Text 11. FOLK AND NATIVE ART

Isolated by vast distances and long winters, Russians evolved an amazing spectrum of richly decorated folk art. Perhaps most familiar are the intricately painted, enamelled wood boxes called palekh, after the village east of Moscow that’s famous for them; and finift, luminous enameled metal miniatures from Rostov-Veliki. Fron Gzhel, also east of Moscow, came glazed earthenware in the 18 c. and its trademark blue-and-white porcelain in the 19 c. Gus-Khrustalny, south of Vladimir, maintains a glass-making tradition as old as Rus. Every region also has its own style of embroidery and specialize in knitting and other fine fabrics.

The most common craft is woodcarving, represented by toys, distaffs (tool for hand-spinning flax) and gingerbread moulds in the museums, and in its most clichéd form by the nested matryoshka dolls - surely the most familiar symbol of Russia, although they actually only date from 1890. Overflowing from souvenir shops you’ll also find the red, black and gold lacquered-pine bowls called khokhloma. Most uniquely Slavic are the ‘gingerbread’ houses of western and northern Russia and Siberia with their carved window frame, lintels and trim. The art of carpentry flourished in 17-th and 18-th century houses and churches.

РАЗДЕЛ 5. ВЫДАЮЩИЕСЯ ЛИЧНОСТИ

(OUTSTANDING PERSONALITIES)

Assignment: Texts 1-7. Translate the text into Russian. Pay special attention to the personal names. Explain why most anthroponyms are implanted.

Text 1. EDVARD MUNCH

Edvard Munch (1863-1944), Norway’s most renowned painter and one of Europe’s great masters, was a tortured soul. His acquaintance with the darker emotions began with his Christiania (Oslo) childhood: his mother died of tuberculosis when Edvard was just five, his elder sister likewise succumbed at the age of 15, and his younger sister was diagnosed with mental illness as a young girl.

Munch spent his early years as a painter in Paris where he was greatly influenced by the French Realist school, and there he produced his first great work, The Sick Child, a portrait of his sister Sophie shortly before her death. So provocative was the painting that professional criticism was largely negative.

After returning to Christiania, he fell in with a bohemian crowd whose influence exacerbated his natural tendency for darker themes. He returned to Paris, where he learned of the death of his father and, in 1890, he produced the haunting painting Night, depicting a lonely figure in a dark window. The following year he finished Melancholy and began sketches of what would be his best known work, The Scream, which graphically represents Munch’s own inner torment.

In 1892, Munch moved to Berlin where he buried himself in a cycle of angst-ridden, atmospheric themes that he would collectively entitle Frieze of Life - A Poem about Life, Love and Death. The series included Starry Night, Moonlight, The Storm, Vampire, Ashes, Anxiety and Death in the Sickroom. His obsession with darkness and doom went from dominating his work to casting a long shadow over his life. Alcoholism, chronic emotional instability and a tragic love affair culminated in the 1907 work, Death of Marat, and, a year later, he checked into a Copenhagen mental health clinic for eight months.

After leaving the clinic, Munch returned to Norway, where he settled on the coast at Kragerø. It became clear that Munch’s postclinic work was to be altogether different, dominated by a sunnier, more hopeful disposition dedicated to humans in harmony with their landscape. Perhaps the most emblematic of Munch’s paintings from this period is History, which portrays an elderly man beneath a spreading oak tree, relating the history of humanity to a young child.

Upon his death, Munch bequeathed his body of works to the City of Oslo, and they’re now on display at the National Gallery, the Munch Museum and Bergen Art Museum, although not always as securely as art lovers would hope.

Text 2. HENRIK IBSEN

Henrik Johan Ibsen, Norway’s most famous playwright, was born in Skien in 1828. By the age of 15, difficult family circumstances had forced him to Grimstad where he worked as a pharmacist’s apprentice. In his spare time, Ibsen, who failed both Greek and mathematics and thereafter abandoned plans to become a doctor, wrote poetry which caught the eye of the violinist Ole Bull who steered the impressionable young Ibsen toward the theatre.

Ibsen worked for six years with the theatre in Bergen, followed by five years in Christiania (Oslo), where he acquired a sharp eye for theatrical technique. His masterpiece during this period, The Pretenders (1863), takes place in 13th century Norway, with King Håkon Håkonsson expressing anachronistic dreams of national unity.

From 1864, Ibsen lived and studied in Rome, Dresden and Munich, decrying the small-mindedness of Norwegian society of the day; so disenchanted was he by his homeland that he wouldn’t return home until 1891, at the age of 63. In his later works, notably Brand (1866), Emperor and Galilean (1873), Pillars of Society (1877), the highly provocative Ghosts (1881), An Enemy of the People (1882), The Wild Duck (1884) and Hedda Gabler (1890), he achieved a more realistic dialogue and came to be known as the father of modern Norwegian drama.

Above all others, however, the enormously popular Peer Gynt (1867) was Ibsen’s international breakthrough, especially when set to the music of Edvard Grieg. In this enduring epic, an ageing hero returns to his Norwegian roots after wandering around the world and is forced to face his own soul. As he looks back on a wasted life of travel and his fruitless search for truth, his essence peels away like the skin of an onion, ultimately revealing no core to his personality.

In the similarly acclaimed The Doll’s House (1879), Ibsen successfully explored the doctrine of critical realism and the experiences of the individual in the face of the majority. As his protagonist Nora puts it: ‘I will have to find out who is right, society or myself. As a result, Nora has become a symbol for women who sacrifice family life to struggle for equality and liberation.

In his last drama, the semi-autobiographical When We Dead Awaken, Ibsen describes the life of the estranged artist, sculptor Professor Rubek, who returns to Norway in his later years but finds no happiness, having forsaken his only love and his youth to misplaced idealism.

Ibsen became a partial invalid after suffering a heart attack in 1901 and died five years later.

Text 3. EDVARD GRIEG

Norway’s best known and most universally loved composer, Edvard Grieg, has always been inextricably tied to Bergen. He composed his first symphony in Copenhagen, but so disappointed was he with the result that he scrawled across the score that it must never be performed! Thankfully, his wishes were ignored, even if he steadfastly refused to acknowledge it as his own creation.

Grieg’s early style strongly reflected his German romantic training, but he always understood the expectation that he would compose national music for his homeland, Norway. After returning to Christiania (Oslo) in 1866, Grieg became increasingly influenced by Norway’s folk music and melodies. In 1868, he completed his first great, signature work, Piano Concerto in A minor, which has since come to represent Norway as no other work before or since.

Two years after the concerto, Grieg, encouraged by the resulting acclaim and by support from luminaries such as Ole Bull and Franz Liszt, collaborated with Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, setting the latter’s poetry and writing to music. The results - Before a Southern Convent, Bergliot and Sigurd Jorsalfar - established Grieg as the musical voice of Norway. This was followed by a project with Henrik Ibsen , setting to music Ibsen’s wonderful novel Peer Gynt. The score found international acclaim and became his-and Norway’s - best-remembered classical work.

In 1874, a government grant allowed Grieg to return to Bergen and set his creative juices flowing; the result was his Ballad in G minor, The Mountain Thrall, the Norwegian Dances for Piano and the Holberg Suite. Between 1880 and 1882, he conducted an orchestra in Bergen, but resigned in order to return to his preferred work of composing. In 1885, he and his wife Nina moved into the coastal home Troldhaugen, from which he set off on numerous concert tours of Europe. At Troldhaugen he created the Sonata for Violin and Piano in С minor, the Haugtussa Songs, the Norwegian Peasant Dances and Tunes, and the Four Psalms, his last major work, based on a series of Norwegian religious melodies.

It was only after his death in Bergen on 4 September 1907, that his music garnered Europe-wide acclaim. However, perhaps the greatest praise for this most Norwegian of composers came from his first biographer, Aimer Grøvald, who noted that it was impossible to listen to Grieg without sensing a light, fresh breeze from the blue waters, a glimpse of grand glaciers and a recollection of the mountains of Western Norway’s fjords.

Text 4. THOR HEYERDAHL

Larvik’s favourite son was the intrepid and controversial Thor Heyerdahl (1914-2002), the quirky scientist, anthropologist and explorer.

He specialised in epic journeys. In 1947 he sailed 6000 km in a balsawood raft, the Коn-Tiki, from Peru to Polynesia to prove that the South Pacific may have been settled by migrants from South America rather than Asia. His hotly disputed theories - backed up by discoveries of similarities of fauna and cultural artefacts in Polynesia and South America and by the fact that Pacific ocean currents run east-west - ran against the grain of conventional wisdom. The film of his journey won an Oscar in 1951 for Best Documentary and his exploits in the grim postwar years (during WWII, Heyerdahl won medals for bravery in resisting the Nazis) captured the imagination of millions across the world; his book describing the expedition sold an astonishing 60 million copies I worldwide.

Although also renowned as one of the first Europeans to excavate sites on Galapagos and Easter islands, Heyerdahl again grabbed international attention in 1970 when he crossed the Atlantic in a papyrus raft. His purpose was to prove that Columbus may not have been the first successful transatlantic navigator and that even the ancient Egyptians could have accomplished the voyage. His first raft, Ra, sank soon after setting out, but the dogged Heyerdahl was undeterred, successfully completing the crossing in Ra II.

In 1978, the indefatigable Heyerdahl sailed the Tigris from the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, down the Persian Gulf and across the Indian Ocean to Djibouti to prove how the ancient Sumerians travelled widely. When he was subsequently prevented from entering the Red Sea due to local conflicts, Heyerdahl set fire to his ship in a spectacular anti-war protest. In addition to his many roles of scientist and explorer, Heyerdahl was a fervent internationalist - his crew was always multinational and his boats flew the UN flag.

On the occasion of Heyerdahl’s 75th birthday in 1989, a statue in his honour was unveiled at Tollerodden, east of Larvik’s harbour. It’s sculpted in blue larvikite, a beautiful 50 million-year-old type of granite which is quarried locally.

Heyerdahl, who believed to his dying day that the world’s oceans ought to be considered one vast highway when studying ancient civilisations, died of cancer in northern Italy on 18 April 2002.

Text 5. FRIDTJOF NANSEN

Anyone seeking a modern hero need look no further than Fridtjof Nansen (1861-1930), the Norwegian explorer, then diplomat, who pushed the frontiers of human endurance and human compassion.

Nansen grew up in rural Store Frøen outside Oslo, enjoying a privileged childhood. He was an excellent athlete, winning a dozen or so national nordic skiing championships and breaking the world record for the one-mile skating course. Studies in zoology at the University of Christiania led to a voyage aboard the sealing ship Viking to study ocean currents, ice movements and wildlife. Offshore, he gained tantalising glimpses of Greenland that planted the dream of journeying across its central icecap.

That dream of his came true. In 1888, Nansen, then a mere 27, headed a six-man expedition. He wintered over in Greenland and his detailed observations of the Inuit (Eskimo) people formed the backbone of his 1891 book, Eskimo Life.

In June 1893, aboard the 400-tonne, oak-hulled, steel-reinforced ship Fram, Nansen’s next expedition left Christiania for the Arctic with provisions for six whole years. Nansen left behind his wife Eva and six-month-old daughter Liv, not knowing when, if ever, he’d return.

On 14 March 1895, he and Hjalmar Johansen set out in the Fram for the North Pole and journeyed for five months, including 550 km on foot over the ice, before holing up for nine winter months in a tiny stone hut they’d built on an island. On heading south, they encountered lone British explorer Frederick Jackson (for whom Nansen later, magnanimously, named the island where they’d spent the winter). Having given up on reaching the Pole, all three headed back to Vardø.

In 1905, a political crisis arose as Norway sought independence from Sweden. Nansen, by then a national hero, was dispatched to Copenhagen and Britain to represent the Norwegian cause.

Upon independence, Nansen was offered the job of prime minister but declined in order to pursue science, exploration and a planned expedition to the South Pole (he’s also rumoured to have turned down offers to be king or president). He did, however, accept King Håkon’s offer to serve as ambassador to Britain. In 1907, after the sudden death of his wife, he allowed fellow Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen to take over the Fram for an expedition north of Siberia, thus abandoning his own South Pole dreams.

After WWI, Nansen took on large-scale humanitarian efforts: the new League of Nations; repatriating a half-million German soldiers imprisoned in the Soviet Union; and an International Red Cross programme against famine and pestilence in Russia. When some two million Russians and Ukrainians became stateless after fleeing the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, ‘Nansen Passports’ enabled thousands of them to settle elsewhere.

Probably Hansen’s greatest diplomatic achievement, however, was the resettlement of several hundred thousand Greeks and Turks in the wake of the turbulence following WWI.

In 1922 Hansen, surely one of its most worthy winners, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize – then gave it all away to international relief efforts. After 1925, he concentrated on disarmament and lobbying for a non-Soviet homeland for Armenian refugees. Although this project failed, he is still revered among Armenians worldwide.

On 13 May 1930, Nansen died quietly at his home in Polhøgda, near Oslo, and was buried in a garden nearby.

Text 6. ATATÜRK

It won’t take you long to discover the national hero, Kemal Ataturk. Though he died on 10 November 1938, his image is everywhere in Turkey - his picture is in every schoolroom, office and shop a bust or statue is in every park, and quotations from his speeches and writings are on every publie building. He is virtually synonymous with the Turkish Republic.

Lord Kinross’ best-selling biography of Atatürk portrays a man of great intelligence and even greater energy and daring, possessed by the idea of giving his fellow Turks and their homeland a new lease of life. In contrast to many leaders, he had the capability and opportunity to realise his obsession almost single-handedly. His achievement in turning a backward empire into a forward-looking nation-state was extraordinary, and was taken as a model by President Nasser of Egypt, Reza Shah of Iran and other leaders of neighbouring countries.

In 1881, a boy named Mustafa was born into the family of a minor Turkish bureaucrat living in Salonika, now the Greek city of Thessaloniki, but at that time a city in Ottoman Macedonia. Mustafa was smart and a hard worker at school. His mathematics teacher was so impressed that he gave him the nickname Kemal (excellence). The name Mustafa Kemal stuck with him as he went through a military academy in Harbiye, the Ottoman war college, and his career as an infantry officer.

He served with distinction, particularly in the Tripolitanian War (1911) when Italy seized Ottoman Libya, though he acquired a reputation as something of a hothead. By 1915 he was a promising lieutenant colonel of infantry in command of the 57th Regiment, one of many units posted to the Gallipoli Peninsula. The defence of Gallipoli, which saved Constantinople from British conquest (until the end of the war, at least), was a personal triumph for Mustafa Kemal. His strategic and tactical genius came into full play when circumstances put him at the heart of the battle and he correctly divined the enemy’s strategy. He led with utter disregard for his own safety, inspiring his men with his heroism. A superior force of British, Australian, New Zealand and French armies and navies was fought to a standstill and finally forced to withdraw, and Mustafa Kemal became a popular hero.

Though he was promoted to the rank of paşa (general), the sultan and government were afraid of his brilliance and popularity, and sought to keep this ‘dangerous element’ in Constantinople under their control. When the war was lost and the empire was on the verge of being dismembered, Mustafa Kemal Paşa had himself posted to Anatolia as Inspector-General of the defeated Ottoman armies - the perfect post from which to begin his revolution.

On 19 May 1919, four days after a Greek army of invasion landed at Izmir, Mustafa Kemal Paşa landed at the port of Samsun. He reorganised the defeated Ottoman armies, and convened congresses to focus the will and energies of the people. His democratically established revolutionary government at Ankara held off several invading armies (French, Italian and Greek) with very limited resources. Several times the whole tenuous effort neared collapse, and many of his friends and advisers were ready to flee Ankara for their lives. Kemal never flinched, always ready to dare the worst - and he succeeded brilliantly.

Many great revolutionary leaders falter or fade when the revolution is won. Ataturk lived 15 years into the republican era, and directed the country’s progress with skill and foresight. The forward-looking, Westernised, secular, democratic nation-state you see today is his legacy, and his memory is truly sacred to the majority of Turks.

Text 7. MAHATMA GANDHI

One of the great figures of the 20th century, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was born on 2 October 1869 in Porbandar, Gujarat, where his father was chief minister. After studying in London (1888-91) he worked as a barrister in South Africa, where the young Gandhi became politicised, rallying against the discrimination he encountered. He soon became the spokesman for the Indian community and championed equality for all.

Gandhi returned to India in 1915 with the doctrine of ahimsa (nonviolence) central to his political plans, and committed to a simple and disciplined lifestyle. He set up the Sabarmati Ashram in Ahmedabad, which was innovative for its admission of Dalits (the Scheduled Caste, formerly known as Untouchables.

Within a year, Gandhi had won his first victory, defending farmers in Bihar from exploitation. This was when he first received the title ‘Mahatma’ (Great Soul) from an admirer. The passage of the discriminatory Rowlatt Acts (which allowed certain political cases to be tried without juries) through parliament in 1919 spurred him to further action and he organised a national protest. In the days that followed this hartal (strike), feelings ran high throughout the country. After the massacre of unarmed protesters in Amritsar in 1919, a deeply shocked Gandhi immediately called off the protest.

By 1920 Gandhi was a key figure in the Indian National Congress, and he coordinated a national campaign of noncooperation or satyagraha (passive resistance) to British rule, with the effect of raising nationalist feelings while earning the lasting enmity of the British. In early 1930 Gandhi captured the imagination of the country, and the world, when he led a march of several thousand followers from Ahmedabad to Dandi on the coast of Gujarat. On arrival, Gandhi ceremoniously made salt by evaporating sea water, thus publicly defying the much-hated salt tax; not for the first time, he was imprisoned. Released in 1931 to represent the Indian National Congress at the second Round Table Conference in London, he won over the hearts of the British people, but failed to gain any real concessions from the government.

Jailed again on his return to India, Gandhi immediately began a hunger strike, aimed at forcing his fellow Indians to accept the rights of the Untouchables. Gandhi’s resoluteness and the widespread apprehension throughout the country forced an agreement, but not until Gandhi was on the verge of death.

Disillusioned with politics and convinced that the Congress leaders were ignoring his guidance, he resigned from his parliamentary seat in 1934 and devoted himself to rural education. He returned spectacularly to the fray in 1942 with the Quit India campaign, in which he urged the British to leave India immediately. His actions were deemed subversive and he and most of the Congress leadership were imprisoned.

In the frantic bargaining that followed the end of WWII, Gandhi was largely excluded, and watched helplessly as plans were made to partition the country - a tragedy in his eyes. He toured the trouble spots, using his own influence to calm intercommunity tensions and promote peace.

Gandhi stood almost alone in urging tolerance and the preservation of a single India, and his work on behalf of members of all communities inevitably drew resentment from some Hindu hardliners. On his way to a prayer meeting in Delhi on 30 January 1948, Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated by a Hindu zealot.

Historical reminders of Gandhi’s life and work can be found throughout South India: his ashram is at Sevagram in Maharashtra; the house where he stayed during many visits to Bombay (now Mumbai) and where he launched the Quit India campaign in 1942 is now a museum (Mani Bhavan); and the former palace where he was imprisoned by the British for nearly two years is in Pune, Maharashtra. There is also a fine museum devoted to Gandhi’s life in Madurai and a memorial in Kanyakumari.