The Cossacks are best known as the roving horsemen of the Russian steppes, famed for their ungovernability and violence, epitomized by tales of wild fighters like Stenka Razin and Yermak. In the 20th century, one of the most famous portrayals of Cossacks was in that early classic of Russian cinema, "The Battleship Potemkin", in which a body of these perennial soldiers, dressed in the white jackets of the Tsar, gun down a crowd of civilians on a set of steps in Odessa ("Cossack massacre on the steps" in English works well as a pun).

A little-known aspect of Cossack history is explored in Claudio Magris' pseudo-novel, "Inferences from a Sabre" (1986). In June 1941, shortly after Hitler's invasion of Russia, German agents persuaded General Pyotr Krasnov, "ataman" (chieftain) of a band of Cossacks, to command a battalion of these fighters, famed for their aversion to communism. Krasnov, then 72 years old, was one of the most colorful figures of the 20th-century. As Neal Ascherson writes in his engrossing book, "Black Sea", Krasnov's hatred of "Bolshevism" was matched "only by his contempt for the Judaeo-democratic West." After joining the White Russian armies in the civil war, he fled to Paris, "where, to the astonishment of this tough old soldier's friends, he became a prolific novelist." After World War II, so the story goes, Krasnov was betrayed by the English, handed over to Stalin, and hanged as a traitor.

Magris' "novel" takes the story up in October 1944. Hitler had promised the Cossacks a homeland in Carnia, that mountainous part of northeast Italy wedged between Venice, Austria, and Slovenia, and, the end of the war approaching, these exiles of the steppes were fighting it out with the Italian partisans. The book is a letter by Father Guido, a priest from Trieste, to one of his superiors.

In 1944 Guido was sent to interecede with the Cossacks and try to mitigate the cruelty meted out on the Carnians. While he was there, he thinks he met Krasnov, whose life and death intrigue him from then on. The crux of the book is the "enigma woven around the death of Krasnov", an enigma that begins on 2 May 1945. As the Cossacks flee on horseback through the Val di Gorto to hide out in the forests of Austria, one of them is shot dead by the partisans. His companions bury him in a poorly marked grave and throw in a broken sabre. Father Guido explores the possibility that, contrary to the official story, this soldier was Krasnov.

Blurring the lines between fiction and reality, Magris plumbs the depths of Krasnov's character. Apart from the fact that Guido never existed, this lyrical "novel" would be an interesting work of speculation. Magris "plays through the pathetic coda to Krasnov's life". We see the Cossack commander and his men as living contradictions, romantic figures ("the flash of the blade in the air evoked for a moment the vague yearning glow of certain brief, blustery evenings, of curling sea-waves that seem to shine with the promise of everything we lack"), medieval men, "untamed and feudal" who "saw the revolution as the anonymous assault of modernity, the sunset of the individual, the end of adventure", yet also as anti-Semites, butchers, and the enemies of their own dream ("the Cossacks reached that corner of the world [Carnia] to build themselves a house and to take shelter from the indeterminacy of nothingness, and instead they destroyed the hospitable order enclosed by these walls and delivered it back to formlessness.")

The novel is a great read, one of the best I've read this year. I also recommend Magris' depressing book, "The Other Sea", about an Italian on the plains of Patagonia, plus Ascherson's book mentioned above.

For me this is still the essential C. K. Williams collection, because it shows the evolution of his style from rather "standard" versification through the long line he has only lately begun to abandon. The books is worth the price if only for one poem: "In The Heart of the Beast," a furious elegy on the massacres and Kent and Jackson State Universities in May 1970. I don't think Williams wrote anything like it before or after, but it's a staggering piece of political invective.

Danube
Claudio Magris
2001
ISBN 1-86046-823-3

I have seen the Danube at Donauwoerth in Germany and Linz and Melk in Austria. When I came across Claudio Magris' book, I was interested enough to buy it. Magris' book about the Danube is an unusual one. It is not a travel book, but more the historical reflections of a man visiting centuries-old towns along the river from where it originates in Germany to where it ends in the Black Sea in Rumania.

Since I have visited or read about some of the towns along the Danube in the German-speaking world, I found that part of the book more interesting. I knew less about the other countries -- Hungary, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, and Rumania, and I did not relate as well to that part of the book.

On the whole, there are some obstacles to overcome in reading this book. The writer's style is rather wordy and rambling. In one sentence, for example, I counted seventy-five words. There are endless literary and historical references, many of which are somewhat obscure. For me, eventually they grew tiresome. The book, in English, is a translated work. At points, one wonders if the rendering of sentences such as, "That life which the photograph fixed in one of its instants is vanished forever", could not have been translated in plainer English.

Still, some of this book is good reading. Magris' story about the director of the river works at Linz who spent a lifetime marking out the confines of the upper Danube and wrote a three volume work of 2,164 pages about all the aspects of the river from the different types of rafts and barges to the poems, songs, plays, and novels that related to the river is amusing. At the other extreme, Magris' description of visiting the terrible stone quarry at Mauthausen concentration camp that the Nazis set up on the Danube, where 110,000 people died, is disturbing.

On the whole, I would say this book is interesting reading in places. Elsewhere, it drags a bit. For example, consider a sentence such as, "Are the Istrians therefore Thracians, as Apollodorus thought, or Colchians, according to the view of Pliny and Strabo, or are they Gepids? "

Perhaps, the main problem with "Danube" is that the scope and coverage of the book are simply too great. The countries through which the lower reaches of the Danube flow do not have so much in common with those of the German-speaking part of the Danube. Like the Nile, it is a very long river, and, similarly it comes into contact with a number of lands with differing cultural traditions and histories. The Danube as an organizational theme for Magris' reflections about history and literature falters in the face of the great diversity of the material. Also, there is the question of if this book is really about the Danube or more a vehicle for Magris' wide-ranging interests.

Magris's account of the journey, from its obscure and contested origins in Germany (Donaueschingen? Brigach? Furtwangen?), to the Black Sea is alternatingly scintillating and impenetrably dense. It is fully possible that many of the stylistic difficulties that occur hear arise out of the translation process.

Despite the occasional obfuscation, this is a deeply intriguing book. I picked it up, thinking that it may perhaps successfully do for the Donau (Danube) what Rebecca West's monumental "Black lamb and Grey Falcon" did for Yugoslavia, namely to serve as a marvelous compilation of historical narratives and anecdotes, sort of a "reference point for the ages". In this, "Danube" does not disappoint. There may be thousands of more readable books, but this one is rare, in that it blends so wonderfully narrative, history, and anecdote. Ultimately even the denseness of the prose may be a virtue...it reduces the reader's speed, allowing us to better digest and reflect upon its contents. I recommend it.

Claudio Magris's Danube is special to me first of all because I spent 8 years living and working in the Central European area described in the book. But it is more than just another travel book because it manages to capture the mood and feeling of Central Europe: its complex overlapping history, the melancholic pensiveness of so many of its writers and artists, the sense of hidden mystery in so many of its places. Danube manages to combine the travel narrative with philosophy, history and real sense of place. It is essential reading whether you go to Central Europe or are just interested in its complexity.

This is a rather unusual book. Its genre is that of an essay collection, mixed with guide book, biographies and philosophy. The author tells us about his home town Trieste in north-eastern Italy and the surrounding regions: The inland and coast of Friuli (the region between Venice and Trieste), Piemonte in north-western Italy, the Istria peninsula in Slovenia/Croatia and Southern Tirol in northern Italy. All in all, border region where Italian, Slavic and German cultures meet and mix. The author describes places, landscapes, towns and villages in an intense, reflective and beautiful way, presents persons with interesting, moving, comic, poetic and tragic fates, teaches us some history (certainly not dry), tells some anecdotes, studies some literature and philosophises about landscapes, persons, culture and life itself. The tone changes between dark, poetic and humorous. The main theme of the book is how people live their lives in a microcosm where ways of thinking, language, traditions, and arts are influenced by many cultures and peoples, some gone and some still around. It pays homage to cultural diversity and warns against homogenizing and ethnic cleansing, as in the Yugoslavian Civil War, which the author describes as "the most silly of all wars", and which went on while this book was written. Personally I think the book was very interesting, rich, farsighted and with a very important theme. Sometimes I felt that there were too much philosophy, but it is rather simple and an important part of the book. It is a very European book, dealing with Europe's great heritage of both disastrous border disputes and rich cultural exchange across the borders. For Americans living within borders drawn officially drawn on the map with a ruler this book could be useful when it comes to understand the rich and tragic aspects of Europe's diverse ethnic heritage. But I recommend it to everybody who wants to enjoy a cultural journey to an exciting corner of Europe.