Tales of Contagion: A Comparative Reading of Goran Stefanovski’s Divo Meso

November 23, 2022 | in Essays | by Sofija Popovska

[T]he image of Western Europe as a cataclysmic pathogen becomes a motif, repeated unto the ages of ages.

The Macedonian playwright Goran Stefanovski, working against the background of ex-Yugoslavia, has long used the microcosm of the theatre to address shifting politics, disintegrating identities, and violence in both physical and spiritual levels. His most well-known work, which encapsulates this lifelong address, is perhaps Divo Meso, an intimate family drama that speaks to the overarching condition of the Macedonian nation, as it is subsumed by invasive forces. In this following essay, Sofija Popovska discusses how the play’s oft-overlooked pathogenic themes dialogue with other texts and narratives from across history, and how, seen along these lines, it speaks universally to the private tragedy of loss, as hidden within the greater global narrative of cultural collisions.

The horseman on the white horse was clad in a showy and barbarous attire. . . While his horse continued galloping, he was bending his bow in order to spread pestilence abroad. At his back swung the brass quiver filled with poisoned arrows, containing the germs of all diseases.

—Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse

In Scene VIII of Goran Stefanovski’s 1979 theatrical piece, Divo Meso, a destitute Macedonian household is paid a visit by a German investor, who offers to buy their house in order to have it remodeled into a showroom. Upon his arrival, Maria, the mother of the family, plunges into reverie, ruminating about a mythical condition she’s certain she’s plagued by: the eponymous divo meso. It is, we are told, an “old wives’ tale”—flesh which forms around a hair inside the throat, and grows until its victim asphyxiates. Despite its superstitious roots, Maria’s fear sublimates the intuition of a condition more cataclysmic and widespread: the body of Macedonian society, weakened by discord and poverty, being infiltrated by foreign interests as if by a pathogen. Transformed into an eschatological growth, the will of their German visitor continues its indomitable conquest throughout the play, leading the family to a coda marked by desolation, surrender, and powerless rage.

Though indicated by the title, the element of illness in Divo Meso hasn’t been explored much, relegated to the background in favor of discussing the loss of tradition. Regardless, the pathogen metaphor is especially apt at describing imperialist intervention into cultures; rather than cultivating a mutualistic or commensalistic relationship between two consenting cultures, it introduces a drastically one-sided power dynamic, to the profit of one and the undoing of another. However, before we delve further into the specificities of Divo Meso, I would like to invite you to consider two episodes, one historical and one literary, that tell stories of cultural contagion. These will help unravel the pathogen-host relationship in its cultural, imperialist context, and illuminate individual processes that comprise it—such as the transformation of identity into a collision site of imposed, internalized, and inherent traits. Rather than the reductive (albeit also valid) reading of Divo Meso as a tragedy of familial and national scope, a simultaneous reading of the following tragic—and in many ways analogous—texts will allow for a richer understanding of the theatrical piece, one that includes transcultural motifs.

On June 23, 1763, trader and land speculator William Trent recorded in his diary that two Native American diplomats had arrived at Fort Pitt in order to persuade the British to abandon the location. After negotiations failed, the British offered the Delaware emissaries a parting gift. “Out of our regard to them we gave them two Blankets and a Handkerchief out of the Small Pox Hospital. I hope it will have the desired effect,” wrote Trent. It remains unknown whether this instance of biological warfare succeeded, though the Native American population around Fort Pitt was “struck hard” by smallpox in the spring and summer of 1763. This wasn’t the first, nor last tale of contamination to be found in the imperialist trajectories of Western Europeans. Engraved upon traditions, echoing through languages, and rising scar-like from the surface of collective memory, the image of Western Europe as a cataclysmic pathogen becomes a motif, repeated unto the ages of ages. READ MORE…

Contributor:

Sofija Popovska

Language:

Macedonian

Place:

Macedonia

Writer:

Goran Stefanovski

Tags:

The Two Plagues of Evgeny Vodolazkin

July 6, 2020 | in Essays | by José Vergara

Vodolazkin can imbue the plague with the metaphysical import and apocalyptic logic necessary to his tale.

As the COVID-19 pandemic rewrites our realities, so do writers around the world take up their instruments to render the new world into text. In the following essay, José Vergara discusses the newest work by Russian author Eugene Vodolazkin, Sister of the Four, a existentialist-absurdist play that cohere’s the writer’s familiarity with the pandemic as subject, and the unprecedented facts of what we face today.

This isn’t Eugene Vodolazkin’s first pandemic.

The author’s initial encounter with a brutal, contagious disease took place across fifteenth-century Russia and Europe, the setting of his acclaimed novel Laurus (2012). In it, Vodolazkin chronicles the life of a healer turned holy fool, pilgrim, and monk; Arseny, as he is called in his youth, first loses his parents to the plague, and after training as an herbalist under his grandfather, falls in love with the sole survivor of a village that succumbed to the same pestilence. He then spends his days atoning for what he considers his sins by serving God and miraculously curing the ill. Disease is omnipresent, as Arseny walks fearlessly into plague-stricken homes to do his work. For him, as it is for his world, this illness is something entirely familiar—it is part of everyday life and has its own traditions of suffering, prayer, and death, imbuing the book with a well-suited sense of apocalypticism. Likewise serving as a plot device, it also draws Arseny into the orbit of various characters.

Now, in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis, the award-winning Russian author and specialist in Old Russian Literature has returned for another round. In doing so, he propels us into the era of corona-literature, a subgenre which is sure to spike in popularity in coming years. Published as the first in a series of four separate plays released weekly as audiobooks and e-books starting May 18, 2020, Sister of the Four is Vodolazkin’s attempt to make sense of our shared descent into this surreal existence. The play focuses on the titular four: a group of patients being treated for COVID-19 at the Albert Camus Hospital for Infectious Diseases, an imagined setting whose name immediately establishes Vodolazkin’s wry humor and self-awareness when it comes to literary precedents. The main characters consist of: a pizza delivery impresario with delusions of grandeur who goes by the name Funghi; a writer who has been having trouble producing original work for a decade and a half—totally unlike Vodolazkin with his impressive output; a man who claims to be a parliamentary deputy; and last, the chief doctor who eventually catches the virus himself and, in an apparent reference to Anton Chekhov’s “Ward No. 6,” becomes part of the very ward under his supervision. To round out the primary cast, the playwright includes a nurse, who, at the end of the first of two acts, announces herself to be Death incarnate.

This motley set of characters, the circumstances that bring them together, and plenty of alcohol contribute to Sister of the Four’s carnivalesque atmosphere, where the specter of death—both theoretical and apparently embodied in the Nurse—motivates discussions on everything from marriage and the qualities of a life worth living to pizza toppings. In the face of their impending end, the characters feel compelled to play a game of confessions, resulting in several reveals in the play’s latter half. All the while, the disorder of the day muddles the characters’ ability to communicate effectively. The addition of a French cognac at the end of act one doesn’t help, even if distracts the heroes from their condition. READ MORE…

Contributor:

José Vergara

Language:

Russian

Place:

Russia

Writer:

Eugene Vodolazkin

Tags:

Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

February 3, 2017 | in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup | by Hanna Heiskanen, Janani Ganesan, and Vivian Szu-Chin Chih

Your update from Taiwan, India, and Finland!

This week, put on your walking shoes so we can follow Vivian Szu-Chin Chih, Editor-at-Large for Taiwan, through Taipei, from an international book exhibition to a history museum. Then we’ll zip over to India to meet Assistant Managing Editor Janani Ganesan for discussions about literary translation and, wait for it—bull fighting. And finally in Finland, Assistant Blog Editor Hanna Heiskanen has some Finnish Publishing Industry gossip for us. Cheers!

Editor-at-Large Vivian Szu-Chin Chih reports from Taiwan:

As the Chinese Lunar New Year ushered in the Year of the Rooster, as well as the Ding-You Year (丁酉年) in the Chinese Sexagenary cycle, readers in Taiwan have been anticipating the annual Taipei International Book Exhibition, which is kicking off on February 8 and will last till February 13. The international event for book-lovers will take place at the Taipei World Trade Center, only a few steps away from the landmark 101 building. Among this year’s featured sessions are a forum specifically dedicated to children’s books in Taiwan and a discussion concerning how local bookstores can be redefined and reshaped, featuring several Taiwanese and Japanese speakers and the founding chair of the Melbourne Writers Festival, Mark Rubbo. The eminent Chinese novelist and poet based in the U.S., Ha Jin, will also deliver two speeches, one on the art of humor writing in fiction, the other to announce his two latest books, “The Boat Rocker” (《折騰到底》) and a poetry collection, “Home on the Road” (《路上的家園》). The female poet and publisher from Paris, Anne-Laure Bondoux, will travel to the island to attend the book exhibition as well, giving several talks including a discussion with the Taiwanese novelist Nathalie Chang.

The 90-year-old Taiwanese poet Luo Men passed away this January in Taipei. His poems are rich in imagery, with an emphasis on the spiritual search of the human mind. The TSMC Literature Award will see its fourteenth iteration this year, presented by the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company to encourage emerging young Sinophone writers in Taiwan and overseas. For 2017, all writers under the age of 40 composing in Chinese, traditional or simplified, are welcome to submit a piece of a novel. The deadline will be at the end of August. Since its establishment, the award has provided young Sinophone writers with a platform to debut their literary works. For example, the 2013 first-prize winner from Nanjing, Fei Ying’s novel, was published in Taiwan by INK this past week. One of the previous winners, Liou Dan-Chiou’s latest book on a couple surviving in the wild, is forthcoming, as well.

This year marks the seventieth anniversary of the 1947 228 Incident followed by one of the longest martial law periods in the world, imposed upon the island by the Kuomingtang government. To help the society further comprehend this historical trauma and to commemorate the victims of the incident, the National Museum of Taiwan History in Tainan is holding an exhibition and a series of talks on the event. The exhibition will last until late May.