“Maggie Meriwether’s Rich Experience “ - A Short Story by Jean Stafford - set in Paris - first published June 17, 1955 in The New Yorker

 

“Maggie Meriwether's Rich Experience” - A Short Story set in Paris 

By Jean Stafford - first published June 17, 1955 in The New Yorker

This story in included in The Library of American Edition of The Complete Stories and Other Writings of Jean Stafford 

This is part of my participation in Paris in July - 2021- hosted by Thyme for Tea

Works read so far for Paris in July 2021

1. Lost in Paris by Elizabeth Thompson - 2021
2. Loving Modigliani by Linda Lappin - 2020
3. Russian Émirgé Short Stories from Bunin to Yanovsky - edited by Bryan Karetnky. 2018 - an overview 
4. Pancakes in Paris - Living The American Dream in France by Craig Carlson - 2016
5. The Paris Apartment by Kelly Bowen- 2021
6. The Paris Architect by Charles Belfoure - 2013
7. “Requiem” - A short story by Gaito Gazdanov - 1960
8. The Ice Swan by J’nell Ciesieski - 2021
9. Two Short Stories from the 1920s by Teffi
10. “Dimanche” - A Short Story by Irene Nemirovsky - 1934- translated by Bridget Patterson 2015
11. “The Life of Madame Duclos” -1927-  A Short Story by IRINA ODOEVTSEVA 

Jean Stafford 

Born - July 1, 1915 - Covina, California 

Married 1940 to 1948 to Robert Lowell . One of three marriages.

She published three novels but most now regarded for her wonderful short stories, most of which were published in The New Yorker or The Psrtisian Review as her Glory.

1970 - Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 

Died - March 26, 1979 - White Plains, New York

A few days ago i was very kindly given a copy of Library of American Edition of The Complete Stories and Other Writings of Jean Stafford.  I was delighted to discover that The lead story in her first collection, Innocents Abroad, “Maggie Meriwether’s Rich Experience” is about a young woman from Tennessee first trip to Paris.  Stafford acknowledged a literary debt to Henry James and Edith Wharton as one can see in this wonderful story.

This story is my first venture into the work of Jean Stafford.  It will, I hope, be far from my last.  I was stunned by the magnificent first sentence, as I am sure the editor’s of The New Yorker were:

“There  was a hole so neat that it looked tailored in the dead center of the large round beige velours mat that had been thrown on the grass in the shade of the venerable sycamore, and through it protruded a clump of mint, so chic in its air of casualness, so piquant in its fragrance in the heat of mid-July, that Mme Floquet, a brisk Greek in middle life, suggested, speaking in French with a commandingly eccentric accent, that her host, Karl von Bubnoff, M. le Baron, had contrived it all with shears and a trowel before his Sunday guests arrived at his manorial house, Magnamont, in Chantilly.”

Now that is an opening sentence!

Paris in 1955 must have been a very powerful experience for a girl from Tennessee even if her parents could afford to send her to France by herself.  She learned French so she could,she hoped.fit in.

Just when she is regretting her trip she encountered an Englishman she had met in London

“Her parents, who had had to be cajoled for a year into letting her go to Europe alone, had imagined innumerable dreadful disasters—the theft of her passport or purse, ravishment on the Orient Express, amoebic dysentery, abduction into East Berlin—but it had never occurred to them that their high-spirited, self-confident, happy daughter would be bamboozled into muteness by the language of France. Her itinerary provided for two weeks in Paris, and she had suffered through one week of it when, like an angel from heaven, an Englishman called Tippy Akenside showed up at her hotel at the day of the Baron’s party”.

Tippy offers to escort her to party, He knows the Baron and assured her everyone at the party Will speak English. Of course it turns out no one does.

“Tippy introduced them he had smiled in the friendliest possible way and had said, in English, “How nice of you to come,” but then, when rotten Tippy said, “Miss Weriwether is the American girl I told you about on the phone,” the Baron thereafter addressed her in highly idiomatic French until, encountering nothing but silence and the headshakes and cryptic groans that escaped her involuntarily, he began to pretend, as the others had done from the start, that she wasn’t there.”

The rest of The story, full of so many besutiful sentences, is kind of a satire of French post war gentility.or maybe a parody of how Americans saw the French.

Mel u

The Reading Life.

 

A Dog’s Heart by Mikhail Bulgakov - finished 1926 but not published until 1966- translated from the Russian by Antonina W. Bouis, 2011

 A Dog’s Heart by Mikhail Bulgakov - finished 1926 but not published until 1966- translated from the Russian by Antonina W. Bouis, 2011

Mikhail Bulgakov

May 15, 1891 Kyiv, Ukraine

March 10, 1940 - Moscow 

In May I read The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov.

(In the translation by Richard Pevear and Lariosa Volohonsky).  I was just mesmerized by this work.  I knew I wanted to read more of his fiction.  I decided to start my read through of his work  with his first novel White Guard.  Black Swan, my third of his novels is set largely  in The famous Moscow Art Theater.  The theater was founded in 1898 by The  highly influential Konstantia Stanislavski, whose acting philosophy greatly influenced American cinema and theater.

The Fatal Eggs was my fourth work by Bulgakov.

A Dog’s Heart (sometimes translated as “The Dog’s Heart”), a novella, is considered to be a satire of early Soviet society.  Evidently Bulgahov felt it safest not to publish it.

A well known scientist attempts to transform a dog, picked up from the streets near starvation, into a human by transplanting into him a human heart, testicles and a pituitary gland.  The dog begins to speak, to walk upright.

The point of view switches from the that of the dog to the scientist.  His combination office home occupied seven rooms.  According to the local Soviet Housing Committee he is entitled to only three rooms.  Watching him make short work of them was great fun.

The dog makes savage comments about people and society.  He is perpetually hungry.  

All sorts of crazy things happen.

I found this work a lot of fun to read.  No doubt published in 1926 it would have gotten Bulgakov in serious trouble.

I believe I have now read all his translated longer fiction.  There are three anthologies of short stories I hope to read through within a year.

Mel u

Opyt’, - A Short Story by Yury Felsen (pen name of Nikolai Freudenstein), first published in the magazine Zveno (1927). ‘An Experiment’ translation copyright © Bryan Karetnyk, 2017.

‘Opyt’, - A Short Story by Yury Felsen (pen name of Nikolai Freudenstein), first published in the magazine Zveno (1927). ‘An Experiment’ translation copyright © Bryan Karetnyk, 2017.

Paris in July - 2021 - Hosted by Thyme for Tea

This is part of my participation in Paris in July 2021

This story is included in Russian Émirgé Short Stories from Bunin to Vanovsky - edited by Brian Karetnyk.  I highly reccomend this wonderful collection

Nikolai Berngardovich Freudenstein - real name of Yury Felsen

Born 1894 - St Petersburg, Russia 

1917 - with his Family after The October Revolution he moves to Riga, Latvia 

1923 - Settles in Paris

Dies 1943 - Auschwitz - upon arrival he was judged unfit to live and sent at once to the gas chamber - this was made possible by the cooperation of French authorities who had placed him in The Drancy concentration camp located in an eastern suburb of Paris to await being deported 

Works read so far for Paris in July 2021

1. Lost in Paris by Elizabeth Thompson - 2021
2. Loving Modigliani by Linda Lappin - 2020
3. Russian Émirgé Short Stories from Bunin to Yanovsky - edited by Bryan Karetnky. 2018 - an overview 
4. Pancakes in Paris - Living The American Dream in France by Craig Carlson - 2016
5. The Paris Apartment by Kelly Bowen- 2021
6. The Paris Architect by Charles Belfoure - 2013
7. “Requiem” - A short story by Gaito Gazdanov - 1960
8. The Ice Swan by J’nell Ciesieski - 2021
9. Two Short Stories from the 1920s by Teffi
10. “Dimanche” - A Short Story by Irene Nemirovsky - 1934- translated by Bridget Patterson 2015
11. “The Life of Madame Duclos” -1927-  A Short Story by IRINA ODOEVTSEVA 

Most Russian Émigrés were sympathetic toward the attempts of White Russian  Armies to overthrow the Bolsheviks and restore a pre-revolutionary form of government.  White Russians blamed Jewish intellectuals for the fall  of the Tsar and the destruction of their privileged way of life.   There were Jews among those who left Russia for Paris.  When the Germans took over Paris most, not all French people, were fine with the removal of even French born Jews to concentration camps.

One of the things Russian Émigrés often had to cope with was the psychological impact of just getting by, struggling to survive without a secure income, a comfortable residence or servants.  .  

As today’s story open, the narrator and his journalist friend have just been picked up by a Hungarian woman and her Parisian friend.  They take them to a cafe the narrator could have afforded in his younger days, offering to pay.  He feels like a prostitute but thinks what does it matter now.  The four of them leave the cafe to go to a late night place.  They pickup a young French woman and a man.

The narrator gets bored, walks around until he encounters a Russian he knows 

“We ask each other a thousand questions. Russians have still not grown used to the fact that there are thousands of them in Paris, and they are congenial and curious about one another, like men in a barracks who hail from the same parts.”

He then takes to his apartment a Frenchman and a woman from the club.  They end up robbing him.

From the narrator I got the feeling of a man now just going through the motions of life.

 

“The Life of Madame Duclos” - A Short Story by IRINA ODOEVTSEVA -translated by Irina Steinberg ‘The Life of Madame Duclos’ (Zhizn´ madam Diuklo) first published in Zveno 6 (1927), pp. 336–60.

“The Life of Madame Duclos” - A Short Story by IRINA ODOEVTSEVA -translated by Irina Steinberg ‘The Life of Madame Duclos’ (Zhizn´ madam Diuklo) first published in Zveno 6 (1927), pp. 336–60.

This story is included in Russian Émirgé Short Stories from Bunin to Vanovsky - edited by Brian Karetnyk.  I highly reccomend this wonderful collection

This is part of my Participation in Paris in July 2021 - Hosted by Thyme for Tea

Works read so far for Paris in July 2021

1. Lost in Paris by Elizabeth Thompson - 2021
2. Loving Modigliani by Linda Lappin - 2020
3. Russian Émirgé Short Stories from Bunin to Yanovsky - edited by Bryan Karetnky. 2018 - an overview 
4. Pancakes in Paris - Living The American Dream in France by Craig Carlson - 2016
5. The Paris Apartment by Kelly Bowen- 2021
6. The Paris Architect by Charles Belfoure - 2013
7. “Requiem” - A short story by Gaito Gazdanov - 1960
8. The Ice Swan by J’nell Ciesieski - 2021
9. Two Short Stories from the 1920s by Teffi
10. “Dimanche” - A Short Story by Irene Nemirovsky - 1934- translated by Bridget Patterson 2015

Irina Odoevtseva

Born -June 15, 1895 - Riga,Latvia (then part of the Russian Empire)

1922 - with her husband the poet Georgy Ivanov, she emigrates to Paris 

She wrote several novels which sold well. She also authored two commercially successful memoirs, On the Banks of the Neva (1967) and on The Banks of the Seine (1983).  Her final book caused a good bit of controversy do to her remarks on famous Émigre artists and writers, including Ivan Bunin.

In 1987, she returned to Russia, living in Leningrad.  New editions of her memoirs sold over 200,000 copies and sh was a frequent guest on cultural Tv shows.

Dies - October 14, 1990 - St Petersburg, Russia 

“The Life of Madame Duclos”, set in Émigré Paris in the 1920s, is just a wonderful mini-history of the life of a Russian woman in Paris. 

Manechka,an orphan, was sent to an exclusive St Petersburg girls boarding school by her aunt.  Right after graduation her aunt marries her to a very wealthy Parisian, 33 years her senior.  He has business that takes him to St. Petersburg every few months.  He saw her preforming in a ballet and fell in love with her.

“In the very first winter following her graduation from the institute, Manechka Litvinova got married to Monsieur Ducious…. So, on that morning, when the aunt walked into her room – a white room, covered in pictures of her girlfriends from the institute – pinched her cheek and said: ‘Now listen up my dear, I’ve found you a husband. A Frenchman. A rich one. You’ll have your own house in Paris. How about that?’ Manechka curtseyed just as gracefully. ‘You’re an angel, ma tante! Merci!’ They were married a month later. Monsieur Duclos was fifty, Manechka was seventeen. Monsieur Duclos would come to Russia on business, staying for no more than six weeks at a time. He had seen Manechka at the ballet and had fallen in love.”

He was fifty, a widower, and she 17.  The house turns out to be a huge mansion. Manechka is proud of her status and her girlfriends are jealous.  The house has numerous tenants and even a concierge.  Her husband is not at all a bad man, affectionate and generous.  She learns what is expected of the wife of a wealthy Parisian businessman.  They settle into a routine.  Then one day she finds him dead in his room.  She becomes a devoted widow for years, very affluent from her husband’s businesses and rental income.  She wears black for three years.  Then, she is only 21,

throws of her widows clothes and has an extensive new wardrobe made.  The servants are scandalized by her.  

She begins notice a young Russian man her age who has recently become a tenant.  She finds he is a student.  She becomes infatuated with a man way below her station in society.  She is dismayed to find he has moved out. She hires a defective to find him.  

The story closes in a very romantic fashion.  

 

“Dimanche” - A Short Story by Irene Nemirovsky - 1934- translated by Bridget Patterson 2015

 

“Dimanche” - A Short Story by Irene Nemirovsky - 1934- translated by Bridget Patterson 2015

Website for Paris in July 2021- Hosted by Thyme for Tea 

This is part of my tenth year of participation in Paris in July 

Suite Francaise is the acknowledged master work of Iréne Nemirovsky.  I first read this book during Paris in July in 2015.  I loved that book so much that I added her to my read all I can list.  Since then I have read and posted on eleven of her novels and four short stories.  On her way to Auschwitz in a cattle car she carried with her a copy of the notebook of Katherine Mansfield.  She died there after a month at age forty.  She was a very prolific writer with about a novel a year.  The Germans cheated the Reading Life world out of at least thirty wonderful works.  I cannot find a way to forgive or forget this.

I am happy to be able to post on one of her set in Paris short stories “Dimanche” - (“Sunday” in English) from 1934.  The chief characters are a Middle aged Parisian couple, married for twenty years plus, and their twenty year old daughter Nadine.  The father has long been a philander, making little effort to hide things from his wife.  As he story opens he gives her a vague explanation as to why he Will not be home tonight.  His wife wonders who he is meeting.  She thinks of The days when he once had a passion for her,  

Nadine has her first love.  He seems like her father in that The man laughs  when he tells her he sees other women.  Nadine wonders if her mother, who she sees as past the years of passion, has any clue how she feels.

Nemirovsky skillfully lets us see the family dynamics, a younger daughter and the servants.

To those new to Nemirovsky start with Suite Francaise.  

Irène Némirovsky was born in Kiev in 1903 into a wealthy banking family and immigrated to France during the Russian Revolution. After attending the Sorbonne in Paris, she began to write and swiftly achieved success with David Golder, which was followed by more than a dozen other books. Throughout her lifetime she published widely in French newspapers and literary journals. She died in Auschwitz in 1942. More than sixty years later, Suite Française was published posthumously for the first time in 2006. - from Vintage Press 

Two short stories by Teffi set among Russian Émigrés in Paris in the 1920s

 

Paris in July - 2021  - hosted by Thyme for Tea

Works read so far for Paris in July 2021

1. Lost in Paris by Elizabeth Thompson - 2021
2. Loving Modigliani by Linda Lappin - 2020
3. Russian Émirgé Short Stories from Bunin to Yanovsky - edited by Bryan Karetnky. 2018 - an overview 
4. Pancakes in Paris - Living The American Dream in France by Craig Carlson - 2016
5. The Paris Apartment by Kelly Bowen- 2021
6. The Paris Architect by Charles Belfoure - 2013
7. “Requiem” - A short story by Gaito Gazdanov - 1960
8. The Ice Swan by J’nell Ciesieski - 2021

Two short stories by Teffi set among Russian Émigrés in Paris in the 1920s

Teffi was The Pen name of Nadezhda Alexandrovna Lokhvitskaya

May 21, 1872 - Born St Petersburg, Russia

1920- initially a supporter of The Revolution, she soon turned against The Bolsheviks.  She came to live in Paris and never returned. She was an important part of The Russian Émigre community.  She published extensively in Russian language publications, including 100s of Short stories and feuilletons. 

October 6, 1952 - Dies Paris, France

“Que Faire” - 1923

“We—les russes, as they call us—live the strangest of lives here, nothing like other people’s. We stick together, for example, not like planets, by mutual attraction, but by a force quite contrary to the laws of physics—mutual repulsion. Every lesrusse hates all the others—hates them just as fervently as the others hate him.”  - from “que faire?” 

Our narrator tells us every Paris based Russian Émigré calls others a crook as a matter of course 

““that-crook”, placed before the name of every lesrusse anyone mentions: “that-crook Akimenko”, “that-crook Petrov”, “that-crook Savelyev”. This particle lost its original meaning long ago and now equates to something between the French le, indicating the gender of the person named, and the Spanish honorific don: “don Diego”, “don José”. You’ll hear conversations like this: “Some of us got together at that-crook Velsky’s yesterday for a game of bridge. There was that-crook Ivanov, that-crook Gusin, that-crook Popov. Nice crowd.”

Émigrés divide each other into two categories- those selling Russia and those trying to save it.  The sellers are getting rich as middle 

persons, the other seen themselves on a holy mission to restore Tsarist era culture.

The tone of this charming story is comic with Émigrés attributing crazy actions to other Émigrés such as selling a Black Sea port to Chile.

You can also tell Émigrés are totally wrapped up in their own world.

“MARQUITA” - 1924 - set in a Russian Cafe in 

Paris - 

How can you not like a story that opens like this:

“The waitresses, all of them daughters of provincial governors (did we ever imagine our governors could end up with so many daughters?), pulled in their stomachs as they squeezed between the tables, abstractedly repeating, “One chocolates, two pastry and one milk…” The café was Russian, which is why it offered music and “entertainments”.”

(Ok maybe the ex-governors probably did not find this real amusing in 1924)

The characters in this story are all preforming in the club to survive.

The club is also a spot where richer Émigrés come looking for a mistress.

A rich Tarter has sent a box of candy to one the women working at the club.  Here is the advise an older woman gives her:

“A woman must be a mysterious flower (honest to God!) and not give anything away about her domestic arrangements. Men all have domestic arrangements of their own—and that’s what they want to get away from. Or do you want to go on singing romances russes in this teashop until you’re an old woman? Until either you or the teashop come to the end of your days?”

There are four other set in Paris stories in the collection.  These two were my favorites.

I read these works in TEFFI SUBTLY WORDED AND OTHER STORIES - Translated from the Russian by Anne Marie Jackson with Robert and Elizabeth Chandler, and others. From Pushkin Press

There are 23 works in the collection.  The New York Review of Books has published two collections of her work.  In is my hope to do a full read through of these collections.

Mel u

The Reading Life 

The Ice Swan by J’nell Ciesielski - 2021

The Ice Swan by J’nell Ciesielski - 2021

Website of Paris in July - 2021 - Hosted by Thyme for Tea

This is part of my participation for this year

Works read so far for Paris in July 2021

1. Lost in Paris by Elizabeth Thompson - 2021
2. Loving Modigliani by Linda Lappin - 2020
3. Russian Émirgé Short Stories from Bunin to Yanovsky - edited by Bryan Karetnky. 2018 - an overview 
4. Pancakes in Paris - Living The American Dream in France by Craig Carlson - 2016
5. The Paris Apartment by Kelly Bowen- 2021
6. The Paris Architect by Charles Belfoure - 2013
7. “Requiem” - A short story by Gaito Gazdanov - 1960
8. “Paris” - A Short Story by Ivan Bunin -1942

This year I am focusing a bit on Russian Émigrés in Paris, people driven out by the Revolution.  About 75,000 or so went to Paris.  The classic figure is a former Grand Duke working as a waiter, or like Gaito Gazadanov, writer by day and Paris cab driver by night. Many at first thought they would soon be going home when the Russian Civil War was won by the White Russian Armies. Of course this did not happen

The Ice Swan by J’neil Ciesielski, just published this week, is an exciting romantic account of the life of a Russian Princess who fled Saint Petersburg with her mother and younger sister to avoid being killed by Bolsheviks.  They had jewels sown into the lining of their clothes.  Used to being very rich with servants doing everything, they are reduced to just surviving in Paris. The “The Reds” had agents looking for aristocratic Émigrés to be taken home for execution.

Petrograd - 1917 - Princess Svetlana Dalsky, about 21, along with her mother and younger sister Marisa barely escape death by the Reds onto a train bound out of the country. Her father and her brother Nicky remain in Russia fighting to restore the Tsar. They arrive in Paris with little more than the Jewels in their corsets.  They have to live almost in hiding from Bolshevik agents.  They have to give a ruby for a loaf of bread. 

The male romantic lead is a Scottish Doctor, from a very wealthy family, working in a military hospital in Paris. Wynn MacCallan is the second son of a Scottish Duke but his passion is his work as a surgeon, taking care of wounded soldiers. One day he sees Svetlana injured by some glass thrown at her and he treats her. She is, of course, very beautiful, he is intrigued he followers her into an underground Russian nightclub. This club is owned by a sinister Russian who knows everything going on in the Émigré community.  The club is the social hub of Émigre 

Paris, full of dancing, vodka, and shady deals.  The doctor had earlier treated the owner’s son when he was shot so he has an in.

Svetlana begins to run up debts to the club owner, made worse by her mother’s bar tabs.  She agrees to marry the doctor who will settle her debts and get her to his castle in Scotland.

What made the story exciting for me were the numerous plot lines, the development of relationships, watching the Russians adjust. There are lots of surprises and cliff hangers to keep you eagerly reading on.

“J’nell Ciesielski

Inspirational Romance Author

With a passion for heart-stopping adventure and sweeping love stories, J’nell Ciesielski weaves fresh takes into romances of times gone by. When not creating dashing heroes and daring heroines, she can be found dreaming of Scotland, indulging in chocolate of any kind, or watching old black and white movies. Winner of the INSPY and the Maggie Award, she is a Florida native who now lives in Virginia with her husband, daughter, and lazy beagle.”   From https://jnellciesielski.com/. There is data on her other books on her website.

Mel u

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