Father of Wife's Unborn Child....Anton Chekhov and Peter Arno

William Boyd, The Guardian, August 20 2018:

"On 25 May 1901, Anton Chekhov, aged 41, married the actor Olga Knipper, eight years his junior. The marriage provoked great surprise and consternation among his friends and family. In Russia at the time, Chekhov was as famous a writer as Tolstoy and, in addition, a passionate and amorous man who had enjoyed more than 30 love affairs. He was also a regular visitor to brothels. And, even more significantly, he was the ultimate commitment-phobe. Many women had fallen in love with him and wanted to marry him but he always quickly backed away. Then suddenly, clandestinely, he married....

....On 1 March Olga wrote that on the train journeying back to Moscow she felt ill: pain in the belly, nausea. She wondered if she were pregnant. On 24 March she complained about feeling ill again with severe abdominal pain. Then in a letter of 31 March she wrote that she was so ill she collapsed and was taken to the Clinical Obstetric Institute and a foetus was aborted by a surgeon named Dmitri Oskarovich Ott, obstetrician to the tsarina, no less.

And this is where Knipper’s subterfuge begins. She implies to Chekhov that this child, this “failed Panfil” as she called it, had been conceived during her four-day visit to Yalta and was a six-week-old embryo....

She was indeed pregnant, but many months so – with a child fathered by someone other than Chekhov...."

Artist: Peter Arno, The New Yorker, December 26 1936

 

शंभर वर्षांत एक ...Corona, The Great Influenza- II

Lee Child:

"...Most of all we would see tsunamis of disease racing back and forth across the globe, constantly, like raking machine-gun fire. Our scaled-up brains would see the Black Death of the fourteenth century, and again in the seventeenth, and the Spanish flu of the twentieth – bang-bang-bang, with barely a pause between..."

 

द न्यू यॉर्कर ने "The Great Influenza", २००४ चे लेखक John M. Barry यांची मुलाखत घेतली आहे .

"The influenza epidemic of 1918 was ruthless. It killed somewhere between fifty million and a hundred million people—and that was in a far less populated, dense, mobile, and globalized world. The new coronavirus is aggressive, and governments and populations that do not act with alacrity and discipline will suffer for it."

काही वर्षांपूर्वी मला दोन प्रश्न भेडसावत होते -

१> भारताने १९१८ साली या संकटाचा मुकाबला कसा केला ज्यामध्ये  भारतीय उपखंडातील साधारण १.७ ते १.८ कोटी लोक मृत्यमुखी पडली. महाराष्ट्रात मुंबई , पुणे खूप बाधित शहरे होती.

साबरमती आश्रमात देशाचे नेतृत्व लवकरच करणाऱ्या महात्मा गांधींना सुद्धा लागण झाली होती. ते  इतरांच्या सल्ल्यानुसार वागत त्यातून मुक्त झाले.

२. तरीसुद्धा हा आजार मराठी साहित्यात क्वचितच येतो, का?

त्यासाठी मी बॅरी  यांचे पुस्तक २००६ साली विकत घेतले आणि त्या विषयात संशोधन करणाऱ्या श्रीमती म्रिदूला रामण्णा यांच्याशी संपर्क केला.

पहिल्या प्रश्नाचे उत्तर श्री रामण्णा यांच्या लेखात मिळाले पण दुसऱ्या प्रश्नाचे उत्तर अजून मिळालेले नाही.

मी मागे पहिले महायुद्ध मराठी साहित्यात का नाही या बद्दल सुद्धा आश्चर्य व्यक्त केले होते. त्याचे एक उत्तर कदाचित असे की त्यावेळी प्रसिद्ध झालेले मराठी साहित्य बहुतांशी ब्राह्मण लिहीत असत आणि ब्रिटिशांनी ब्राह्मणांचा त्यांच्या सैन्यातील प्रवेश कमी केला होता, किंबहुना थांबवला होता. त्यामुळे ब्रिटिशांच्या बाजूने लढणाऱ्या असंख्य भारतीय सैनिकांत  मराठी ब्राह्मण अतिशय कमी होते.... वगैरे.

पण युद्धानंतर आलेल्या फ्लु ने  तर असा भेदभाव नक्कीच केला नसेल.

पण मी अलीकडे वाचले की तो फ्लू तत्कालीन इंग्लिश साहित्यात सुद्धा कमी आहे.

"Despite its vast toll, the pandemic was never a big theme in American literature—an absence the historian Alfred Crosby calls “puzzling.” But a few leading writers who lived through it created accounts that remain vivid in ways a medical journal can never be. Thomas Wolfe witnessed the suffering at his mother’s boardinghouse..."

कृतज्ञता : श्रीमती म्रिदूला रामण्णा, त्यांनी स्वत: मला त्यांचा लेख पाठवला , त्याचे पहिले  पान

हे तुम्ही पुण्यात रिक्षावाल्याला करू शकत नाही!....Making an Auto to Take a Road Less Traveled

Artist: Harry Bliss

Robert Frost: 

"...I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference."

Neither Black Death Nor Covid-19 But He Lost The Game Anyway...Max von Sydow

Great actor Max von Sydow died on March 8th 2020. (I liked his every film I saw .)

Frank M. Snowden, The New Yorker, March 3 2020:

“…You can see this even into the twentieth century with that wonderful film by Ingmar Bergman, “The Seventh Seal,” where the plague is a metaphor for what Bergman was worried about in 1957, which is nuclear war. One can see that it has all the things that I’ve been talking about with regard to the plague, including the danse macabre with which the film ends. You’d see paintings of the Grim Reaper coming, and it really is an example of the persistence of this artistic response to death….”

Wikipedia informs:

"The Seventh Seal  is a 1957 Swedish historical fantasy film written and directed by Ingmar Bergman. Set in Sweden during the Black Death, it tells of the journey of a medieval knight (Max von Sydow) and a game of chess he plays with the personification of Death (Bengt Ekerot), who has come to take his life..."

from Ingmar Bergman's  'The Virgin Spring', 1960