Emperor of the Earth by Czeslaw Milosz

Author:Czeslaw Milosz [Milosz, Czeslaw]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2015-03-30T16:00:00+00:00

On Thomas Mayne Reid

In Chekhov's story "Boys," written in 1887, twelve-year old Volodia coming home for Christmas vacation brings with him his freckled schoolmate Chechevitzyn. The boys' behavior is strange, conspiratorial: they do not take part in family activities but instead keep aloof, whispering to each other. At last Chechevitzyn reveals to Volodia's little sisters who he really is: "I am Montigumo, the Hawk's Claw, chief of the invincible people." He lets this confession slip out in spite of the scorn he feels for creatures who have not read Mayne Reid and who are not aware of the big plan being discussed in secret talks by the two plotters.

"First to Perm," said Chechevitzyn in a low voice. "From there to Tiumen... next to Tomsk... next... next... to Kamchatka .... From there the Samoyeds will carry us in their boats across the Behring Strait.... Then we're in America.... There are plenty of fur animals there."

"And California"? asked Volodia.

"California is below.... Once you're in America, California isn't far. We can get food by hunting and robbing."

Volodia lives through internal agony. He worries about his parents but yields to the promptings of the Hawk's Claw and they escape, only to be caught at the first railway station.

The true instigator of that adventure, Mayne Reid, fired the imaginations of youthful readers in Russia as he did nowhere else; and in no other place have several generations remained so loyal in their maturity to a beloved writer of their school years. Today Mayne Reid is the rather rare case of an author whose fame, short-lived where he could be read in the original, has survived thanks to translations.

I was ten when I discovered a coffer of my father's treasures gathered in the years when he had attended a Russian high school. It was filled with Mayne Reid's books in Russian. Struggling with the Cyrillic alphabet I deciphered inscriptions under the illustrations, and this became the first text that I read in Russian. The editions from before the Revolution were far from the last, however. Quite recently some American friends told me about their embarrassment in Moscow when they learned, in a conversation about authors translated from the English, of the wide circulation of Mayne Reid's books. They had never heard his name in America. They are not to be blamed: in English-speaking countries with their rich literature for young readers Mayne Reid was overshadowed by his literary successors and utterly forgotten, so that even the best encyclopedias dedicate to him no more than a few lines.

Thomas Mayne Reid was born in 1818 in Northern Ireland. He was the son of a Presbyterian minister and, himself destined for a career in the ministry, received a very thorough education (to his bored dismay). Of a martial temperament, he dreamed of glorious deeds. Moreover, he sympathized with suffering Ireland and detested the monarchic establishment. In 1840 he migrated to America where he soon became convinced that his Latin and Greek were of no great use; thence his continuous attacks upon the obsolete (in his opinion) training of students in classical languages.

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