My British children's literature, part 4

Read part 1, 2 and 3 of this story. 

 

Yet another unlikely British author, significantly more famous in Russia than in his home country, was Donald Bisset. Bisset was an actor at the National Theatre and Royal Shakespeare Company, as well as in a large number of profoundly forgotten movies and some TV shows, including Dr Who. But he also published numerous children's books with self-explanatory titles such as Anytime Stories (1954), Some Time Stories (1957), Next Time Stories (1959), This Time Stories (1961), Another Time Stories (1963), as well as a more imaginative Talks with a Tiger (1967). Bisset's stories are very simple, almost devoid of plots, conflicts or morals. They feature anthropomorphised animals and animated objects and machines, including a minibus, a raisin bun, and a birthday. They are perfect for bedtime reading, and Bisset indeed read them on the radio, as well as adapted them for stage.

Again, I can only guess why several of his books were translated, but the translator was also a legendary editor at the central Children's Literature Publishing in Moscow, who was perhaps in a position to translate and publish what she wanted. We know that Bisset visited Moscow in 1969, so it is likely that the first translation was the result of this visit. Unlike the common practice in Russia, the first publication kept Bisset's original illustrations. Most subsequent editions were illustrated by Russian artists. A dozen tales were made into short animations. Today his stories are available at several sites for downloading or online reading.

In my upper teens, everybody in Russia, old and young, loved Bisset's stories, and one reason may be that they are in a way reminiscent of Hans Christian Andersen's tales, tremendously popular in Russia, but without Andersen's dark undertones.

One of the stories is about the rivalry between St Pancrass and King's Cross. I read the story long before I knew that these places were real, and little did I know that King's Cross would one day become my most visited railway station. Not to mention that it would also become world famous thanks to a certain J.K. 

 

The last book in this series of reflections is The Questers, by E. W. Hildick, from 1966, published in Russian in 1969. Again, a book you have hardly heard about, by an author essentially forgotten, although there are very short entries both in the Oxford Companion to Children's Literature and the four-volume Oxford Encyclopedia of Children's Literature. E. W. (Edmund Wallace) Hildick (1925-2001) was educated at Leeds Training College and worked as a teacher until he became a full-time writer. Extremely prolific, he wrote several series of school novels, detective and adventure novels, but as far as I know is completely forgotten today. He also wrote a number of books about children’s literature, including Children and Fiction: a critical study in depth of the artistic and psychological factors involved in writing fiction for and about children (1970), to my surprise available at Homerton College Library. (Was it possibly included in the syllabus of one of those early children's literature courses?) The Questers is one of his less known books, followed by two sequels: Calling Questers Four (1967) and The Questers and the Whispering Spy (1968).

Why would this obscure writer be translated into Russian, when so many significantly more famous writers were not? I have not managed to find any relevant information, but my guess is, just as with Leila Berg, that he either visited the Soviet Union some time during mid-1960s or was among the hosts for a visit from Soviet writers. Hildick was a working+class writer, his books set in working-class environments of Yorkshire, Stevenage, and Southern London. Writers with a working-class background who wrote about working-class children were acceptable and therefore attractive in the Soviet Union, unlike suspicious Christian Oxbridge types such as C S Lewis.

In 1969, I was seventeen and entering university, so strictly speaking this book was not part of my childhood reading, but at that point I already knew that I wanted to study children's literature professionally, even though there were no accessible resources. Every translated book was an event, and I still had an illusion that if a book was translated it had to be a masterpiece by a famous writer. There was no way to find any information about the author or to set the book in a context. By that time, I had read Winnie-the-Pooh, Peter Pan, Mary Poppins and other genuine classics of British children's literature, and I knew that fantasy rather than realism was its strongest aspect. The Questers puzzled me because I could not understand what made it a great book it was supposed to be.

Unlike The Adventures of Chunky, this book does have a chronological progression and a problem in the beginning, partially solved in the end. It is quite interesting in the light of today's disability studies. The main character, Peter, is bedridden with an unnamed disease – possibly polio – that he has little hope of being cured of. And he isn't, but there is a technological improvement of his situation that must have been truly radical in the mid-60s. The plot revolves around obtaining the technology – a walkie-talkie – that would enable Peter to participate in his friends' outdoor adventures and pastimes. As a side comment, a walkie-talkie was to us something from science fiction and would be considered illegal in the Soviet Union.

While planning for the treasure hunt in the local park that will win them the coveted prize, Peter's friends are also engaged in a number of other activities, including ice-cream eating competition, pet show and talent contest, all with disastrous outcomes. These episodes are not particularly funny or engaging, and the characters quite flat, so I am not surprised that the book has gone into oblivion in the UK, but in Russia, in the absence of hundreds of similar stories, it filled, and probably still fills a gap. Unlike classic Soviet gang books featuring brave and virtuous young communists, The Questers is devoid of any ideology or morals, apart from Peter's friends' genuine desire to support him. There are no lessons learned from disasters and no serious consequences either. All adults are nice, and the overall atmosphere benevolent. Even Peter's disability is presented in a positive light.

When I was writing my book From Mythic to Linear, that I still view as my major contribution to scholarship, I considered books such as The Adventures of Chunky and The Questers within my theoretical framework, in which I examined the temporal conditions of children's narratives in three main patterns: prelapsarian, carnivalesque and postlapsarian. Both fit into the first category, since nothing significant happens to the protagonists, and they are not in any way, not even temporarily, introduced to linearity and thus the central aspects of adulthood, such as growing up, death and power hierarchies. It can of course be argued whether it is legitimate to view the temporal structure of realistic stories as mythical, but this will take us to a discussion of the concept of realism and mimesis. Muffin the Mule, although featuring sentient animals, is also an example of Arcadian fiction: a narrative without linear progression, with characters trapped in eternal present. I am not questioning the value of such stories; on the contrary, they are essential to provide young readers with a sense of permanence and stability before they are ready first to explore and interrogate the world through carnival and eventually leave Arcadia in a linear progression toward imminent adulthood. What I find fascinating is that Soviet publishers, at least in the 1950s and '60s, clearly prioritised prelapsarian narratives in their choice of British books to translate. 

I want to conclude this series of blog posts with an event that became a turning point in my career and that most probably eventually brought me to Cambridge. In 1975, after I had finished my undergraduate degree and had a job as far away as imaginable from children's literature, British Council brought a large exhibition of children's books to Moscow. The venue was perhaps odd, a bookstore rather than a library. The nature of my job enabled me to dispose of my time as I saw fit, and for the duration of the exhibition, probably a couple of weeks, I spent day after day there, reading books and taking notes. This was my first encounter with The Borrowers, Tom's Midnight Garden, The Children of Green Knowe, the Narnia Chronicles and many other books that would become central in my research. Then the exhibition was closed and the books gone. And the glossy 12-page exhibition catalogue would for many years remain my only source of information about British children's literature.

The End

My British children's literature, part 3

Read part 1 and part 2 of this story.

While the reason Leila Berg was acceptable in the Soviet Union seems clear, it is less obvious with another favourite: Muffin the Mule. When I started my academic studies of children's literature in Sweden, Muffin the Mule was not a part of children's literature canon, and somehow I lost sight of it, until sometime in mid-90s I was guest lecturing at the University of Edinburgh and visited the Museum of Childhood, where I suddenly saw the puppet of Muffin the Mule in a glass case. This brought back fond childhood memories and kindled by curiosity. 

When I mentioned Muffin the Mule to an elderly Cambridge colleague some years ago, she immediately started singing the signature tune from the television series. Muffin is probably less known to contemporary audience, although BBC Two released a new animated series in 2005, and there are several picturebooks based on this series. However, I don't think Muffin is as famous in the UK today as he is in Russia. I was surprised to find scores of print editions, the most recent from 2017; free digital editions at numerous portals; as well as audio dramatisation from 1972 available both online and on CD. The book is included in the unofficial primary school curriculum. When I was a child, it was presented as one of the most popular children's books in England, and its author, Ann Hogarth, as one of the most important English children's writers. 

 

I could not find any evidence of Ann Hogarth's or her co-author Annette Mills's support of the Soviet Union or the Communist Party of Great Britain, so there must be other factors – as with all translations, extraliterary and frequently serendipitous. I have found information about Hogarth Puppets performing in Moscow, at the famous Obraztsov Puppet Theatre, and indeed the translation from 1958 has a foreword by Sergei Obraztsov, Russia's most celebrated puppeteer. In 1953, a provincial Russian film studio made a puppet animation, featuring crocheted figures and settings. For some reasons, the film was not released until 1974, by which time it was probably only of interest for specialists. I didn't see it then. It's available on YouTube.

The book, which is a collection of Muffin stories, was published in 1958 when I was six. In addition to Muffin stories, it also contained riddles, find five errors, colouring pages, join-the-dots drawings, patterns for cardboard figures and soft toys, and two board games, one a standard snakes-and-ladders game, but the other a child-appropiate version of Monopoly called “Carrots”, played with matches. The reason it is called “Carrots” is that the eponymous protagonist loves carrots. I remember playing it with my friends well in our upper teens. We were not familiar with Monopoly until much later.

But the main attraction was the stories. Anthropomorphic animals are prominent in Russian children's literature, as elsewhere, but Muffin and his friends were particularly attractive because of their exotic English names. I have read on a recent Russian webpage that the author was very clever when she gave her characters interesting English names – no comment! What I didn't know when I was a child, and that most Russian readers probably don't realise still today is that the names in English are alliterations: Muffin the Mule, Peregrine the Penguin, Sally the Seal, Oswald the Ostrich, Peter the Puppy, Grace the Giraffe, Poppy the Parrot, Hubert the Hippo, Louise the Lamb, Willy the Worm, and Katy the Kangaroo. Knowing this now, I wonder whether the translator gave up or simply didn't notice. It would have been difficult, but not impossible to render this wonderful linguistic feature in translation. The Russian Muffin was not a mule, but a donkey, probably because mule doesn't sound particularly nice in Russian. Donkey in Russian sounds even worse, just like “ass”, so Muffin got a diminutive suffix, oslik, little donkey, which is fine.

Muffin is anthropomorphised so that he sleeps in a bed and eats at a table, bakes a cake and combs his mane with a comb in front of a mirror. But he also eats carrots and walks on all four and wears a saddle and a bridle. In my book, the illustrations were printed in monochrome, alternating between red, yellow, green and blue. This irritated me because I didn't know which was the right colour of Muffin's saddle and bridle. Today, I am irritated that an antropomorphised animal wears a saddle and a bridle at all, and is proud of it. There is something profoundly wrong with it.

Muffin's friends are anthropomorphised in various degrees. Sally the Seal and Hubert the Hippo swim or soak in a pool, Peter the Puppy loves digging up flower beds, while Peregrine the Penguin reads scholarly books on statistics. Unlikely friendships, such as between Oswald the Ostrich and Willy the Worm, did not bother me, and I never wondered what had brought all these exotic animals together. One detail that did bother me was Poppy the Parrot who, on learning that Muffin is baking a cake, contributes an egg that she has just laid. Even to a very young me it sounded like cannibalism. Every time I re-read the book, I tried to get over this episode as quickly as possible.

Something that didn't bother me at all were the two characters who would definitely be expunged from any children's book today: the only two human characters, siblings Wolly and Molly. I presume that in the original puppet show they were golliwogs at a time when golliwogs were still acceptable, but I could not find information on whether they featured in the TV show. They are not listed among the TV characters, so probably not; and they definitely do not appear in the 2005 BBC production. Yet they are quite prominent in several stories, and it is mentioned that they come from Louisiana. Today we would of course object to these children being equalled with exotic animals – just as indigenous people were one time displayed in European zoos. For me, as a child, although I knew that these children were supposed to be human, they were certainly in the same category as the animals and came from similarly exotic countries as Peregrin's Antarctica, Oswald's Africa or Katy's Australia. Moreover, the characters were in line with a large number of black children popular in Soviet children's literature for various reasons, but always as tokens and never as central characters. Soviet publishers in the 1950s would not see any reasons for eradicating these characters.

There are two more human characters in the stories whom I, with my critical eyeglasses on, might call metafictional: Annette and Ann. In the story, at least in Russian, they are presented as little girls, but the names point at the creators of the TV show, Annette Mills and Ann Hogarth. The story they appear in was a disturbing one, and it wasn't until I was grown-up that I realised what was really implied. Muffin wants to write a book for Annette and Ann, with each of his friends contributing a chapter. The purpose is, as the Russian text states, for the girls to remember the animals in case they have to travel away. This statement puzzled me. Why would the animals travel away, “for a long time”, as specified some lines further down?

What strikes me now is the inversion of the toy-animal trope we recognise from Winnie-the-Pooh or Toy Story: the toys' anxiety about the child growing up and abandoning them. Here, the toys – if the characters are indeed toys rather than animals – are anxious that something will happen to them and their humans will forget them. With my today's critical eyes, I don't put high demands on the stories' psychological sophistication, but the fact that it troubled me as a child implies that there was definitely something wrong with the idea.

I was also disturbed by what I probably saw as a breach of genre conventions. I was prepared to accept that animals could talk, but I had problems with Muffin's magical gadgets that enable him to catch a thief and retrieve the stolen objects; or with the magic wish-granting comb. I also had problems with a spider who turns out to be an enchanted fairy.

Considering these stories today, I see them as rather bland, not without humour, but also with a good deal of morals. I am sure they worked well as short puppet shows, but there is very little literary merit in them. However, we all know that children do not necessarily appreciate books for their artistic quality. Also of significance is that the book was published in Russian three years before Winnie-the-Pooh, which doubtless offers a substantially more profound animal/toy narrative. Pooh was quickly incorporated in Russian children's literature, followed by a tremendously popular animated film, as far away from Disney in its aesthetics as can be. Pooh quickly started to function as an independent cultural icon, which I have written about and will not repeat now. Muffin was more of an oddity, and far from all in my generation in Russia still remember him. Yet it is still in print today, in dozens of editions, with various illustrations, and available on various online readers.

To be continued

My British children's literature

It so happened that I never gave the talk that was supposed to be my valedictory appearance. But I did finish it, and I think it may be of interest for some people, both those who were coming to listen and those who weren't. Therefore I have taken the liberty to cut it up into smaller chunks, appropriate for blog posts. If you have followed my blog, you may recognise some facts and arguments, but I don't think it matters.

For this talk, I was asked to share my experience of childhood reading – something that our Cambridge children's literature team asks masters students to do for their first assignment. I must admit that when I first came to Cambridge and saw this assignment on the syllabus, I said to myself: Oh dear, what is it, kindergarten? Then I started to supervise the essay and later grade it, and I realised that I was profoundly wrong. It is an immensely challenging assignment if you do it properly (and if you don't, why bother?). If you manage to balance between the authenticity of your childhood experience (and we know that memory is totally unreliable) and your critical self at the moment of writing.

I have since supervised and graded scores of these assignments, and I have seen both how students struggle with it and how beneficial it is for them to go back to their childhood reading and consider what was appealing and why. I have also read a number of childhood reading memoirs, including Francis Spufford, Margaret Mackey and Lucy Mangan. This is not really my genre, but I accepted the challenge.

However, I decided to limit my reflections to British children's literature, for a number of reasons. Firstly, at least the context, if not the texts themselves would be familiar to the intended audience (and probably to this blog's readers). Secondly, a valedictory talk is supposed to be entertaining, so I hope you, dear reader, will share the amusement of my critical self in contemplating what British children's books reached my young self behind the Iron Curtain and subsequently what my picture of British children's literature was before I was given the opportunity to study it academically outside the restrictions of my home country.

(If you want to know more about my childhood reading, I wrote several blog posts about it). 

Like Jerusha Abbot says in Daddy Long Legs: “I have never read Mother Goose or David Copperfield or Ivanhoe or Cinderella or Bluebeard or Robinson Crusoe or Jane Eyre or Alice in Wonderland or a word of Rudyard Kipling”. Well, I did read David Copperfield and Robinson Crusoe and Just So Stories, but I never read Beatrix Potter or J M Barrie or Frances Hodgson Burnett or Arthur Ransome or a word of C S Lewis. I read and loved a children's edition of Gulliver’s Travels, purged of all indecencies and politics. And of course I read and loved Alice in Wonderland, and I could go on forever explaining why it was so much loved in Russia where “Off with your head!” was not an empty declaration, but a real threat, and where someone could decide what words mean.

But I chose to talk about British children’s literature that few if any of British children's literature scholars would recognise: British books that got translated into Russian for any number of reasons – of which more in a minute – and that created my image of British children’s literature that is radically different from the established canon. For instance, of all Enid Blyton’s production, the only book translated until recently was Tim the Famous Duckling. 

 

Ever heard of him? Probably not, but a web search yields scores of Russian sites offering various editions of Tim the Famous Duckling, as well as audiobooks, stage versions and animation. There is even a lesson plan for teaching Tim the Famous Duckling to 8-year-olds and a variety of reviews on parenting sites. You need to know your Blyton well to figure out that the original story is The Famous Jimmy, published in 1936 and fetching fancy prices on ebay and online bookstores. How did The Famous Jimmy, with its hugely dubious morals, get translated and published in Russia in 1946 and never stayed out of print? It's just one of many mysteries when a mediocre and totally forgotten book becomes a hit in another culture.

One of my favourite books when I was a child was The true history of a little ruggamuffin, by James Greenwood. It wasn't just my favourite, it was everybody's favourite, a classic, mandatory classroom reading, yet still a favourite, as famous as Alice in Wonderland and Robinson Crusoe and mentioned in every Russian source on world children's literature, British children's literature, children's literature, fullstop. When I got professionally interested in children's literature and started reading Western sources, I was puzzled that this masterpiece wasn't mentioned anywhere. What foreign children's books got translated into Russian was a serendipity; and this one was a very progressive book from the point of view of Soviet ideology, showing the misery of the working classes under capitalism.

When I visited London for the first time, many place names, for instance, Covent Garden, were familiar from The little rugamuffin. I still think of The little rugamuffin these days when I take the Tube and pass Covent Garden.

In my book Children's Literature Comes of Age, I have a chapter on canon and an argument about how books can become more prominent in a foreign culture than in their own. The little rugamuffin was obviously a good example, but I needed at least some information about it. I had asked English and American colleagues, and nobody had heard of this book. I found it eventually in the British National Bibliography for 1866 (this was long before Google). It wasn't even a children's book. The book we all loved during my childhood and that is still loved and cherished by Russian children was a retelling of an obscure penny-dreadful. 

James Greenwood (1833–1929) was an investigative journalist with Pall Mall Gazette and later Daily Telegraph and wrote reports from the lives of the London poor, particularly workhouses. He published several books based on these reports. He also wrote adventure stories for Boy's Own and some children's books, mostly high sea adventures and nature stories. The true history of a little rugamuffinin was published in 1866 and only reprinted once in 1884. It was never marketed for young readers, most probably because it was so radically different from contemporaneous Victorian children's literature. In the 1860s and '70s, Greenwood was tremendously popular in Russia both with his reports and his fiction. The true history was translated two years after it appeared in English and published in a progressive literary magazine. The most prominent Russian working-class writer Maxim Gorky mentions it in his autobiography as influential adolescent reading. It was retranslated and retold several times, and in the Soviet Union it had over fifty editions, with printruns of millions of copies. It was acknowledged as a children's literature classic and is still in print. Several academic works have been written on it.

One of my questions in investigating the book further was how much liberty the translator/reteller had taken. This reteller was no other than the Grand Old Man of Soviet children's literature, Kornei Chukovsky, who also gave us Kipling and Doctor Dolittle and many other key texts of British children's literature. But why The little rugamuffin? That we might never know. Maybe the novel reminded him of Dickens. It surely fit in well with other fiction describing the horrors of capitalism that Soviet educationalists viewed as desirable reading for children. On close inspection, Chukovsky was quite faithful to the original, although he deleted episodes of domestic violence, references to wicked Jews and some other minor details. However, he did amend the ending to suit the Soviet ideology. In the original, the protagonist grows up, goes to Australia and makes his fortune there. In the version I know, he becomes a child factory worker, which apparently was a huge improvement for a little boy as compared to being a street urchin. Well, at least he wasn't adopted by a rich lady.

To be continued

Too late to change identity

This is a very, very personal story. It took me several days to decide that I want to share it. Stop reading now if you find skeletons in closets disgusting.

Many years ago, my great aunt Margarita, my paternal grandmother's younger sister, came to visit me in Stockholm. It was the first and only time she traveled outside the Soviet Union. I have told her story in a novel and partially in a blog post, so I won't repeat it, and it is only marginally relevant to what I want to tell now.

We were walking in a wood just outside our house, and suddenly, out of the blue, she said: “There is something I need to tell you. You may have heard rumours… They are not true”.

My family has a long tradition of rumours, lies and omissions, secret adoptions and illegitimate children; so I wasn't surprised, but I had no idea what she was talking about. She went on: “I have your granny's and granddad's conversation books from when they were evacuated during the war, and the truth is there”. I still had no idea what she was talking about. My granny lost hearing, ostensibly after childbirth (although with all the lies I am now not sure). During the war they were evacuated from Moscow to a small city on the Volga river, probably sharing a room with several other evacuees. My father was ten years old. Clearly if my grandparents had things to talk about, using notebooks was an appropriate solution. So what did they talk about, I didn't ask. “People said that your granddad could not be your father's father”, Aunt Margarita went on, “because nine months before his birth you granddad was away”. Now, after learning that you are adopted or that one of your parents is not your parent, learning that your granddad whom you loved dearly wasn't your granddad is a huge shock. I wasn't prepared for it. Twenty years earlier I learned that the very same granddad had a second family and a daughter ten years younger than me. It was a shock because it changed my view of him, but as I said things like that weren't unusual in my extended family. I had always wondered about my grandparents' relationship. They never shared a room (but neither did my parents so it was not until I was in my late teens that I learned, from novels, that it was habitual for spouses to share a bed), and granddad always spent summer holidays elsewhere. He also went somewhere every evening – ostensibly to teach evening classes. Somehow, I have always been slow in interpreting obvious facts.

“People said that your granddad could not be your father's father”, continued Aunt Margarita, ”but your granny explains it in the notebooks. She went overdue. She was pregnant for eleven months”.

Now, not even I, naive as I am, could believe this. If Aunt Margarita had never mentioned it, I would have never considered the possibility. My father didn't look much like my granddad, but this didn't justify any doubts. The natural question to follow was: If not granddad, then who…? Did anyone except granny know? Did she know?

It turned out eventually that everybody knew except me. A cousin on my mother's side knew, and that was really none of her business.

Next time I was in Moscow, I asked Aunt Margarita to see the notebooks, and she said she had burned them. This didn't sound credible to me. Why did she have them in the first place? When my grandparents were in evacuation, she was in deportation in Kazakhstan and didn't return to Moscow until 1956. If granny for whatever reason had kept the wartime notebooks, why did she suddenly give them to her sister? And why did Aunt Margarita keep them for more than thirty years only to burn them right after she had tried to persuade me that granny had been pregnant with my father for eleven months? Did those notebooks ever exist at all?

Dismissing the eleven-months-long-pregnancy theory, every piece fell into place. I remember Uncle Andrei well. He was practically part of the family, always with us on holidays, frequently in for tea and dinner. He gave me wonderful presents: toys, clothes, picturebooks, which I didn't of course contemplate then, but that weren't easily available in Russia in the early 1950s. He could get these lovely gifts because he had the privilege of travelling abroad, and he had the privilege because he was accompanist to a very famous violinist. One thing I remember particularly vividly: my teddy's shirt became shabby, and Uncle Andrei made him a new one. I still have the teddy. Every other link has disappeared, the last probably the picturebooks that I had brought to Sweden and that my children eventually tore to pieces. This was before I learned the truth, otherwise I probably would have saved them. Or probably not at all. I am not sentimentally attached to material objects.

I have very few photographs from my childhood, but I do have a picture of myself, aged one, my parents, my grandparents and Uncle Andrei. I had seen this picture scores of time before I learned the truth, but I had no reason to pose any questions. Now of course there is not doubt which of the two older men was the young man's father.

When you are very young, you don't contemplate why some people disappear from your life. I was an extremely shy (or maybe extremely intimidated) child who never asked any questions about anything, not even most innocent questions, so I would have never asked why Uncle Andrei no longer came to visit nor spent summers with us. I do remember, however, meeting him on the landing outside our apartment which was next to the violinist's apartment. He smiled at me, but didn't say anything. He must have been coming to the violinist regularly, but I only met him once.

I have no idea why he suddenly wasn't welcome any more. He had been by granny's side for almost thirty years, her secret, or not so secret lover and her son's father, and my granddad had tolerated it. Something must have happened, and I had no one to ask. Least of all could I ask my father, but he must have known all along and lived with it his whole life. Did he ever meet his biological father after the quarrel? They moved in the same musical circles so it is almost inconceivable that they didn't meet, but did they talk? Were they close at all? Why didn't I ask my father while I still could? Simply because in my family, we didn't talk about such things. All was lies, secrets and pretence.

Now, you may think, does it really matter? Despite his other family, my granddad whose last name I still bear, loved me. He was a fabulous storyteller, and every evening I would come to his room – he was the only family member who had a room of his own – and ask him to tell me a story or draw a picture, which he also was good at. I would sit on his lap. Sometimes he would show me family treasures otherwise locked in his desk drawer: his mother's diamond earrings, war medals, miniature Fabergé eggs, all in lovely boxes with velvet lining. He would tell me about these objects again and again, and I was never tired of them.

He died shortly before I moved to Sweden. I was with him when he died. (Death is very ugly, by the way). He was my granddad.

And yet…

There are interesting family legends on that side. For instance, that our very Russian-sounding last name was adopted by our distant Greek ancestor, Nikolai Stamati. We have traced granddad's ancestry four generations back to a Stepan Nikolajev, so Nikolai Stamati must have been at least a generation above, which takes us to the dark eighteenth century where no records have been preserved in Russia. It seems that granddad's relatives who managed to escape from Russia after 1917 took back the old name, but I haven't been able to find them. Stamati is a common name.

Another legend says that some generations back we were related to the famous Swedish aristocratic family of Oxenstierna, and I still have a brass seal with the Oxenstierna coat of arms, so there must have been some connection. Granddad's mother's maiden name was Reutersköld, which is another Swedish noble family, and while Oxenstierna could be a myth, Reutersköld is a fact. Her mother, my granddad's grandmother, was Victoria Reutersköld, and of all the retained family possessions I value most a silver sugarbowl with the monogram VR.

Neither Stamati nor Reutersköld are part of my ancestry anymore. Nor are the four generations of the Nikolajevs. My name is no longer mine.

Let me introduce myself. My name is Miriam Mitnick. I am Jewish.

I have no Jewish identity whatsoever. My maternal grandmother was Jewish, but she didn't keep any Jewish rituals. I would probably qualify for Israeli citizenship. The overwhelming majority of my parents' and grandparents' friends were Jewish, because they were musicians, artists, scientists, and all were secularised Jews. At least half of my classmates were Jewish, but I didn't learn anything about Jewish culture until my husband started writing a book about Jewish history. (He is not Jewish).

For the past thirty years I have lived with the unconfirmed knowledge of my Jewish grandfather. It didn't make any difference. And it did.

To make a long story short, some time ago my daughter finally persuaded me to do a DNA test. She gave me a DNA test for my birthday. I had been reluctant for a whole number of reasons, but then I thought, what can I lose? (A fourth of my identity, my seal, my sugarbowl, my name, my second cousin twice removed who is the only relative I still keep contact with).

The results have come. I am 45% Ashkenasi Jewish. (I am all sorts of other things, and as I have always known, not a drop of Russian, but that's another story). I have over a thousand DNA relatives in the database, most of them in the USA, and their last names are Cohen, Levine, Shapiro, Friedman and Goldberg. Happy belated Passover, cousins!

It is of course much less of a shock than when I first heard Aunt Margarita's disclaimer. I was prepared for it, and now I know for sure. What shall I do with this certainty? It's too late to change identity and become an observing Jew, not least because I have never been an observing Christian either, and while I have kept family traditions for Christmas and Easter, they have always been precisely that: family traditions. I have been to Israel several times, and I like it, but I don't feel any affinity with the country. I have zillions of Jewish friends, but the reason is that they are my friends, not that they are Jewish.

Maybe the main problem is not embracing Jewishness, but letting go of the other part. Somehow, all these years I have fooled myself into believing that I can keep both. But then, my strongest identity has always come from my German granny's side: traditions, songs, family anecdotes, food recipes. They are still with me. So maybe I am not Miriam Mitnick after all. Maybe I am Maria Tietz.

Unclaimed skills

During my long life I have acquired a number of professional skills that once were useful but have proved to be of no value in the long run.

For instance, I can recite Russian poetry for hours. I once recited Russian poetry for at least an hour while waiting for a delayed flight. My audience didn't understand Russian, but they were fascinated by the sound of it. I frequently recite Russian poetry for myself. Otherwise, it's a useless skill.

I can also sing bawdy Russian songs. I once impressed a younger male colleague who had compiled a collection of dirty Russian verse, but wasn't familiar with some of my repertoire. Another time, at a Slavist conference in Denmark, a friend and I entertained the participants well after midnight, until we got a round of beer on the house because the owner liked his guests to have fun.

Generally, my profound knowledge of Russian literature, bawdy or not, is of no consequence. In Stockholm, I used to teach two optional courses, on nineteenth and twentieth century Russian literature. I have stopped using Russian texts in my research because reviewers complain that texts unfamiliar to readers make my research less relevant (!). So much for trying to be international.

My profound knowledge of Swedish literature is rather pointless these days. Although I have managed to smuggle Pippi Longstocking into my syllabus this year, and although I always bring Sven Nordqvist's picturebooks into class, it does not make any difference. My Bahktin-inspired studies of Selma Lagerlöf are of no interest for anyone. Generally, my engagement with literary theory is superfluous. The last course I taught in Sweden before I collapsed and went on sick leave was “Contemporary theories of the novel” where I treated Imre Kertesz' Holocaust novel Fateless as a displacement of myth, examined heteroglossia in Coetzee's Life and Times of Michael K. and combined Alice in Wonderland and The Magic Mountain in the same class from a Jungian perspective.

My Alice studies are, by the way, also irrelevant. Nobody is impressed by Alice studies in the UK. I am donating my whole collection, about two hundred and fifty volumes, in various translations and with various illustrations, to the Homerton library,

Which reminds me of translations. This is what I used to do for a living. Already in Sweden, translations from Swedish into Russian were not in great demand, apart from an occasional short story or a political manifesto. Now Russian and Swedish are two useless languages which at best make me slightly exotic in my colleagues' eyes. Not to mention Norwegian and Danish.

I don't regret all these things in the past, because they have made me what I am now. But it is one of life's paradoxes that the only thing that proved decisive for my present situation is a foreign language I learned in school.

Books are dangerous!

 You think books are harmless? You think book cannot kill? Let me tell you something.

Last week, as I was at home indulging myself with a PhD examination on a bright, sunny morning, I got an email from Reception at work. My bookshelf had come off the wall. My first reaction was, “Hell, I must interrupt my pleasurable pastime and go to the office”. My second reaction was, “What a nuisance, I have just sorted all the books, and it will take me ages to put them back”. Third reaction, “All my Alice and Moomin mugs will be broken”.

I didn't go to the office that day because it made no sense: what could I do other than watch the ruins? I suppressed all thoughts of it, but yesterday I felt that I had to go, out of propriety. (Mind, I could have been away on holiday or conference).

My first reaction as I opened the door was, “It doesn't look all that bad”. The holes had been painted over, the books were in neat piles all over the room, the Alice and Moomin and Peter Rabbit mugs had miraculously survived – a few other mugs of less affectionate value were broken, as well as some picture frames.

The porters saw me coming and gave me a full account of what it looked like when they discovered it. “Did you have your books in any particular order?” asked one. “Luckily no one was there when it happened, another said. It would have killed them”.

Fifteen minutes later it hit me.

This bookshelf with its sharp corners and its tons of books could have killed me. Or a student. Or a cleaner.

It doesn't help to know they have filed it as a “serious incident”, that an inspection stated that wrong fittings had been used, and that they will give me a new and safer bookshelf. It's like having been in a minor car accident, and cannot keep imagining what could have happened a second before or after and turned it into a major accident. A fatal accident. I may not have been here to tell the story. 

Image: Colin Thompson

Do it yourself

I have published a book. And it wasn't the first time either. It is only a co-edited volume, but a book is a book. As opposed to - say, online journal. It has my name on it. Second, in alphabetical order.

It is three years since I have published my last book, but it seems that the world of publishing has changed completely. I have always been good at advertising my own books: bringing flyers to conferences and such. But today this is not enough. Today you are supposed to do all the marketing yourself. Publishers have huge marketing departments - what do they do? As an author of an academic book, I am supposed to have a profile page on amazon, to blog, tweet, share on fifteen social networks, link to this and that, and ask my friends and colleagues to write "an honest customer review". Amazon has dozens upon dozens of pages with advice on self-promoting. Madness. This is an expensive hardcover book, and it will only be purchased by libraries. All my blogging and tweeting and Facebook sharing may possibly raise the sales by five copies. You, My Dear Reader, are you going to buy a book for £52 just because you are reading this? No, you won't, and I cannot blame you. I won't either. I'll get my free copy.

And yet, I have shared the link on the social networks I belong to, I am obviously blogging about it, and, believe me or not, I have created an amazon profile. As an example of an author profile page, amazon suggests Neil Gaiman. I am afraid mine isn't that impressive. Half of my books are not available on amazon. Too bad.

I know you won't buy the book, but if you really want to help me promote it, write an honest 3-sentence customer review. I'll do it for you next time.

Special expertise

Once upon a time during summer vacations I was for some reason sitting in my office at the Department of Comparative Literature when a call came from the University phone exchange. "Someone from the press, they said. Asking whether there is any expert in fairy tales at the university. We tried your department. You were the only one in". The press had reached the right person for fairy-tale expertise, but the question was weird. An American movie star was having an affair with a "simple" Swedish girl. Everybody was talking Cinderella story. The press wanted to know exactly what the Cinderella story was. Next morning I was quoted in 300,000 copies.

Apparently they kept my name on the file because when princess Diana died and everybody was saying she would become a myth, the press called me, bypassing University phone exchange, to inquire what exactly a myth was.

It's strange how you can become a dedicated expert on journalists' files. What obscure things haven't I been asked to comment on! A couple of times I was on hold when the Nobel Prize in literature was about to be announced, in case it was a Russian. Even now, four years after I have left Sweden, Swedish media call me every now and then, and I can never guess what they might want this time. A recipe for Russian pancakes or a comment on Lord of the Rings?

When BBC called me yesterday I had a quick rush of thoughts: Olympics? No. Has some important children's writer died? Hope not, too many have died this year. Ahh, Fifty shades... No, I haven't read it. My instinct of self-preservation keeps me away from it. I had to read Twilight and Hunger Games and Divergent for professional reasons, but thank goodness I am not an expert on Mom porn so I don't have to read Fifty shades. Not even Forty-nine shades. Still, could I please say something..? About the phenomenon... marketing... social media... reader engagement..?

For a moment of weakness I considered getting the book on Kindle. Then I decided that life is too short. Ars longa vita brevis, as we used to say when I worked as a film researcher, and a long and boring film was screened.

I had done my homework by the time they called again, as well as some contemplating, and I referred confidently to Gone with the Wind and The Thorn Birds, much to the reporter's surprise. (Where have all the thorn birds gone?)

Although I could not help thinking about the old evil times in the Soviet Union when all sorts of people said or were forced to say: "I have of course not read Solzhenitsyn, but he is a bad writer".

Some are more equal

Yesterday I took a compulsory online course on Equality and Diversity. I don't know why I had to take it – apparently as a step in my Professional Development. Frankly, I had felt I was sufficiently Equal and Diverse, but a subjective feeling doesn't get you a course certificate. The intro said it would take an hour, but apparently I am a slow learner, it took me an hour and a half. There was a test afterwards, and I had to score 80% to pass. I did quite well with the exercises, but I always get stressed about any kind of tests, exams and quizzes, so I only got 85. I missed some intricate legal nuances between discrimination, harassment and victimisation.

It was quite interesting and useful, especially learning about all the legal particulars. Not that I expect to be involved in any, but who knows.

Where I grew up, a professor could say to a student: Don't bother to apply for PhD, you are Jewish. Where I grew up, a professor could say to a student: If you want to pass the exam you'll have to sleep with me. Where I grew up, homosexuality was a crime. Where I grew up, women were expected to work and take care of the family. Where I grew up, there were no wheelchairs, and you wouldn't see a disabled person in a public place. Where I grew up, people were discriminated, harassed and victimised by each other and by the authorities. Where I grew up, some people were more equal than other people.

In Sweden, I was a member of equality committee at my work place. I spent hours and hours trying to persuade the other committee members that equality was not only about gender. They thought that I was making too much of being Diverse. I pointed out that there were other Diverse people in the department, staff as well as students. I was useful by being Diverse when diversity was the slogan of the day, but being Diverse didn't make you Equal. In fact, the more Diverse, the less Equal. Perhaps we should all have taken courses in Equality and Diversity. It's easy to be Equal, but very difficult to be Diverse. If you are Equal, you don't think much about those who are Diverse.

Perhaps I should go back and revise until I get it 100% right.

Object of sentimental value

 

I am normally not attached to material objects. I have lost so many in the numerous moves that it's just as well to adopt a Moominish attitude: worldly possessions are merely a nuisance. Every now and then I wonder where this or that thing has gone, whether it was just thrown away as garbage, sold for a fortune at Sotheby's or is hidden away in somebody's cupboard. Yet there are some few objects from my childhood that I have very special feelings for. This sugar bowl has been in the family as long as I remember and far beyond. In fact, I have just noticed that there is a stamp on it that says 1883.The bowl was always filled with lump sugar, and there was a pair of tongs in case someone wanted half a lump. The bowl symbolises the stability of home for me, the centrepiece of the tea table around which family and friends would gather. (A Freudian would of course come with any number of interpretations, and a Jungian would add the albedo phase to it. Be my guest). 

When my granny died almost twenty years ago, my mother asked me whether I wanted anything in her memory. Sugar bowl, I said. Fine, said my mother, it's yours, but you will not be able to take it our of the country so let it stay here for a while. For many years I went back to Moscow, to what without granny wasn't my home anymore, and watched the sugar bowl in the centre of the tea table that wasn't any longer the centre of the world. Every time I'd say that I wanted to take the bowl with me, and every time my mother said, not yet. Then I stopped going to Moscow, and the sugar bowl became just one of those many lost objects that are of no value to anyone. Actually, I have no idea, it can be awfully valuable. 

After my mother died two months ago, my son, who is her sole heir, asked me whether I wanted anything from the house. Sugar bowl, I said. My sugar bowl. Yes, I know it's yours, he said, but you won't be able to take it out of the country. It will buzz in security. It sounded familiar so I dropped any further argument, but lo and behold! someone smuggled my sugar bowl from Russia to Sweden, and my dear daugher brought it from Sweden to me. Twenty years later, it is turly mine. 

The funny thing is that you'd think that with such a cherished object I would remember it well. Yet when I unwrapped it, I was shocked to see how much smaller it was than I had remembered. I can imagine that it might look large to me when I was a child, but I did see it repeatedly when I was grown-up, and yet the memory saved the image from childhood. I could also swear that the monogram was Russian BH, for Vera Nikolajeva, my grandfather's aunt. This was the mark on all our family silver. But it is actually Latin VR, which must be Victoria Reutersköld, who was my grandfather's grandmother. From her, the sugar bowl apparently went to her daughter Ernestina, my great-grandmother, who somehow managed to keep it through the wars and revolutions. 

The balance of the world is finally restored. The sugar bowl is once again in the middle of the tea table.

Professional knowledge

Once a month I pamper myself with massage. And every time, while she is working on the tiniest muscle hiding behind five other muscles, I ask myself: how does she know? How can she feel what is tense and what needs special attention today? And then I tell myself: because she is a professional. Because she learned how to do it. Just as you once learned how to analyse a literary text and how to recognise all the tiny details that make a literary text a masterpiece and other details that make it a pile of garbage. And just as she knows what the matter is with your muscles and what to do about it, you know what the matter is with a poor essay draft and what to do with it to make it better. So I don'r feel bad because somebody is taking care of my tired body. I am professional in my own way.

Three years in diaspora

The day before yesterday, at breakfast, Staffan said he was going to buy champagne. We have long since stopped celebrating published articles, book contracts, unexpected royalties and other work-related events; I was sure it wasn't my or his birthday or our anniversary, so I was a question mark. "Use your brain", he said. I did. Nothing happened. "Three years since I came to Cambridge", he said. It means today it is three years since I came to Cambridge. I am not sure whether it is an occasion for celebration or reflection.

The natural thing now would be to look back at these three years, but I won't. I can just read through this blog from the very beginning. This is exactly why I started blogging. I won't think about everything I left behind, because it is pointless. Instead, I am thinking about what my life might have been if we hadn't moved to Cambridge. And I am not talking about the serendipity of that dinner conversation in Barcelona, but about my conscious choice. I believe that human beings have a free will. But I also believe, at least a bit, in that parallel world in which I made a different choice.

What we had decided before I got the job here in Cambridge was that I would quit my job in Stockholm. So I assume that I would have done so. My idea for a living was to write textbooks. I have two textbooks on the market and get nice royalties, so if I could write a couple of textbooks every year we'd manage. I would also do workshops and advertise myself worldwide as guest lecturer. I would spend much more time in Finland and teach and supervise there. I wouldn't want to be without students. I would - as I actually do - teach online courses. I would continue on the ALMA jury. I would review books and do all those odd jobs a freelance academic can do. I could even do some translation.

I would possibly go to conferences, but I probably wouldn't be invited to many conferences without an academic affiliation. Or maybe I would. I had a solid reputation three years ago already. But I would have less time for academic writing if I were to write for my bread.

I would probably see my grandchildren a bit more often, but I am not sure. They are all very busy.

It would be very upsetting to think about everything I would have missed.

Things I don't do anymore

I frequently refect upon the fact that things that were indispensible once aren't any longer. I don't mean that few of us use typewriters because we have a better technology, but something that you used to do a lot and then stopped for some reason or other, although it is still easily available.

I used to cross-country ski - not that I particularly liked it, but that's what we did in my time in my country, perhaps because it was the cheapest and easiest winter sport.I haven't done it since I moved to Sweden. I also used to skate a lot, even when I was quite grown up; I had a good skating partner. I brought my skates to Sweden, and we went skating a couple of times when the kids were small, but it never became a must like it used to be.

Fishing was the most important summer pastime; I just couldn't imagine my life without fishing. Interestingly enough, Staffan was also a passionate fisher, but we both stopped since we got married. He claims that nothing can compare with his former wife's fishing waters (thus emphasising what a sacrifice he made for my sake). There is enough fishing space in the archipelago or in the inland lakes and rivers, but for some reason it never became a habit. Sergej used to bring home pike from local lakes, and we even cooked and ate them. But he soon found other pleasures.

I don't knit. Knitting was obsessive when I was young. For one thing, this was the only way to make an original piece of clothing, but it was also highly social: we would sit and knit and talk, or listen to music. We exchanged patterns and ideas. My daughters both knit a lot, but I quit when they were still small. I cannot really explain it because it is still nice to have an original piece of clothing, and it is still relaxing. Probably it's the social bit that is lacking.

I don't make clothes because nobody wants homemade clothes these days.

I don't play cards, or any other games. In my youth, we played cards, Scrabble and mahjong. For poker, a friend used to have a five-liter jar of pennies we used as chips. Our first Scrabble sets were made of school erasers cut in four bits with letters written in ink. Our first mahjong set was made from dominoes. Games were bridges between young and old, children and adults.

We played simple card games with our children, as well as Scrabble and Trivial Pursuit, but it felt much more playing for their sake. I never found good mahjong partners in Sweden.Staffan promtly refuses to play Scrabble or Mastermind with me - I wonder why?

Of course I do other things these days, although most of them solitary rather tahn social. Yet it is strange how all these things just fade away.

Awakening

So now I have been to the Amazon. It was my ultimate dream, what shall I do now? There are things I would like to do, but know that I can't, like a cruise to Antarktis (they are expensive, but not tremendously expensive; however, I get seasick, so we can forget it). Of all the wonders of the civilised world, I'd like to see the Pyramids, but it doesn't feel the right time now. Maybe, at some point. Of the many wonders of the natural world - yes, there are many, but nothing that I can't get off my mind, like I had with the Amazon. I mean, something that I tell myself I need to see before I die.

I hope to live some years still, but if I take one long trip every year, there are not that many left (and I have promised never to travel again). What are my priorities? Do I have any?

I am reading all these clever books about the philosophy of time that argue that there is neither the past nor the future, just the present; which I have always said, without reading clever books. Does it mean that the Amazon does not exist, has never existed, been a dream, is a dream? Yes, I know it's all quite pointless.

Yet I feel a huge emptiness and sorrow. I know I will soon fill it with something new, but right now I feel a weird kind of disappointment: it's over, this big huge enormous dream that was so wonderful that I really have no words to describe it, but would so much like to. But, as all dreams, when you wake up, it's gone.

Travel emergencies

There is a happy subspecies of homo sapiens that has never experienced travel sickness. I am talking Travel Sickness, not just occasional dizziness or nausea; sickness that knocks you out and stays for weeks, that comes unexpectedly and unpredictably, that is humiliating and excruciatingly painful. If you are now wondering: "What is she talking about?", you belong to that happy subspecies.

When I was a child, nobody took it seriously; it was rather a norm that children were travelsick. However, my mother had it too, and so it was harder to dismiss. Then somebody brought a magical remedy from abroad, and for some years we both travelled without problems. But as I said, unexpectedly and unpredictably; nothing to do with turbulence and independent of what I have eaten, of whether I have slept well, of whether I take medication or not, of whether the travel takes half an hour or thirty hours. I can get sick on planes, trains, buses, boats and merry-go-rounds. The latter I have eventually learned to avoid, but for the rest the alternative is never to leave home, and it is a professional handicap, if not otherwise.  

At one point I went through a thorough examination by Sweden's (and world's) leading expert on MdDS, which spells out as mal de debarquement syndrome. They rolled and swayed and centrifuged me, pumped hot and cold water into my ears, gave me injections to cause motion sickness and measure it, and concluded that there was nothing wrong with me. That was extremely helpful.


About eight years ago I had to cancel all commitments involving travel. I missed conferences, guest lectures and many other interesting events. Some of these I had to cancel at short notice, jeopardizing my reputation. I thought I would never be able to travel again. Fortunately, it's a bit like childbirth: if you remember the horror, you'd never do it again. So I started to travel again, with varying results and thus high risk-taking. My calculation shows that one of ten trips is a catastrophe. Take it or leave it. And the flight from Manaus happened to be that one of ten.

Staffan has seen me in my worst shape several times, but each time he is reluctant to believe me - which I fully understand as his survival strategy. So when I told him, direct after landing in Sao Paulo, that nothing could make me board another plane, his reaction was: "But the cat can die!" I was too feeble to reply: "So you'd rather I should die?" But I was strong enough to act - thinking back, I admire myself. As I was leaving the plane, crawling more than walking, I told the radiantly smiling flight attendant that I needed a doctor. She obvioulsy wasn't prepared for such an outrageous request, but told me there was medical help available in the terminal. The bus from the plane to the terminal took ages, but as soon as we were inside I attacked the first uniformed man I saw. Presumably, Portuguese for doctor is doctor, since he understood that much, conjured a wheelchair and raced through the terminal, with Staffan in tow. Imagine, first time ever I had a ride in a wheelchair and I couldn't even enhoy it.

In the Emergency room, nobody spoke any English. My general message was: "I cannot travel" (our flight was leaving in two hours), but it didn't quite come across. However, the male nurse did the reasonable things you do with someone coming to Emergency: took my temperature, pulse and blood pressure. After that, all those present, including the airline representative, talked to each other in great agitation, and the message they managed to get across to Staffan and me was: "You cannot travel". At least we were in agreement on one point. They didn't care about my travel sickness, but they were seriously concerned about my blood pressure. Somehow, I think there was a connection.

They put me on a drip, all the time talking cheerfully in Portuguese. The airline representative explained in broken English that our luggage would be taken off the flight, that she would book us for the next day (did I think I would be able to travel then?), and that as soon as I had rested, they would transport us to a hotel with meal vouchers and free intercontinental phone calls. I wish I could enjoy the hospitality. Staffan said the food was good, and they didn't even charge him for whisky.

Twenty-four hours later I still felt rotten, but since I couldn't stay in Brazil for the rest of my life (although it was tempting), I boarded the plane, took a double doze of sleeping pills and woke up an hour before landing at Heathrow at 3pm local time. The long travel by underground and train to Cambridge was child's play.

Moral? Obviously, I should never travel again. Unfortunately, I happen to live on a island, so wherever I want to go I need to take a plane, a boat or a superspeed train. So I guess I am stuck. Friends and relatives will have to come here to visit. I WILL NEVER TRAVEL AGAIN. (Let's see how long it lasts).

On evil stepmothers

Mother's Day feels the right time to contemplate the odious figure of the evil stepmother. It is a hugely sensitive issue, but I cannot read all these odes to wonderful mothers on Facebook without thinking about what lies behind. The evil stepmother of the folktale is a complex figure, since she is both a reflection of hard facts and a highly symbolic image. In old times, stepmothers were the necessary evil - and in many cases a blessing - because of high childbirth mortality, and mortality in general, so it was imperative for a man to remarry to have someone to take care of his children. If the woman brought in children from her previous marriage or if she had more children in the new marriage, it was natural that she preferred her own flesh and resented the stepchildren. Today stepparents are a result of divorce rather than death, but who can blame a woman who loves her own child more than a stepchild? It would be perverse otherwise. This is the Cinderella version.

The Snow White version is more complex and more repulsive. The stepmother is young, perhaps almost as young as the stepdaughter who is just coming into fertility. The stepdaughter is a rival, not only for her father's love (connected with the memory of love for the first wife), but the love and admiration of all other eligible men. The stepmother is jealous, and who can blame her?

If you were paying attention in your fairy tale class, or if you have read your Bettelheim carefully, you know that the stepmother is a circumscription of a biological mother. The idea of a mother hating her daughter and being jealous is so forbidden in a civilised society, as we claim we belong to, that storytellers prefer to substitute a stepmother, so that it would be less offensive. In many other fairy tales, the mother figure is a witch. Symbolically, the mother is split into two agents, a good, benevolent, biological mother and a wicked, jealous stepmother. The young girl has to accept that her mother has both these sides, and the mother has to accept, negotiate and control her contradictory feelings toward her daugher. Most women manage it, at least superficially - who knows what's going on in their minds. Some women don't manage it and turn into wicked witches.

I once attended a seminar on Anna Karenina, where someone wondered why Anna loved her son from a cold marriage and was indifferent toward her daughter conceived in passion. I explained, cynically and provocatively, that Anna's love focused on her son when she had no one else to love, but she saw her daughter as a future rival for her lover's attention. The woman who had posed the question got furious. She yelled that I apparently had no children and didn't know what I was talking about. I said that I had two sons, a daughter and two stepchildren and knew very well what I was talking about. I also pointed out that Anna Karenina was a piece of fiction and thus carried metaphorical as well as realist levels. My opponent was not convinced. So strong is our reluctance to admit the forbidden. So hard is our struggle between the animalistic instinct and the civilised, socially imposed ethics. Thanks goodness we have literature to provide outlet for our most hidden feelings.

In fairy tales, the evil stepmother is punished, often in a most awful manner. Symbolically, it means that the young girl has accepted and exterminated the evil side of her mother, and for the mother, it means that she has admited and learned to control the evil side of herself. The good biological mother is either resurrected or reincarnated as a fairy godmother or simply watches from her heaven her daugher's wedding. If she has really won over the evil stepmother, she is thinking about how she will become immortal through her daughter's children.

All this to say that I wish I had a mother whom I could celebrate on Mother's Day.

Shopping binge

I have certain serious defficiences. I don't like spectator sports, I almost never watch television, I don't understand contemporary music, and I hate shopping. I enjoy buying kitchen utencils and office supplies, and I love flea markets, but buying clothes is a nightmare. If I need a piece of clothing, I dash into a shop, preferably one I have known for years, find the item, try it on, pay and run. I have on severeal occations walked around in the company of shopaholics, and I don't really mind if they try on dozens of things, as long as I don't have to. When I need anything extraordinary, it's a pain.

The main reason, I think, is my background. When I was young in Moscow, there was nothing in the shops worth buying, and we had tailors and seamstresses to make our clothes, and later I made my own clothes and knitted sweaters and cardigans. It was also a common practice to swap clothes when you got tired of them.

When I came to Sweden and could potentially buy anything I fancied, I didn't have income of my own the first years, and although I am sure my husband would have never denied me money, I continued making the children's clothes from my old blouses and pants, learned quickly to use post order (the Russian community in Stockholm shared the secrets), watched out for sales, and made the most of the Swedish tendency toward casual attire.

As a result, I never developed the taste for leisure shopping, for either spending hours and days in search of anything particular or browsing shops in search of anything interesting. I eventually stopped buying canvas strap shoes and cheap t-shirts. In San Diego, I found a shop that suited my taste, age, social status and purse, and when we came back to Sweden, I searched and found an analogue. Only once when I was in London, about five years ago, I bought several nice and expensive outfits. I own an evening gown that I bought for $30 at Nordstrom Rack in San Diego and have so far worn three times; I own an incredibly expensive cocktail dress from Stockmann in Finland, that I have worn on dozens of occasions, and I own a black formal suit that I inherited from my daughter.

The necessity to get an outfit for the imminent wedding hovered heavily on me ever since the wedding was announced last year, especially when the bride-to-be insisted that the mother of the bride must wear a hat. I have never worn a hat in my whole life (except for beach hats). The other kids did not require hats when they were married, and I don't remember getting any special outfits for their weddings. I had hoped to use one of my existing nice dresses, possibly getting a hat to match, but after the Royal wedding I realised what my daughter expects me to look like. Goodness! Am I supposed to outdo Mrs Middleton?

In any other situation, I would ask my clever, supportive daugher with good taste and profound knowledge of fashion brands, to assist me. She has on several occasions helped me to find the right item for award ceremonies and job interviews. But in this one case, my dress must be a surprise for her. And there is no one here in Cambridge to turn to - so I thought. But as it happens, the world is full of eager shopping advisors. Earlier this week, I shared my concerns with one of my PhD students, Ghada, who immediately told me that I had to go London to shop, whereupon I asked humbly whether she would be kind enough to assist me - provided it would be in Cambridge. Presumably, proxy shopping is just as attractive for genuine shopaholics, so she got highly enthusiastic

Yesterday morning, I reluctantly went to town to meet Ghada at the shopping mall. We started with a cup of coffee and discussed our strategy. Ghada wanted us to get a dress first, and she had a firm idea about the colour, which made me wince. I suggested looking at hats first because if I saw a hat that I fell in love with, we'd buy a dress to match the hat. Ghada was sceptical, but as we took the first round of shops in search of a hat, we saw a dress that I thought was perfect and happened to be the colour Ghada had in mind. I tried it on and asked the shop assistant to hold it for me, and we went on. Two hours later, we had been to all fashion shops in Cambridge, selected a pair of shoes, found a possible hat, and, exhausted, sat down for lunch. Now the plan was to go back quickly to the very first shop with the very first dress, try it on again, quickly get the hat and the shoes and wind down with another cup of coffee. Ghada was meeting up with some fellow students later, and as they exchanged texts, the others bombarding Ghada with eager questions about their professor's shopping ordeal, I suggested that she invite Clementine to join us. By the time we were back in the first shop and stated that the dress I had tried and found perfect wasn't after all, Clementine arrived, and the orgy began. If you have seen a Hollywood movie in which a woman does some serious shopping, use your imagination. Together with the shop assistant, three young ladies brought me heaps of dresses, in all colours and designs, alternating "Maybe" and "NO!" and "YES, this is perfect...no, not really". By that point, I had resigned and would buy a potato sack if they recommended it, and I was getting more and more depressed as I couldn't squeeze into some really nice things. Yet finally, by a majority vote of three to one, we made a decision, and the minority admited that it was acceptable, and it was not until then I looked at the price, and it was too late to change my mind.

By this time, new forces joined us, and we marched to the hat place, only to discover that the hat Ghada and I were sure was exactly the same colour as the dress, actually wasn't. It may be that we didn't buy the original dress, or that we are colour blind, but Debbie was adamant that the hat did not match the dress. We had to break the neat package to be absolutely sure, and Debbie was right. The hunt continued, and we had fun trying on all those completley impossible hats and fascinators - a word none of us knew before last week - until suddenly we all, at the same moment, saw The Hat, and that was the end of it. Getting shoes was simple, and, loaded with bags, we went to a restaurant, and I got us a bottle of sparkling and a glass of cranberry juice for Clementine who does not drink alcohol, clever girl.

When I got to the parking structure, I had been in town for seven hours. Shopping. I simply cannot believe it. However, as Debbie pointed out, I actually had found everything I needed. It would have been frustrating to spend seven hours shopping and come home with empty hands.