Goodbye Eastern Europe by Jacob Mikanowski

Author:Jacob Mikanowski
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780861542604
Publisher: A Oneworld Book

Those who did not share Malevich’s faith in the revolution, and who had lived through close to a decade of bloodshed, famine, and unrest, found it hard to look upon the time before the First World War as anything but a lost paradise. To Stefan Zweig, these years were the “Golden Age of Security” when everything had been predictable, and every item “had its norm, its correct measurement and weight.”25 Danilo Kiš, the Yugoslavian writer, thought of them as “those ancient, mythical times when men still wore derbies.”26 For Bruno Schulz, it had simply been the “age of genius.”

When Schulz reached back in his memory to recover the lost world of his childhood, two figures loomed larger than any others. One was the Habsburg emperor Franz Joseph I, and the other was Anna Csillag, a woman whose image seemed to appear in every newspaper in Eastern Europe before World War I. Advertisements, drawn in the coarse lines of folk woodcuts, showed her dressed in a flowery peasant frock, holding three lilies aloft in one hand. The most striking thing about her, though, was her hair: almost two meters long, it cascaded down her back like a woolly Niagara.

An accompanying text explained this remarkable growth. Translated into whatever language the newspaper was printed in, it always began the same way: “I, Anna Csillag, possess an immense, 185-centimeter growth of Lorelei-like locks thanks to fourteen months spent using my specially-formulated pomade.” Sometimes, when culturally appropriate, she compared her locks to those of a rusalka, a Slavic river-nymph, instead of the more Germanic siren. Schulz remembered Anna’s story as an almost “Job-like” tale, in which the young woman, cursed with a meager growth of thin and unappealing hair, lived in dread of ever finding a mate and was pitied by her entire village for her affliction.

One day, however, salvation arrived. While working with chemicals and herbs, Anna stumbled upon a truly miraculous medicine that not only cured her baldness but worked as a sort of hair-growing wonder drug. After using the mixture a few times, her hair grew in an uncontrollable torrent from her own scalp. Soon all the men in her family likewise boasted astounding pelts of lustrous black hair—fanlike beards stretching past their waists, and ropelike mustachios coiled around their trunks and midsections like so many boa constrictors. It was a blessing, one that Anna shared with the world through a stream of paid print advertisements that appeared unceasingly in the daily newspapers of Budapest, Kraków, Łódź, Vienna, Helsinki, Riga, and all points in between.

So ubiquitous were Anna Csillag’s ads that they became part of the background hum of life in the Eastern Europe of the Belle Époque. Many writers besides Schulz thought of Anna when they recalled that vanished golden age. Czesław Miłosz, Gyula Krúdy, Karl Krauss, and Kálmán Mikszáth all discussed her, while Józef Wittlin, the great chronicler of prewar Lviv, devoted a whole poem to Anna, in which she becomes the symbol of every sweet and foolish thing that had vanished from the world.

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