ursusanglicanus

This is meant as an informal blog.

When it comes to religious items, I would stress that these are my personal opinions, and not those of the Russian Orthodox Church which I belong to.

Most of what I write is 'friends only' (pod zankom). This is because the informal rules governing public questioning of Church positions are considerably tighter in Russia than they are in Western Europe. There is no tradition of 'loyal dissent' as there is in the Anglo-Saxon world. Which is why I am fairly careful before opening the door.

Russian friends: feel free to comment in your own language... I read Russian, but writing is just too difficult...

Для русских гостей -
Вы можете оставлять комментарии на русском языке, избегая слишком сложных и слэнговых оборотов.
Также в ответ на мои комментарии на английском можно отвечать по-русски.

Just occasionally an author grabs me and I read one novel after another. After German author Ernst Wiechert, almost the only writer I have ever read twice, there is his countryman Gustav Frenssen, whose Otto Biebendeck and Der Pastor von Poggenpohl I have both devoured during the past couple of months.

Gustav Frenssen (1863 to 1945), the son of a cabinetmaker, was a Protestant pastor who, when an early book,
Jörn Uhl, became a best-seller in 1901, quit to devote himself full-time to writing.

Frenssen lacks the depth of his near-contemporary Ernst Wiechert (1887-1950), but spins a better yarn, and also has stronger female characters (Wiechert is weak here). Both share a common Protestant background, but one senses a greater sense of spiritual struggle with Wiechert. Wiechert went against the Nazis, and it was a near-miracle that his most famous work ‘Das einsame Leben’ was published at all, while Frenssen’s religious-nationalism took him towards the Nazis and he has been sharply criticised for his nationalism and anti-semitism.

Otto Biebendeck is the life of an orphan boy in northern Germany from around 1880 through to just after WWI. A dozen characters weave in and out of each other’s lives, in the countryside and small towns, some better drawn than others (his wife Gesa vom Gang, a passionate sailor who eventually drowns, or the drunken artist Eilart, are particularly well drawn) and with a few jumps which test the limits of probability, like Otto’s journey to the USA in 1917 or his meeting up with nearly every male character at different places during the war. But the plot moves at the right pace and, simply, Frenssen is a good raconteur: his characters continue to play through my mind a week after finishing the book. Underlying it all is a deep sense of humanity – curiously similar to Dickens – which leaves one feeling better for having read the book.

I have just finished with much pleasure the newly-published book ‘A Cry is heard’[i], the ‘memoir, spiritual autobiography and a call to unity’ of Jean Vanier. JV is Canadian and the founder of L’Arche, which since the 1960s has set up across the world a string of houses where mentally handicapped people live in community along with ‘normal’ assistants. An early book of his, ‘La Communauté, lieu de pardon et lieu de fête’ published in 1979, was partly responsible for my 2-year stint in a monastery in the early 1980s.

It is the story of a deeply Christian man, now aged 89 and counting his days,

It is a story of

I very much like his insistence

[i] Darton, Longman and Todd 2018, original French version: Un cri se fait entendre: Bayard, 2017