Books Do Furnish A Room

Darkling beauty

Another poem about birdsong, following a wonderfully songful weekend in Dorset, where the summer lull in birdsong seems to have passed my cottage by!  This is a sad poem about beauty, but one which gives even the melancholic author some cause for hope.  This is Thomas Hardy's The Darkling Thrush:

 

I leant upon a coppice gate

When Frost was spectre-gray,

And Winter's dregs made desolate

The weakening eye of day.

The tangled bine-stems scored the sky

Like strings of broken lyres,

And all mankind that haunted nigh

Had sought their household fires.

The land's sharp features seem'd to be

The Century's corpse outleant,

His crypt the cloudy canopy,

The wind his death-lament.

The ancient pulse of germ and birth

Was shrunken hard and dry,

And every spirit upon earth

Seem'd fervourless as I.

At once a voice arose among

The bleak twigs overhead

In a full-hearted evensong

Of joy illimited;

An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,

In blast-beruffled plume,

Had chosen thus to fling his soul

Upon the growing gloom.

So little cause for carollings

Of such ecstatic sound

Was written on terrestrial things

Afar or nigh around,

That I could think there trembled through

His happy good-night air

Some blessèd Hope, whereof he knew

And I was unaware.

A View of One's Own

While in Florence, I resolved to re-read E M Forster’s A Room with a View, and in the week the papers were full Virginia Woolf, this mongrel title seemed apt.  Forster’s novel is about independence and freedom of choice, from the moment Lucy doesn’t know what to admire in the Church of Santa Croce without Ruskin to guide her, to the moment she realises she cannot marry the effete and irritating Cecil.  There is actually very little of Florence in this book, but it serves throughout as a metaphor for the interests and aspirations of the sensibly adventurous middle classes – going further to Greece and Constantinople is foolhardy and takes one beyond the Christian pale (even if the pale is already dangerously Roman Catholic in Florence), and staying at home is too narrow minded and insular.

In fact, narrow mindedness and insularity is exactly what Lucy finds, often while visiting Florence, and even more so back at home at Windy Corner. But in to the stultifying convention come George Emerson and his father, who Lucy and her companion-cousin Charlotte had met in Florence; indeed these were the vulgar and embarrassing people who had given up their rooms in the pension for Charlotte and Lucy, and who had tried to befriend them, riding snubs subtle and unintended as well as the direct and brutal ones.  George, of course, has fallen in love with Lucy, and has actually stolen a kiss on a hillside outside the town.  How she realises that George is not only the most genuine of all the men she has met – possibly only excepting her rather dense brother Freddie – but also one she passionately loves, is beautifully explored in Forster’s gentle and precise prose.

This is not a novel that Forster found it easy to write, nor was he particularly fond of it.  But, while perhaps lacking the weight and passion of Where Angels Fear To Tread or Howards End, A Room With A View is amusing and yet perturbing; it is a love story in two lovely settings, with some beautiful character observation and some sharp and compelling dialogue.  It is the most delightful of his novels, and with  Helena Bonham Carter in the main role, made a film which is both very beautifully shot and remarkably emotionally true to the text.  Both are recommended warmly.

Streetwise

To Dorset, and to the Chedington Street Fair, an annual event which does what it says on the tin.  I could have been at WOMAD, but that takes organising in advance, and hey, the Fair’s not on the radio.  I did my neighbourly duty, buying things – ice-cream, a coffee pot for the family that visits occasionally and misses its coffee badly, some tapes for the car, and – of course – some second hand books.

 

Book pricing was straightforward - £1 for hardbacks, 50 pence for paperbacks.  I bought a couple of fine hardback Kiplings, two collections of short stories; and the Paul Auster New York Trilogy.  I read the first volume of Auster’s trilogy some time ago [link], and wasn’t sure whether to read more – but at £1 for all three, there didn’t seem any argument against at least having it on the shelf.  But I most look forward to browsing through the 600 items in a magnificent prose anthology, edited by the eccentric ‘Q’, Arthur Quiller-Couch, which ranges from John Trevisa (mid/late C14th) to Rupert Brooke.

Myfanwy

Have I ever shared some John Betjeman with you?  I think so, but here is an iconic poem, which I suspect is not really very good.  But who is caring, we are all in calf love with John Betjeman's Myfanwy, girlfriend from another age. And here is David Essex singing it - from 1987, when it was an unlikely chart success!

Kind o’er the kinderbank leans my Myfanwy,
White o’er the playpen the sheen of her dress,
Fresh from the bathroom and soft in the nursery
Soap scented fingers I long to caress.

Were you a prefect and head of your dormit'ry?
Were you a hockey girl, tennis or gym?
Who was your favourite? Who had a crush on you?
Which were the baths where they taught you to swim?

Smooth down the Avenue glitters the bicycle,
Black-stockinged legs under navy blue serge,
Home and Colonial, Star, International,
Balancing bicycle leant on the verge.

Trace me your wheel-tracks, you fortunate bicycle,
Out of the shopping and into the dark,
Back down the avenue, back to the pottingshed,
Back to the house on the fringe of the park.

Golden the light on the locks of Myfanwy,
Golden the light on the book on her knee,
Finger marked pages of Rackham's Hans Anderson,
Time for the children to come down to tea.

Oh! Fullers angel-cake, Robertson’s marmalade,
Liberty lampshade, come shine on us all,
My! what a spread for the friends of Myfanwy,
Some in the alcove and some in the hall.

Then what sardines in half-lighted passages!
Locking of fingers in long hide-and-seek.
You will protect me, my silken Myfanwy,
Ring leader, tom-boy, and chum to the weak.

Churches on the Neva

In St Petersburg, we visited three main churches: St Isaac’s cathedral in the centre, the Cathedral of Peter and Paul in the fort of the same name, and the Church of the Saviour on the blood; we also saw Kazan cathedral several times a day, as our hotel was just round the corner, with its heavy homage to St Peter's in Rome in the form of the curving colonnades round its western plaza.  Many other churches were passed by or seen from a distance, gems awaiting another visit.  This is a long post, but do yourself a favour and don't miss the pix at the bottom!

When Peter the Great founded the city, in the early decades of the eighteenth century, he was determined that it would be a great city, quickly growing with fine stone buildings, but that it would also be a very western city.  So instead of the onion domes of the Orthodox tradition, and the higgeldy piggeldy streets and lanes of a medieval city, this was to be a planned metropolis, with broad avenues, clear vistas, and western buildings.  This vision has largely survived, and with the canals and rivers has created a unique cityscape.

The two great cathedrals we visited – are there are plenty of others – are firmly in the baroque tradition, one (Peter and Paul) with a splendid, slender spire, and one (St Isaac’s) with a great dome of gold raised on a drum.  Both of these, and the equally remarkable spire on the Admiralty, are seen continually as you walk around St Petersburg, down the broad roads called ‘prospects’, in-between crowded houses in small alleyways, and towering over the normal city of five storeys.

The first group of photographs shows St Isaac’s in the centre of the Fontanka area of the city; the great dome towering over the streets, and the inside of the dome; and the violent blue and green of the columns in the altar screen.

 

 

 

The second group shows the Peter and Paul Cathedral in the Fort of the Peter and Paul across the Neva from the main centre, but within the fort that was the first building when Peter first took this land from the Swedes and established his vision of a new, western Russia; the great spire and wind vane, the tombs of the Tsars, and a taste of the baroque.

 

But the third church is a rebuke to Peter’s western vision, and is, even in the late nineteenth century, a riot of Orthodox tradition.  This is the Church of the Saviour on the Blood, a curious title it owes to the fact that this is a memorial church to the assassinated Alexander II, built so carefully over the spot where he was killed that the tabernacle is over the cobble stones that were stained with his blood.  To achieve this, the church had to be built out slightly into the canal.  The exterior is a riot of onion domes, golden, striped and studded with colour, of different heights so that the external view is always asymmetrical – and further adorned with the arms of all the cities and provinces of Russia, to show the whole nation in mourning for the Tsar; the interior is wholly covered in golden mosaic, completely visually overwhelmingly.  The photographs show the exterior along the canal and the domes in close up, the interior and some detail.  It is not, to my eyes, an attractive church, but it has riotous energy and life, and it is hard not to be seduced by its confidence.

Pope damns

My title is not quite as striking as Dorothy Parker's entry for a "most striking headline" competition (Pope elopes) but you get the idea.  This came to me earlier in the week when I found myself praising a book but meaning to diminish it.  So here is the master, Alexander Pope, in An Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot, tearing apart the character of a man unwilling in any way to be wholehearted in praise or criticism, jealous and yet a coward.  Atticus probably refers to the great Addison, who Pope much admired.

Should such a man, too fond to rule alone,
Bear, like the Turk, no brother near the throne.
View him with scornful, yet with jealous eyes,
And hate for arts that caused himself to rise;
Damn with faint praise, assent with civil leer,
And without sneering, teach the rest to sneer;
Willing to wound, and yet afraid to strike,
Just hint a fault, and hesitate dislike;
Alike reserved to blame, or to commend,
A timorous foe, and a suspicious friend;
Dreading even fools, by flatterers besieged,
And so obliging, that he ne'er obliged;
Like Cato, give his little senate laws,
And sit attentive to his own applause;
While wits and templars every sentence raise,
And wonder with a foolish face of praise:

Who but must laugh, if such a man there be?
Who would not weep, if Atticus were he?

St Petersburg, city and food

A long weekend in St Petersburg, an eighteenth century Venice perched high up on the Baltic shoulder of Mother Russia, augmented with the ‘style moderne’ of the early twentieth century, and still carrying the emotional charge of the siege of Leningrad sixty years ago.  I went during the white nights (late June, early July), when it is hardly dark, and I saw a great art gallery, fine buildings, great cityscapes, and some interesting Russiana; but I was very conscious that I had hardly begun the journey, and that I shall have to return.

On the Hermitage and the great churches I shall post separately; this post will capture, in my pictures, some of the other highlights.  First, there are fine buildings everywhere, often along the canals and rivers which cross the city in a dense network.  These are mostly eighteenth century or nineteenth century in the same spirit – but most importantly, they all have the same general approach, of elegance and proportion over some four to six stories, so there are no towers in the centre and no blocked views.  The streets are crowded, lively with Russians of all ages and with tourists; the shops suggest that the luxury western lifestyle has come to Russia with a vengeance, and in the evening there was a feeling of Sex and the City New York, with tall young women wearing a very pricy very little, showing leg and breast for their consorts, often older men who should know better.

 

 

We ate well, often in the Georgian style, although portions were extraordinarily generous – and I could have done without the musician singing along to CDs of, among others, Louis Armstrong!  The food collage shows the cheese pie, khachapury (recipe here), some enormous ravioli, and a dish of chicken, tomatoes and potatoes sufficient to feed a family but in fact all for me.

One day, across the river, we walked along the embankment to see the warship which started the revolution in 1917, Aurora, which fired a blank shell and began and almost at once ended the Provisional Government.  It is still in the Russian navy, and sits there close to the scene of its greatest moment (it was a rare survivor from the war with the Japanese), looking grimly old-fashioned and determined.

Finally, the many bridges of St Petersburg open between 1.30 am and 4 am during the night, to let the big ships through.  Like hundreds of others, we went down to the Neva to see this nightly event, brilliantly lit in the warm dusk.  One big peaceful party.

Coetzee and Dostoevsky, Masters of St Petersburg

Before my recent trip to St Petersburg, I found several interesting books to read – but one of them didn’t get read, either before or during my visit.  This is J M Coetzee’s The Master of St Petersburg (1994), which I read – wildly inappropriately – in Florence, city of angels.

The story opens with a man called Isaev visiting St Petersburg to clear up the affairs of his son, Pavel Alexandrovich.  There is something odd, something strained and un-natural about the relationship with the young man for whom he grieves so bitterly and so passionately, and gradually we learn that Pavel is not his son, but his stepson, and that he may have been involved in a revolutionary organisation.  Did he commit suicide?  Have an accident?  Was he killed by the police?  Further complexity develops as it emerges that the man is not Isaev at all, but Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, a writer living in Germany, already with Crime and Punishment (1866) behind him, although Coetzee develops Dostoevsky slightly unhistorically in places.

Fyodor Mikhailovich seems to believe that his son will speak to him, but that to hear his voice – which may not come from at all an expected source – he must open himself to others, finding sexual solace with his son’s landlady, freeing a trapped dog, giving a beggar a bed for the night.  He justifies this by remembering that Pascal said we should embrace everyone, only then can we be sure that the One for whom we are waiting will not slip by unnoticed. 

He puts off return to Dresden and his wife, and gradually becomes more and more embroiled with his landlady and her daughter, with the revolutionary Nechaev and his acolytes, and with the forces – strong but not always admirable – of law and order in the shape of the thoughtful and courteous Maximov.  All this time – several weeks – he has not written anything.  We understand he is too diminished, too anguished, by Pavel’s death.  Then he reads his son’s papers, and finds there pain and truth, but also an unfinished short story, jejeune but with promise.  Then, Fyodor Mikhailovich starts to write again, fluently, powerfully, and uncompromisingly, about the apartment he is living in and the people he is meeting – we hear of The Apartment and The Child, (which I cannot find that the real Dostoevsky wrote) - written without compromise, without hesitation or change, and without remorse.

“They pay him lots of money for writing books”, said the child, repeating the dead child.  What they failed to say was that he had to give up his soul in return.

This is a fine novel by Coetzee, one I enjoyed all the more from recognising some of the places from my recent visit.  But it is well worth reading without that, and makes me remember that I must read more Coetzee than I have – only [check] The Life and Times of Michael K, Booker prize winner in 1983.  It is a very different narrative from Mann’s Dr Faustus, with which it shares one central idea, that genius is paid for very terribly, as it focuses on one set of events, not a whole biography, but the two books are also alike in their reflecting the personal drama with violent public events.

Akhmatova and Bulgakov

I wrote recently about Bulgakov’s manic novel, The Master and Margarita.  Here is an obituary, a memory, a tribute, by Anna Akhmatova who knew and, I guess, loved him.  It was written in 1940, in a house on the Fontanka, a river in St Petersburg, and now the name given to the centre of the city, with the cathedrals and the palaces and the art galleries – where I stayed last weekend!  This is Anna Akhmatova’s In Memory of Mikhail Bulgakov

This, not graveyard roses, is my gift;

And I won’t burn sticks of incense:

You died as unflinchingly as you lived,

With magnificent defiance.

Drank wine, and joked – were still the wittiest,

Choked on the stifling air.

You yourself let in the terrible guest

And stayed alone with her.

Now you’re no more.  And at your funeral feast

We can expect no comment from the mutes

On your high, stricken life.  One voice at east

Must break that silence, like a flute.

O, who would have believed that I who have been tossed

On a slow fire to smoulder, I, the buried days’

Orphan and weeping mother, I who have lost

Everything, and forgotten everyone, half-crazed –

Would be recalling one so full of energy

And will, and touched by that creative flame,

Who only yesterday, it seems, chatted to me,

Hiding the illness crucifying him.

Mrs Cornflower and Lady Croom

Cornflower is troubled by her husband's violent assault on the garden, which she fears may destroy more than it creates.  She should read Tom Stoppard's Arcadia, which while it will not give much comfort, will amuse enormously, and set her worries in a wider historical context.  It's a positive marvel of a play (why no plays in the Cornflower Book Group?), and it's just being revived in London at the moment.

Lady Croom has a lovely garden.  But her husband has invited in Richard Noakes, a landscape architect, to "improve" it.  Read, and weep:

Lady Croom: Your drawing is a very wonderful transformation. I;would not have recognized my own garden but for your ingenious book - is it not? - look! Here is the Park as it appears to us now, and here as it might be when Mr Noakes has done with it. Where there is the familiar pastoral refinement of an Englishman's garden, here is an eruption of gloomy forest and towering crag, of ruins where there was never a house, of water dashing against rocks where there was neither spring nor a stone I could not throw the length of a cricket pitch. My hyacinth dell is become a haunt for hobgoblins, my Chinese bridge, which I am assured is superior to the one at Kew, and for all I know at Peking, is usurped by a fallen obelisk overgrown with briars.

Noakes:   (Bleating) Lord Little has one very similar -

Lady Croom:  I cannot relieve Lord Little's misfortunes by

adding to my own.  Pray, what is this rustic hovel that presumes to superpose itself on my gazebo?

Noakes: That is the hermitage, madam.

Lady Croom: I am bewildered

Brice: It is all irregular, Mr Noakes.

Noakes: It is, sir. Irregularity is one of the chiefest principles of the picturesque style.

Lady Croom:  But Sidley Park is already a picture, and a most amiable picture too. The slopes are green and gentle. The trees are companionably grouped at intervals that show them to advantage. The rill is a serpentine ribbon unwound from the lake peaceably contained by meadows on which the right amount of sheep are tastefully arranged - in short, it is nature as God intended. 

 

… … …  

 

Lady Croom:  Mr Noakes!
Noakes: Your ladyship -
Lady Croom:  What have you done to me!
Noakes: Everything is satisfactory, I assure you.  A little behind, to be sure, but my dam will be repaired within the month -
Lady Croom: (Banging the table) Hush!
           (In the silence, the steam engine thumps in the distance.)
Can you hear, Mr Noakes?
Noakes: (Pleased and proud) The Improved Newcomen steam pump - the only one in England!
Lady Croom:  That is what I object to.  If everybody had his own I could bear my portion of the agony without complaint.  But to have been singled out by the only Improved Newcomen steam pump in England, this is hard, sir, this is not to be borne.
Noakes: Your lady -
Lady Croom: And for what?  My lake is drained to a ditch for no purpose I can understand, unless it be that snipe and curlew have deserted three counties so that they may be shot in our swamp.  What you painted as forest is a mean plantation, your greenery is mud, your waterfall is wet mud, and your mount is an opencast mine.  (Pointing through the window)  What is that cowshed?
Noakes: The hermitage, my lady?
Lady Croom: It is a cowshed.
Noakes: Madam, it is, I assure you, a very habitable cottage, properly founded and drained, two rooms and a closet under a slate roof and a stone chimney -
Lady Croom: And who is to live in it?
Noakes: Why, the hermit.

Lady Croom: Where is he?

Noakes: Madam?
Lady Croom: You surely do not supply a hermitage without a hermit?
Noakes: Indeed, madam -
Lady Croom: Come, come, Mr Noakes.  If I am promised a fountain I expect it to come with water.  What hermits do you have?

 Good luck, Cornflower!

Tailors

I love words, and I am always amused by the different meanings of a word, especially when they’re slightly out of the way.  So, today’s word is “tailor”.  Yes, it’s a man who makes clothes, originally mainly for men, and now for everybody; but now the word has an upmarket connotation, and few of us have a tailor to design and make our clothes to order (though I have just watched Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy on DVD, Le Carré’s Smiley masterpiece, based on the game for divining your career from plum stones – "tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, rich man, poor man, beggarman, thief”).  The tailor is, in folk tales, the man who cuts up the cloth - but in the trade, he's the cutter, and the tailor is the man who stitches them together.

 

But did you know, tailors are also small fish, and a kind of caterpillar?  And:

 

Nine tailors make a man – a contemptuous expression, suggesting that tailors were of such poor physique that nine of them would make a real man.  But also, the nine strokes of the funeral bell that announce the death of a man - "tailor" may be a corruption of "teller", a stroke on a bell.  See, in a a light hearted murder mystery, but one evoking the quiet desolation of the Fens, Dorothy Sayers' Nine Tailors.

 

It’s a tailor’s war – a World War II saying, meaning I know not what.

 

To tailor a shot – to bungle a shot at a bird or a deer, injuring but not killing it (I came across this in John Buchan's John McNab).

 

Any more?

One day

Alexandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day In The Life of Ivan Denisovich was almost a cult, certainly a set text of liberal values, in the Cold War.  Published in 1962, I read it at school when I was sixteen or so (about 1972) as a description of the contemporary Soviet Union.  In fact, though it might have reflected some aspects of that time very well, it was much more based on Solzhenitsyn’s own time in one of Beria’s ‘special’ camps in Karaganda in Kazakhstan in the late 1940s or early 1950s.  He was released on Stalin’s death, but although this story was published with Khrushchev’s consent, he was deported after the European publication of The Gulag Archipelago in 1974, eventually returning to Russia twenty years later.

Re-reading One Day after about thirty-five years, I was struck by the fact that I enjoyed it and raved about it as a teenager.  It focuses very much on the little things of life – getting some food, how to keep your boots dry, staying warm when being frisked for smuggled goods, how to keep your food parcel to yourself – and these don’t seem the kind of things to appeal to me when I was so much younger.  I suppose I was much more caught up in the bigger picture – man’s inhumanity to man, the denial of free speech, and the spiritual and economic poverty of communism. 

 

What I had completely forgotten that the One Day (and it is literally a single day, from reveille to lights out) is actually a pretty good one by camp standards.  All through the book, you are told about he ceaseless struggle to get enough food, to stay warm, to avoid the brutality of the guards, that the get out of perspective what is a bad day.  At the end, about to fall asleep, Ivan Denisovich puts you right, as he enumerates the events of the day (or some of them, I have edited a bit, to shorten it, and to obviate the need for explanations in some cases):

 

Shukov (Ivan Denisovich himself) went to sleep fully content.  He’d had many strokes of luck that day: they hadn’t put him in the cells; they hadn’t sent the team to the settlement; he’d pinched a bowl of kasha at dinner …  and he hadn’t fallen ill.

 

A day without a dark cloud.  Almost a happy day.

 

There were three thousand six hundred and fifty-three days like that in his stretch … the three extra days were for leap years.

 

This is a fine book, written by a brave man.  In both respects, it reminds me of Primo Levi’s If This Is A Man about surviving Auschwitz, and  also of J M Coetzee’s The Life and Times of Michael K about survival of a black man in apartheid South Africa, which seems to me a deliberate, careful tribute to Solzhenitsyn.  All three books are marvellous, powerful, compelling  - and shaming - reads.

Memory and desire

I could not plan a trip to St Petersburg without reading some Anna Akhmatova, whose fame is huge, but whom I had not previously read – mainly because I have a reluctance to read poetry in translation, and need some special stimulus.  So this week and next, two poems, from a volume called You Will Hear Thunder – poems taken from seven collections, but all translated by D M Thomas, himself no inconsiderable poet.  I think of her as a cold war poet, a writer of the age of Solzhenitsyn, but in fact she was rather older than that (1889 – 1966) and sang the sadness of Russia from before the revolution, her first collection being published in 1912.  This rather lovely poem, about memory and seeing is from Rosary, and written in 1913.  This is Anna Akhmatova’s The Voice of Memory.  (The ‘white nights’ are the long, darkless days of late June and early July in St Petersburg – now, indeed).

What do you see on the wall, our eyes screwed up,

When in the sky the sunset’s burning late?

Do you see a seagull on the water’s blue

Cloth, or gardens by the Arno?

Or the great lake of Tsarskoye Selo

Where terror stepped in front of you?

Or the young man who left your captivity, left

You by walking into death like a white night?

No, I am looking only at the wall’s

Reflections of the dying heavenly fires.

Smiley and Charlie

Regular readers will know of my esteem for John Le Carré, novelist who uses the spy story has his chosen vehicle.  While in the country over recent weeks, I have been slowly watching the BBC dramatisations of Tinker, Tailor and Smiley’s People  on DVD, starring Alec Guinness as George Smiley – unhappy, podgy, a man who found much of life, including love, rather bewildering, yet is the master spy of his generation.  The BBC versions are not absolutely true to the texts, but they are very true to the spirit, and I loved them, partly for their 1970s London, and partly for Smiley’s gentle ruthlessness.  If you’re planning any wet afternoons soon, I do recommend them!

 

 

And here are the credits for the BBC's Smiley's People, amazingly atmospheric even before the story begins:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-fq_Vhl0zs.

But no DVD can compare with the text, so I took great pleasure in re-reading Le Carré’s Little Drummer Girl, an espionage thriller set across Europe, but in a different context, that of Israeli intelligence agencies against the Palestinian struggle.  The initially unwilling spy in this case is Charlie, actress, rebel, redhead, and the story of her recruitment, her mission, and her relationship with Gadi, her agent runner, is truly wonderful.  Sometimes ‘serious’ readers can be snobbish about detective or spy fiction – this is the book they should read.

Women reading: July

The July painting on my Women Reading calendar (see also 1st of each month this year) is August Macke's Elisabeth Reading, from 1911, towards the end of Macke's short life (1887-1914).  I love its clear, challenging, almost tropical colours, and the absolute elimination of everything superfluous. But there's something slightly sinister, too, about the blankness of everything, don't you think?

 

But what is she reading?  Well Macke was German, so one candidate would be Wellen (Waves), a novel by Eduard von Keyserling, first published in 1911.  According to Wikipedia (what do I know?), this is set during a long hot summer in a small fishing village somewhere on the Baltic.  It depicts a group of aristocratic city-dwellers spending their holidays in that remote part of the Empire (a far call from the Mediterranean feel of the painting!). Keyserling focuses on the follies of a doomed fin de siecle society whose self-imposed repressions eventually lead to catastrophe.

Or more realistically, it could be something written in the previous ten years - when a number of fine writers were just getting into their stride: might it be Robert Musil's Young Torless, or Thomas Mann's utterly wonderful Buddenbrooks?  Just too early for Kafka, sadly, or Mann's Death in Venice, which would suit the picture's mood rather well, I think.

Curiously, my calendar apparently prints this picture the wrong way round!  All the other references I can find show it this way, and there is no internal evidence that I can see.