Heartbreaking and hilarious, compassionate and severe. A glittering jewel-box of a novel. It’s the sort of book, as other reviewers have suggested, where you end up living inside its world.

For a historical novel, The Blue Flower is vanishingly slim. It has 55 brief chapters--essentially vignettes of a few pages each--concluding with an incredibly spare and moving afterword. The German I found off-putting at first, but it’s mostly people’s names, nicknames, and place names and adds a lovely antique shade to the prose. (If audio is your speed and German is not, I definitely recommend the audiobook read by Derek Perkins—he gives marvelous voice to the ensemble cast and dispatches the German with utmost fluency!)

So what is The Blue Flower? Better to start with what it’s not: it isn't, first of all, anything like an 18th-century Lolita story, although it’s hard not to make that link. Surely Fitzgerald wrote with this knowledge, although we don’t see her dropping any hints to that effect: the story feels deeply rooted in its time period. While the poet and philosopher Fritz von Hardenberg is attracted to young Sophie von Kuhn's looks, the way he describes her to others and speaks to her directly makes it clear that he’s primarily attracted to his self-created idea of the girl.

Fritz calls Sophie “my heart’s heart.” For me, the “heart’s heart” of The Blue Flower lies in how it imagines the lives of two very different families, and in the questions its asks about the fragility of childhood and youth. Childhood and young adulthood in The Blue Flower look all the more fleeting and strange given how uncertain it was at that time for a person to survive to any great age.

Social expectations for young women and girls also weave into the novel's reflections on youth: Fritz’s family and friends are startled and even shocked at his attachment to a twelve-year old girl, but since she is expected to marry at sixteen, how much (or how little) time has she left for childish things anyway? Does she become genuinely attached to him, and if so, in what ways? In the case of Fritz’s close friend Karoline Just, what happens if you are only in your twenties, yet feel that life has passed you by?

But I don’t mean to make the book sound like a puzzle to be labored over. While some have experienced this as a dry or demanding read, or felt that Fitzgerald is overly harsh to her characters, the families’ emotions struck me as powerful and deeply felt. I think I will continue living with this book, again and again.

As first I wasn't sure if I was reading fact or fiction and I suspect it was a mixture of both. Having just finished The beginning of Spring by the same author I was really looking forward to this book as many reviewers say it is her best. I preferred the other one. This book is well written and life during that period appears to be well researched but the characters did not come alive for me as they did in The Beginning of Spring. It wasn't clear to me why a well educated man became infatuated with a child, not a very intelligent one at that. I think that's what I hoped to find out by reading the book but didn't as I didn't get to know the characters well enough. A peculiar tale and probably if it occurred nowadays he's be arrested for being a pervert.

Book Review Article

ASTONISHINGLY ACCURATE PORTRAYAL OF RUSSIA AND RUSSIANS

Set in Russia in 1913, this is an astounding book. Seldom does a novel so astound me. My first question is “How did Penelope Fitzgerald do it?” In an article on the writer Julian Barnes mentions that everyone asked this same question about her last four novels, all set in foreign locales. Andrew Miller asks it again in his introduction to the paperback edition: “how on earth can someone living in England in the second half of the twentieth century know so much about the minutiae of day to day life in Moscow in 1913?”

In answer to the question we have only a few hints. In the front matter of the book the writer thanks Harvey Pitcher for allowing her to use details from his book, The Smiths of Moscow (Swallow House, 1984). From published material about her life we also learn that Penelope Fitzgerald had an intense interest in Russian literature, that starting in the 1960s she took Russian language courses. That in 1975 she and her daughter Maria went on a two-week package tour to Moscow, which included a visit to the Tolstoy Museum—the author’s house in the Khamovniki District—and a dacha in a birch forest. In the early 1970s she became friends with a Swiss art curator who had been brought up in pre-revolutionary Russia; and whose family had had a greenhouse business in Moscow since the middle of the nineteenth century.

Even all this seems far too little to explain how Fitzgerald went imaginatively into the Russia of 1913 and described it with such authenticity—unlike so many other writers who have tried pulling this off. I have recently discussed the issue in a note about foreign writers who have made countless little missteps in the fictional Russia they chose to depict—see the posting on Dactyl Review, “When Writers Who Are Not Russian Write Novels Set in Russia.”
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A central character in the novel, Selwyn Crane, 52, who works as accountant at Frank’s printing company, is a pacifist do-gooder vegetarian, follower of the teachings of Tolstoy. He also writes poetry about birch trees and snow, and a good deal of fun is milked from the publication of his first book of poems, Birch Tree Thoughts. Here is the only sample quoted from that chapbook:
‘Dost feel the cold, sister birch?’
‘No, Brother Snow.
I feel it not.’ ‘What? Not?’ ‘No, not!’

Described early on as “not quite sane looking,” Selwyn is a man who brings a smile to people’s faces whenever his name is mentioned. The Russians all love him for his impractical ways, seeing him as a cloud in trousers and “a man of God.” The sharp-tongued and cynical Mrs. Graham calls Selwyn “the great recommender,” since he is always trying to help people by recommending them to others for employment.

Selwyn would seem an unlikely candidate for a prime mover of the novel’s action, but he is precisely that; in fact, it is he who makes almost everything happen. Ironically, most of his impulses are aimed at doing good, but his altruism ends up creating tremendous problems. We find out only near the end of the book, when he confesses to Frank, that he had been gently nudging Nellie past her down-to-earth pragmatism, hoping that she, like him, would learn to commune with Mother Nature and Holy Impractical Russia. He didn’t count on her falling in love with him.
As he explains to Frank, “Nellie was turning towards the spiritual. Unfortunately, she couldn’t, as yet, distinguish it from the romantic, which casts a false glow over everything it touches.” In a word, Nellie decides to run off with Selwyn, who gets cold feet at the last minute. As he tells Frank, “I failed the tryst.” When he does not rendezvous with her at the railway station agreed upon, Nellie abandons her children, sending them back to Moscow, while she herself travels on to England.

Selwyn is also responsible for Frank’s bringing of Lisa Ivanovna into his household as governess, leading to the many complications near the end of the book. As usual, Selwyn appears to believe that he is only helping an unfortunate, a young woman of peasant background who works at the department store Muir and Merrilees. But Lisa, with her quiet and gentle ways, is too attractive and too much of a temptation for Frank. If that were not bad enough, Lisa apparently has nebulous connections with student revolutionaries. Near the end of the book Frank receives a letter from the Ministry of Defense, suggesting rather strongly that he might wish to sell his business and leave Russia at his earliest convenience. This is the logical end result of Selwyn’s well-meaning maneuverings and meddling.

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Now a bit about the details that so authenticate the action of the book, making us feel as if we really were in the Russia of 1913. Frank Reid was born in Russia, speaks perfect Russian, as do his children, and all of them are perfectly attuned to the way things work. There are countless examples of this. On his way to the train station in the morning to pick up his abandoned children, Frank reasons that he must find a horse-drawn cab with a cabman who is starting work in the morning, not one who is ending his shift of night work. Why? Because the driver getting off will always be drunk. After he finds a cab the driver immediately begins taking him the long way around, so as to increase the fare, and Frank calmly tells him where to turn, so as to drive directly to the station.

Frank keeps vodka in his office at the printing company, expressly for the visits of the police. Among the many things you needed to know if you wanted to do business in Russia, “you had to have a good digestion, a good head for drink, particularly spirits, a good circulation and an instinct for how much in the way of bribes would be appropriate for the uniformed and for the political police, the clerks from the Ministry of Direct Import, Commerce and Industry, and the technical and sanitary inspectors.”

Frank’s bright-eyed children are more like Russian children than English. Dolly takes her bungling Uncle Charlie to the outdoor market to buy souvenirs. Not Russian speaking and totally out of his element, Charlie is lost at the market, but Dolly knows all its ins and outs: “Taking pity on him, she turned left at the crossing point of the next glass corridors, and they bought a number of small birchwood objects and a cigar-case. She counted his change and recovered, without argument, another thirty kopeks” (my emphasis).

There it is, one of the many little details that you would not expect an English writer to know, but she slips it into the sentence so matter of factly. Back then, and still today, in a Russian outdoor market you must expect to be short-changed; you will always be short-changed. You should not be offended by this; it is simply the way things are done. You must always count your change, confront the short-changer with his/her mistake, but not in anger, simply as a matter of course. The short-changer, in turn, will not usually defend her/his self, but will, equally without rancor, return the change to you. That’s the way it is done, but how did Penelope Fitzgerald know that? And this is just one of scads of authentic details that sprinkle the pages of the book.

Perhaps most amazing of all is how the merchant Arkady Kuriatin is portrayed. Frank knows exactly all the divagations of Kuriatin’s mind, and, consequently, Fitzgerald must know as well. Everything about Kuriatin rings true: his swagger, his drunken bravado, his way of openly lying in business dealings, while aware that his fellow businessman knows that he is lying. Best of all is the way that Kuriatin is often under the sway of contradictory impulses, which inhabit his devious brain simultaneously.

Now that his wife is gone Frank wonders who will care for the children when they are not at school. He assumes that he can leave them temporarily under the care of the Kuriatin household. But he soon sees the error of his ways when the Kuriatin children run wild, show off in front of the English children by tormenting a pet bear cub and feeding it vodka. The bear runs wild, smashing things up in the dining room, and Frank later goes by to apologize to Kuriatin, whose reaction is to be magnanimous—poo-pooing the whole incident and playing up his wealth.

“An unfortunate incident? The children left to themselves? Damage? Broken china, pissed carpet, fire, destruction, twenty-three and a half bottles of the best vodka? Did Frank think his credit wasn’t good enough to bear a little loss, a little trifle? Did he think there was some shortage of tablecloths?”

This is a kind of potlatch behavior: see how rich and carefree I am? Give me more precious material objects—I’ll throw them into the fire to prove how little they mean to me, how far above the mere material I am. This is also very typically Russian behavior. Shortly after this response to Frank’s apology Kuriatin invites him to stay for an evening meal. Frank knows that the invitation is not made to be accepted; it is more empty bravura. If he decided to stay all sorts of preparations would have to be made for the foreign guest, and he would cause as much trouble as the bear had.

Kuriatin escorts Frank to the door, and Frank asks him why he doesn’t do something about the weak spots in the stairway, and why he doesn’t let his clerks have a telephone. Whereupon Kuriatin, resenting the implied criticism, throws an insult after him: “’Why don’t you get your wife to come back to you?’ shouted Kuriatin, exploding with laughter, as the doorman came out of his cupboard-like room and ushered them, deeply bowing, into the street. For Kuriatin life, like business, was a game, but not a gambling game. On the contrary, it was one in which he had arranged to win, although the rules were peculiar to himself. Knowing that the children had been put at risk in his half-savage household, he had felt Frank’s visit as a reproach. But by insulting Frank—of whom he was genuinely fond—he had restored himself to a superior position. It almost compensated him for the loss of his tablecloth, glass and china, to which he had been insanely attached.” Exactly.

These games of pecking order, who is superior, who is inferior, are perpetually revolving in the Russian psyche. Later, in the presence of naïve Uncle Charlie, Kuriatin offers to adopt the Reid children, and Charlie calls him “the soul of hospitality.” Frank knows otherwise. “He doesn’t really want to adopt my children. It’s just a general expression of good-will, or more likely, the opposite” (my emphasis). Once again we get the Russian propensity for holding two contradictory impulses in the psyche at the same time. In the generosity of his heart—and Kuriatin half believes it to be real generosity—he makes the offer to adopt the children, while aware somewhere else in his psyche that he is faking magnanimity only in an effort to make himself look good, and make Frank look bad. As if to say, “Look at this sorry spectacle; a man who can’t even take care of his own children!”

One more thing about Kuriatin. He was resident in the Russia before the Soviet Era, but Kuriatins by the scores still walked the streets of the U.S.S.R., behaving exactly as this Kuriatin does. And now, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the coming of the New Russia in the new millennium, are the Kuriatins all gone? By no means. As long as there is a Russia there will be Kuriatins.

Nellie’s return on the final page of the novel is, as Andrew Miller writes, “a sort of faux-resolution, a moment that seems to offer the possibility of a return to good order, but which in fact promises the exact opposite.” Spring and hope are in the air, and we have the lovely scene of an annual ritual—opening the sealed windows of the house, to let Spring in. But there is a mixed message here. Traditionally in Russian households, when there was a death in the house all the windows were thrown wide open, to let the spirit of the deceased escape. There is no physical death in the novel, but Frank’s new spring love turns out to be short-lived—is in fact stillborn. And even such an unflappable person as Dolly has lost her self-confidence, shaken by the second abandonment.

Given everything that has happened in this one short month of their separation, Frank and Nellie are hardly likely to reconcile quickly, if at all. The children (at least Dolly) are thoroughly discombobulated by the events of March, 1913, and given that they seem to have related better to Lisa Ivanovna than to their own mother, Nellie’s return will probably not bring them much cheer.

Soon to come are tumultuous political upheavals, which the Reid family may not be in Russia to see. But then, a return to England is not a happy prospect for them either. After all, Frank was born in Russia and has lived there most of his life. The children know nothing of the world beyond Russia, are in effect Russian children who love the country. In England they will be something like political émigrés, having lost their native land.

SPACE LIMITATIONS ON AMAZON; TO SEE THE WHOLE OF THIS LONG BOOK REVIEW ARTICLE, GO TO THE WEBSITE OF DACTYL REVIEW
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“Life makes its own corrections,” says the Russian cabman to Frank early on, and the characters of the novel are alive at the end, waiting for the next set of corrections. As for the writer, Penelope Fitzgerald, corrections of her few mistakes would have improved the novel, but apparently there was no Russian fact checker at the time the book was published. A few examples.

For the most part she is good on the name/patronymic thing, which can present excruciating problems for foreign readers and writers. She bungles this only once, with the appearance of the student in love with Lisa (and probably a potential revolutionary) Vladimir Semyonich Grigoriev. This is his real name, but he lies to Frank upon their first encounter, calling himself “Volodya Vasilych.” Not possible. You cannot use a nickname (Volodya, a nickname for Vladimir) with a patronymic. What he should have said: Vladimir Vasilych.

On p. 141 “the almond trees would be in flower” in Moscow. Hmm. If so, that’s the first I’ve heard of almond trees growing in Moscow, or anywhere else in the northern part of Russia. Here is how the making of the sign of the cross is described (153): “As they faced the icon they crossed themselves, striking the forehead, each shoulder in turn, then the breast.” Nope. As any believer in Eastern Orthodoxy worldwide can tell you—in Greece, in Syria, in Russia—your pursed fingers touch the forehead first, then the breast or abdomen, then the right shoulder, and finally the left.

Kuriatin takes Uncle Charlie on a jaunt outside Moscow, to visit “the Merchants’ Church, between Kursk and Ryazan, about twelve miles out of Moscow” (p. 180). Huh? Don’t know what happened here. Kursk is a provincial city some 500 km. south of Moscow; Ryazan is another, some 200 km. south of Moscow.

On the eve of Palm Sunday the servants in the Reid household go around the house, and then to the neighbors, asking forgiveness for any sins they may have committed, knowingly or unknowingly, over the past year—sins of commission and omission (203). Actually, that is done not on the eve of Palm Sunday, but on Forgiveness Sunday, the last day before Lent.

Then there is the problem of the Russian Orthodox saints. St. Modestus, we are told, is the patron saint of printers. His saint’s day in Russia is commemorated on March 27 (Old Style, old Julian calendar). We are even shown a very convincing scene, in which the priest comes to Frank’s establishment to commemorate the holiday, bless the icons and honor the saint. But I can’t find any such St. Modestus anywhere in the Orthodox calendar, and I have checked all the saints’ days in the months of March and April, even in Cyrillic (Russian) script. There is a Modestus of Jerusalem, whose saint’s day is May 17 (New Style; modern Gregorian calendar); he is the patron of domestic animals.

Although much is made of the celebration of Modestus the Printer’s day, nothing is said in the book about a much, much bigger holiday in March, Благовещение (Annunciation Day), which falls on March 25 Old Style (now celebrated in Russia on April 7). Mention is also made of the Feast of St. Benjamin, commemorated on March 18 (p.160), but alas, I cannot find Ben either in the church calendars. There is a martyr Benjamin the Deacon, whose day is October 13 (NS). In the Catholic Church he is commemorated on March 31, so maybe Fitzgerald is conflating Roman Catholic saints with Eastern Orthodox saints. I don’t know. It will take somebody with much more insight into Orthodoxy than me to figure out what is going on with the saints in The Beginning of Spring.

In correcting, or trying to correct the mistakes of the author, am I finding fault with her? By no means. I still remain astounded by the brilliance of her book. It’s worth the price of the book just to read her description of how people in Russia stand on bridges in springtime, watching the amazing spectacle of the ice breaking up in the water below. If you’ve never done this, I would highly recommend it. Get on a bridge over a river in Russia at the end of March or early April. Pick a sunny day. Watch. Free of charge too.

I learned more than I ever thought I even wanted to about 17-18th c. Germany. And about Novalis. Fitzgerald's interest in complex, tragicomic family life must stem from her own family experience; I read THE BLUE FLOWER mainly because I just read her newish biography.
BTW, the question about pace offers no really relevant answers. The book appears to move very slowly--and then slam! bang! I should add that, although I knew in advance the THE BLUE FLOWER is based on the early life of the famous poet known as Novalis, I completely forgot that as I read the book--which I regard as a compliment to the book's intrinsic interest.