An Endangered Cultural Technique
Publications of edited exchanges in letters are currently booming. Most are correspondences from former times that, after obtaining the release of the copyright, are made accessible to a public living at a considerable temporal distance from the date when the documents were created. The content of the writings ranges from philosophical and political reflections on the one end of the spectrum to personal confessions and trivial chatter on the other. If some readers feel rather repulsed by embarrassments such as pretentiousness and condescension, it is exactly this dimension that satisfies the voyeuristic tendencies of others. But is it really necessary to suffer through the correspondence between Martin Heidegger and his wife Elfride?
Even written exchanges of most recent dates can be highly explosive as demonstrated by the excitement surrounding the – published – e-mail exchanges between the Swiss writer Christian Kracht and his American partner David Woodard. Be it intellectual curiosity, the testing of boundaries or even racist tendencies – the signature of this exchange of thoughts and the experiences from 2004 to 2007 is and will remain diffuse. Kracht, the author of the newly published novel titled Imperium, which is a work about a questionable character in German colonial history, is being attacked as well as defended. A resurrected, certainly not new or especially differentiated, debate regarding political correctness has emerged on this new subject and spread like wildfire in the internet. Peaking into the thoughts of others can invite us to better specify and formulate our own positions. It can also give pleasure, as it places contemporary history in the – polyphonous – context of acting and affected persons thus inviting us to arrive at the one or other new realization.
Role play and self-design
Letter-writing has many faces. It lets the authors slip into different roles. On the one hand, there is the claim that there exists an intimate familiarity between the writers – even if they never met, as in the case of Rilke and Marina Zwetajewa. On the other hand, drafting a letter has always been an act of self-stylization. In fact, self-styling is not an invention of the Facebook generation that happily crafts its online biographies. Letters written to individuals are often intended for consumption by a wider audience. Influential contemporaries often used these exchanges to test the validity of intellectual positions, rehearsing lines of thought as well as devising strategies for action that did not fail to leave their mark on the course of history. Letters are highly instructive as historical primary source material because, aside from painting a tapestry of the spirit of the times, they serve as a reservoir of original detail and offer insights into the mental makeup and character profiles of important personalities.
The correspondence between Tsarina Catherine the Great and philosopher Voltaire (from 1763 until Voltaire's death in 1778) provides an outline of the Enlightenment in Europe and Russia laying the contradictions between foreign and domestic policies open to inspection. The letters by the Marquis Astolphe de Custine were published in 1843 under the title "La Russie en 1839;" they fell on open ears resonating, first and foremost, also among Russian critics of the Czarist autocracy. They are still widely cited when a controversy re-erupts between "westernizers" and "slavophiles." The marquis did not dare entrust his missives to the postal authority; he hid them instead like suspicious papers and did not publish them until after his return home. Indeed, who today would devise a fictitious correspondence in order to voice social grievances regarding one's own country – like Montesquieu did in 1721 in his "Lettres persanes"?
Correspondence, the adventure
Writing while travelling – same as drafting epistles and missives from the study near the homely hearth – always meant writing by hand. Documents were often created and transported under adventurous circumstances. The personal courier who carried the letters written by the Russian monarch, often accompanied with gifts such as furs, to her friend and interlocutor and 35 years her senior from the St. Petersburg to Ferney in France was probably rather the exception than the rule.
Getting letters from the sender to the recipient was not only hampered by infrastructural obstacles; there were also political roadblocks. Writing from prison has always been prohibited or subject to strict rules. Such was the case for Václav Havel, who had to follow prescribed guidelines when writing to his wife Olga between 1979 and 1983: one letter per week, four pages, written in a clearly legible hand, the only allowable content was news about the family and of a personal nature. Even following all of these rules, the prison censors did not always forward all letters.
Images of writers are ever present in all of our collective minds: "The Poor Poet" by Carl Spitzweg (1839) who scribbles while seated in his bed with an umbrella held up against the leaky ceiling of the room; the Thora writer (1902) by the Dutch painter Jozef Israëls; or Auguste Renoir's "The Letter" (1900) depicting how two young girls, his daughters, get comfortable around a table. The subjects set in scene in the portraits naturally create an atmosphere of mental collectedness, calm penmanship with a quill and an ink well setting accents. The great historical painter of the later Czarist empire, Ilja Jefimowitsch Repin, captured a probably unique, lively scene on canvas that details the collective writing of a letter between 1880 and 1891. Set in 1676, depicted are the Saporosh Cossacks who are engaged in the spirited wording of a letter that is addressed to the Turkish Sultan Mehmed IV and in which they reject the Sultan's demands for giving up the region of the lower Dnepr without a fight. In the tableau, this letter is dictated to somebody who can read and write and is replete with insults addressed to the Muslims – this is textbook knowledge of any Russian school child. Repin allowed himself to be inspired by these words in the letter that had been explained to him by his friend and a historian a good 200 years after the incident. Czar Alexander III acquired the painting immediately for the newly founded Russian Museum. In the collective historical mind of the Russians, this representation has iconous significance for the expansion of the Russian Empire (as well as of Orthodox Christianity) into the realm of the Tatars and Turks. Rarely has any letter of this kind inspired such broad resonance and timeless fascination. Two instruments take their central place next to sables, daggers and canteens well under the open sky – quill and ink well.
Farewell from penmanship and privacy of correspondence
Meanwhile, penmanship and writing by hand has become an endangered species, same as the act of letter-writing. Single voices among politicians already promise grade school kids success in the race for the best jobs by devising new educational concepts that will relieve standardized curricula of the tedious task of teaching cursive writing. Knowing how to print letters is quite sufficient for any successful future career, they argue.
But penmanship that is acquired during the childhood years is the foundation for the unmistakable written hand in the adult person. It is not an accident that the metaphor of a person's "handwriting" is used when pointing to the uniqueness and originality of a creative piece of work in any industry. Handwriting and letters were always deemed to be an interconnected single unit in any personal relationship based on mutual appreciation. Friends André Gide and Paul Valéry had been in intensive letter-writing contact since 1890. They perceived the change in 1924 from pen to typewriter, a concession to changing times, as cumbersome; indeed, a betrayal of the intimate directness of their interaction and an overt sign that their interaction had become a public affair.
The urge to write letters was always also felt by people who themselves were not knowledgeable in the art. Contract writing was a profitable profession in Europe until well into the 20th century. Literary testimony to this fact is found in Luigi Pirandello's narration of "L’altro figlio" in which a widow keeps dictating letters to her two sons who emigrated to the United States. These are letters that do not faithfully reflect her dictation, nor were they sent properly, which is why they remained unanswered. The mother rejects the one remaining son who stayed with her and who wants to care for her, because he is the fruit of a rape. Letters were often a vehicle for cultivating illusions over great geographical distances. Reports that emigrants sent home were often beautified. Any admission of disappointment to the loved ones who stayed behind and who probably helped scrape together the money for the passage was taboo. An exception of long-distance contact are the letters of missionary brides who did not know their intended husbands and were supposed to familiarize themselves with their new life before leaving home.
Often, letters are key aspects, in fact, turning points in dramatic works. Tatjana's letter to dandy Eugene Onegin in Pushkin's verse novel, which Tchaikovsky turned into an opera in 1877 forty years after the author's death, became a style and character model for generations of Russian daughters. In this work, Pushkin tones down his usual irony and, while remaining the consummate cosmopolitan, reveals his sympathy for the provincial child as his secret favorite character. That Tatjana writes her declaration of love at a desk is self-understood. Sentiment dictates the strokes of her hand.
With alarm, many realize today that they have lost their own personal handwriting due to a lack of opportunity and practice. This is all the more regrettable because letters written by hand are some of the most treasured gifts that people can give to each other. Children still write their letters interspersed with hand-drawn sketches and envelopes glued directly to them. But now that the new media are moving into play corners and school rooms, the days of this practice are numbered. In contrast, adults have rediscovered calligraphy – it has recently become à la mode as a therapy for self-realization, as a concentration or meditation exercise. Meanwhile, in schools, practicing nice penmanship is more often than not considered a disturbance in the conditioning of the young generation for adulthood.
Letter-writing has seemingly become an act of resistance; although its general relinquishment is quite voluntarily. The value of old manuscripts is undisputed. But in our own daily routine uniqueness is surprisingly losing its prominence. Privacy of correspondence is a term that will soon be taken out of circulation. Indeed, today's electronic letters are public property, they are stored citing various pretexts and requirements; this is de facto monitoring of personal mail. Furthermore, the post-privacy generation lacks the will altogether of wanting to protect its intimate personal sphere. Personal aspects are intentionally revealed so as not to be an outsider – among these, at times even compromising party photos, etc. All this is voluntary, peer pressure plays a role and drives the feeling that a person has no longer a right to privacy. The authors themselves no longer consider their e-mails as letters. They are pragmatic messages. The authors have trouble with the proper form of address. In the worse scenarios e-mails are abused for bad jokes or harassment, and difficult for victims to defend against. Indeed, this is malice that comes so much more easily than in the anonymous letter of ye' old times.
A new lettered culture will supersede and displace the old, familiar way to correspond if we shy away from the effort of cultivating this tradition even against the zeitgeist, the fashion of contemporary times. The argument that these losses can be offset with the gains afforded by instant communication is a dead end. It is a comparison of incompatible things.
The letter as the medium of the weak
Also extinct is the writing of letters to fathers and über-fathers. Kafka's expansive epistle to his father, which he wrote in 1919 at the age of 36, is an inventory of a life and a general accounting of a failed existence, and even today highly valuable reading that offers great insight. It was a very lucky circumstance that the letter was published at all, although it never reached its originally intended recipient. The letter is a report on the far-reaching failures at socialization, educational errors, the perspective of the child – an extremely detailed log, modern educational literature pales by comparison.
How different but, nevertheless, no less enlightening is the generational conflict in the letter "Dearest Father" by Ludwig Boerne. Boerne's name was Louis Baruch until the day of his baptism in 1818, and he fought off and on alongside Heinrich Heine as a revolutionary and publicist. In 1807, the 21-year-old rebel repudiates his father's reproaches of being a bad son. He argues this charge lacked relevance. Rather, he insists, a son must be different from his father and develop a new consciousness if humanity is to make advances. He wants to prove to his father that complete understanding between the two of them is not possible. He argues his position by outlining the "different viewpoints that we both take and that do not allow for harmony other than that of the heart and of love, but that do not allow for the concordia of the minds."
Replete with contrition, this is the undertone of the letters that the victims of dictatorships wrote in desperation to their über-fathers. Fallen from grace, Nikolai Bukharin, member of the Politburo and leading theoretical Bolshevik thinker, wrote only a few weeks before his show trial in March 1938, when he was supposed to be sentenced to death, from his prison cell to Comrade Stalin. The highly educated prisoner recants the confessions he made while awaiting trial, he affirms his loyalty to the political system, offers the dictator his services in that he would, if pardoned, try to recruit converts among the educated classes for the great idea while in American exile or, if sent to a penal colony, help build universities, museums and other institutions. His demonstration of humility did not help him. The letter illuminates the mechanisms of the cynicism of power that shaped an entire political period and the futile struggle against the deformation of the person.
Must letters owe their genesis to a historical catastrophe in order to move the generations that follow? Certainly, political and personal suffering reinforces their impact. Often it is exactly such correspondence that was created under these trying circumstances that has a special urgency today, when some seem blinded in the right eye. For example, the clarity that Joseph Roth demonstrates in reading the signs of the looming National Socialist dangers and how he identifies them in letters to his more optimistic friend Stefan Zweig is telling. Then follows Roth's ultimatum-like statement of November 7, 1933: "An abyss will be between us as long as you do not break completely and finally with the Germany of today."
Regula Heusser-Markun is an expert on Slavic literature, language and culture and a journalist. She lives in Zurich.
