysis o f the way in which Byron, through his iconic importance as much as through the impact o f his poetry, influenced the way in which the British imagined and portrayed Balkan independence movements throughout the nineteenth and the early parts o f the twentieth century. While Byronic images o f Greece (and particularly the most famous o f them which - as memorised by generations o f nineteenth- and twentiethcentury students - remain free o f the potentially uncomfortable complexity o f B yron’s political m essage) created the tem plate for m ore recent depictions o f heroic M ontenegrins, A lbanians or Serbs, philhellene perceptions o f Greek history have in turn created a degree o f ambivalence about G reece’s place in the Balkans. If Greece does not feature much in this examination o f perceptions o f Balkan identity once Byron and Shelley have left the scene, it is because, unlike other Balkan countries, it could never fully function as an alien Other: its topography was, after Romanticism, too familiar to house imaginary kingdoms, haunted castles and toy-soldier wars. Its very definition as a Balkan country has, in recent times, become politicised and used by some as a way o f depriving contemporary Greece o f a particular set o f historic traditions o f which it feels itself to be both a progenitor and heir. At the same time, Hellenic images, such as democracy, have been appropriated in positive constructions o f (West) European identity. Olivia Manning’s tril­ ogy points to the difficulties implicit in ‘locating’ Greece: the Athenian story represents the last part o f her Balkan Trilogy, but within the volume, Greece is described as a Mediterranean rather than a Balkan country.

‘Why the Balkans Attract W om en’ With the exception o f the reprint o f High Albania, Edith Durham ’s work lias been somewhat neglected in the post-war period (although in 1996, the Durham Gallery opened at the Bankfield Museum in Halifax, England). Rebecca W est’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon has remained continuously in print and sold tens o f thousands o f copies in Britain and the United States over recent years, when the wars in the former Yugoslavia renewed interest in her work. Fortunes o f War, the BBC TV series based on Olivia Manning’s novels, broadcast for the first time in November 1987, featured Emma Thompson and Kenneth Branagh in the roles o f Harriet and Guy Pringle and was, with the still rigidly Communist Romania out o f bounds for filming o f this kind, shot largely in the former Yugoslavia. The AustroI lungarian cityscapes o f former provincial Habsburg centres failed to cap­

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ture the exotic world o f Manning’s Bucharest as Romania itself might have done. The degree to which the Balkan peninsula attracted British women writers is apparent in both the popular genres and the documentary and autobiographical works I have explored. The interesting absence o f women in the section devoted to comic genres is, perhaps, caused by the fact that humour so frequently relies on reinforcing, rather than breaking, existing stereotypes. Some o f the earliest descriptions o f Balkan travel are recorded in Lady Mary Wortley M ontagu’s celebrated letters, published in May 1763, which describe her journey to Constantinople, undertaken in late 1716 and early 1717. In the nineteenth century, among the noted travellers to the Balkans are such figures as Viscountess Strangford (Emily Anne Beaufort) whose The Eastern Shores o f the Adriatic in 1863 with a Visit to Montenegro was published in I864,'54 and Mary Adelaide Walker, whose book Through Macedonia to the Albanian Lakes appeared in the same year.155 Adeline Paulina Irby and Georgina Muir Mackenzie made several extensive journeys across the Balkan lands, the first being in 1859, and published an extensive collection o f works, the best-known o f which is probably Travels in the Slavonic Provinces o f Turkey-in-Europe, first published in 1867, and reissued in 1877 with an introduction by William Gladstone.156 In the early decades o f the twentieth century - as Jennifer Finder’s ‘Women Travellers in the Balkans: A Bibliographical G uide’ (1991) easily confirms - the number o f British (and American) women who travelled through, and wrote about, the Balkans increased sharply.157 This disproportionately high number o f women was registered as early as 1912, in an unsigned article in the Graphic magazine rediscovered by John Allcock and Antonia Young. Entitled ‘Why the Balkans Attract W omen’, this article asks: ‘Why should the Balkans, those rough, wild, semi-civilised and more than half orientalised little countries, appeal so strongly to some o f our astutest feminine intelligence?’158 Attempting to answer this question, the writer explains that ‘the Balkans are the gateway to the East, through which one catches one’s first glimpse o f the langorous land . . . the East attracts women because it is feminine to the core, just as the West is essentially masculine.’I5<) The argument that the Balkans attracted British women as a form o f substitute, accessible Orient (merely ‘semi-civilised and more than half Orientalised’), an area not quite as oriental as the Orient proper - which was fully open only to male travellers - does not offer an entirely satisfactory explanation. Parts o f the Middle East were just as accessible to women travellers, and yet that did not make the Balkans any less attractive. An intrepid traveller through the Albanian hinterlands in the most turbulent o f times, Edith Durham could hardly be accused o f choosing the Balkans for their ‘accessibility’ and comfort o f travel.

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In all its apparent backwardness and poverty, the Balkan world offered British women a chance o f real equality with men. British women enjoyed a sort o f ‘honorary male status’ in the Balkans. Many o f them took little interest in Balkan women, except in a thoroughly patronising way. Durham, who rarely saw them as anything other than m en’s chattels and overworked wretches, devoted more attention to the exotic Albanian ‘Virgins’, the women who dressed as men and vowed never to marry, than to any o f the hard-working wives and mothers she met. Even Olivia Manning - writing well after the Second World War - describes her Romanian female characters as seductive coquettes whose main ambitions in life are to acquire British passports by stealing other wom en’s husbands. As they travelled through the Balkans, many British women were re­ spected, allowed to participate in public life, and credited with political influence in a way which made their position very different from the one they occupied at home (even if the Albanians were never quite prepared to offer Edith Durham their throne - indeed, an English cricketer seems to have been considered more suitable). They were frequently able to meet Balkan politicians, military and religious leaders, and even members of the royal households. If British men usually travelled to the Balkans in an official capacity, British women regularly set out as private travellers but not infrequently became professionally involved and committed to the region. Paulina Irby opened a school for Christian girls in Sarajevo in 1870. Viscountess Strangford became closely engaged in the work of the Bulgarian Peasant R elief Fund after 1876, and others became active in campaign work back in Britain. In the first decades o f this century, and in particular during the First World War, many British women worked in the Balkans. Lady Hutton was awarded Serbia’s highest Order o f Merit for her work as a doctor in Serbia. Her experiences are described in two books o f memoirs.160 Flora Sandes, who appears thinly disguised in David Footman’s novel Pig anti Pepper, was wounded on active service as a captain in the Serbian army and received the Karageorge Star for bravery. Her two books o f m em­ oirs, An English Woman Sergeant in the Serbian Arm y (1916) and The A utobiography o f a Woman Soldier: A B rief Record o f Adventure in the Serbian Army, 1916-1919 (1927), offer evidence o f the way Balkan soci­ eties could open up opportunities unavailable for women in Britain at the tim e.161 Attempting to answer the question posed by the title o f the anonymous article in the Graphic, ‘Why the Balkans Attract W omen’, does not necess­ arily explain why so much o f the best writing about what I have referred to as the ‘real’ Balkans (in an effort to encompass all those elusive genres which straddle the boundaries o f fact and fiction but contain descriptions o f real places and historical events), comes from British women rather than men. These works are certainly not free from prejudice and personal bias, errors caused by ignorance and deliberate blindness (even if any

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attempt to expose those might achieve no more than to reveal my own frailties). The explanation given by Rebecca West for her interest in Yugo­ s la v ia -th a t she was interested in the relationships between small countries and great empires - might, translated into gender relations, have made women readier to sympathise with ‘small countries’. More probably, arriv­ ing in the Balkans free from institutional pressures and without a pre-set agenda, women writers created their own itineraries and spoke about their own uncertainties in a way in which many men, having to live up to the role o f experts, could not. Many o f these women travelled to the Balkans in order to find themselves, to discover, to engage and to support a cause, and simply to escape the boredom o f home. In this, they were the true heirs o f Byron.

Chapter Six

Reclaiming Balkan Erewhons*

W e’re back to the Balkans again. Back, where to-morrow the quick may be dead, With a hole in his heart or a ball in his head Back, where the passions are rapid and red Oh, w e’re back to the Balkans again!1 ‘Lord!’ he cried, ‘how I loathe our new manners in foreign policy. The old English way was to regard all foreigners as slightly childish and rather idiotic and ourselves as the only grown-ups in a kindergarten world. That meant that we had a cool detached view and did even-handed unsympathetic justice. But now we have got into the nursery ourselves and are bear-fighting on the floor. We take violent sides, and make pets, and o f course, if you are -phil something or other you have got to be -phobe something else. It is all wrong. We are becoming Balkanized.’2 The 1990s, which began with the wars in the former Yugoslavia and continued with news o f chaos and lawlessness elsewhere in the Balkans, show few superficial parallels with the child-like characters - chocolate soldiers, Ruritanian princes and toy-town revolutionaries - who populate many o f the books I have analysed. The enchanted playground o f Byron’s fictional heirs is similarly obscured by the polluted legacy o f Communism. Grime-covered factories and decrepit nuclear-power stations now dot the Ruritanian landscapes. Ruritania itself is very much alive. It may not have a seat in the United Nations, but newspaper articles mention it more often than many members o f the world organisation. While Cecil Rhodes no longer has a country named after him, Anthony Hope’s influence as an imperialist has proved more enduring. His lucrative statelet, a product o f the entertainm ent industry’s scram ble for novel excitements on the uncharted margins o f Europe, created roughly at the *

‘Ercw hon’ - t h e mythical Nowhere land, created by Samuel Butler in his satirical novels, Erewhon (1872) and Erewhon Revisited ( 19 0 1).

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same time as the final scramble for Africa, lives on. It remains powerful precisely because it is unrecognised. Its insidious strength is born out o f the power o f the Western entertainment industry which dom inates the markets o f the imagination. In meeting its needs this industry is still as ruthless as any imperialist endeavour in the last century. In assuaging the demands o f the popular imagination, the imperialism perpetrated by the entertainment industry plays a role analogous to that played by the more familiar forms o f economic imperialism. Indeed a Marxist critic could argue th at it provides a su b stitu te ‘opium o f the m asses’, based on the subordination o f other peoples, thereby delaying the class struggle. While Europe remained divided into two monolithic blocs, many o f the visions explored in this study seemed obsolete. As the Communist tide withdrew, the Balkans became, once again, highly visible and this, in turn, created a need for a new shorthand for journalists and commentators. If j some o f the volumes I analyse were all but forgotten, they have now been dusted down and cited by journalists and newspaper columnists who, lacking the time to research their subjects thoroughly, are ever eager for readable - a n d quotable - accounts o f life and death in the Balkans. While the turmoil o f the 1990s forged new perceptions o f individual Balkan nationalities, these frequently grew out o f the archetypal representations o f the region which were first established in the nineteenth century and then transmitted and transformed by successive generations o f writers. Stereotypes derived from popular literature remain common currency in many discussions o f the Balkans. While few political commentators cite Rider Haggard in ac­ counts o f contemporary Africa, Hope’s Ruritania or Stoker’s Transylvania - two o f the most powerful products in the history o f entertainment in our era - are regularly invoked in assessments o f present-day Balkan crises. Hidden behind the seemingly clear-cut opposition between ‘Commu­ nist’ and ‘capitalist’ Europe in the post-war era, nineteenth-century ideas o f the Balkans had remained alive. The ‘Balkan’ identity seemed forceful enough to emerge through any superimposed Communist structures. ‘Will the Communist empire absorb the Balkans, or will the Balkans absorb and ‘Balkanize’ Com munism ?’ John C. Campbell asked in an article written in 1963.3 Individual regimes in the Balkans continued to be described with the help o f old, formulaic images. Nicolae Ceau§escu o f Romania plundered his country as thoroughly as a reincarnated Phanariot and was habitually compared to Count Dracula. Romania continued to be seen as more ‘Byzan­ tine’ than other Balkan countries. It continued to function - to use the words o f its most famous historian, Nicolae Iorga - as ‘Byzance après Byzance’,4* Bulgaria was frequently seen, even under socialism, as the Shavian ‘peasant paradise’ o f the Balkans, with its prosperous yoghurt-drinking peasantry *

Iorga was assassinated in 1940 soon after a pro-Axis regime was established in Romania.

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enjoying health and longevity, while Albania was typecast as a secretive and dangerous tribal society (notwithstanding its Stalinist leadership, which was itself, in its internal struggles, influenced by the tribal character o f the country), into which few Westerners dared to - or could - venture. Instead, they viewed ‘the wild Albanian shore’ from Corfu with much the same fr iss o n o f excitem ent as B yron. C om m unist Y ugoslavia, under its ‘Ruritanian’-attired Marshal Josip Broz Tito (in his youth an NCO in the army o f Emperor Franz Joseph, in which capacity he took part in the attack on Serbia in 1914), whose love o f tailored uniforms and fine cigars was proverbial, remained, until its collapse, a relatively benign Balkan heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, held together, like its Habsburg forebear, by shambolic authoritarianism and increasingly complex constitutional ar­ rangements. The marketing o f ‘ethnic variety’ which characterised the former Yugoslavia as a ‘success story’ in the West - as opposed to the more oppressive attitudes towards the minorities adopted in some other Communist countries - helped to highlight apparent differences between the Yugoslav nationalities. Western journalists in the 1990s wrote about the ‘m ulticulturalism’ and ‘multi-ethnicity’ o f Sarajevo, for example, in much the same way as they would write about New York or London. They did not pause to point out exactly what the range o f cultures and ethnicities was in the monoglot, Slav capital o f Bosnia, and indeed repeatedly decried the importance o f religious affiliation, the main defining difference between the different groups who inhabited the city. (At the same time, Belfast - to cite a comparable example - is rarely described as ‘multicultural’ or ‘multi­ ethnic’: the divide is usually described as sectarian.) The disproportionate coverage o f Sarajevo’s minuscule Jewish community helped sustain the modern Western ideal o f a cosmopolitan city. Greece continued to appear more ‘European’ than other Balkan coun­ tries. In a reflection o f the complexity o f the constructions o f identity, the philhellenism which survived the Colonels’ regime o f 1967-74 seems to have been more seriously affected by Greek membership o f the European Union. Once formally within the walls o f the new ‘Europe’, Greece began increasingly to be seen as the Other, a Balkan cuckoo in the EU’s nest. Patronising European attitudes towards Greece in the Balkan crises o f the 1990s bear evidence to this symbolic ‘Balkanisation’ o f the Hellenes. Analyses o f the Balkan situation in the 1990s frequently address the questions o f the ‘essential’ traits o f Balkan identity and its place in Europe - or its difference from it. Political questioning o f the necessity and degree o f European involvement in the Balkans - from peace-keeping in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina to the policing o f A lb a n ia -h a s been particularly indicative o f the ambiguous ways in which the Balkans are perceived. It was, for example, asserted - in a new orientalising move - that the Balkans are not truly ‘European’ in so far as wars o f ‘Balkan’ brutality are unthink­ able elsew here in Europe at the end o f the tw entieth century. Such an

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assertion rarely entails an examination of the systems of cultural privileging which underpin it. ‘Now this part o f southeastern Europe is following suit; catching up, one might almost say, with Modern Europe,’ Timothy Garton Ash remarked in the New York Review o f Books, arguing that Balkanisation can, in many o f its aspects, be seen as a quintessentially Europeanising process, and pointing to the subtle irony o f the fact that it was the Foreign M inister o f Luxembourg who, on behalf o f Europe, pointed out to the na­ tions o f former Yugoslavia that small states are ‘unviable’.5 If a denial o f Balkan ‘Europeanness’ is political in its implications, this is no less true o f the converse, overemphatic, equation between the Balkans and Europe, such as that made by the French philosopher Bernard Henry Levy in his ‘Europe begins at Sarajevo’ campaign during the European elections o f 1995. Although superficially reminiscent o f Shelley’s asser­ tion that ‘we are all Greek,’ Levy’s call prompted few volunteers to emulate the philhellenes o f the nineteenth century. While journalists continued, in a similar vein, to assert that Yugoslavia was ‘our generation’s Spain’, new Orwells and Hemingways were noticeable by their absence; it was worth staking one’s life in the pursuit o f a journalistic career, but not quite so worthwhile to die for any Balkan cause. These assertions o f Balkan ‘Europe­ an n ess’ dem onstrate the continuing em otional pow er o f Rom anticist rhetoric, as each generation desires to pass the tests failed by its pre­ decessors. The Balkans are forced to adapt to any number o f templates thrown at them in the process. The perceptions o f the region have a direct bearing on its future, as they determ ine concrete and important matters such as developm ent loans, economic investment, and the speed o f admission into the European Union or NATO and similar organisations. But as well as determining the rationale for any external involvement in the area, these perceptions have an important impact on political and cultural life inside each Balkan country. In his ar­ ticle entitled ‘The Internal Perceptions o f Romania’s External Image’, Zoltan Rostas points out that Western perceptions influence domestic politics in the Balkans and are frequently used as arguments in internal political struggles.6 The relevance o f examining such perceptions in the West lies in the opportunity to explore the ideas o f Europeanness which every insight into the Balkans yields as its by-product. The degree to which the privileging o f a ‘European’ identity can be used as an acceptable excuse for otherwise unpalatable exclusions has been stressed in the introduction to this book. Throughout, I have sought to emphasise the process by which a body o f literature and its constructions o f a particular identity can end up in a dialogue with itself, thereby continuing to impose a particular template. The presence o f Byron at the beginning o f this particularly British journey into the Balkans has been inspiring as well as inhibiting, as it defined the

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terms o f the debate which many subsequent writers felt duty-bound to address. As if to confirm the assertion made in 1983 by Barbara Jelavich that the Balkan peninsula ‘usually impinged on the Western consciousness only when it has become the scene o f wars’,7 new writing about the Balkans has started to flood into the bookshops over recent years. A wave o f new political memoirs and analyses by politicians, soldiers and journalists from the West has competed for attention with writings from the Balkans. A broad spectrum o f new publications has ranged from the reissuing o f fiction by the only Yugoslav Nobel Prize winner, Ivo Andric (with posthumously doctored titles which sought to exploit the mood o f the m om ent by em phasising A ndric’s Bosnian settings), to the diaries o f young Zlata Filipovic, the ‘Sarajevan Anne Frank’, who now lives with her parents in France and whose authorship has been the subject o f controversy. Indeed A ndric’s settings were temporarily transformed from obscure Bosnian backwaters into desirable destinations for leading foreign correspondents, as each ‘strategic’ town and village had its Warholian seconds o f fame on television. As the Balkans seemed to lurch from crisis to crisis, Western journalists and academics from opposing schools o f thought were given new chances to battle out their differences in the media. In an article entitled ‘Champi­ ons Go to War’, published in the Guardian, Richard Norton-Taylor wrote about the eruption o f ‘open warfare’ between the supporters o f the leftleaning Albanian Society o f Britain and the adherents o f the right-wing, monarchist Albanian Association o f Great Britain. The two organisations, among whose champions Norton-Taylor lists many o f the leading academ­ ics and commentators on Albania in Britain, as well as a number o f MPs, had for years, he writes, been engaged in a ‘largely underground war’ which burst into the open over the right-wingers’ backing for the then Albanian P resid en t Sali B e ris h a .8 In the sam e way new histories o f BosniaHerzegovina, Serbia, Croatia and Albania reflect contemporary attitudes towards the Balkans in the West, as views o f medieval and early modern reality have shifted to make way for the accepted wisdom o f the 1990s, while at the same time helping to legitimise the process o f nation-building in the Balkans themselves. However it was the period o f history which this book largely focuses on - the era between the national revolutions in the nineteenth century and the Communist revolutions in the twentieth - that came to be viewed as the key to understanding the region. Timothy Garton Ash commented: If a Swiss diplomatic observer had gone to sleep after the Congress o f Berlin which assigned Bosnia-Hercegovina to Austria-Hungary in 1878, and awoke now, he would o f course find much to surprise him in the institutionalised cooperation o f West European states. Here, he might

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exclaim, is a permanent Congress o f Berlin! So far as the diplomacy around Bosnia-Hercegovina is concerned . . . a great deal would seem very familiar!9 British writers o f the early years o f this century, such as Saki or Edith Durham, would certainly have found the terms o f the debate sparked by the war in the former Yugoslavia very familiar. Saki’s ideas for the division o f Macedonia under international supervision, or Edith Durham ’s assertion that ‘the vexed question o f Balkan politics might be solved by studying the manners and customs o f each district, and so learning to whom each place should really belong’ would not have been so very different from the brief with which Dr David Owen was dispatched to the Balkans in the 1990s. Indeed, at one point the media were briefed about the need, perceived by Owen, to study the pattern and history o f settlement in the Sarajevo area prior to drawing borders. In his recently published Balkan Odyssey, Dr Owen noted that he was re-reading Rebecca West as he considered whether or not to take up the role o f peace mediator.m The focus on British fiction with Balkan settings - rather than, for example, historiography - is more relevant than it might superficially appear. In terms o f British political and economic interests, the Balkans as a geopolitical entity have always been o f marginal significance. (The sole exception to this - from the moment when the dissolution o f the Ottoman Empire became likely - was Greece, which was deemed to be o f strategic importance to Britain and its empire.) The occasional moments when Balkan issues managed to unite large numbers o f British people in a common cause, such as Gladstone’s Bulgarian Campaign, seem all the more interesting in view o f this marginality. These moments tended to occur when the terms o f the debate sparked by Balkan crises happened to coincide with divisions along the key ideological fault-lines in British political life. In the 1870s, for example, the Gladstone-Disraeli confrontation over British policy in the Balkans mobilised large numbers o f newly enfranchised citizens with few if any direct interests o f their own in the region, and was perhaps the first example o f a truly popular debate about foreign policy. The debate raised the dilemma, for a much wider audience than in Byron’s and Shelley’s day, o f reconciling the interests o f Britain as a great power with the moral dimensions o f foreign policy, much as the recent war in Bosnia-Herzegovina popularised, through TV coverage, questions about the role o f the United States as the sole remaining superpower in the post-Cold War world. In the second half o f the nineteenth century, the newly enfranchised classes also represented a large new body o f readers who, as I point out in Chapter 2, purchased thousands o f copies o f Gladstone’s pamphlets about the Bulgarian Question. Soon they and their progeny were to become the audiences for Balkan-inspired popular literature as the peninsula was plundered for raw material for the entertainment industry. In an increasingly industrialised Europe, the Balkans offered an opportunity to bring together

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the quaintness o f historical romance, with its princes and princesses, and the uncertainties o f the European present - the threat o f war, the fear of invasion and the ever greater internationalisation o f the economic system. Anxieties about the loss o f control were frequently expressed through sinister fictional conspiracies and the anti-Semitic figures of shadowy Jewish financiers who regularly crop up in popular novels with Balkan settings. In Britain, unlike the Germanic world or Russia, there was little special interest in the academic study o f the Balkans (the exception again is the study o f Greece). When it came to fiction, however, and especially to popular and comic literature, the situation is very different. Although French, Russian and German literature all had their own ‘Balkan’ novels and poems (and this study points in its course to numerous examples from Goethe, Pushkin and Turgenev to Balzac and Mérimée), few matched the British-created Balkan imagery for its sheer proliferation and world­ wide influence. The power o f British-created Balkan ‘brand-names’ con­ tinues to scar thinking about the Balkans as surely as British irrigation programmes have salinated the fertile lands o f the Punjab. This is in large part due to the disproportionate impact o f anglophone literature on the British and American film industries. The baton may have been passed to America in view o f its dominance o f the moving image, but it was stereotypes made in Britain, in the throes o f the entertainment revolution from the late nine­ teenth century onwards, which have determined the outside world’s reflex responses to the Balkans. The extent to which Britain led the world in pioneering new genres o f popular fiction, and thus setting a substantia] part o f the agenda for popular entertainment in this century, should not be overlooked. The Prisoner o f Z enda, to cite one o f the m ost obvious examples, sold hundreds o f thousands o f copies at home and abroad long before any o f the popular film versions appeared. Lack o f familiarity with the Balkan world and a corresponding sense of its exoticism and extraordinary complexity (reiterated by almost every British writer who has ever written anything about the region) enabled British authors to use the Balkans as a suitable location for a variety of popular genres. The cultural identities o f the countries them selves are largely disregarded, and they remain in thrall to the imperialist advance o f the expanding industry o f the imagination, eager to chart its maps o f intel­ lectual property rights. The 1890s and the early 1900s brought vampires and imaginary monarchs, and increasingly in this century spies travelled up and down the peninsula. After them came tourists, detectives, seedy businessmen, revolutionaries in disguise, and drug dealers. The Balkans continued to offer locations for imaginary Illyrias and Ruritanias, long after the other corners o f Europe had become too thoroughly explored to house an imaginary town. Many o f their creators never set foot in the peninsula and were, anyway, more preoccupied wilh specific projections o f Britishness than with the accuracy o f their scenic Balkan backdrop.

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Although the debate now centres around the Balkans and their place in or outside Europe, the literature analysed in this book frequently defined ideas o f Britishness as being opposed to a more generalised ‘Continental Other’, o f which the Balkans were only the most extreme example. The assertion o f Anthony Hope, Cecil Roberts or Agatha Christie that ‘this sort o f thing always happens in the Balkans’ is to a degree synonymous with the idea that ‘this sort o f thing always happens on the C ontinent’. W hile the perception o f the inferior ‘Continent’ (Europe) is now sometimes reversed to the point that the British may describe themselves as inferior to the Continental Other (whether in terms o f human-rights guarantees or the educational system, to give but two examples), the place o f the Balkans at the bottom o f the sym bolic scale rem ains largely unchallenged. An interesting reversal o f this hierarchy occurs in writings either created around the time o f the Second World War or inspired by it. As ‘Europe’ becomes threatened from within, Rebecca West is able to equate ‘Britishness’ and ‘Balkanness’ and see Balkan suffering as the key to understanding Europe itself. Sacheverell Sitwell and, to some degree, Patrick Leigh Fermor lament the passing o f a feudal world, the Europe o f peasants and princes the two w riters encountered on their B alkan w anderings. T heir m elancholy reminiscences about the decaying palaces in the East, the pre-industrial Arcadias o f Europe’s Orient, with their Romanticist, more or less openly anti-urban and anti-modernist agenda, are again unmistakably British. Like Ruritania, they represent a retreat into the land o f lost content - personal, free o f economics and bureaucracy - in short, adult fairy tales. There is some irony in the fact that the large number o f popular novels discussed here - for which the Balkans were frequently an incidental setting - has had more persistent influence on the imagery now commonly used to describe the Balkans than the works analysed in the last section o f this book, which are a product o f extensive experience and study o f the area. Popular literature created a repository o f relatively sim ple ‘B alkan’ archetypes which can easily be drawn upon. Adding a pair o f protruding eye-teeth onto a photograph o f the late Romanian Com m unist leader Ceau§escu, or portraying a Balkan head o f state in a heavily gold-braided uniform as ‘R uritanian’ is a form o f shorthand which can, in lieu o f descriptions, be used all over the world. Such trademarks are recognised and used in the Balkans themselves, even if Balkan nations exploit the British-created imagery with a degree o f ambivalence. ‘Romanians are not all that keen on the Dracula legend. In fact they are rather proud of Vlad the Im paler,’ a British journalist points out before describing the vigorous Dracula industry growing around Castle Bran in Transylvania." Few Croatians who enjoy Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express (set largely in Croatia) and few Serbs who read Greene’s Stamboul Train (set partly in Serbia) would see these works as local novels.

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This study has endeavoured to show the different ways in which British popular literature, in its exploitation o f Balkan settings and m otifs, transm itted and transform ed the central am biguity in the R om antics’ perceptions o f the peninsula. Byron’s or Shelley’s desire to show that the area is part o f ‘our w orld’ (and should therefore be supported in its struggle against its alien Ottoman rulers) went hand in hand with the impulse to exoticise the Balkans. Byron’s ambiguous literary use o f Greece as a setting is a good illustration o f these contradictory urges. The Balkans continued, for generations o f British writers after Byron, to provide a blank page upon which ambiguities o f this kind could be imposed. Popular novelists praised an increasingly ordered, civilised Europe, while desiring to preserve a blazing, chaotic corner o f it in the Balkans. The urges to industrialise and urbanise the continent went hand in hand with the need to preserve one last Romantic sanctuary untouched by progress. The members o f the Arts and Crafts movement and the architects o f the new garden suburbs in London found their literary counterparts in the writers o f Balkan romances. If popular adventure stories exploited the ‘familiarly alien’ world o f the Balkans which was created by the Romantics in their desire to escape the increasingly ordered world o f industrialised W estern Europe, com ic literature exploited very similar imagery. Humour, much more than other genres, needs to function though ‘recognition’. To be effective, it requires a shared fund o f knowledge and imagery, embodied in this case in a set of familiar stereotypes and perceptions. The truth o f the Balkans is o f much less use than the ‘truth’ o f the British perceptions o f it. An analysis of comic representations o f the Balkans shows how little bearing writers’ actual experience o f the peninsula has on the comic representations o f the region in th eir fiction. Shaw and D urrell describe pathetic B alkan m isunderstandings o f what it means to be European through relatively similar imagery, although Shaw had to use an atlas to locate the settings of Arms and the Man, while Durrell actually lived in the locales o f his Antrobus stories. Saki’s personal experience o f Macedonia, Bulgaria and Serbia is directly represented only in a handful o f exotic toponyms. The strategic use o f the adjective Balkan in Saki’s humour suggests that he expected his readers to take the mere word as a signal for all kinds o f comic confusions. While this study attempts to compare the representations o f the Balkans in specific works with an author’s actual knowledge o f the region, the degree o f ‘tru th ’ inherent in their representations frequently seem s irrelevant. How does one evaluate the ‘reality’ o f an explicitly imaginary kingdom such as Ruritania; the story o f Dracula, a Wallachian feudal lord, which has been deliberately removed to Transylvania; or the atmospheric descriptions o f Greene’s Subotica, a town in northern Vojvodina(in Serbia) never actually seen by the writer, even on a postcard, in a situation in which neither the writer’s nor the readers’ primary concern is the accuracy o f representation?

Reclaiming Balkan Erewhons

211

The question o f truthfulness, as the acrimonious argument between Rebecca West and Edith Durham described in the preceding chapter dem­ onstrates, is hardly any more tractable in the case of works which explicitly set out to portray the ‘real’ Balkans. These works show a similar depen­ dence on the structures imposed by intellectual and literary movements, and even the geographical delineation o f the area, as the introduction points out, varies according to political convenience. There could be as many Balkan ‘truths’ as there are tellers, and instead o f truth we can more use­ fully talk about the changing perceptions o f truthfulness. Thus West’s work, which was recommended as ‘still one o f the best general introductions to the country (Yugoslavia) and its people’ in 1991,12 is now regarded as needing an introduction, and is thus published with a ‘historical explana­ tion’ o f her pro-Yugoslav and pro-Serb attitudes.11 Edith Durham’s cham­ pioning o f the Albanians or Evelyn Waugh’s campaign on behalf o f Croatian Catholics have undergone similar evaluations and re-evaluations in tune with the political master-narratives o f the day. The concept o f imaginative, textual colonisation, as suggested by this examination o f literary exploitation o f the Balkans, shows the way in which an area can be exploited as an object o f the dominant culture’s need for a dialogue with itself. Indeed, the same methodology could be readily applied to other parts o f the world, but the process can be observed with particular clarity in south-east Europe in the view o f the virtual absence o f fully fledged conventional Western imperialism. The Balkan nations, like other small nations o f the world, are forced to learn not only the language o f the West, but the archetypes and stereotypes which underpin that language, if the communication is not to be like the one between the Pasha and the young English traveller in Kinglake’s Eothen, quoted at the beginning of the section devoted to comic visions o f the Balkans.* Just as many o f the nascent genres o f popular literature exploited Balkan locales, so, from the 1870s onwards, Balkan political crises continued to feed the industries o f conscience created by the development o f new forms o f journalism and the spread o f foreign reporting. Like the development o f popular literature, the birth o f these industries (reflected in the fact that a number o f the writers examined here encountered the Balkans as foreign reporters) coincides with the emergence o f newly enfranchised groups in society which, to an unprecedented extent, had the leisure, the money and the ability to enjoy the printed word.* As the media-based industries o f *

*

One o f the most quoted political statements from the war in B osnia w as that made by its president Alija Izetbegovic in which he compared the map o f his country with a painting by Jackson Pollock. The comparison - so effective for Western journalists - could hardly have been more obscure to a Balkan audience. The activities o f W.T. Stead, to whom I draw attention in Chapter 2, reflect many o f these developm ents.

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conscience have become even more important with the decline o f traditional political party activism over the past decades, they need to manufacture in order to meet an insatiable appetite for involvement - countless new ‘Others’ both at home and abroad. In this, the Balkans again provide an apparently inexhaustible quarry, with an almost unbroken line of passionate engagement stretching from Byron to Martin Bell, the former BBC war correspondent from Bosnia, and the first independent MP for decades to be elected to the British Parliament, voted in, tellingly, on an anti-corruption ticket. Just as B yron’s Balkan costum e was an iconic symbol o f his convictions, the whiteness o f the suit in which Bell filed his reports from Bosnia and then led his political campaign in Britain indicated once again a direct connection between Western interest in Balkan crises and the desire for self-examination. The fact that debates about the Balkans still become heated and induce name-calling in a way which is rarely encountered in the coverage o f recent conflicts in Rwanda or Zaire, is just as much a product o f the greater proxim ity o f the Balkans as o f the fact that the area is ‘E uropean’. Apparently free from possible imputations o f racism, it continues to offer up old-style orientalised villains and Westernised heroes. Our political imagination, after all, feeds off much the same archetypes as literature. In politics, as in literature, Ruritania outlives Hope.

NOTES

Slavic Review: American Quarterly o f Russian, Eurasian and East-European Studies, 5/1, (Spring 1992), pp. 1-15.

Preface I

R ichard Bassett, Balkan Hours. Travels in Other Europe (London: John M urray,

1990). 2. Robert D. Kaplan, Balkan Ghosts. A Jour­ ney Through History (New York: St. Mar­ tin ’s Press, 1993) p. xxi.

C hapter One: ‘And w hat should I do in Illyria?’ 1. W illiam Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, I. ii, line 3. 2. ‘Balkan peninsula’, in The Encyclopae­ dia Britannica. 11th edn, (New York: En­ cyclopaedia Britannica, 1910), vol. III. pp. 2 5 8 -6 1 . The Dobrudja, south o f the final D anube bend, is divided between Bulgaria and Rom ania, ‘N ovibazar’ lies along the Serbian and M ontenegrin bor­ ders, and Servia’s English spelling inspired by classical Greek changed to Serbia as a m inor consequence o f W orld W ar I. 3. ‘B alk an p e n in s u la ’, in Encyclopedia Americana. International edn (New York: G rolier, 1991), vol. I 4. The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), vol. I. 5. Ibid 6. Dic(ionar Limbii Romane, (Bucharest: A cadem ia Rom ana, 1913). 7. Recnik srpskohrvatskoga knjizevnog jezika, (Novi Sad, Zagreb: M atica srpska, 1967), vol. 1. 8. The Oxford English Dictionary ( 1989). 9. Q u o te d in T im L aw re n ce and P eter G u ttr id g e , ‘R e lo a d in g th e A n c ie n t C an o n ’, The Independent, 21 N ovem ber 1994, p. 23. 10. A nthony Bevins, ‘W hitehall Ruined by Tory Y ears’, The Independent, 31 M arch 1997, p. 1. 11. M ilica B ak i£ -H ay den and R obert M. Hayden, ‘O rientalist Variations on the Them e ‘B alkans': Sym bolic Geography in Kcccnt Y ugoslav C ultural Politics’,

12. Ibid 13. Michael Herzfeld, ‘Romanticism and Hel­ lenism: Burdens o f O therness’, Anthro­

pology Through the Looking Glass: Criti­ cal Ethnography in the margins o f Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 1-27. 14. E.g. A ndrew G um bel, ‘A n End to the Greek M yth’, The Independent, 17 Janu­ ary 1996, p. 7. 15. M ichael Herzfeld, ‘The D ouble-H eaded Eagle: S elf-K now ledge and S elf-D isplay’, op. cit.. p. 108. 16. A J P. Taylor, The Habsburg Monarchy

1809-1918. A History o f the Austrian Empire and Austria-Hungary (London:

17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

22. 23.

24. 25.

Penguin, 1964), p. 11. (First published in 1948.) Imre Karacs, ‘A ustria Vows to Repel A l­ ien Balkan T id e’, The Independent, 19 April 1997, p. 16. Robert D. Kaplan, Balkan Ghosts A Jour­ ney through History, (New York: St M ar­ tin ’s Press, 1993), p. xxiii. T a ra s K e rm a u n c r, ‘P ism o srp s k o m prijatelju’, Nin, B elgrade,9 August 1987, p. 23. Quoted in English translation in M. Bakic-Hayden and R.M. Hayden, op. cit. John Lukacs, ‘In D arkest T ransylvania’, New Republic, 3 February 1982. Q uoted in Robert D. Kaplan, op.cit., p. 149. My italics. C h ris tin e S u th e r la n d , Enchantress Marthe Bibesco and Her World. (London: John M urray, 1997), p. xvi. Q uoted in M ilica B a k ic -H ay d e n and R obert M. H ayden, op. c it D espina C h risto d o u lu , ‘T he P lace o f Greece in E urope’, The Independent, 19 January 1996, p. 18. M y italics. Q uoted in M ilica B a k ic -H ay d e n and R obert M. H ayden, op. cit. Q uoted by W endy B racew ell, o f the School o f Slavonic and East European Studies, University o f London, in an un­ p u b lis h e d p a p e r , “ E u r o p e a n ls m ',

214

Notes to pages 8-13

‘O rien talism ’, and N ational M yths in Y u g o slav ia’. 26. R. G. D. Laffan, The Serbs. The Guard­ ians at the Gate (New York: Dorset Press, 1989), pp. 299. First published in L on­ don in 1918. R ebecca W est, Black Lamb

and Grey Falcon. A Journey Through Yu­ goslavia, (London: M acm illan, 1982). (First published in 1941.) 27. Harry de Windt, Through Savage Europe.

Be ing the Narrative o f a Journey (Under­ taken by Special Correspondent o f the Westminster Gazette) throughout the Bal­ kan States and European Russia (Lon­ don: T. Fisher U nwin, 1906). 28. Harold Spender, The Cauldron o f Europe (London: H. F. & G. Witherby, 1925), p. 9. 29. S tatem ent m ade by the Belgrade actor B o ra T o d o ro v ic . Q u o te d in M is h a Glenny, The Fall o f Yugoslavia. The Third Balkan War (London : Penguin 1992), p. x. (M y italics). The New York Times, 23 July 1992. Quoted in Stjepan G. MeStrovic,

The Balkanization o f the West. The Con­ fluence o f Postmodernism and Post­ communism (L ondon and N ew York: R outledge, 1994), p. 20. 30. M ilica B ak ic-H ayden and R obert M. H ayden, op. cit. 31. M arilyn Butler, ‘R om anticism in E ng­ lan d ’, in Roy Porter and Mikulää Teich (eds), Romanticism in a National Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 59. 32. N otable exam ples o f bibliographical re­ search in this field include: Vojislav M. Jovanovic, An English Bibliography o f

A lbanian C om m unist president, E nver Hoxha, m entions her name as a rare ‘hon­ ourable’ exception am ong British writers in his book entitled The Anglo-American Threat to Albania. See John Hodgson: ‘Edith Durham , T raveller and P ublicist’, in John B. A llcock and A ntonia Y oung (eds), Black Lamb and Grey Falcons Women Travellers in the Balkans (B rad­ ford: University o f Bradford Press, 1991), pp. 8-28. 34. The Great Fortune and The Spoilt City, volum es one and two o f The Balkan Tril­ ogy, were published by Univers Publish­ ers in B ucharest in 1996. The sam e pub­ lisher, one o f the m ost prestigious pub­ lishing houses in Rom ania, brought out volum e three, Friends and Heroes, in 1997. All were translated into Rom anian by Diana Stanciu. The launches at the Bu­ charest International Book Fair in 1996 and 1997 received considerable public­ ity in the Rom anian media. 35. Svetozar Ignjacevic’s study, Zemljacuda и izlomljenom ogledalu, offers, for the first tim e in Serbo-Croat, a detailed ac­ count o f his work. S.M Ignjacevic, Zemlja

cuda и izlomljenom ogledalu Moderni britanski pisci ijugoslovenska tematika,

36.

the Near-Eastern Question, 1481-1906 (B elg rad e: S erv ian R oyal A cadem y, 1909); A leksandar M atkovski, Balkanot

vo delata na stranskite patopisci vo vremeto na turskoto vladeenje: Janichari, haremi, robovi (Skopje: Kultura, 1992); M aria N. Todorova, Angliiski putepisi za Balkanite, kraia na XVl-30-te godine na XIXvek, Uvod, sustavitelstvo i kom entar M a ria N. T o d o ro v a, (S ofia: N a u k a i izkustvo, 1987). 33. T ennyson’s sonnet ‘M ontenegro’, forexample, was subject to a number o f detailed stu d ie s in Y u g o s la v ia . S ee: S im h a K abiljo-Sutic, Posrednici dveju kultura (B e lg ra d e : In s titu t z a k n jiz e v n o s t i um etnost, 1989), pp. 72-132. Sim ilarly, Edith D urham ’s work has been a focus o f interest in A lbania. The Albanian En­ cyclopaedic Dictionary, published in 1985. says that ‘she remained until the end n defender ol the cuu.se o f Albania ’ The

37. 38.

39.

(Belgrade: DBR Publishing, 1995), p. 251. A selection o f D urrell’s sketches appeared in Zagreb in 1991, as Pjevaci diplomatskogzbora, translated by Zlatko C rnkovic (Zagreb: Znanje, 1991). E velyn W augh’s Sword o f Honour tril­ ogy was published in C roatia as: Pocasni mac: I Ljudi pod oruzfem, II Casnici i gospoda, III Bezuvjetnapredaja (Zagreb: Z n a n je , 1993), tra n s la te d by Z la tk o Crnkovic. W augh’s Report on the Catho­ lic Church in Croatia w as published as Izvjesce Evelyna Waugha, translated by Z latko C rnkovic, in the Marulic review, 2 7 / 1, 1994, pp. 12-30. Taylor, op. cit. Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Fal­ con. Сто jagnje i sivi soko. T ranslated and abridged by N ikola K oljevic, (Bel­ grade, Sarajevo: BIGZ, Svjetlost, 1989). Betw een 15 M ay 1991 and 15 February 1993, the B e lg ra d e lite ra ry re v ie w , Knjiievne novine, published A na S elic’s translations o f those sections which had been edited out o f the abridged version. B arbara Jelavich, History o f the Balkans

Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (CCambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). p ix 40. К mi mcs, op. cit

Notes to pages 14—20 Chapter Two: B yron ’s Children

215

1. B yron’s letter to Henry Drury o f 3 May 1810. M archand, op. cit., p. 37. 2. See T erence Spencer, Fair Greece Sad

Penguin Books, 1991), p. 119. (First pub­ lished in 1978.) 19. Robert Escarpit, ‘Byron and France. B y­ ron as a Political Figure’, in Paul Graham Trueblood (ed.), Byron 's Political and

Relic Literary Philhellenismfrom Shake­ speare to Byron (London: W eidenfeld

Cultural Influence in Nineteenth Century Europe A Symposium (London: M ac­

and N icholson, 1954), p. 242. 3. M ary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes. Travel Writing and Transculturation, (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 138. 4. B yron’s letter to Henry Drury o f 3 May 1810. M archand, op. cit., p. 37. 5. Q uoted in Nigel Leask, British Romantic

millan, 1981), pp. 4 8 -5 8 . 20. George G ordon B yron, ‘T he C urse o f M inerva’, in The Poetical Works, (Lon­ don: Oxford University Press, 1959), p. 144. 21. Piotr Kuhiwczak, ‘Reading Byron in EastCentral E urope’, in Sim ha Kabiljo-Sutic (ed ), Bajron i bajronizam u ju g o -

Writers and the East. Anxieties o f Empire

6. 7.

8. 9.

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 13. Q uoted in Leask, op. cit., p. 23. M ichalis P apaconstantinou, ‘The B al­ k a n s’, in Balkan Forum, 3/1 (no. 10) (Skopje, 1995), pp. 5-7 . (Quotation from the book Diary o f a Politician, Athens, 1994.) See Pratt, op. cit., p. 23. Lady M ary W ortley M ontagu, Letters to

the Right Honourable Lady M—y W—y M —e. Written during her Travels in Eu­ rope, Asia and Africa, to Persons o f Dis­ tinction, Men o f Letters &c. in Different Parts o f Europe. 3 vols (L ondon: T. Beckett and P A. De H ondt, 1763). 10. John Lindsay, Earl o f Crawford, Memoirs

o f his Life, describing many o f the high­ est military atchievements in the late wars, more particularly in the campaign against the Turks, wherein his Lordship served both the Imperial and Russian ar­ mies. Com piled from his own papers by Richard Rolt (London, 1753). 11. Pratt, op. cit., p. 11: ‘The eighteenth cen­ tury has been identified as a period in w hich N orthern Europe assured itself as the center o f civilization, claim ing the legacy o f the M editerranean as its ow n.’ 12. Spencer, op. c it, p 167. 13. Ibid., p. 146. 14. R om aic is the vernacular language o f m odern Greece. 15. Spencer, op. c it, p. 165. 16. See Pratt, op. cit., pp. 63^1, on the proc­ ess o f deculturation and the ‘denial o f coevalness’. The ethnographic gesture, Pratt argues, ‘hom ogenizes the people to be subjected, that is, produced as subjects into a collective they, w hich distils down even further into an iconic he (the stand­ ard adult m ale specim en).' 17. Nigel Leask, op. cit , p. 13. IK. Edward W Said, Orientalism (London:

slovenskim knjizevnostima (Byron and Byromsm in Yugoslav literatures) (B el­ grade, Z agreb, Pozarevac: Institut za knj izevnost i um etnost, Zavod za znanost o k n jizev n o sti F ilo zo fsk o g fakulteta, 1991), pp. 33-39. 22. See, for exam ple, B arbara Jelavich, His­

tory o f the Balkans Eighteenth and Nine­ teenth Centuries, vol. I (Cambridge: Cam ­ bridge U niversity Press, 1983), p. 255. 23. George Gordon Byron, Don Juan, Canto III, 85, lines 673-80. Jerom e J. M cGann (ed ), Byron. The Oxford Authors series, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 509. 24. G eorgeG ordonB yron,‘F o u ro rF iv eR e a­ s o n s in F a v o u r o f a C h a n g e ’, in M archand, op. c it, p. 47. 25. E .G . P rotopsalis,‘Byron and Greece. By­ ro n ’s Love o f Classical Greece and his R ole in th e G re e k R e v o lu tio n ’, in Trueblood (ed.), op. cit., pp. 91—107. 26. George G ordon Byron, ‘Song ( ‘M aid o f Athens, ere we p art’) ’, in M cGann (ed ), op. cit., p. 16 27. George Gordon Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, in M cGann (ed.), op. cit., pp. 19-206. 28. F re d e ric R a p h a e l, Byron (L o n d o n : Tham es and Hudson, 1982), p. 40. 29. Byron’s letter to Mrs Catherine Gordon Byron, 12 N ovem ber 1809 in M archand, op. cit., p. 30. 30. B yron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, C anto II, 58, lines 514-22, in M cGann, op. cit., p. 69. 31. Ib id ., C a n to II, 3 8 , lin e s 3 3 8 - 9 , in M cGann, op. cit., p. 63. 32. Ibid., C anto II, 43, line 380, in M cGann, op. cit., p. 65. 33. Ib id ., C a n to II, 4 2, lin es 7 3 5 - 9 , in: McGann, op. cit., p. 65. 34. Ibid., note to C anto II, 42, line 338, in McGann, op. cit., p. 87.

216

Notes to pages 20-25

35. Ib id ., C a n to II, 73, lin e s 6 9 3 - 4 , in M cGann, op. cit., p. 75. 36. B yron, ‘The C urse o f M inerva’, The Po­ etical Works (London: Oxford University Press, 1959), pp. 142-5. Cf. O livia M an­ ning’s account o f the Acropolis on p. 195. 37. B yron, The Giaour, lines 9 1 -7 . The Po­ etical Works (London: Oxford University Press, 1959), p. 253. 38. B y ro n , Childe H arold’s Pilgrimage, C anto II, 3, line 20, in M cGann, op. cit., p. 54. 39. Ibid., Canto II, 2, line 12, in M cGann, op. cit., p. 53. 40. B yron, The Giaour, lines 114-20. The Poetical Works (London: Oxford Univer­ sity Press, 1959), p. 253. 4 1. Byron, Don Juan, Canto V, 42, lines 32 9 36, in M cGann, op. cit., p. 558. 42. B y ro n ’s letter to Henry Drury, 3, May 1810, in M archand, op. cit., p. 36. 43. Ibid. 44. Percy Bysshe Shelley, Hellas. A Lyrical Drama, lines 2 4 0 -8 , in Poetical Works ed. T hom as H utchison, corrected by G. M. M atthews (Oxford and New York: Ox­ ford University Press, 1971), pp. 446-81. 45. Ibid., lines 6 9 6 -7 0 0, p. 468. 46. Ibid., preface, p. 446. 47. Byron, The Bride o f Abydos. XIII, line 219. The Poetical Works (London: O x­ ford U niversity Press, 1959), p. 271. 48. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communi­

ties. Reflections on the Origins and Spread o f Nationalism. Rev. ed (London and N ew York: Verso, 1991), p. 11. 49. Ibid., p. 70. 50. 'W hen the lim bs o f the Greeks are a little less stiff from the shackles o f four centu­ ries - they will not m arch so m uch ‘as if they had gyves on their legs’, ’ Byron noted in his 'Journal in C ephalonia’, on 28 Septem ber 1823, in Marchand, op. cit., p. 298. 5 1. Abbe Alberto Fortis, Travels into Dalma­

tia; containing general information on the natural history o f the country and the neighbouring islands; the natural pro­ ductions, arts, manners and customs o f the inhabitants. In a series o f lettersfrom Abbe Alberto Fortis to the Earl o f Bute, the Bishop o f Londonderry, John Strange Esq. Ac. To which are added by the same author, observations on the island o f Cherso and Osero. T ranslated from the Italian under the author’s inspection. With tin appendix, and other considerable il­ lustrations, never before printed. Illus­ trated with twenty coppcr plates (London

J. Robson, 1778). 52. See M ihajlo B. Pavlovic, Jugoslovenske

teme u francuskoj prozi (Les Thèmes yougoslaves dans la prose littéraire fra n ça ise), (B e lg ra d e : I n s titu t za knjizevnost i um etnost, 1982), p. 13. 53. An article by V. Jo v a n o v ic ( ‘A L ost Translation by Scott’, The Athenaeum, no. 4219 (5 Septem ber 1908), p. 270), led to the discovery o f the m anuscript in 1924. 54. B yron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, notes to Cantos I-II, line 649 in M cGann, op. cit., pp. 9 0 -1 . 55. Ibid., lines 649 -9 2 in M cGann, op. cit., p. 92. 56. Exam ples o f such translations include:

Translationsfrom the Servian Minstrelsy; to which are added some specimens o f Anglo-Norman Romances. P riv a te ly printed (London, 1826); John Bowring,

Narodne srpske pjesme Servian Popular Poetry, translated by John Bowring Jos te braca da vam rijec kazem! (L ondon: Printed for the Author, 1827), pp. xlviii, 235. 57. See, for exam ple, T. Keightley, ‘Illyrian p o etry ’, in Foreign Quarterly Review (June 1828), p. 662; [Anon.], ‘Servian Songs and B allads’, [4 poems] in Dublin University Magazine, (June 1854), pp. 6 6 8 -9 ; [A non ], ‘S ervian B a llad s’, in Chambers's Journal, (Septem ber 1855), pp. 190-2. 58. Honoré de Balzac, La Comédie humaine.

Etudes des moeures: Scènes de la vie privée, II Modeste Mignon - Un Début dans la vie. Texte révisé et annoté par

59.

60. 61.

62. 63. 64.

Marcel Bouteron et Henri Longon, (Paris: Louis Connard, 1947), p. 358. Revd George Croly, ‘C zem i G eorge’, in The Poetical Works. 2 v o ls (L ondon: H enry C olburn and R ichard B entley, 1830), vol. I, pp. 166-76. Ibid. W illiam F. M ontgom ery and G eorge F. Buckle, The Life o f Benjamin Disraeli, Earl ofBeaconsfield. 2 vols (New York: R ussell & Russell, 1968), vol. I, p. 162. Jane Ridley, The Young Disraeli (Lon­ don: Sinclair Stevenson, 1995), p. 89. Ibid., p. 90. See Patrick Brantlinger, Rule o f Darkness.

British Literature and Imperialism 18301914 (Ithaca and London: Cornell Uni­ versity Press, 1988), p. 148. Benjamin Disraeli, Contarini Fleming. A Psychological Romance (N ew Y ork: Knopf, n. d,), pp. 316-17. My italics. 66. Jcluvich, op cit., p. 70.

65.

Notes to pages 26-32 67.

68.

69.

70.

71 72.

73.

Leslie A. Marchand (ed.), For Freedom's Battle. Byron’s Letters and Journals, vol. XI (London: John M urray, 1981), p. 71. Shelley, ‘Preface to Hellas', in Poetical Works, ed. T. Hutchison (Oxford: Oxford U niversity Press, 1971), p. 448. Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Revolt o f Is­ lam. A Poem in Twelve Cantos in Poeti­ cal Works, ed. T. H utchison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), Canto IV, X X V ,p . 77. G eo rg e G o rd o n B y ro n , ‘T he A ge o f B ronze’, lines 2 9 8 -3 0 5 , in The Poetical Works o f Lord Byron, pp. 169—78. Shelley, Hellas, A Lyrical Drama, lines 537-43, in Poetical Works (1971), p. 465. L. S. Stavrianos, Greece: American Di­ lemma and Opportunity (Chicago: Re­ gency, 1952), epigraph. M. S. Anderson, The Eastern Question

1774-1923. A Study in International Re­ lations (London: M acm illan, 1982), p. 389. 74. Ibid., p. 393. 75. Q uoted in Patrick W addington, From the

Russian Fugitive to the Ballad o f Bulgarie Episodes in English Literary Attitudes to Russia from Wordsworth to Swinburne (O x fo rd and P rovidence: Berg, 1994), p. 183. The Nation, XXIII (5 O ctober 1876), p. 213. 77. Leon Edel and Dan H. Laurence, A Bibli­ ography o f Henry James. 3rd edn, revised with the assistance o f Jam es Rambeau (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), p. 320. 78. Philip M agnus, Gladstone A Biography (London: John M urray, 1968), p. 240. 79. R obert Blake, Disraeli's Grand Tour:

1876), pp. CIV, 445; Illyrian Letters, a Revised Selection o f Correspondence from the Illyrian Provinces o f Bosnia, Herzegovina, Montenegro, Albania, Dal­ matia, Croatia and Slavonia, Addressed to the Manchester Guardian during the Year 1877 (London: Longm ans, Green, 1878), pp. XXI, 255; The Slavs and Eu­ ropean Civilisation (London: Longmans, Green, 1878), p. 32. 89. W. J. Stillman, Herzegovina and the Late

Uprising: the Causes o f the Latter and the Remedies. From the Notes and Letters o f a Special Correspondent (London : Long­ mans, Green, 1877), pp. IV, 186. 90. Vojislav M. Jovanovic, Engleska biblio-

grafija o Istocnom pitanju u Evropi Drugo, dopunjeno i ispravljeno izdanje. P riredila Dr M arta F rajnd (B elgrade: Institut zaknjizevnosti umetnost, 1978). 91 11. A. M unro-Butlcr-Johnstone, The East­ ern Question (London: Private edition, 1875), p. 50. 92. H. A. M u n ro -B u tle r-J o h n sto n e , The

Turks their Characters, Manners and In­ stitutions, as bearing on the Eastern Question, (London: James Parker, 1876), p 43. 93. Ibid., p. 44. 94. Alfred Austin, Tory Horrors or the Ques­

tion ofthe Hour A Letter to the Right Hon W E. Gladstone MP (London: C hatto & W indus, 1876); Russia before Europe,

76.

(London: Chatto & W indus, 1876). 95. A lfred A ustin, England's Policy and

Peril: A Letter to the Ear! o f Beaconsfteld, (London: John M urray, 1877). 96.

Benjamin Disraeli and the Holy Land, 1830-31 (L o n d o n : W e id e n fe ld & N icolson, 1982), p. 58. 80. Q uoted in W addington, op. cit., p. 183. 81. M agnus, op. cit., pp. 240 -1 . 82. W illiam E. Gladstone, Bulgarian Horrors and the Question o f the East (London: John M urray, 1876), p. 64. 83. John M orley, The Life o f William Ewart Gladstone. 2 vols (London: M acm illan, 1906), vol. II, p. 160. 84. See W addington, op. cit., p. 180. 85. M agnus, op. cit., p. 243. 86. Q uoted in M orley, op. cit., vol. II, p. 168. 87. M agnus, op. cit., p. 245. 88. In c lu d in g A rth u r J. E v an s, Through

Bosnia and the Herzegovina on Foot dur­ ing the Insurrection, A ugust and Septem­ ber 1875 With an Historical Review o f Bosnia (London: L ongm ans, Green,

217

97.

The Position o f the Christian Population in Bosnia Herzegovina Report o f the Consul o f One o f the Great Powers (Lon­ don, 1875); Turkey and India or Our Moslems. A Question o f the Present Cri­ sis by S. (An Indian Civil Officer), (Lon­ don, 1876); Opinion on the Eastern Ques­ tion, by a Russian General (L ondon, 1876); Thé Cabinet Council and the Im­ pending War. By an Englishman (Lon­ don: W. M itchell, 1876); The Crimean War or the Turk Avenged By a London Physician, (London: Harrison, 1876); The Essence o f the Eastern Question, with a Few Plain Words on the Case o f Turk and Tory Versus the People o f England. By an Old Diplomatist (London: Phillpot, 1876); The Indignation Meetings o f the Liberals and the Conduct o f Affairs in the East By an English LiberaI (London: W illiam Ridgway, 1876). ' R A ,L. ', Old Nabob Picklts, the Naughty

218

Notes to pages 32-40 Turk and his Little Slave Selina Servia

115. A lfred Lord T ennyson, ‘M ontenegro’,

(Canterbury, 1876); Comus, The Devil's

The Nineteenth Century. A Monthly Re­ view, no. Ill (M ay 1877), p. 359. 116. Petar II Petrovic-NjegoS, Gorski Vijenac, (The Mountain Wreath). Translated and

Visit to Bulgaria and Other Lands (Brighton: W. Junor, 1876); [Anon.], Mrs

Britannia s East-Wind Symptoms, Treat­ ment, and Previous Medical History. By Her Chemist ’s Unrecognized Apprentice (Dublin: Hodges, Froster & Figgis, 1876). 98.

The Complete War Guide with a Sketch Map o f the Fields o f Operation (Manches­

117. 118.

ter: John Heywood; London: Simpkin, M arshall, 1877). 99. Outrages in Bulgaria. The Latest Authen­

tic Details. Horrible Scenes at Batak. Re­ port o f the Special Commissioner o f the “D aily N ew s" (L iv e r p o o l: G e o rg e 100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105.

106.

107. 108. 109.

110.

Howden, 1876). Q uoted in M orley, op. cit., p. 169. Ibid., p. 173. Ibid., p. 174. Gladstone’s speech, quoted in Morley, op cit., pp. 175-6. W addington, op. cit., p. 78. A lfred Lord Tennyson, ‘N apoleon’s Re­ treat from M oscow ’ (1827-8). Quoted in W addington, op. cit., p. 68. A lfre d L o rd T e n n y so n , ‘P o la n d ’, in C hristopher Ricks (ed.), The Poems of Tennyson in Three Volumes. 2nd edn, in­ corporating the T rinity C ollege m anu­ scripts (Harlow: Longman, 1987), vol. I, pp. 4 9 8 -9 . Alfred Lord Tennyson, ‘Hail B riton’, in Ricks (ed.), op. cit., vol. I, pp. 529-30. Q uoted in W addington, op. cit., p. 60. Hallam T ennyson , Alfred Lord Tennyson. A Memoir by His Son. 2 vols, (London: M acm illan, 1897), vol. II, p. 217. Sir Thom as Henry Hall Caine (ed.), Son­

nets o f Three Centuries: A Selection In­ cluding Many Examples Hitherto Unpub­ lished (L o n d o n : E llio t S tock, 1882); Sam uel W addington (ed.), English Son­ nets by Living Writers, Selected and Ar­ ranged, with a Note on the History o f the Sonnet’ (London: Bell & Sons, 1881); W illiam Sharp (ed.), Sonnets o f This Cen­ tury. Edited and Arranged, with a Criti­ cal Introduction on the Sonnet (London: W alter Scott, 1886). Cf. W addington, op. cit., p. 240. 111. Q uoted in W addington, op. cit., p. 103. 112. W . E. G la d s to n e , ‘M o n te n e g ro . A S k e tc h ’, The Nineteenth Century. A Monthly Review, no. Ill (M ay 1877), pp. 360-79. 113. Iln llam T en n y so n,op.cit., vol. II,p. 217. I 14 llyron, ( ' hihU• Harold's Pilgrimaget. Canto II, 42, in McGann (cd ), op. cit., p. 65.

119. 120. 121.

122. 123. 124. 125.

edited by V asa D. M ihajlovic. 2nd edn (Belgrade: Vajat, 1989), lines 2 6 2 -9 , pp. 12-3. Tennyson, op. cit. NjegoS, op. cit. Cf. Anna Karenina, where one o f T olstoy’s characters refers to the M ontenegrins as ‘born w arrio rs’. Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (Oxford: Oxford U niversity Press, 1995), p. 672. W addington, op. cit.. p. 105. Ibid., p. 168. Algernon Charles Swinburne, ‘R izpah’, in Collected Poetical Works (London: William Heinemann, 1935), vol. I, p. 427. Ibid., p. 168. W addington, op. cit., p. 179. Ibid. A lgernon Charles Swinburne, Note o f an

English Republican Against the Musco­ vite Crusade (London: Chatto & Windus, 1876). 126. See W addington, op. cit., pp. 186-7. 127. Thomas Carlyle, ‘M rC arlyle on the East­ ern Q uestion’, The Times, 28 N ovem ber 1876, p. 12. 128. Ibid. 129. A lgernon Charles Swinburne, Note o f an English Republican, pp. 4 -5 . 130. Ibid., p. 10. 131. Ibid., p. 23. 132. Note o f an English Republican, reviewed in The Athenaeum, no. 2656, 23 D ecem ­ ber 1876, p. 827. 133. Q uoted in T. A. J. Burnett, ‘S w inburne’s The Ballad o f B ulgarie’, Modern Lan­ guage Review, 64 (1969), pp. 27 6 -8 2 . 134. The Swinburne Letters, ed. Cecil Y. Lang 6 v o ls (N ew H aven: Y ale U niversity Press, 1959-62), vol. Ill, pp. 227 -9 . 135. Ibid., pp. 229-30. 136. Burnett, op. cit. 137. W addington, op. cit., p. 78. 138. Ibid., p. 79. 139. A lgernon Charles Swinburne, ‘The B al­ lad o f Bulgarie’, in Burnett, op. cit., stanza 2, p. 280. M y italics. 140. Ibid., stanza 10, p. 281. M y italics. 141. Ibid., stanzas 11-4, p. 281. 142. Q uoted in Burnett, op. cit., p. 276. 143. Ibid. 144. On the different versions o f ‘The Russ and the B ulgar’ see W addington, op. cit., p. 209. 145. Robert I) Kaplan, Balkan Ghosts A Jour­

Notes to pages 40-58 ney Through History (New York: St M ar­ tin ’s Press, 1993), p. xxiii.

C hapter Three: The Balkans in Popular Fiction 1. See B arbara Jelavich, History o f the Bal­ kans. Volume 2. Twentieth Century (Cambrid g e: C a m b rid g e U n iv ersity Press, 1983), pp. 1-9. M ontenegro had always enjoyed defacto independence, although it still harboured its own territorial am bi­ tions. 2. H. H. M unro, The Cupboard o f the Yes­ terdays, in The Penguin Complete Saki (London: Penguin Books, 1982), p. 528. 3. See M argaret FitzH erbert, The Man Who

Was Greenmantle A Biography o f Aubrey Herbert (London: John M urray, 1983), pp. 107-27. 4. Anthony Hope, Memoirs and Notes (Lon­ don: H utchinson, 1927), pp. 120-1. 5. Anthony Kamm, for exam ple, writes: ‘He had devised a fresh approach to the m od­ ern adventure story, with a dashing hero and tender love interest, set with royal trappings in a country in south eastern Eu­ rope, nam ed Ruritania, which has passed into the English language as a term for a fictitious land o f rom ance. ’ In A. Kamm,

Collins Biographical Dictionary o f Eng­ lish Literature (London: H arper Collins, 1993), p. 221. 6. C harles M allet, Anthony Hope and His

Books. Being the Authorised Life o f Sir Anthony Hope Hawkins (L o n d o n : 7.

8. 9. 10.

11.

12.

Hutchinson, 1935), p. 221. Anthony Hope, The Prisoner o f Zenda (Bristol and London: J.W. Arrowsmith, 1894), p. 11. Ibid., p. 23. H. H. M unro, The Easter Egg, in The Pen­ guin Com plete Saki (1982), p 155. A nne A pplebaum , ‘M ichael Portillo is hailed in R uritania’, Evening Standard (London), 1 A ugust 1996, p. 9. Andrew Lamb, ‘L ehär’s Immortal Merry Widow', in Merry Widow. Libretto (Lon­ don: EM I Classics, 1994), pp. 7-12. Sarah Helm, ‘N ew R uritania in Search o f the W est’, Independent on Sunday, 20 A ugust 1995, p. 8.

13. Royal Romances. The Love Affairs That

Shaped History. 32. King Carol and Magda Lupescu (L o n d o n : M a rsh all 14

Cavendish, 1991), p. 2, T erence Kattlgan, The Sleeping Prince

219

(London: Ham ish H am ilton, 1954). 15. Anthony Hope, Sophy o f Kravonia (Bris­ tol: J. W. Arrowsm ith, 1906). 16. S.C. Grier, /( Uncrowned King. A Ro­ mance o f High Politics (Edinburgh and London: W illiam Blackwood and Sons, 1896). 17. S. C. Grier, A Crowned Queen. The Ro­ mance o f a Minister o f State (Edinburgh and London: W illiam B lackw ood and Sons, 1898). 18. M arguerite B ryant and G. H. M cAnally, The Chronicles o f a Great Prince (L on­ don: Duckworth, 1925). 19. Quoted in: C harles M allet, op. c it, p. 96. 20. Brigid Brophy, Palace Without Chairs (L o n d o n : H am ish H a m ilto n , 1978). M alcolm Bradbury, Why Come to Slaka (London: Arrow Books, 1987), pp. 102— 3. (First published in 1986, it is a com ­ panion volum e to B radbury’s B ooker short-listed novel Rates o f Exchange.) 21. Anthony Hope, Sophy o f Kravonia, p. 98. 22. Ibid. 23. Charles M allet, op. cit., p. 190. 24. S. C. Grier, A Crowned Queen, p. 28. 25. S. C. Grier, The Prince o f the Captivity. The Epilogue to a Romance (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood & Sons, 1902), p. 6. 26. John Lawrence Lambe, By Command o f the Prince. A True Romance. New and rev. edn (L on d o n : T. F ish er U nw in, 1902), p. 1. (First published in 1901.) 27. Barbara Jelavich, History o f the Balkans (1983), vol. I, p. 372. 28. D o ro th e a G erard (M m e L o n g ard de Longgarde), The Red-Hot Crown. A SemiHistorical Romance (London: John Long, 1909). 29. John B uchan, The Thirty-nine Steps, (W are: W ordsw orth C la ssic s, 1993). (First published in 1915.) Agatha Christie, The Secret o f Chimneys (L o n d o n : Fontana, 1989), p. 13. (First published in 1925.) 30. Eric A m bler, Judgement on Deltchev (London: F ontana, 1989). (First pu b ­ lished by H odder and Stoughton Ltd in 1951.) 31. S .C . Grier, An Uncrowned King, p. 7. 32. Ibid. 33. A nthony Hope, Sophy o f Kravonia, p. 124. 34. G rier, A Crowned Queen, p. 342. 35. Hope, Sophy o f Kravonia, pp. 389-90. 36. ‘M o n te n e g ro ’, in: F elipe F em än d ezArmesto (ed.), The Times Guide to the Peoples o f Europe. Rev. edn (London:

220

Notes to pages 58-74

Tim es Publishing, 1997). 37. G rier, A Crowned Queen, p. 340. 38. Will iam Denton, Montenegro: its People and their History. (L o n d o n : D ald y , Isb iste r& C o ., 1877), p. 289. 39. Q uoted in Em m et B. Ford, ‘M ontenegro in th e Eyes o f the E nglish T ravellers 1 8 4 0 -1 9 1 4 ’, Südostforschungen (M u­ nich), XVIII (1959), pp. 350-80. 40. Hope, The Prisoner ofZenda, p. 117. 41. G eo rg e G o rd o n B yron, "The A ge o f B ronze’, in The Poetical Works o f Lord Byron (London: Oxford University Press, 1959), pp. 169-78. 42. G rier, The Crowned Queen, p. 418. 43. Ibid., p. 288. 44. Ibid., p. 293. 45. Ibid., p. 447. 46. F. O. H. Nash, Kattie o f the Balkans (Lon­ don and N ew York: F rederick W arne, 1931). 47. V. Blain et al., The Feminist Companion to Literature in English (London: B.T. Batsford, 1990), pp. 4 17-18. 48. A. J. Langguth, Saki: A Life o f Hector

Hugh Munro. With Six Short Stories Never Before Collected (London: Hamish H am ilton, 1981), p. 108. 49. Ibid., pp. 108-9. 50. N ellie B lissett, The Bindweed: A Novel, (London: A rchibald C onstable, 1904); A gatha Christie, op. cit.; H. H. M unro, The Death-Trap, in The Penguin Com­ plete Saki (1982), pp. 842-50. 51. D orothea Gerard, The Red-Hot Crown A Semi-Historical Romance (London: John L ong, 1909), p. 7. 52. Ibid., p. 55. 53. Ibid., p. 10. 54. Hope, The Prisoner ofZenda, p. 117. 55. G erard, The Red-Hot Crown, pp. 156-7. 56. Ibid., p. 114. 57. Jelavich, op. cit., p. 360. 58. G erard, The Red-Hot Crown, p. 252. 59. Ibid. 60. Ibid., p. 254. 61. Ibid., p. 253. 62. Ibid., p. 318. 63. C hristie, The Secret o f Chimneys, p. 14. 64. C harles Osborne, The Life and Crimes o f Agatha Christie (L o n d o n : M ic h a e l O ’M ara, 1990), pp. 3 1 -4 . M y italics. 65. G rier, An Uncrowned King, p. 29. 66. C hristie, The Secret o f Chimneys, p. 41. 67. Ibid., p. 257. 68. Bryant and M cAnally, The Chronicles of a Great Prince, p. 8. 69. C hristie. The Secret o f Chimneys, p. 117. 70 ( irier, An Uncrowned King, p. 13.

71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86.

Gerard, The Red-Hot Crown, p. 14. (irier, An Uncrowned King, p. 80. Gerard, The Red-Hot Crown, p. 135. Ibid., p. 174. Christie, The Secret o f Chimneys, p. 12. Ibid., p. 148. Ibid., p. 124. ‘The King and I’, Evening Standard (Lon­ don), 21 April 1997, p. 9. G rier, An Uncrowned King, p. 47. Ibid., p. 252. Ibid., p. 42. G rier, A Crowned Queen, p. 28. Ibid., p. 541. Gerard, The Red-Hot Crown, p. 541. Ibid., p. 317. See C D. Eby, The Road to Armageddon.

The Martial Spirit in English Popular Lit­ erature, 1870-1914. (Durham , N C, and London: Duke U niversity Press, 1987), p. 23. 87. Ibid. 88. N orm an S tone, Europe Transformed 1878-1919, (London: Fontana, 1983), p. 359. 89. Hope, Sophy o f Kravonia, pp. 3 19-20. 90. Malcolm Bradbury, ‘In Bulgaria, my nov­ e l’s m ain character turned up to m eet m e’. Independent on Sunday, 22 June 1997, Travel & Money section, p. 1. 91. Global Policemen ’s Ball. Play performed at the Edinburgh Festival, A ugust 1994. 92. David Edgar, Pentecost. First perform ed by the Royal Shakespeare com pany in Stratford-upon-Avon in Septem ber 1994. 93. Peter Guttridge, ‘An A uthor’s Lot is not a H appy O n e’ (an interview with John Fowles), The Independent, 9 D ecem ber 1994, p. 25. 94. Bram Stoker, Dracula (London: Penguin Books 1979), p. 10. (First published in 1897.) 95. H. C harles W oods, The Danger lone o f Europe (London and Leipsic: T. Fisher U nwin, 1911). 96. See Gottfried A ugust Bürger, ‘L eonore’, in Leonard Forster (ed.), The Penguin Book o f German Verse (London: Penguin Books, 1957), pp. 178-90; Bram Stoker, Dracula, p. 20; and ‘D racula’s G uest’, in Christopher Frayling, Vampyres. Lord Byron to Count Dracula, (London: Faber and Faber, 1991), p. 358. Cf. Leonard W o lf (ed.), The Essential Dracula. The

Definitive Annotated Edition o f Bram Stoker 's Classic Novel (New York: Plume Books, 1993), p. 15. 97. See M atthew B unson, Vampire The Encyclopedia (L ondon: T huines und

Notes to pages 74-87 Hudson, 1993), p. 206. 98. Q uoted in A ndrew Sanders, The Short Oxford History of English Literature (Ox­ ford: Clarendon Press, 1994), p. 341. 99. John Sutherland, The Longman Compan­ ion to Victorian Fiction (London: L ong­ m an, 1988), p. 368. 100. Sheridan Le Fanu, ‘C a rm illa’, in In a Glass Darkly (Alan Sutton, 1990), pp. 239 -3 1 4 . 101. 'F o r the whole paraphernalia o f a terror novel is designed to continually quicken the im agination w ith w eird apprehen­ sions. Soon the castle and the convent w ere jo in ed by the cavern, the G othic T yrant by banditti, the vaults and the gal­ leries by dark forests at midnight, and the scene o f langorous am ours becam e the haunt o f how ling spectres.’ D evendra P. Varma, The Gothic Flame (New York: Russell & R ussell, 1966), p. 17. 102. Sara M ills, Discourses o f Difference An

Analysis o f Women s Travel Writing and Colonialism (L ondon and N ew York: 103.

105. 106. 107.

108.

109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116. 117.

(W estp o rt, C T , L ondon: G reenw ood Press, 1984), p. 13. Paul Feval, La Ville-Vampire (Paris: E. Dentu, 1875), p. 258. Leatherdale, op. cit„ p. 237. Ibid. Sam uel B utler, Erewhon, or Over the Range (1872), and Erewhon Revisited (1901). M m e E. de L a s z o w s k a G e ra rd , ‘T ran sy lv an ian S u p erstitio n s’, in The Nineteenth Century, XVIII (July 1885), pp. 130-50. Frayling, op. cit., pp. 319-26. Gerard, ‘Transylvanian Superstitions’, op. cit., p. 130. Stoker, Dracula, p. 10. My italics. Ibid., p. 41. Sabine Baring-G ould, The Book o f WereWolves (London: Smith Elder, 1865). Q uoted from Frayling, op. cit., p. 342. Stoker, Dracula, p. 15. Ibid., p. 9. F o r a d e ta ile d a n a ly s is se e C liv e L eath erd ale, The Origins o f Dracula (London: W illiam Kimber, 1987); and,

Dracula, the Novel and the Legend. A Study o f Bram Stoker s Gothic Master­ piece. Rev. edn (Brighton: Desert Island 118.

124. 125.

126. 127.

128. 129. 130. 131.

R outledge, 1991), p. 89. R o b ert D onald S p ecto r, The English

Gothic. A Bibliographic Guide to Writ­ ersfrom Horace Walpole to Mary Shelley.

104.

119. 120. 121. 122. 123.

Books. 1993). ‘B ram S to k e r’s W o rk in g Paper« for

132.

133.

134. 135. 136. 137. 138. 139.

140. 141. 142. 143.

144.

145.

221

D racula’, in Frayling, op. cit., pp. 3 0 3 16. Stoker, Dracula, p. 9. Ibid. Ibid.,p. 11. Ibid., p. 16. Q uoted in Leonard W olf (ed.), The Es­ sential Dracula, p. 3. Stoker, Dracula, pp. 16-17. Leatherdale, The Origins o f Dracula, p. 86. (It should be noted, however, that Hungary is not noticeably ‘more steeped’ in vam pire lore, but that m ore o f it was available in English.) Stoker, Dracula, p. 40. ‘W hat devil or w hat witch was ever so great as Attila, w hose blood is in these veins?’ (Dracula, p. 41); Em ily Gerard, The Land Beyond the Forest, p. 43. B arbara Jelavich, History o f the Balkans, vol. 1, p. 31. Stoker, Dracula, p. 41. Ibid., p. 42. See Branislav D im itrijevic, ‘N osferatu u S rba’, Vreme (Belgrade), 21 June 1993, p. 42. Dejan A jdacic, ‘The V am pire M otif in European and Balkan Slav L iteratures’, Balkanistic [sic] Forum (B lagoevgrad, Bulgaria), I (1993), pp. 53-8. Stephen D. Arata, ‘T he Occidental T our­ ist: Dracula and the A nxiety o f Reverse C o lo n is a tio n ’, Victorian Studies, 33 (1990), pp. 621—45. R eprinted in Carol A. S enf (ed ), The Critical Response to Bram Stoker (W estport, C T : G reenw ood Press, 1993), pp. 84-104. Stoker, Dracula, p. 31. Ibid. M ills, op. cit., p. 88. Stoker, Dracula, p. 28. Ibid. Stoker, The Lady o f the Shroud (Stroud: Allan Sutton, 1994), p. 32. (First pub­ lished in 1909.) Ibid., p. 240. Ibid. Ibid., p. 258. G jeraquina Tuhina, ‘Looking for Solu­ tions’, War Report. Bulletin o f the Insti­ tute for War & Peace Reporting, no. 51 (M ay 1997), p. 10. Lawrence Durrell, White Eagles Over Ser­ bia (London: P enguin Books, 1980), p. 29. (First published in 1957.) See Richard U sbom e, Clubland Heroes:

A Nostalgic Study o f Some Recurrent Characters in the Romantic Fiction o f Dorrford Yates, John Buchan, and 'Sap-

222

Notes to pages 87-104

p e r ’ (London: Constable, 1953). 146. John G. Cawelti and Bruce A. Rosenberg, The Spy Story (London and Chicago: Uni­ versity o f Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 5 6 7. 147. Ibid., p. 41. 148. Jo h n B uchan, The Thirty-nine Steps, p. 17. 149. Ibid., p. 1. 150. Ibid., p. 2. 151. Ibid. 152. Ibid., p. 6. 153. Ibid., p. 35. 154. W illia m B u c h a n , John Buchan A Memoir, (L ondon: B uchan & E nright Publishers, 1982), p. 51. 155. Ibid., p. 212. 156. Jo h n B uchan, Greenmantle (L ondon: P enguin Books, 1956), p. 13. (First pub­ lished in 1916.) 157. Ibid., p. 78. 158. Ibid , p. 116. 159. Ibid. 160. Ibid. 161. Ibid., p. 122. 162. Ibid. 163. Buchan, The Thirty-nine Steps, p. 50. 164. Caw elti and Rosenberg, The Spy Story, p. 97. 165. Buchan, Greenmantle, pp. 24-5. 166. Ibid. 167. Ibid., p. 18. 168. Ibid. 169. Ibid., p. 17. 170. Ibid., p. 25. 171. M argaret FitzH erbert, op. cit., p. 45. 172. Ibid., p. 52. 173. Ibid. 174. Ibid., p. 47. 175. Caw elti and Rosenberg, op. cit., p. 110. 176. John Buchan, Castle Gay, in The Adven­

tures o f Dickson McCunn. Huntingtower. Castle Gay. The House o f the Four Winds. (London: Penguin Books, 1994), p. 261. (First published in 1925.) 177. G. S. Fraser, Lawrence Durrell. A Study,

with a Bibliography by Alan G. Thomas 178. 179.

180. 181. 182. 183 184. 185.

(L ondon:F aber andF aber, 1973),p. 183. Ibid. ‘Strange Doings in Foreign L ands’, in The Times Literary Supplement, 31 M ay 1957, p. XVIII. Ibid. Ibid. ‘B riefly N oted: F ic tio n ’, in the New Yorker, 34 (19 April 1958), p. 149. L aw rence Durrell, op. cit., p. 7. Ibid., p. 9. Ibid., p. 29.

186. 187. 188. 189. 190.

191. 192.

193. 194. 195. 196. 197. 198. 199. 200. 201

202. 203. 204. 205. 206.

Ibid., p. 113. Ibid., p. 170. Ibid., p. 138. Buchan, Greenmantle, p. 18. Saki, ‘The Lost S anjak’, in H. H. M unro, The Penguin Complete Saki (London: Penguin Books, 1972), p. 53. (First pub­ lished in Reginald in Russia in 1922.) Fraser, Lawrence Durrell, p. 183. Lawrence Durrell, Spirit o f Place. Medi­ terranean Essays, ed. A lan G. Thomas (London: Faber and Faber, 1988), p. 101. (First published in 1969.) Ibid., p. 100. Ibid.,p. 101. Ibid., p. 107. Durrell, White Eagles Over Serbia, pp. 56-7. Ibid., p. 60. Durrell, Spirit o f Place, p. 103. Ibid., p. 110. Ibid. Law rence D urrell, ‘S arajev o ', :n Col­ lected Poems 1931-1974, ed. Jam es A. B righam (L ondon: F ab er and F aber, 1985), pp. 224-5. Durrell, White Eagles Over Serbia, p. 13. Ibid., p. 88. Fraser, Lawrence Durrell, p. 113. Durrell, White Eagles Over Serbia,^. 149. Svetozar M. Ignjacevic, Zemlja cuda u

izlomljenom ogledalu. Moderni britanski pisci ijugoslovenska tematika (Belgrade: DBR Publishing, 1994), p. 144. 207. Durrell, White Eagles Over Serbia, p. 137. 208. Ibid., p. 140. 209. V alentine Cunningham , British Writers and the Thirties (Oxford and New York: O xford University Press, 1989), p. 354. (First published in 1988.) 210. Ian Flem ing, From Russia With Love. Q uoted in E. H. Cookridge, Orient Ex­

press. The Life and Times o f the World's Most Famous Train (London: Allen Lane, 1979), p. 236. 211. Cookridge, Orient Express, pp. 229-30. 212. N orm an S herry, The Life o f Graham Greene, Volum e One: 1904-1939 (Lon­ don: Jonathan Cape, 1989), p. 407. 213. V alery Larbaud, ‘O de’, Les Poésies de A. O. Barnabooth (Paris: Gallim ard, 1966), pp. 2 5-6. 214. G regor von R ezzori, The Orient Express (London: Chatto and W indus, 1993), p. 107. 215. Cookridge, op. cit., p. 29. 216. Graham Greene, Stamboul Train (Lon­ don: W illiam Mcinctnann and the Bodley Head, 1974), introduction, p. ix.

Notes to pages 104-120 217. 218. 219. 220. 221. 222. 223. 224. 225. 226. 227. 228. 229. 230. 231. 232. 233. 234.

235.

236. 237. 238. 239. 240.

241. 242. 243. 244.

245.

246. 247.

Ibid. Sherry, op. cit., p. 591. Ibid., p. 414. G reene, op. cit., p. ix. Ibid., p. x. Sherry, op. cit., p. 422. G reene, op. cit., p. x. Ibid., p. xi. Ibid., p. 168. Ibid., p. 206. Ibid., p. 204. Ibid., p. 164. M y italics. Ibid. Ibid., p. 16. Ib id .,p . 165. Ibid., p. 153. Ibid., p. 192. M ichael Shelden, Graham Greene. The Man Within, (L o n d o n : H e in e m a n n , 1994), p. 91. A gatha C hristie, Murder on the Orient Express, (L o n d o n : W illiam C o llin s, 1990). p. 39. Ibid , p. 41. Ibid., p. 44. Ibid., p. 188. Ibid. Cecil Roberts, Victoria Four-Thirty (Lon­ don. Ilodder and Stoughton, 1977), p. 236. (First published in 1937.) Ibid., p. 133. Ibid., p. 134. Ibid. Eric Ambler, The Mask o f Dimitrios (Lon­ don. Fontana, 1966), p. 111. (First pub­ lished in 1939.) Eric Am bler, speaking at the N ational Film T h eatre, L ondon, 24 N ovem ber 1996. Am bler, The Mask o f Dimitrios, p. 190. Ibid., p. 31.

Chapter Four: W ar and Diplomacy in the New Ruritania 1. A. W. Kinglake, Eothen. Traces o f Travel Brought Home from the East (London: Picador Travel Classics, 1995), pp. 9-10. (First published in 1844.) 2. Ibid., p. 8. 3. A Handbook fo r Travellers in Turkey:

4

describing Constantinople, European Turkey, Asia Minor, Armenia and Meso­ potamia. With new travelling maps and plans (London: John M urray, 1840). Sec Kurl Beckson, London In the 1890s A ( ultural History (New York mul I .un-

223

don: W.W. N orton, 1992), p. 26. 5. Q uoted in M ichael H olroyd, Bernard

Shaw. Volume 1. 1856-1898: The Search for Love (London: C'hatto and W indus, 6. 7. 8. 9.

10. II 12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31 32. 33. 34.

1988), p. 300. Ibid. Ibid., p. 297. Ibid., p. 300. David W alker, ‘B attles o f the Balkans: A Survey o f W ars from 1877-1945 and Their Underlying Causes’, RUSIJournal, vol. 138, No. 3, (June 1993), p. 57. Holroyd, op. cit., p. 300. Ibid.,p. 16. Ibid. Beckson, op. cit , p. 26. Bernard Shaw, Arms and the Man (Lon­ don: Longman Literature, 1991), p. 15. (First perform ed on 21 April 1894. First published in 1898.) Ibid., p. 16. Ibid., p. 83. Ibid., p. 84. Ibid., p. 39. Ibid., p. 32. Ibid., p. 57. Ibid., p. 31. Ibid. Ibid., p. 12. My italics. Holroyd, op. cit., p. 297. (See ‘Forever Prisoners o f Z en d a’ for a sim ilar Balkan student reaction to a com ic representation o f th eir ho m elan d , w hen The Merry Widow staged in Vienna.) Shaw, op. cit., p. 12. Ibid., p. 17. Ibid., p. 40. Ibid., pp. 40-1 Ibid., p. 43. Ibid., p. 53. Ibid., p. 84. Ibid. Robert D. Kaplan, Balkan Ghosts (New York: St M artin’s Press, 1993), p. 61. A. J. Langguth, Saki: A Life o f Hector

Hugh Munro. With Six Short Stories Never Before Collected (London: Hamish 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44

Ham ilton, 1981), p. 87. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., p. 89. Ibid., p. 90. Ibid, p. 91. Ibid, p. 95. Ibid., pp. 98-9. Ibid., p. 101. Ibid., p. 106. H. II. M unro, ‘The Cupboard o f the Y es­ terdays', in The 1‘engutn Complete Saki,

224

Notes to pages 121—133

pp. 528-9. 45. Ibid., p. 529. 46. Langguth, op. cit., p. 251. 47. Ibid., p. 258. 48. M unro, ‘The C upboard o f the Y ester­ d ay s’, op. cit., p. 530. 49. Ibid., p. 531. 50. M alcolm Bradbury, Why Come to Slaka (London: A rena, 1987), back cover. 51. Saki, ‘The Cupboard o f the Y esterdays’, op. cit., pp. 529-30. 52. Ibid., p. 531. 53. M unro, ‘The Toys o f Peace’, op. cit., p. 394. 54. Ibid, 55. Ibid. 56. M unro, ‘The Purple o f the Balkan K ings’, op. cit., p. 526. 57. Ibid., p. 527. 58. Ibid., p. 528. 59. H. H. M unro, The Death-Trap, op. cit., p. 845. 60. Ibid. 61. Ibid., p. 847. 62. H. H. M unro, ‘R eginald’s R ubaiyat’, op. cit., p. 37. 63. H. H. M u n ro , ‘T h e S to ry o f St. V espaluus’, op. cit., p. 166. 64. H. H. M unro, ‘The Forbidden Buzzards’, op. cit., p. 333. 65. H. H. M unro, ‘R eginald on T ariffs’, op. cit., p. 30. 66. H. H. M unro, ‘The Soul o f L aploshka’, op. cit., p. 73. 67. H. H. M unro, ‘The L o stS an jak ’, op. cit., p. 53. 68. H. H. M unro, ‘The O versight’, op. cit., p. 517. 69. Ibid. Cf. in Chapter 2, the heat generated by G ladstone’s Bulgarian agitation. 70. H. H. M unro, ‘Reginald on W orries’, op. cit., p. 19. 71. H. H. M unro, The Watched Pot, op. cit., p. 869. 72. D avid Footm an, Pig and Pepper. A Com­ edy o f Youth (L ondon: R o b in C lark, 1990), p. 68. (First published in 1936.) 73. J u lie W h e e lw rig h t, ‘C a p ta in F lo ra Sandes: A Case Study in the Social C on­ struction o f Gender in a Serbian C ontext’, in John B. A llcock and A nthonia Young (eds). Black Lambs and Grey Falcons. Women Travellers in the Balkans (Brad­ ford: Bradford U niversity Press, 1991), p. 82. 74. E. M. Forster, Short Stories and Plays Forster Typescripts and Manuscripts, K ing’s College Library, Cambridge, Se­ ries I - v o l . I. pp. 150-65.

75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81.

Ibid., p. 150. Ibid., pp. 153-5. Ibid., p. 157. Ibid., p. 160. Ibid. Ibid., p. 163. P. N. Furbank, E. M. Forster: A Life. Vol­

ume One The Growth o f the Novelist (1879-1914), (L o n d o n ; S e e k e r and W arburg, 1977), p. 200. 82. E. M. Forster, ‘The Heart o f B osnia’ (un­ p u b lish e d ). F o rste r T y p e sc rip ts and M anuscripts, K in g ’s C ollege Library, C am bridge, Series I - v o l . I, p. 186. 83. Ibid., p. 190. 84. Ibid., p. 191. 85. Ibid., p. 197. 86. Ibid., p. 199. (A gesture typical o f the p h a llic sy m b o lism w h ich p erm eates F orster’s play.) 87. Ibid., p. 200. 88 Ibid., p. 202. 89. Ibid., p. 203. 90. Ibid., p. 209. 91. Ibid., p. 210. 92. Ibid., p. 211. 93. Ibid., p. 213. 94. Ibid., p. 214. 95. Ibid., p. 217. 96. Ibid. 97. Furbank, op. cit., p. 201. 98. Furbank, op. cit. 99. Forster, ‘The H eart o f B osnia’, p. 195. 100. Furbank, op. cit., p. 200. 101. Forster, ‘The Heart o f B osnia’, p. 195. 102. Furbank, op. cit., p. 143. 103. P. N. Furbank, E. M. Forster: A Life. Vol­

ume Two. Polycrates Ring (1914-1970),

104. 105. 106. 107.

108. 109. 110.

111.

112. 113.

(London: Seeker and W arburg, 1978), p. 174. Ibid. E. M. Forster, ‘The Eyes o f S ibiu’, Spec­ tator, no. 5426 (25 June 1932), p. 894. Ibid. Bob C onsindine [i.e. C harles L ever], ‘W hat I Did at B elgrade’, in Blackwood's Edinburgh M agazine , C I I I, n o. DCXXVII, (1868), p. 74. Ibid., p. 75. Ibid. Douglas Hurd, ‘The Last Day o f Sum ­ m er’, in the Daily Telegraph (London), 19 Septem ber 1992, W eekend Supple­ ment, pp. 1-2. David Footman, Balkan Holiday (London and Toronto: W illiam Heinemann, 1935), inside eovcr. David Footm an, Pig and Pepper, p. 16, Ibid.

Notes to pages 133—147 114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120.

121. 122. 123. 124. 125. 126. 127. 128. 129. 130. 131. 132.

133. 134. 135. 136.

137. 138. 139. 140.

141. 142. 143. 144.

Ibid.. p. 120. Ibid.. p. 166. Ibid., p. 62. Ibid., p. 264. Ibid., p. 268. D avid Footm an, Pemberton (London: C resset Press, 1943), pp. 188. W inston S. C hurchill, The Second World War. V olum e III. The Grand Alliance (London: Cassell, 1950), p. 144. D avid Footm an, Pemberton, p. 188. Ibid., p. 17. Ibid., p. 16. Ibid., p. 17. D avid Footm an, Pig and Pepper, p. 195. Ibid., p. 216. Ibid., p. 113. Ibid., p 143. Ibid. Ibid., p. 144. Ib id .,p . 19. Ian S. MacNiven (ed.), The Durrell-Miller Letters 1935-1980. (London: Faber and Faber, 1988), p. 244. Lawrence DurreW, Spirit o f Place, p. 94. Ibid., p. 104. M acN iven, op. cit., p. 244. Svetozar Ignjacevic, ‘ Lorens Darel [Law­ rence D urrell] i J u g o s la v ia ’, in Anali Filoloikog akulteta. Sveska 18 (Belgrade, 1987), pp. 83-98. Durrell, Spirit o f Place, p. 108. Ibid., pp. 108-9. Ibid., p. 107. Law rence Durrell, ‘Letters in D arkness’, in Collected Poems 1931-1974, ed. James A. Brigham (London: Faber and Faber, 1985), pp. 2 2 3 -4 . Q uoted in Durrell, Spirit o f Place, p. 90. Ibid., p. 114. Ibid. Julian M itchell and G ene A ndrew ski, ‘L aw rence D u rre ll’. An interview , in

Writers at Work The Paris Review Inter­ views. Second Series (New York: Viking Press, 1963), p. 262. 145. K e n n e th Y o u n g , ‘A D ia lo g u e w ith D urrell’, in Encounter, XIII/6 (December 1959), pp. 6 1 -8 . 146. M acN iven, op. cit., p. 241. 147. Durrell, Spirit o f Place, p. 100. 148. Ibid., p. 109. M y italics. 149. G. S. Fraser, Lawrence Durrell, p. 183. 150. C o nstantine F itzG ibbon, ‘H ow Funny C an You G et’, the Spectator, 27 D ecem ­ ber 1957, p. 903. 151. G erald S y k es, ‘T he A ntic A nnals o f A ntrobus’, New York Times Book Re­ view, 25 January 1959, p. 34.

152. 153. 154. 155. 156. 157. 158. 159. 160. 161. 162. 163. 164. 165. 166. 167.

225

Fraser, op. cit., p. 183. Ibid., p. 182. M itchell and A ndrew ski, op. cit., p. 269. ‘A ntrobus A gain’, The Times Literary Supplement, 14 N ovem ber 1958, p. 651. G. W. Stonier, ‘Funnies’, New Statesman, 54 (7 December 1957), p. 789. John M. Allison, ‘Em bassy A ntics’, Sat­ urday Review, 50 (25 M arch 1967), p. 33. Durrell, Sense o f Place, p. 96. M itchell and A ndrew ski, op. cit., p. 281 Law rence D urrell, ‘T he G host T ra in ’, Antrobus Complete, p. 179. D urrell, 'Noblesse Oblige', Antrobus Complete, p. 80. D urrell, ‘A unt N orah’, Antrobus Com­ plete, p. 179. D u r re ll, ‘W h a t-h o o n th e R i a l t o ’, Antrobus Complete, p. 159. Durrell, ‘La V alise’, Antrobus Complete, p. 101. Ibid., p. 102. John A. W eigel, Lawrence Durrell (New York: Twayne, 1965), p. 174. ‘Slivovitz’, Time, 73 (February 1969), p. 94. The ‘chocolate soldiers’, o f course, refers to the m usical version o f S haw ’s

Arms and the Man 168. Durrell, ‘Call o f the S ea’, Antrobus Com­ plete, p. 94. 169. Herg6, The Adventures o f Tintin. King Ottokar’s Sceptre (London: M am moth, 1992). (First published in 1947.) 170. Durrell, ‘Call o fth e S ea’, Antrobus Com­ plete, p. 95. 171. Durrell, ‘High B arbary’, Antrobus Com­ plete, p. 139. 172. Durrell, ‘Frying the Flag’, Antrobus Com­ plete, p. 46. 173. D u rre ll, ‘F o r Im m e d ia te R e le a s e ’, Antrobus Complete, p. 46. 174 Durrell, ‘Jots and Tittles’, AntrobusComplete, p. 28. 175. Durrell, Spirit o f Place, p. 101 176. Ibid., pp. 101-2. 177. M ichael D avie (ed .), The Diaries o f Evelyn Waugh (L ondon: W eidenfield and Nicolson, 1976), p. 571. (Entry for 10 July 1944). 178. Ibid., pp. 571-2. 179. Martin Stannard, Evelyn Waugh. No Abid­ ing City. 1939-1966 (London: J. M. Dent, 1992), p. 114. 180. Ibid. 181. Ibid. 182. Davie, op. cit., p. 571. (Diary entry for 10 July 1944.) 183. Ibid., p. 574. (Diary entry for 11 July 1944.) 184. Fit/.roy M aclean ’s letter to M ichael

226

Notes to pages 147-159

D avie. Q uoted in Davie, op. cit., p. 572. 185. F itzroy M aclean, Eastern Approaches (L ondon: P enguin B ooks, 1991), pp. 4 0 2 -3 . (First published in 1949) 186. D avie, op. cit., p. 573. 187. Ibid., p. 574. (Entry for 17 July 1944.) 188. Ibid. 189. E v e ly n W a u g h , ‘A L e tte r to L a u ra W augh. 16 Septem ber 1944’, in M ark A m o ry (e d .). The Letters o f Evelyn Waugh, (London: Penguin Books, 1982), p. 187. (First published in 1980.) 190. PRO FO 371 /4 4 2 8 2 /R 2 1384. Quoted in E v ely n W au g h , ‘C a th o lic C hurch in C roatia under T ito ’s H eel’. Introduction by A ndrew H arvey, Salisbury Review (Septem ber 1992), p. 10. 191. D avie, op. cit., p. 579. (Entry for 16 Sep­ tem ber 1944.) 192. Ibid. 193 Ibid. 194. Ibid. 195. Davie, op. cit., p. 596. (Entry for 9 De­ cem ber 1944.) 196. Ibid., p. 599. (Entry for22 December 1944.) 197. D onald H am ilton-H ill, S O.E Assign­ ment (London: W illiam Kim ber, 1973), p. 171. 198. Davie, op. cit., p. 612. (Entry for 28 Janu­ ary 1945.) 199. W au g h ,‘Catholic Croatia’, op. cit., p. 10. 200. Davie, op. cit., p. 618. (Entry for 2 March 1945.) 201. Ibid. 202. W augh, ‘Catholic C roatia’, op. cit., p. 12. 203. Ibid. 204. Ibid., p. 13. 205. Ibid., p. 14. 206. Ibid., p. 15. 207. Ibid., p. 17. 208. Ibid. ( ‘Introduction’), p 10. 209. Stannard, op. cit., p. 136. 210. D avie, op. cit., p. 615. (Entry for 12 Feb­ ruary 1945.) 211. Stannard, op. cit., p 137. 212. W augh, ‘Catholic Croatia’, op. cit., p. 10. ( ‘Introduction’.) 213. Ibid. 214. Ibid. 215. Stannard, op. cit., p. 145. 216. C hristopher Sykes, Evelyn Waugh. A Bi­ ography (London: Collins, 1975), p. 298. 217. E velyn W augh, Scott-King’s Modern Europe, in Work Suspended and Other Stories, (London: Penguin Books, 1982), p. 196. (First published in 1946.) 218 M Spiering, EnglLihness. Foreigners and

Images o f National Identity in Postwar Literature, Studlii Imagologlca 5 (Anislcr-

dam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1992), pp. 22-3. 219. W augh, Scott-King 's Modern Europe, pp. 196-7. 220. Ibid., p. 218. 221. Ibid. 222. Ibid., p. 219. 223. Davie, op. cit., p. 603. (Entry for 26 D e­ cem ber 1944.) 224. Ibid. 225. Frank Kermode, Introduction’, in Evelyn W augh, The Sword o f Honour Trilogy (London: Everyman, 1994), p. xxx. 226. Bernard Bergonzi, ‘Recent English Lit­ erature’, in Ifor Evans, A Short History o f English Literature (L ondon: Penguin B ooks, 1978), p. 357. 227. Kermode, op. cit., p. xi. 228. Evelyn W augh, Unconditional Surren­ der. Part III o f The Sword o f Honour Tril­ ogy (London: Everyman, 1994), p. 613. 229. See Stannard, op. cit., pp. 135^15. 230. Waugh, Unconditional Surrender, p. 638. 231. Ibid., p. 625. 232. Ibid., p. 674. 233. See Stannard, op. cit., pp. 124-5. 234. W augh, Unconditional Surrender, p. 702. 235. Ibid. 236. Davie, op. cit., p. 618. 237. W augh, Unconditional Surrender, p. 702. 238. Ibid., p. 703. 239. Ibid., pp. 674-5. 240. B arbara Jelavich, History o f the Balkans. Twentieth Century, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 268. 241. W augh, Unconditional Surrender, p . 675. 242. Ibid., p. 636. 243. Ibid., p. 704. 244. Ibid., p. 638. 245. Ibid. 246. Ibid., p. 637. 247. D avie, op. cit., p. 574. (Entry for 17 July 1944.) 248. W augh, Unconditional Surrender, p. 686. 249. Ibid., p. 635. 250. Ibid., pp. 688-9. 251. Ibid. 252. Ibid., p. 691. 253. Ibid., p. 692. 254. Ibid., p. 693. 255. Ibid., p. 680. 256. Ibid., p. 483. 257. Ibid., p. 694.

Chapter Five: Spectres o f War I

Edith I hirhrnn, The Burden o f the Balkans

(London: I homns N elson, 1905), p, 14

Notes to pages 160-174 2. A lexander W illiam K inglake, Eothen.

Traces o f Travel Brought Home From the East (London: Picador, 1995), pp. 1, 3. (First published in 1844.) 3. Q uoted in Edith Durham, High Albania (London: Virago Press, 1985), Introduc­ tion by John H odgson, p. x. (First pub­ lished by Edward A rnold in 1909.) 4. Ibid. 5. Edith Durham , Through the Lands o f the Serb (London: Edward Arnold, 1904), p. 1 6. D urham , High Albania, Introduction, p. xii. 7. Malcolm Foster, Joyce Cary A Biography (London: M ichael Joseph, 1969), p. 77. 8. Ibid. 9. Q uoted in Joyce C ary, Memoir o f the Bobotes (A ustin: U niversity o f T exas Press, 1960), Introduction by Jam es B. M eriwether, p. ix. 10. C ars. Memoir o f the Bobotes, p. 3. 11. D urham , Through the Lands o f the Serb, p. 22. 12. As, for exam ple, in B yron’s letter to Mrs Catherine Gordon Byron, from Prevesa, 12 N ovem ber 1809, quoted in C hapter 2. 13. Durham , Through the Lands o f the Serb, p. 22. 14. Durham , High Albania, p. 131. 15. Ibid., p. 54. 16. Durham , Through the Lands o f the Serb, p. 18.. 17. John Hodgson, ‘Edith Durham. Travel­ ler and P ublicist’, in Black Lambs and

18. 19.

20.

21. 22. 23. 24.

25. 26. 27.

I

227

28. Ibid., pp. 14-5. 29. Ibid., p. 20. 30. Ibid., p. 8. 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid. 33. Ibid. p. 11. 34. Ibid., p. 202. 35. Durham, High Albania, p. 342. 36. Durham, The Burden o f the Balkans, p. 384. 37. Durham, High Albania, p. 342. 38. Ibid., p. 344. 39. MS letter to Fan Noli, dated 11 Septem ­ ber 1943. Q u o ted in John H odgson: ‘Edith Durham, T raveller and P ublicist’, p. 27. 40. Rebecca W est, Black Lamb and Grey

Falcon. A Journey Through Yugoslavia (London: M acm illan, 1982), p. 1089. (First published in 1941.) 41 M arina Warner: ‘R ebecca W est: An In­ terview ’, in Writers at Work, The Paris Review Interviews, 6th Series, (London: Seeker and W arburg, 1985), p. 37. 42. Jennifer Finder, ‘W omen Travellers in the Balkans: A B ibliographical G u id e’, in John B. A llcock and A n to n ia Y oung (eds.), Black Lambs and Grey Falcons, p. 195. 43. A. J. P. Taylor, The Habsburg Monarchy

1809-1918. A History o f the Austrian Em­ pire and Austria-Hungary (London: Pen­

Grey Falcons. Women Travellers in the Balkans, ed. John B. Allcock and Antonia

44.

Y oung (Bradford: Bradford University Press, 1991), p. 16. Ibid., p. 24. Edith Durham , Twenty Years o f the Bal­ kan Tangle (London: Allen and Unwin, 1920), p. 81. H. N. Brailsford, review o f The Burden o f the Balkans in The Speaker, 25 M ay 1905. Quoted in John H odgson, ‘E d ith Durham . T raveller and P ublicist’, p. 15. Durham , Through the Lands o f the Serb, p .3 . Durham , High Albania, p. 1. My italics. Durham , Through the Lands o f the Serb, p. 69. D avid Footm an, Balkan Holiday, (Lon­ don and Toronto: W illiam Heinem ann, 1935), p. 189. Q uoted in Durham , High Albania, Intro­ duction by John H odgson, p. xv. Durham, Through the Lands o f the Serb, p. 83. Durham, Thit liurtkn (fth t Balkans, p 14

45.

46. 47.

48. 49.

50. 51. 52.

53. 54.

guin Books, 1981), p. 294. (First pub­ lished in 1948.) Brian Hall, ‘R ebecca W est’s W ar’, New Yorker, 15 April 1996, p. 79. Robert D. Kaplan, Balkan Ghosts A Jour­ ney Through History (New York: St Mar­ tin ’s Press, 1993), p. 3. Ibid., p. 4. Victoria G lendinning, Rebecca West. A Life (London: W eidenfeld and Nicolson, 1987), p. 154. West, Black Inmh and Grey Falcon, p. 1089. Andrew Sanders, The Short Oxford His­ tory o f English Literature (O x fo rd : Clarendon Press, 1994), p. 580. G lendinning, op. cit., p. 155. M yitalics. W est, op. cit., p. 1158. Car! Rollyson, Rebecca West. A Saga o f the Century (London: Sceptre, 1996), p. 159. (First published in 1995.) Ibid, p. 176. Fjalor Enciklopedic Shquiptar (Tirane: A cad e m ia e S h e n k a v e e R e p u b lik e s P o p u llo rc S o c ia liste te S h q u ip e rise , 1985), p. 215. Q uoted in John Hodgson: ‘Edith Durham, Truvcllcr and P ublicist',

p

228

Notes to pages 174-186

55. R ebecca W est, ‘M adam e S ara’s M agic C rystal’, in The Only Poet and Short Sto­ ries, edited and introduced by A ntonia Till (London: Virago, 1992), p. 167. 56. Ibid. 57. T revor Royle, ‘Introduction’, in Rebecca W est, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. A Journey Through Yugoslavia (Edinburgh: C anongate Classics, 1995), pp. xi-xvii. 58. G lendinning, op. cit., p. 64. 59. H odgson, ‘Edith D urham , T raveller and P ublicist’, p. 26. 60. Edith D urham , The Struggle fo r Scutari (London: Edw ard A rnold, 1914), p. 238. 61. M S letter to G. P. G ooch. Q uoted in H odgson, ‘Edith Durham , T raveller and P ublicist’, p. 26. 62. W est, op. cit., p. 20. W est refers to Noel and C harles B uxton, who wrote about M acedonia in the early years o f this cen­ tury. 63. Ibid., p. 21. 64. Ibid., p. 1077. 65. Ibid., p. 175. 66. Ibid., p. 176. 67. Ibid., pp. 6 3 8 -9 68. Durham , High Albania, p. 118. 69. Durham , Through the Lands o f the Serb, p. 93. 70. W est, op. cit., p. 288. 71. Ibid. 72. Ibid., p. 287. 73. Ibid., p. 289. 74. W est, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, pp. 1088-9. 7 5. Durham , Through the Lands o f the Serb, p. 220. My italics. 76. ‘E legy’, in: Rebecca West, A Celebration (London: Penguin Books, 1978), p. 388. 77. Ibid., pp. 3 9 2 -3 . 78. W est, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, p. 786. 79. Ibid., p. 827. 80. Ibid., p. 915. 81. Hall, op. cit., p. 74. 82. W est, op. cit., p. 1121. 83. Ibid., p. 1126. 84. Ibid., p. 1149. 85. Ibid., p. 1147. 86. G lendinning, op. cit., p. 168. 87. Ibid. 88. Hall, op. cit., p. 77. 89. Larry W olf, ‘R ebecca West: T his Time, L et’s L isten’, New York Times Book Re­ view, 10 February 1991, p. 28. 90. W est, op. cit., p. 1124. 9 1. O livia M anning, The Great Fortune Vol­ ume One o f the Balkan 'Trilogy (London: Penguin Books, 1974). (First published

in 1960); The Spoilt City. Volume Two o f the Balkan Trilogy (London: Penguin Books, 1974). (First published in 1962);

Friends and Heroes, Volume Three o f the Balkan Trilogy (London: Penguin Books, 1974). (First published in 1965.) The BBC TV series, based on The Balkan Trilogy and The Levant Trilogy, Fortunes o f War, directed by Jam es Cellan-Jones, and starring Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thom pson, was originally transm itted in N ovem ber 1987. 92. Jam es Vinson (ed.), Contemporary Nov­

elists. With a Preface by Walter Allen (London and New York: St Jam es’s Press, 1976), pp. 900-3. 93. Kay Dick, ‘O livia M anning’, in The Dic­

tionary o f National Biography 19711980, ed. Lord Blake and C. S. N ichols,

94. 95.

96. 97. 98.

(Oxford and New York: Oxford U niver­ sity Press, 1986), pp. 544-5. F rancis King, ‘O livia M anning 19151980’, Spectator, 2 A ugust 1980, p. 21. Ivor Porter, Operation Autonomous With S.O.E. in Wartime Rumania. (London: C hatto and W indus, 1989), p. 23. Ibid. Inform ation supplied by M anning’s and A llen’s friend, the novelist Francis King. I provide a detailed account o f research into the identity o f the real characters be­ h in d The Balkan Trilogy in V e s n a G oldsw orthy, Olivia Manning’s Bucha­

rest '. Reality and Imagination in The Bal­ kan Trilogy. University o f London unpub­ 99.

100. 101.

102. 103.

104. 105.

lished M A thesis, 1992. Inform ation supplied by Francis King. Derek Patm ore, Invitation to Roumania (London: M acm illan, 1939). Information supplied by Margaret Drabble. Artemis Cooper, Cairo in the War 19391945 (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1989), p. 77. Jelavich, History o f the Balkans. Twenti­ eth Century, p. 207. O livia M anning, The Sum o f Things. Vol­ ume Three o f the Levant Trilogy (London: Penguin Books, 1982), p. 199. (First pub­ lished in 1980.) Ibid. Patrick Leigh Fernior, Between the Woods

and the Water. On Foot to Constantino­ ple from the Hook o f Holland. The Mid­ dle Danube to the Iron Gates (London: Penguin Books, 1987). (First published in 1986.) 106. Richard Bassett, Balkan Hours Travels In Other Europe (I .ondon: John M urray, 1990), p 129, Allhough published alter

Notes to pages 186-202

107.

108. 109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118.

the fall o f Ceau§escu, B assett’s account relates to the Ceau?escu era. Sacheverell Sitwell, Roumanian Journey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 1. (First published in 1938.) M anning, The Great Fortune, p. 1. Sitwell, op. cit., p. 13. M anning, The Great Fortune, p. 16. Ibid. Ibid., p. 18. Ibid., p. 30. Bernard Shaw, Arms and the Man (Lon­ don: Longm an Literature, 1991), p. 31. M anning, The Great Fortune , p. 116. Ibid., p. 164. Sitwell, op cit., p. 118. See Neil Ritchie, Sacheverell Sitwell. An

142. 143. 144. 145. 146. 147. 148. 149. 150. 151. 152.

Ibid., p. 95. Ibid., p. 24. Ibid. Ibid., p. 78. Ibid., p. 329. Ibid., pp. 232-3. Sir Henry Channon, op. cit., p. 270. M anning, Friends and Heroes, p. 46. Ibid. Ibid.,p. 111. Patrick Leigh Fermor, Roumeli Travels in Northern Greece (London: Penguin Books, 1993), p. 18. (First published in 1966.) 153. George Gordon Byron, Don Juan, Canto II, line 765. 154. V ico u n tess S tra n g fo rd , The Eastern

Shores o f the Adriatic in 1863. With a Visit to Montenegro (London: Richard Bent­

Annotated and Descriptive Bibliography (Florence: O irado Press, 1987), A33. 119. Patm ore, op. cit., p. 9. 120. G regor von Rezzori, Memoirs o f an AntiSemite, translated from the Germ an by Jo ach im N eu g ro sch el and the author (London: Picador, 1983), p. 173. 121. Claudio Magris, Danube, translated from the Italian by Patrick Creagh (London: Collins H arvill, 1989), p. 365. 122. M anning, The Great Fortune, p. 20. 123. Ibid., p. 2 5 -6 . 124. Ibid., p. 107. 125. Ibid., p. 164. 126. O livia M anning, The Spoilt City, p. 9. 127. M anning, The Great Fortune, p. 59. 128. Sitwell, Roumanian Journey, p. i. 129. Anne Marie Callim acki, Yesterday was Mine (N ew Y ork, L o n d o n , T oronto: M cG raw -H ill, 1949), (Sitw ell’s letter is published on p. xiii.) 130. Sir Henry Chaniion, ('hips The Diaries of Sir Henry Channon, ed. Robert Rhodes J a m e s , (L o n d o n : W e id e n fe ld and Nicolson, 1967), p. 186. 131. C h r is tin e S u th e rla n d , Enchantress. Marthe Bibesco and Her World (London: John M urray, 1997), pp. 202, 237. 132. Ibid., p. 202. 133. Sitwell, op. cit., p. 57. 134. H ugh H erbert, ‘T alism an for the Desert W ar’, the Guardian, lO N ovem ber 1978. 135. M anning, The Great Fortune, pp. 3 1-2. 136. Ibid., p. 132. 137. Ibid. 138. R.G. W aldeck, Athene Palace Bucharest

Hitler s 'New Order ’ comes to Rumania (London: C onstable, 1943), p. 207. 139. M anning, The Great Fortune, p. 72. 140. O livia M anning, Friends and Heroes, p. 11. 141. Ibid.. p. 15.

229

155.

156.

157. 158.

159. 160.

ley, 1864), Mary Adelaide W alker, Through Mac­ edonia to the Albanian Lakes (London: Chapman and Hall, 1864). G eorgina M uir M ackenzie and Adeline P aulina Irby, Travels in the Slavonic Provinces ofTurkey-in-Europe (London: Bell and Daldy, 1867). (Second edition in two volum es, with a Preface by the Right Hon. W. E. G ladstone, M.P. (Lon­ don: Daldy, Isbister, 1877).) Jennifer Finder, op. cit., pp. 192-201. The Graphic, 26 O ctober, 1912. Quoted in John Allcock and A ntonia Young, op. cit., p. XV. Ibid., p.xvi. Lady Hutton (Dr Isabel Elm slie), With a

Women ’s Unit in Serbia, Salonika and Sebastopol (London: Williams and Norgate, 1928); Memories of a Doctor in War and Peace (London: Heinem ann, 1960). 161. F lo ra S a n d e s , An English WomanSergeant in the Serbian Army. W ith an Introduction by S. Y. Grouitch (London, 1916); The Autobiography o f a Woman

Soldier. A BriefRecord o f Adventure with the Serbian Army, 1916-1919 (L ondon: H .F .& G . W itherby, 1927).

Chapter Six: Reclaim ing Balkan Erewhons 1. ‘Song o f the B alkan P eninsula’, quoted in Edith Durham, High Albania (London: Virago Press, 1985). (First published by Edward Arnold, 1909.) 2. John Buchan, The Three Hostages, p. 712 in The Complete Richard Hannay (L on­ don: Penguin Books, 1992). (First pub­

230

Notes to pages 202—2 1 1

lished in 1924.) 3. John C. Cam pbell, ‘The Balkans: H erit­ age and C o n tin u ity ’, in C h arles and B arbara Jelavich, The Balkans in Transi­

- Mentalités, XXXV 1-2, 1993, pp. 63-5. 7. B arbara Jelavich, History o f the Balkans.

Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

tion: Essays on the Development o f Bal­ kan Life and Politics Since the Eighteenth Century (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Uni­

8.

versity o f California Press, 1963), p. 396. 4. N icolae lorga, Byzance après Byzance.

9. 10.

Continuation de I histoire de la vie byzantine (Bucharest: Institut Roman de

11.

B izantinologie, 1935). 5. Tim othy G arton Ash, ‘Bosnia in Our Fu­ ture’, New York Review o f Books, Decem ­ b er 1995, pp. 27-31. 6. Z oltân Rostâs, ‘The Internal Perception o f R om ania’s External Im age’, Revue des

Etudes Sud-Est Européenes. Civilisations

12. 13.

(C a m b rid g e : C a m b rid g e U n iv e rsity Press, 1983), p. ix. Richard Norton-Taylor, ‘Champions Go to W ar’, 77œGuardian, lOMarch 1997,p. 15. Tim othy Garton Ash, op. cit., p. 31. David Owen, Balkan Odyssey (London: V ictor Gollancz, 1995), p. 6. C . P e a c h m e n t, ‘O n th e R o a d to T ransylvania’, Independent on Sunday, 27 N ovem ber 1994, p. 87. Jennifer Finder, op. cit. Trevor Royle, ‘Introduction’, in Rebecca W est, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. A Journey Through Yugoslavia (Edinburgh: Cannongate Press, 1995), pp. xi-xvii.

chronology

Key Events

Key W orks

1 7 7 4 T h e T re a ty o f K u tc h u k -K a in a rd ji. T h e O tto m a n E m p ire m a k e s s u b s ta n tia l c o n c e s s io n s to R u ssia, d ire c tly p o s in g th e E a ste rn Q u e s tio n , i.e. h o w th e g re a t p o w e rs w o u ld m a n a g e th e d e c lin e o f T u rk e y . 1804 P a rts o f th e S e rb ia n la n d s re v o lt a g a in s t O tto m a n ru le , le a d in g to th e e s ta b lis h m e n t o f a u to n o m y in p a rt o f S erb ia. 1812 B y ro n Childe H arold's Pilgrim­ age. I—II. 1818 B y ro n The Bride o f Abydos;

Giaour.

1821 T h e sta rt o f th e G re e k W a r o f In dependence. 1 8 2 9 T h e T re a ty o f A d ria n o p le e s ta b lis h e s G r e e k in d e p e n d e n c e .

1818 S h e lle y The Revolt o f Islam. 1 8 1 9 - 2 4 B y ro n Don Juan. 1821 S h e lle y Hellas.

1830 C ro ly ‘C z e rn i G e o r g e ’. 18 4 4 K in g la k e Eothen

1 8 5 4 - 6 T h e C rim e a n W ar. F ra n c e an d B rita in s id e w ith th e O tto m a n E m p ire a g a in s t R u ssia . 1871 L e F a n u Carmilla. 1 8 7 5 R e v o lt b y S e rb s in th e O tto m a n p r o v in c e s o f B o s n ia -H e rz e g o v in a . 1 8 7 6 B u lg a ria n risin g a g a in s t O tto m a n r u le is b ru ta lly su p p re s s e d . R u s s ia s u b s e q u e n tly in te rv e n e s a g a in s t th e T u rk s a n d a d v a n c e s to c lo s e to C o n s ta n tin o p le . 1 8 7 8 C o n g r e s s o f B e rlin . S e rb ia , R o m a n ia a n d M o n te n e g ro g iv e n f o rm a l in d e p e n d e n c e . B u lg a ria (a n d B u lg a r ia n - p o p u la te d E a ste rn R u m e lia ) g ra n te d a u to n o m y . A u s tria -H u n g a ry a d m in is te rs B o s n ia -H e rz e g o v in a , a n d o c c u p ic s

1 8 7 6 G la d s to n e Bulgarian Horrors and

the Question o f the East. S w in b u rn e T h e B a lla d o f B u lg a rie ’.

1 877 T e n n y s o n ‘M o n te n e g r o ’.

232

Chronology

th e S a n ja k o f N o v i P azar. 1885 U n ific a tio n o f B u lg a ria an d E a ste rn R u m e lia ; B u lg a ria d e fe a ts S e r b ia a t S liv n its a . 1886 A le x a n d e r B a tte n b e rg , m o d e rn B u lg a r ia ’s firs t P rin c e , a b d ic a te s . 1 8 9 4 S h a w Arm s and the Man. H o p e The Prisoners o f Zenda. G r ie r An Uncrowned King. 1 8 9 7 S to k e r Dracula. 1903 M u r d e r s o f S e r b ia ’s K in g A le x a n d e r O b re n o v ic a n d h is w ife in a c o u p in B e lg ra d e . M a c e d o n ia n u p ris in g a g a in s t O tto m a n ru le is su p p re s se d .

1904 D u rh a m Through the Land o f the

Serb. 1 9 0 6 H o p e Sophy o f Kravonia. 1 9 08 T u rk is h m ilita ry r e v o lt in M a c e d o n ia p a v e s th e w a y fo r th e Y o u n g T u rk R e v o lu tio n o f 1909 in C o n s ta n tin o p le . A u s tr ia - H u n g a r y a n n e x e s B o sn ia H e r z e g o v in a (a n d w ith d ra w s fro m th e S a n ja k o f N o v i P azar). 1909 G e ra rd The Red-Hot Crown. D u rh a m High Albania. 1 9 1 0 S ak i ‘T h e L o s t S a n ja k ’. 1 9 1 2 - 1 3 B a lk a n W a rs. O tto m a n E m p ire e x p e lle d fro m all its E u ro p e a n te r rito r ie s e x c e p t e a s te rn T h ra c e ( th e re b y lo s in g th e S a n ja k o f N o v i P a z a r, K o s o v o , p re s e n t-d a y A lb a n ia , M a c e d o n ia a n d W e s te rn T h ra c e ). C re a tio n o f an in d e p e n ­ d e n t A lb a n ia . 1914 A s s a s s in a tio n o f A rc h d u k e F ra n z F e r d in a n d o f A u s tr ia in S a ra je v o . F irs t W o r ld W a r b e g in s . 1915 B u c h a n The Thirty-nine Steps. 1 9 1 6 B u c h a n Greenmantle. 1 9 1 8 F o llo w in g th e c o lla p s e o f A u s tria H u n g a ry , th e K in g d o m o f S e rb s, C r o a ts a n d S lo v e n e s (la te r Y u g o s la v ia ) is e s ta b lis h e d an d R o m a n ia a c q u ire s e x te n s iv e te rrito rie s , in c lu d in g T ra n s y lv a n ia . 1923 T h e B u lg a ria n P rim e M in is te r an d P e a s a n t P a rty le a d e r S ta m b o lis k y is m u tila te d a n d k ille d f o llo w in g a s u c c e s s fu l m ilita ry c o u p . 1928 / .o g p ro c la im e d K in g o f A lb a n ia .

1923 S a k i The Toys o f Peace.

1925 C h r is tie The Secret o f Chimneys.

233

Chronology 1 9 2 9 K in g A le x a n d e r o f Y u g o s la v ia e sta b lish e s a p e rso n a l dictato rsh ip . 1 9 3 4 K in g A le x a n d e r k ille d b y a M a c e d o n ia n a s sa s sin in M a rs e ille s. P o w e r p a s s e s to th e P rin c e R e g e n t, P au l. 1935 E s ta b lis h m e n t o f a ro y a l d ic ta to r ­ s h ip u n d e r T s a r B o ris III in B u lg a r ia . 1 9 3 6 E s ta b lis h m e n t o f a d ic ta to rs h ip by G e n e ra l M e ta x a s in G re e c e . 1 9 38 N e w R o m a n ia n c o n s titu tio n g iv e s K in g C a ro l II fu ll p o w e rs. 1 9 4 0 R o m a n ia lo se s B e s s a ra b ia (p re s e n td a y M o ld o v a ) to th e S o v ie t U n io n a n d m u c h o f T ra n s y lv a n ia to H u n g a ry a n d jo in s th e A x is cam p . Italy a tta c k s G re e c e fro m A lb a n ia ( a n d is re p e lle d ). 1941 Y u g o s la v ia in v a d e d b y G e rm a n y . S ta rt o f Y u g o s la v c iv il w a r/ P a rtis a n stru g g le . G e rm a n c o n q u e s t o f G re e c e . 1944 C o m m u n is t ta k e - o v e r s o f g o v e r n m e n t b e g in in Y u g o s la v ia , R o m a n ia , B u lg a ria an d A lb a n ia . S ta rt o f th e firs t r o u n d o f th e G re e k C iv il W a r, f o llo w in g a fa ile d C o m m u n is t ta k e -o v e r. 1 9 48 T ito b re a k s a w a y fro m S ta lin .

1932 G re e n e Stam boul Train. 1934 C h ris tie M urder on the Orient

Express.

1936 1937 1938 1939

F o o tm a n Pig and Pepper. R o b e rts Victoria Four-Thirty. S itw e ll Roumanian Journey. A m b le r The Mask o f Dimitrios.

1941 W e s t Black Lamb and Grey

Falcon.

1957 D u rre ll White Eagles Over Serbia.

Esprit de Corps. 1 960 C a ry M emoir o f the Bobotes. M a n n in g The Great Fortune. 1961 W a u g h Unconditional Surrender. 1962 M a n n in g The Spoilt City. 1965 M a n n in g Friends and Heroes. 1983 B ra d b u ry Rates o f Exchange. 1986 L e ig h F e rm o r Between the Woods

and the Water.

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INDEX

Abdul Hamid, Sultan, 93 Adrianople (Edirne), 109; siege of, 122; Treaty of, 231 Africa, scramble for, 203 Albania, viii, 4, 7, 13, 18, 53, 70, 86, 87, 132, 177, 186, 204-6, 233; independence of, 22, 164, 232; inspiration for fiction, 88, 91; re­ volts against Ottoman rule, 25, 29, 177; see also Byron, George Gordon; Disraeli, Ben­ jam in; Durham, Edith Albanians, 13,21; perceptions of, ix, 19,22,31, 95, 100, 118, 123, 132,143, 164-5, 175,198; ‘virgins’, 200 Albanian Association o f Great Britain, 206 Albanian Society o f Britain, 206 ‘Alemania’, 66 Alexander Battenberg, Prince o f Bulgaria, 44,47, 54, 232 Alexander Karageorgevich, King o f Yugoslavia, 107, 108,233 Alexander Obrenovic, King o f Serbia, 60-2,124, 232; see also Serbia: regicide Alexander o f Macedon, 20 Ali Pasha, 18, 18n Allcock, John and Young, Antonia, Black Lambs and Grey Falcons, 199 Allen, Walter, 185 Allingham, William, 33 Allison, John, 141 Ambler, Eric, 87; Judgement on Deltchev 55; Mask ofDimitrios, The, 101,109-11, 233 Anderson, Benedict, 22 Anderson, M S., 27 Andrews, Henry, 174 AndriiS, Ivo, 206 Antivari see Bar Applebaum, Anne, 46 ‘Arcadia’, 209 Archer, Lord (Jeffrey), 70 Arrival of a Train at a Country Station, The, 104 Arts and Crafts Movement, 210 Ash, Timothy Garton, 205-6 Asquith, Elizabeth, 192 Athenaeum, 38 Athens, 2 0 ,184, see also Byron, George Gordon; Greece; Manning, Olivia Austin, Alfred, England s Policy and Peril, 31,

Tory Horrors; or, the Question o f the How, 3 1; Russia Before Europe, 31 Austria, 56,65,71,76,86,90,172,178; ' Balkanness' of, 4,6-7, see also Austria-Hungary

Austria-Hungary, 65-7, 204, 206, 232; Balkan possessions, 1, 4, 42, 96, 232; ‘Balkanness’ of, 6; in fiction, 123; intervention in the SerboBulgarian war (1885-6), 114; Military Fron­ tier, 8 2; rivalry with Russia 54, 66; seealso individual lands Avala, 48, 48n Baedeker (guides to the Balkans), 80, 81, 106 Bakic-H ayden, M ilica and H ayden, Robert, ‘O rie n ta list V a ria tio n s on th e T hem e ‘Balkan” , 5 ‘Balka’, 86 ‘Balkania’, 86 Balkan Mountains, 3 Balkan Peninsula: ‘Balkan’ identity, vii, ix, 2, 8, 9 ,1 2 ,5 7 ,6 9 -7 3 ,7 4 ,7 6 ,7 9 -8 0 ,9 4 ,1 1 5 ,1 2 0 1,176, 178, 198, 202-12; Balkanisation, vii, 4-5 ,9 ,3 0 ,2 0 2 ,2 0 4 ; ‘Balkanness’ and Europ­ eanness, vii, 2 ,4 -1 1 , 12,13, 57,76, 83,110, 121, 128, 136, 157, 184, 187, 203-4; ‘emer­ gence’ and origin o f the name, 3, 6, 15; ex­ tent, vii, 3,4; folklore, 23,76-7; independence movements, 12,22, 26, 28; in film, 10; postCommunist ‘re-emergence’ o f the Balkans, 202—4; trade with Britain viii; women and the Balkans, 167, 198-201; see also Britain: ‘Britishness’ and ‘Balkanness’, diplomatic relations with the Balkans, travellers in the Balkans; Europe: ‘Balkanisation’ o f Europe; Romanticism; United States o f America: lit­ erary interest in the Balkans; perceptions of the Balkans Balkans see Balkan Peninsula; see also individual countries Balkan Wars (1912-3), 42, 93n, 96, 120, 122n, 123, 162, 163,232 Baltic States, 5 Balzac, Honoré de, 208; Un Début dans la vie, 24 Banat, 86 Bar, 163 Bari, 146, 153 Baring-Gould, Sabine, The Book ofWere-Wolves, 76n, 77-9 Bassett, Richard, Balkan Hours, 187,229n Bâthory, Elisabeth, 76n Battenberg, Alexander see Alexander Battenberg, Prince of Bulgaria Beaufort, Emily Anne see Strangford, Viscountess Beaumont, Peter, 5n Beckford, William, 16

hi ticx

247

Belarus, 5 Bucharest, 15, 47; Battle o f 22, Treaty of, 114, Belfast, 204 see also Magris, Claudio; Manning, Olivia, Belgium, 5 Patmore, Derek; Rezzori, Gregor von; Roma­ Belgrade, 4, 15, 24, 55, 62, 65, 71, 77, 94, 96-9, nia; Sitwell, Sacheverell; Waldeck, R G 106, 108-9, 113, 131-3, 138-40, 151, 161,Budapest, 15, 79; see also Austria-Hungary, Hungary 175; see also Serbia; Lever, Charles; Yugo­ slavia Bukovina, 78 Bulgaria, viii, 4, 5, 7, 46, 53-6, 62, 71, 85, 93n, Bell, Martin, 212 Bellow, Saul, The Dean's December, vii 118-9,171 ,1 7 3 ,2 0 3 ,2 1 0 ,2 3 1 ,2 3 3 ; Bulgar­ Belorussia see Belarus ian atrocities, 2 8-31,37-40; formation o f the Bergonzi, Bernard, 152 independent state, 42, 66, 231-2; as literary Bergson, Henri, 174 inspiration, 54, 55,60, 90,109, 109n, 113-7; see also Gladstone, William Ewart; Serbia: Berisha, Sali, 206 Berlin, Congress of, 66, 206, 231 Serbo-Bulgarian War, Shaw, George Bernard; Bessarabia, 7, 127n, 233; see also Moldavia Sofia; Swinburne, Algernon Charles Bulgarians, perceptions of, ix, 3 1 ,1 3 2 ,136, 176 Bibesco, Prince Antoine, 178n, 192 Bibesco, Prince Emanuel, 192 Bulgarie’ see Swinburne, Algernon Charles Burger, Gottfried August, Leonore, 74 Bibesco, Princess Marthe, 178n, 192 Birkenfeld’, 47 Burke, Edmund, 75 Burne-Jones, Edward, 39 Black George see Karageorge Burton, Sir Richard, 132 Black Hand, 62, 62n, 67 Butler, Marilyn, 10 Black Sea, 26, 54, 122 Blissett, Nellie, Bindweed, 60, 62 Butler, Samuel, 78, 202n Buxton, Noel and Charles Rhoden 177, 228n Bloom, Harold, 5 Blue Mountains’ see 'Land of the Blue Moun­ Byalorussia see Belarus Byron, George Gordon, viii, 1, 10, 14-22,24,40, tains’ 41,99, 116, 164, 181, 187, 195, 196-8, 205, Boccaccio, Giovanni, Decameron, 103 210,212; and the Albanian lands, 10, 15, 18Bohemia, 46 20; and the Greek lands 10, 15, 20, 21, 26, Boris III, King o f Bulgaria, 233 196-7,216n; iconic significance, 16,42,212; Bosnia-Herzegovina, 3n, 4 ,1 3 ,2 2 ,3 0 ,3 1 ,5 3 ,6 5 6, 126-31; 149, 173,204,206, 207,211,212, Russophobia, 26; translations of Balkan folk­ 231,232; Austrian occupation (1878), 43,96, lore, 23; travels in the Ottoman Empire,14232; Austrian annexation (1908), 65, 232 21, The Bride o f Abydos, 22, 231; Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, 14, 15,16, 18, 18n, 19, Bourchier, James, 93n Bowring, John, 23—4 23, 25, 34, 41, 231; ‘The Curse of Minerva’, 17; Don Juan, 17, 21, 231; The Giaour, 17, Bradbury, Malcolm, 50, 122; Rates o f Exchange, 20,231, The Hours of Idleness, 15; ‘The Maid 73,233 o f Athens’, 18 Brailsford, H N , 119, 166 Byronic hero in literature, 17, 42, 43, 51, 72, Bram Stoker’s Dracula (film), 82 75, 88,91,92, 103, 117, 121,136, 157-8,202 Bran, Castle, 2, 81,209 Byzantium, 178; ‘Byzantine’ as ‘Oriental’ 5, 9; Branagh, Kenneth, 198 ‘B yzantine P eninsula’ 4; restoration o f Brankovic, Vuk, 55 (‘Greek project’), 25; see also Roman Empire Brasov, 78 Bright, John, 38-9 Callimachi, Anne-Marie see Callimacki, Princess Britain: ‘Britishness’ and ‘Balkanness’, 9, 10-1, 69, 8 8 ,9 6 ,1 0 7 ,1 1 0 ,1 2 4 -6 ,1 3 4 -6 ,1 6 8 ,2 0 8 , Anne-Marie C a llim ack i, P rin c ess A n n e-M arie, 185; 209; ‘Britishness’ and ‘Europeanness’, 9,48, Yesterday was Mine, 192 69,92,151,209, diplomatic relations with the Balkans, 62; rivalry with Germany, 72, rivalry Cälinescu, Armand, 186, 194 Calvin, Jean, 178 with Russia, ix, 11, 27, 29, 36, 54, 72; sup­ port for the Ottoman Empire, 28, 170, 179; Campbell, John C., 203 Canetti, Elias, 90n trade with the Balkans viii; travellers in the Carlyle, Thomas, 37-9 Balkans, 3n, 10,15,179; see also ‘Englishness’ Carmen Sylvasee Elisabeth, Queen o f Romania Brophy, Brigid, 73; Palace Without Chairs, 50 Carol II, King o f Romania, 233 Browning, Robert, 37 ‘Carpathia’, 47, 73 Bryant, Marguerite and McAnally, G. H , The Carpathian Mountains, 73, 76n, 78, 80-5, 131 Chronicles of a Great Prince, 48, 68 Cary, Joyce, 42; volunteer in Montenegro, 162— Buchan, John, 1 ,1 7 ,69n, 87-93,94,95,107,111, 3; Memoir o f the Bobotes, 163,233 136, 159 ,’Castle Gay, 93; Greenmantle, 44, Catherine the Great, 25 89-93, 94, 136, 232; The House o f the Four Catholicism see Christianity Winds, 93; The Thirty-nine Steps, 54, 87-9, ('attaro see Kotor 92, 93, 232

248

Index

Dickens, Charles, 174 Cawelti, John and Rosenberg, Bruce, The Spy Story, 87, 91,93 Dickinson, Goldsworthy Lowes, 129 Dietrich, Marlene, 104 Ceau$escu, Nicolae, 203, 209 Dilke, Sir Charles, 39 Cetinje, 162, 168 Dimitrova, Blaga, 73 Channon, Sir Henry 191, 197 D israeli, B enjam in, 25, 29, 207; Contarini Chesney, George, 89 Fleming, 25 Chocolate Soldier, The, see Strauss, Oscar Djakovo, 55 Christianity, 182, and Islam 8, 178-9; Orthodox Djilas, Milovan, Rise and Fall, 150n (Eastern), compared to Western, 5, 7, 59,178 Dobrudja, 4, 213n Christie, Agatha, Murder on the Orient Express, 101, 104, 107-8, 209, 233; The Secret of Dostoevsky, Fyodor Mikhailovich, 178 Dracula, Count (Vlad Tepe$, Vlad the Impaler), Chimneys, 55, 60, 62, 67-70, 233 2, 73-85, 209, 210; see also Stoker, Bram Christie, Archibald, 108 Dracula Christodoulu, Despina, 8 Dracula’s Castle see Bran, Castle Church, Richard William, 30, 177 Dresden, 46 Churchill, Randolph, 146, 147-8 Drury, Henry, 14, 18n C h u rc h ill, W in sto n , 135, 147, 155; The ‘Drynia’, 65-6 Second World War, 135 Dubrovnik, 148-9, 150, 151-2, 154 Claes, Willy, 5, 5n Dumas, Alexandre, The Pale Faced Lady, 76n Clinton, Bill, 172 Du Maurier, George, Trilby, 113 Clinton, Hillary, 172 Dunsany, Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, Codreanu, Corneliu Zelea, 186 18'" Baron, 185 Cold War, 101 Durham, (Mary) Edith, 161-71, 172, 174, 175, Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 16, 20 177-181,198-9,207,211,214n; dispute with Collins, John Churton, 38 Rebecca West, 176-7,211; The Burden o f the Collins, Wilkie, The Woman in White, 76 Balkans, 166, 169; High Albania, 164, 166— Communism, ‘Orientalness’ of, 5, 7 7, 171, 187, 198; The Sarajevo Crime, 176; Consindine, Bob see Lever, Charles Some Tribal Origins, Laws and Customs in Constantine I, King o f Greece, 88 the Balkans, 166; Through the Lands o f the Constantinople, 3n, 4, 28, 28n, 56, 89, 91, 92, 105, Serb, 166, 232; Twenty Years o f the Balkan 109,178,231; Shelley’s mythical city, 26 Tangle, 166 Cookridge, E. H., Orient Express, 102 Durham Gallery (Bankfield Museum, Halifax), Coppola, Francis Ford, 82 198 Corfu, 1 Durrell, Lawrence, I, 12, 58, 97-101, 126, 137— Crawford, Earl o f see Lindsay, John 46, 152, 157, 160, 195,210; Alexandria Quar­ Crimean War, 28, 33, 40, 231 tet, 152, 152n; Antrobus Complete, 141; Crna Gora see Montenegro Avignon Quintet, 152, I52n; Bitter Lemons, Crnkovic, Zlatko, 152n, 214n 9 4 ; ‘Call o f the Sea’, 143, 145; ‘For Immedi­ Croatia, 4, 5, 8, 47, 49n, 86, 173, 204, 206, 209, ate Release’, 145; ‘Frying the Flag’, 144; 211; inspiration for fiction, 107-8; South Slav ‘G hostT rain’, 145, Esprit de Corps, 94, 141, movement, 42; see also Waugh, Evelyn; Yu­ 233; ‘Jots and Tittles’, 145; Justine, 94; ‘Let­ goslavia ters in Darkness’, 139; ‘Noblesse Oblige', 142; Croats, 173, 178, perceptions of, ix, 138 ‘Sarajevo’, 99; Sauve Qui Peut, 141, Stiff Croly, George, ‘Czerni George’, 24-5, 231 Upper Lip, 141; White Eagles Over Serbia, 11, Cunningham , V alentine, British Writers and 94-101,132,137,138,146,152,152n, 168,233 the Thirties, 101 Dwight, H. G , Constantinople: Settings & Traits, Cyprus, In 105 Czech Republic, 5 Czerni-Georges see Karageorge Eastern Question, 27-9; 31 -2 ,3 8 -9 ,4 2 , 231; see also Disraeli, Benjamin; Gladstone, William Daily Express, 163 Ewart; Swinburne, Algernon Charles Daily News, 54 Eden, Anthony, 140, 149 Dalmatia, 1, 85, 86, 149, 180, 183, 194 Edirne see Adrianople Damad Ferid Pasha, 93 Elisabeth, Queen of Romania, 47 ‘Danubia’, 65-6 Elmslie, Dr Isabel see Hutton, Lady 'D ardania', 56, 71 ‘E n g lish n ess’, 9, 69, 125; see also B ritain Darwin, Charles, 37 ( ‘Britishness’) Dekobra, Maurice, La Madone des sleepings, 102, ‘Erewhon’, 78, 202 103 Escarpit, Robert, 16 Demaqi, Adcm, 86 E urope E uropean id en tity , vii, 2, 7, 183, Denton, William, Montenegro its People and ‘ Halkanisation’ of Europe, 9, see also Balkan their History, 58

Index Peninsula: ‘Balkanness’ a n d ‘Europeanness’; Britain: ‘Britishness’ and ‘Europeanness’ ‘European Turkey’ see Ottoman Empire ‘Evallonia’, 93 Evans, Arthur, 30 ‘Evarchia’, 50, 73 Evening Standard, 70 Evzones, 89, 196, 197 Fairfield, Cecily Isabel see West, Rebecca Ferdinand of Austria, Archduke Franz, 62n, 74, 176, 232 Ferdinand of Saxe-Coburg, King of Bulgaria, 54 Feval. Paul, La Ville-Vampire, 77 Filipovic, Zlata, 206 Film: dissemination o f ‘Balkan’ imagery 10,208; film noir, 107; see also individual film titles Finder, Jennifer, 199 Finland, 171-2 FitzGibbon, Constantine, 141 F itzH erb ert, M argaret, The Man Who Was Greenmantle, 92 Fleming, Ian, From Russia with Love, 102 Footman, David, 133-7, 142, 159, Balkan Holi­ day, 133, 168; Half-Way East, 133; Pemberton, 133-6; Pig and Pepper, 126,1334,233 Ford, Emmet B , ‘Montenegro in the Eyes of Brit­ ish Travellers’, 58 Forster, E M , 126-31; ‘The Eyes o f Sibiu’, 131; ‘The Heart of Bosnia’, 127-31, Howards End, 127; A Passage to India, 129-30; ‘What Does it Matter’, 126-7, 129 Fortis, Abbe Alberto, 23 Fortunes o f War (BBC TV series), 198 Fowles, John, 73 France, 1, 27, 208, 231; Gothic genre in French literature, 77 Fraser, G. S., 94 Frayling, Christopher, 78 Fry, C. B , 44 Galicia, 61 Gerard, Dorothea, 61-8,71; Etelka's Vow, 61; The Eternal Woman, 61 ;A Forgotten Sin, 6 1; Holy Matrimony, 61; The Red-Hot Crown, 5 5 ,6 1 7, 69, 70, 232 Gerard, E D , 61; see also Gerard, Dorothea and Gerard, Emily Gerard, Emily, 61, 78, 191; The Land Beyond the Forest 61, 82; ‘Transylvanian Superstitions’, 6 1 ,7 7 ,7 8 Germany, 1, 173, 178, 182, 208; in popular fic­ tion, 43, 48, 88, 89-90, 92; see also Britain: rivalry with Germany Gladstone, William Ewart, l,5 5 n , 177,198; ‘Bul­ garian agitation’, 29-30, 32-3, 43, 93, 207; on the Eastern Question, 29,32-4; on Monte­ negro, 32-5; Bulgarian Horrors and the Ques­ tion of the East, 29, 231, ‘Montenegro: A Sketch', 34-5 Glcndinning, Victoria, 172, 173n. 175, 183

249

Goering, Hermann, 139 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 23,75,174,208 Gosse, Sir Edmund William, 38 Gothic fiction see Popular literature Gothic Revival, 83 Graphic, 199,200 Great War o f 189-, The, 71-2 Greece, viii, 1, 7, 53, 56, 76n, 99,171, 207, 208, 210, 233; and the construction o f European identity, 196-8; ‘Balkanness’ o f Greece, 6,15, 204; independence movement, 27,29,42,231; inspiration for fiction, 88-8 9 ; ‘O riental’ Greece 15, 20-1; see also Athens; Byron, George Gordon; Durrell, Lawrence; Manning, Olivia; Shelley, Percy Bysshe Greco-Turkish War (1897), 42 ‘Greek Peninsula’, 4 Green, J. R., 32 Greene, Graham, I, 11, 87, 104-7, 110, 210; Rumour at Nightfall, 105; Stamboul Train, 101, 103-7, 108, 134, 209, 233 Gregg, Hilda see Grier, S. C. Grier, S. C. (Hilda Gregg), 5 2 -6 0 ,6 3 ,6 4 , 68, 83; A Crowned Queen, 48, 53-60, 7 1; The Heir, 52; His Excellency’s English Governess, 52; The Great Proconsul,52; In Furthest Ind, 52, Peace With Honour, 52, The Kings o f the East, 53; The Prince o f the Captivity, 52, 53; The Princess's Tragedy, 52; A Royal Marriage, 52; An Uncrowned King, 48, 52-5, 68, 69, 71,232 Grimm, Jakob, 23 Habsburg Empire see Austria-Hungary Habsburg Monarchy see Austria-Hungary i lad/isehmovic, Omer, 3n Haemus see Balkan Mountains Haggard, Rider, 83, 203; She, 83 Hales, A G., 118 Hall, Brian, 172, 182 Hamilton-Hill, Donald, S. O E. Assignment, 148 Handbookfor Travellers in Turkey, /(,113 Harvey, Andrew, 149, 150 Hasanaginica’ (‘Hasan Aga’s W ife’, South Slav ballad), 23 Haw-Haw, Lord see Joyce, William Hayden, Robert see Bakic-Hayden, Milica Henderson, Percy E , An English Officer in the Balkans, 58 Henty, G. A., 30 Herbert, Aubrey, 44, 92 I lelge. King Ottokar s Sceptre, 143 Hermanstadt see Sibiu Herzegovina, 4, 85, 180, 194; uprising, 28, 31; see also Bosnia-Herzegovina Herzfeld, Michael, 6 ‘Herzoslovakia’, 62, 67-70 Hitchcock, Alfred, 89, 104, 111 Hitler, A dolf, 7, 183 Hoare, Sir Reginald, 185 llobhouse, John Cam, 18, I8n Hodgson, John, 176

?M)

Index

llomor, 15-ft Honegger. Aithur, I OS Hope, Anthony, viii, 17, 45-52, 55, 57, 59, 60, 63, 64, 68, 93, 105, 121, 127, 144, 170,202, 209; The Heart o f Princess Osra, 49, The Pris­ oner ofZenda, 1 ,4 5 -8 ,5 9 ,6 4 ,6 8 ,7 2 ,7 3 ,8 6 , 91, 113, 208, 232; Rupert o f Hentzau, 48; Sophy o f Kravonia, 10,48,49-51,58,72,105, 232 I lorowitz, Goldie see Waldeck, R G Howard, George, 37 Hoxha, Enver, 165n, 214n Hughes, T. S., 18n I lugo, Victor, 93 Hungary, 5,173,178,221 n, 233, the ‘Balkanness’ o f Hungary, 4, 6; revolution (of 1848), 42; see also Austria-H ungary; Leigh Fermor, Patrick Hungarians, 106, 106n Hunyadi, John, 82 Hurd, Douglas, ‘The Last Day ofSum m er’, 132 Hutton, Lady (Elmslie, Dr Isabel), 200 Huxley, Aldous, Brave New World, 142 Ignjacevic, Svetozar, Zemlja cuda и izlomljenom ogledalu, 152n Illyria, 1 ,4 ,9 ,4 1 ,7 7 , 162 Illyrian Peninsula, 4 Independent, The, 6, 8 Ingham, Sir Bernard, 106 loannina see Janina Ionian islands 1, 29 lorga, Nicolae, 203, 203n Irby, A deline Paulina, 200; and M ackenzie, Georgina Muir, Travels in the Slavonic Prov­ inces ofTurkey-in-Europe, 199 Iron Guard, 186 Iskander лее Skenderbeg; Alexander o f Macedon Islam: and Christianity, 8; in popular fiction 89 Istanbul see Constantinople Istria, 86 Italy, 1, 13, 137, 173, 178, 197, 233; in popular fiction, 43, 48, 76, 76n Izetbegovic, Alija, 21 In James, Henry, 28 Janina, 15, 25 Johnson, E. С , 77 Jones, Revd W Henry, 77 Joyce, William (Lord Haw-Haw), 173 Judaism: perceptions o f Jewishness in fiction, 59-60, 69, 208 Jugoslavia see Yugoslavia Kadare, Ismail, 170 Kaplan, Robert D , 6, 172 Karadjordje, K aradjordjevic See Karageorge, Karageorgevich Karadzic, Vuk Stefanovic, 23 Karageorge, 24-5, 100 Karageorgevich, Serbian dynasty, 44n, 64 ‘Kedaria’, 62, 124

Kermaunor, Im us, 7 Kermode, Frank, 152 King, Francis, 185 Kinglake, A, W „ Eothen, 112-3, 161,211,231 Koljevié, Nikola, 12, 175 Korçê, 15 Korcula, 147 Kosovo, 86, 100, 118, 232; the Battle of, 82, 85, 182 Kotor, 187 Kozani, 15 Kragujevac, 67, 155 Krajina, 82 ‘Kravonia’, 48, 49 5 1 ,5 5 ,6 4 ,6 9 , 72, 121, 133 Kriegschuldfrage, Die, 176 Kropf, Lewis L., 77 Kutchuk-Kainardji, the Treaty of, 27, 231

Lady Vanishes, The (film), 104,111 Lambe, John Lawrence, By Command o f the Prince, 54 ‘Land o f the Blue Mountains’, 10, 85-7 Larbaud, Valery, ‘Ode’ 103 La Spezia, 132 Laszowski, Miecislas de, 61, 78 Lawrence, D H., 181 Lawrence, T E., 91 Lazar Hrebeljanovic, Prince o f Serbia, 55 Lear, Edward, 99 Leatherdale, Clive, 81 Le Fanu, Joseph Sheridan, Carmilla, 75, 231 Lehar, Franz , The Merry Widow, 47, 187 Leigh Fermor, Patrick, 209; Between the Woods and the Water, 13,186,194,233; Roumeli, 197 Le Queux, William, 89; The Great War in 1897, 113 Lever, Charles, 131 ; ‘What I Did at Belgrade’ 113, 131-3 Lévy, Bernard Henry, 205 Lewis, Matthew, 16, 76n Lindsay, John, Earl of Crawford, 15 Lipparini, Ludovico, 16 Ljubljana, 97 Llewellyn, Robert, 73 Londonderry, Edith, Marchioness of, 192 Longgarde, Julius Longard de, 61 Lukacs, John, 7 Lumière, Louis, 104 Lyons, Sir Edmund, 27 McAnally, G. H. see Bryant, Marguerite MacDonald, Ramsay, 192 Macedonia, 4 ,7 ,4 6 ,8 5 ,9 6 ,9 9 ,1 1 8 -2 0 ,1 2 3 ,1 7 3 , 178, 180, 181-2, 194, 207, 233; Internal M acedonian R evolutionary O rganisation (IMRO), 118, Macedonian uprising (1903), 118, 162, 177, 232 Macedonians, 54, 109n, 173, 176 M ackenzie, Georgina M uir see Irby, Adeline Paulina and Mackenzie, Georgina Muir Maclean, Fitzroy, 146, 147, 148, 150 McNeile, H C. (Sapper), 87

Index Mucri, Teresa, 18, 18n Mademoiselle, 141 ‘M agnagraecia’, 56 Magris, Caludio, 189 Makri, Teresa see Macri, Teresa Mallet, Charles, 51 Manchester Courier, 54 Manchester Guardian, 49, 119, 177 Manning, Olivia: on Greece, 185, 194-8; on Ro­ mania, 184-94; translations into Romanian, 214n; Fortunes o f War (hexalogy of novels): 185,186; The Balkan Trilogy 1 1 ,127n; I The Great Fortune, 184-94, 233; II The Spoilt City, 184-94, 233; III Friends and Heroes, 194—8,233; The Levant Trilogy, 185; see also Fortunes of War (BBC TV Series) Marie o f Romania, Queen, 8, 44, 81 Masin, Draga (Queen Draga o f Serbia), 61; see also Serbia: regicide Mask o f Dimitrios, The (film version), 109 Masood, Syed Ross, 130 Mavrocordato, Alexander, Prince, 21 Meilhac, Henri, 47 Mérimée, Prosper, 23,24,208; La Guzla 24,77 Merry Widow, The, see Lehâr, Franz Metaxas, John, General, 197, 233 Metternich, Clemens von, Prince, 6 Mickiewicz, Adam, 17 Middle East, 10, 53 Mihailovic, Draza, 100, lOOn, 146, 155 Milan Obrenoviæ, King o f Serbia, 47, 96n Military Frontier see Austria-Hungary: Military Frontier Miller, Henry, 137, 138 Mills, Sara, 76, 84 Mirko Petrovi«c-NjegoÂs, Prince o f Montenegro, 58 Missolonghi, 16, 42 ‘M lavia’, 65 ‘M oesia’, 56, 61—7, 70 Moldavia, 7, 78, 81 ; see also Bessarabia Molière, 174 Monroe, Marilyn, 47 Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley, 10, 15, 199 Montenegro, ix, 4, 33, 43—44, 44n, 47, 53, 96, 162-4, 187, 194; inspiration for fictional lands, 8 5 -7 ; su pport for the uprising in H erzegovina, 28; see also C ary, Joyce; Gladstone, William Ewart, Durham, Edith; Tennyson, Alfred, Tolstoy, Leo Montenegrins, 58, 68, 162-4, 173, 198 Moore, George, 113 Moore, Thomas, 15, 16, 20 Morley, John, 29 Morning Post, The, 62, 118, 119, 120, 121 Morris, William, 37 ‘M oscovia’, 65, 66 Moskopole, 15 Mountbatten, Louis, Lord, 44 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 173, 187 Muersteg agreement see MUrszteg agreement Munich, 79

2.51

Munro, Hector Hugh (Saki), 43, 46 ,6 2 ,6 9 , 11726, 166,207,210; ‘The Cupboard of the Yes­ terdays’, 120-22, 124; The Death-Trap, 62, 124; ‘The Lost Sanjak’, 96, 125, 232; ‘The Old Lore’, 121; ‘The Oversight’ 125; ‘The Purple o f the B alkan K ings’, 120, 123, ‘Reginald on Worries’, 126; The Toys o f Peace (collection), 120, 232; ‘The Toys o f Peace’ (short story), 122; The Watched Pot, 126 Munro-Butler-Johnstone, H.A , 31; The Turks:

Their Character, Manners and Institutions, 31 Murad, Sultan, 55

Murder on the Orient Express (film versions), 104 MUrszteg agreement, 85, 122 Mussolini, Benito, 197 Mysterious Stranger, The [anon.], 76n Nash, F O H , Kattie o f the Balkans, 60, 94 Natalija Obrenoviæ, Queen o f Serbia, 47 Near East, 3, 16, 29, 74, 88, 113, 125, 162 Nemanjic, S a v a g e Sava, Saint Nenadovic, Ljubomir, 34 Nerval, Gérard de, 23 ‘Neutralia’, 151 New Statesman, 141 New Yorker, 94, 172 New York Times, 9 Nicholas Petrovic-Njegos, Prince, later King, of Montenegro, 28, 58, 162, 163 Nicolson, Sir Harold, 141 Nineteenth Century, The, 33 Nis, 56,67, 108, I09n Njegos see Petrovic-Njegos, Petar II Njegus, 44n Nodier, Charles, Smarma ou les démons de la nuit, 11 Norton-Taylor, Richard, 206 Novibazar see Sanjak o f Novi Pazar Novi Pazar see Sanjak o f Novi Pazar Novi Sad, 34 Nusic, Branislav, 52n Obilic, Milos, 55 Obrenovic, Milos, 2 4 ,44n, 55 Obrenovic, Serbian dynasty, 24, 44n, 64 Observer, The, 5n Olivier, Laurence, 47, 184 Oltenia, 7 Orient Express, train, 89; novels, 10, 101-11, films, 102-5 Orient Express (film), 104 Orthodox Christianity see Christianity Osborne, Charles, 68 Ostrog, monastery, 85, 97 Ottoman Empire, 28, 64, 176, 179, 207, 231-2; advance into Austria-Hungary, 6; architecture in the Balkans, 179; colonisation o f the Balkans, viii, 1, 5, 113; ‘Turkey in Europe’ (‘European Turkey’), 3 ,4 ,6 , see also Byron, George Gordon, individual Balkan lands; Turkey

Owen, David, llalkan Odyssey, 207 Pageaux, Daniel-Henri, 31 Palmerston, Henry John Temple, 3,d Viscount, 93 Papaconstantinou, Michalis, IS Parker-Bowles, Camilla, 70 Paüié, Nikola, 55 Patmore, Derek, Invitation to Roumania, 185,189 Paul Karageorgevich, Prince o f Yugoslavia, 135, 233 Peter I Karageorgevich, King of Serbia, later Yu­ goslavia, 64 Peter II Karageorgevich, King o f Yugoslavia, 108, 175 P etro v ich , G eo rg e (P e tro v ic , D jo rd je) see Karageorge Petrovic-Njegos, Nicholas see Nicholas PetroviéNjegos, Prince, later King, of Montenegro Petrovic-Njegos, Petar II, Mountain Wreath, 35 Phanariots, 191-2 Piedmont-Sardinia, 28 Pindar, 195 Pirot, the Battle of, 114 Pius XII, Pope, 149 Plaça, Sylvia, 185 Playboy, 141 Pleven (Plevna), 51, 51 n Podgorica, 164 Polidori, John, The Vampyre, 7 5 ,76n Popular literature, 209-10; gothic novel: 16, 73 87, 101, 221n; growth o f , 10, 208; science fiction, 86; spy novel, 8 7-101; see also France: gothic genre in French literature; Ori­ ent Express; ‘Ruritania’ Porter, Ivor, 185 Portillo, Michael, 46-47 ‘Pottibakia’, 126-7 Powell, Anthony, 152 Powell, Colin, 172 Pratt, Mary Louise, 14, 215n Prince and the Showgirl, The, 47 Princip, Gavrilo, 73 Prisoner ofZenda, The (film versions), 45 Proust, Marcel, A la recherche du temps perdu, 192 Punch, 28, 2 9 ,3 1 ,3 9 , 141, 143 Pushkin, Alexander, 24, 116, 208 Quakers, 38-39 Rabelais, François, 142, 174 Radcliffe, Ann, 77; The Italian, 16,76n; The Mys­ teries o f Udolpho, 16, 76n, 77 Ragusa see Dubrovnik Randall, Sir Alec, 131 Kattigan, Terence, 73; The Sleeping Prince, 47;

see also: Prince and the Showgirl, The Rebac, Hasan, 174 Redschid Pasha, 25 Rezzori, Gregor von, 189n, 194; Memoirs of an Anti-Semite, 189; Orient Express, 103 Rhodes, Cecil, 202

Kidler, Anne, 139, 145 Kila, monastery, 93n Roberts, Cecil, 208, Victoria Four-Thirty, 101, 108,233 Rocky Horror Picture Show, The, 86 Rollyson, Carl, 174 Roman Catholicism see Christianity Roman Empire, 7 Romania, viii, xii, 4, 5, 7, 28, 46, 53, 65, 131, 198-9, 203, 231, 232, 233; formation o f the state, 42, inspiration for fiction, 56, 76n; see also Bucharest; Carpathian Mountains; Man­ ning, O liv ia; S itw ell, S ach ev erell, Transylvania; Wallachia Romanians, perceptions of, ix, 56, 132 Romanticism, 10,14, 74-7; and the Balkans, 11, 14-27, 48, 58,64, 116 ‘Romanzia’, 48 Rome Express (film), 104 R o sen b erg , B ruce see C a w elti, Jo h n and Rosenberg, Bruce Rostiis, Zoltan, 205 ‘Roum’, 56 Roumania see Romania Rumania see Romania Rumelia, Eastern, 54, 113, 232 ‘Ruritania’, viii, 45-50, 57, 67, 68, 69, 117, 136, 192, 194, 202, 203, 209, 210, 212, 219n; Ruritanian lands in literature and film, 10,437,73, 8 6 ,9 3 ,1 0 1 ,1 2 4 ,1 2 6 -3 1 ,1 3 2 ;seealso Hope, Anthony; Prisoner ofZenda (film ver­ sions) Ruse, 90, 119 Russia, 27, 65, 208, 231, 232; fears o f Russian expansionism, ix, 25, 26,27; influence in the Balkans, 1, 27, 28, 54, 71, 101, 114, 172; ‘Orientalness’ of, 5, 7; лее also Britain: ri­ valry with Russia; Austria-Hungary: rivalry with Russia Russophobia see Byron, George Gordon; Shelley, Percy Bysshe; Tennyson, Alfred; Swinburne, Algernon Charles; Waugh, Evelyn: percep­ tions of the Soviet Union Russo-Turkish Treaty see Kutchuk-Kainardji, the Treaty of Rustchuk see Ruse Said, Edward, 16 Saki see Munro, Hector Hugh (Saki) Salonika, 88, 95, 99, 108, 109, 118, 119 Salzburg, 187 Sandansky, Yane, 118 Sandes, Flora, 126, 200; The Autobiography o f a Woman Soldier, 200 , An English Woman Ser­ geant in the Serbian Army, 200 Sanjak o f Novi Pazar, 4, 96, 122, 125; Austrian occupation of, 43, 232 Sapper лее McNeile, H. C. (Sapper) Sarajevo, ix, 13, 56, 74, 99, 175, 179, 200, 204; see also B o sn ia-H erz eg o v in a; D u rrell, Lawrence Sardinia see Piedmont-Sardinia

Index

253

Southey, Robert, 16 Soviet Union see Russia Spain, 76, 76n, 105, 151 Sava Nemanjic, Saint, 8 Spender, Harold, 8 Savic-Rebac, Anica, 174 Split, 145, 154 Science fiction see Popular literature Stalin, J. V., 97,98, 136,233 Sclavonia see Slavonia Stambolisky, Alexander, 109, 109n, 232 Scotland, comparison with the Balkans, 18, 23, Stambolov, Stefan, 54, 109n, 116 164, 181, 192, 196-7 Stamboul Train (film), 104 Scott, Walter, 19, 181; ‘The Lamentation o f the Faithful Wife o f Asan Aga’, 23; The Min­ Stambouloff, Stephen see Stambolov, Stefan Stanciu, Dana, 214n strelsy of the Scottish Border, 23 Stara Planina see Balkan Mountains ‘Scythia’, 52, 56 Stead, W T., 30, 30n, 21 In Selic, Ana, 214n Stefanovic Karadzic, Vuksee Karadzic, Vuk Stefanovic ‘Selovnia’, 73 Stendhal, 137, 138 Semlin see Zemun Serbia, 4, 5, 7, 8 ,4 3 ,5 3 ,5 6 ,7 1 ,7 9 ,8 5 , 118, 173, Stephanides, Theodore, 97 Stevenson, Ralph, 149 182,206,209,210; formation o f the indepen­ Stillman, W. J., 30, 34 dent state, 42,231; inspiration for fiction, 55, Stoker, Bram, viii, 40, 46, 61, 89, 104, 163, 187; 65-70, 94-101, 114, 131-3; uprising against Dracula, 1, 73-85, 101,110,232; ‘Dracula’s the Ottoman rule (1804), 22, 231; regicide Guest’, 74; The Lady o f the Shroud, 10, 85-7 (1903), 60, 61-2, 67, 120, 124, 232 Stone, Ellen, 118 Serbs, 172; perceptions of, ix, 22, 31, 90, 117, Strangford, Viscountess (Beaufort, Emily Anne), 133, 140, 144-5, 176, 178, 198 200; The Eastern Shores o f the Adriatic, 199 Serbo-Bulgarian war (1885-6), 114, 232 Strauss, Oscar, The Chocolate Soldier, 115,225n Serres, 15 Strosmajer, Josif Juraj, 55 Servia see Serbia Stuart David, David, 73 Seton Watson, Hugh, 185 Styria, 75-6, 77, 123 Shakespeare, W illiam , 1, 93; Henry V, 184; Subotica, 105-6, 210 Troilus and Cressida, 186; Twelfth Night, 9 ‘Sultania’, 65, 66 Shanghai Express (film), 104 umadija, 99, 168 ‘Shangri La’, 78 Sunday Times, 141 Shaw, George Bernard, 121, 136, 210; Plays Swift, Jonathan, 142 Pleasant, 113, 116, Arms and the Man, 54, 72, 113-7, 123, 129, 187,209, 232 Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 36-41; on Bulgar­ ian atrocities, 37; on the Eastern Question, 36; Shelley, Mary, 21 Russophobia, 36,38, ‘The Ballad o f Bulgarie’, Shelley, Percy Bysshe, ix, 10, 21, 24, 25, 35, 40, 38— 231; Note o f An English Republican 74, 198, 210, depiction o f Greece, 21-2; Against the Muscovite Crusade, 37, 39; Russophobia, 26; Hellas, 21-2, 24, 26, 231; The Revolt of Islam, 26, 231 ‘Rizpah’, 36; ‘The Russ and the Frenchman’, 40; 'Russia: An Ode’, 36; Songs o f the Sier­ Sherry, Norman, 102, 105 ras, 36 Sibiu, 78, 131 Switzerland, 117 Siebenbürgen see Transylvania Sykes, Christopher, 150 ‘Silaria’, 60 Sykes, Gerald, 141 Sinas, Konstantin, 165 'Syldavia’, 143 Sitwell, Sacheverell, 209; Roumanian Journey, 13, Sz^chenyi, Stephen, Count, 79 187, 188, 189, 192, 193, 194,233 Szecklers, 81—2 Skenderbeg, 20 Szekelys see Szecklers Skopje, 96, 119 ‘Slaka’, 50, 51,73, 122 Taylor, A J P., 6, 12, 172 Slavonia, 86, 108; the Province o f CroatiaTemesvar, 123, 123n Slavonia, 4; see also Croatia Tennyson, Alfred, Lord: involvement in the Span­ Slavs, 183; literary stereotypes of, 56, 145 ish uprising, 40; on M ontenegro I I , 58; Slivnitsa, the Battle of, 114, 232 Russophobia, 33; ‘The Charge of the Light Slovakia, 5 Brigade’, 33; ‘Hail Briton’, 33; ‘Montenegro’ Slovenia, 4, 5, 7, 8, 46, 76 (sonnet), 11,33-5,214n, 231; ‘Written on the Slovenes, 135, 172 Outbreak of the Polish Insurrection’, 35 Smith, R. D„ 184, 185 Tennyson, Hallam, 33 Smyrna, 109 Tepaleen see Tepelena Sobranie, 119 Tepelena, 18, 19, 164, 187 Sofia, ix, 62, 109, 118 Tepe?, Vlad see Dracula, Count Sophy o f Kravonia (film version), 105 Thesaly, 77 Souli, women of, 197 Sargent, SirOrm c, 175

Saturday Review, The, 6 1

254

Index

Thirty-nine Steps, The (film versions), 89 Thomas, Alan, 139 Thomas, Moy, 116 Thompson, Emma, 198 Thoreau, Henry David, Walden, 96, 99 ‘Thracia’, Kingdom o f, 48,52-60,64,69,71 Tierney Clarke, William, 79 Time, 143 Times Guide to the Peoples of Europe, The, 58 Times Literary Supplement, The, 94 Timi.5oara see Temesvar Tito, Josip Broz, 97,98,137, 139,140,146-7,150, 150n, 155,155n, 174-5,204,233 T olstoy, Leo: on M ontenegrins, 218n; Anna Karenina, 5 2 ,218n; The Kreutzer Sonata, 103 Topusko, 147-8, 153 Tractarianism, 83, 177n Transylvania, viii, 7, 42, 46, 61, 76-85, 96, 131, 192, 203,210, 232, 233 Trieste, ix, 132, 137-8, 162, 162n Trollope, Anthony, 37 Tudjman, Franjo, 8 Turgenev (Turgenieff), Ivan, 208; ‘Croquet at W ndsor’, 28 Turkey, 4, 89, 172, 179; the Young Turk Revolu­ tion, 232; see also Ottoman Empire Turksib (film), 104 Turner, John, 18n Ukraine, 5, 7 United States of America, 155, 207, 208; Ameri­ can characters in ‘Balkan’ fiction, 53, 84-5, 107-8,158; literary interest in the Balkans, vii; perceptions o f the Balkans, 143; rivalry with Russia, ix Upward, Allen, 42 Velimirovic, Nikolaj, Bishop, 174 Venice, the Republic of, 1 Venizelos, Elefterios, 88 Victoria, Queen, 28, 44 Victorian Gothic Revival see Gothic Revival Vienna, 6, 7, 15, 61, 79, 123; see also AustriaHungary Vinaver, Elsa, 173, 179 Vinaver, Stanislav, 173—4, 180 Vinkovci, 107, 108 Vis, 1, 146, 147, 155n Vlad the Impaler (Vlad Tepe$) see Dracula ‘Vuchinia’, 1 2 6 ,1 3 3 -7 ’ ‘Vulgaria’, 142-6 Waddington, Patrick, 33, 36 Waldeck, R G (i.e. Goldie Horowitz), Athene Palace, 194 Walker, Mary Adelaide, Through Macedonia to the Albanian Lakes, 198 Wallachia, 7 ,2 2 ,8 1 Walpole, Horace, 16, 75, 76n, Watts-Dunton, Theodore, 38 Waugh, Evelyn, 11,211;-attempts to help Croatian Jews, 153 4, audience with Pope Plu« XII, 149,

letter to The Times, 150; mission to Yugosla­ via (1944-5), 146-153; perceptions o f the Soviet Union, 157; translations o f W augh’s work in Croatia, 214n; ‘Compassion’, 154; The Loved One, 142,152; ‘Report on the Catholic Church in Croatia’, 12, 148-50, 152; ScottKing’s Modern Europe 150-2; Sword o f Honour Trilogy, 11, 142, 152: 1 Men at Arms, 152; 11 Officers and Gentlemen, 152; 111 Un­ conditional Surrender, 112, 141, 143, 153-9 Waugh, Laura, 148 Webb, Sidney, 113, 114 Weigel, John, 143 Wellington, Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of, 77 Wells, H G , 183 West, Rebecca, 1,11,161,166,167,168,171 -84, 186, 187,194,201,207,209,211; translations o f W e s t’s w ork in S erb ia and B osniaHerzegovina, 214n; The Birds Fall Down, 173; Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, 12, 13, 172— 84, 197, 233; ‘Madame Sara’s Magic Crys­ tal’, 174; The Meaning o f Treason, \Th,seealso Durham, (Maiy) Edith: dispute with Rebecca West Whitby, 83, 89; Synod of, 83 White, Ethel Lina, The Wheel Spins, 101, 104 White Hand, 62 White Eagle, Order of, 96n Wied, William von, 44 Wilde, Oscar, 84, 113 Wilkinson, William, 77 Williams, H W„ 18n Wilson, Woodrow, 135n Wise, Thomas James, 38 Wodehouse, P. G., 141 Woodhouse, C. M , 18n Woods, Charles, The Danger Zone o f Europe, 74 Woolf, Larry, 184 World War I, 13, 62, 65, 74, 88-9, 121, 200; the origins, 6 5 ,7 1 -2 , 176, 232 World W ar II, 11, 12, 100, 101, 173, 182^1, 209; see also Waugh, Evelyn Yates, Dornford, 87 Yates, W B , 113 Young, Antonia see Allcock, John and Young, Antonia Young Turk Revolution see Turkey Yugoslavia, viii, xii, 12, 13, 171, 204, 232, 233, inspiration for fiction, 94-101, 105-11, 133— 59; in World War II, 135, 173-84; travel ac­ counts of, 171-84; wars o f the Yugoslav se­ cession (1990s), ix, 12,123,211-12; seealso the names of the former republics and Durrell, Lawrence; Footman, David; Waugh, Evelyn; West, Rebecca Zagreb, 110, 145 Zemlin see Zemun Zemun, 15, 56, 161 Zeune, August, 3 Zionism, 53, see also Judaism Zou, King o f Albania, 232